Grand Theft Auto IV: Media Fantasies and Delusions

Grand Theft Auto IV barrels into stores across the fruited plains today and it's having precisely the effect everyone in the industry predicted it would, meaning that -- yep -- demagoguery's alive and well.

First: Fox News, referring to the game as "the king of violent video," which if we take this Fox reporter's exception to the word "games" (not appended to the end of that phrase) and assume she means "king" on a violent content scale (and not in terms of commercial success), we can read the statement as patently absurd. Unless we're going to conveniently forget media like Friday the 13th and Hellraiser and Nightmare on Elm Street, not to mention stuff like the entire Herschell Gordon Lewis brand of splatter film -- Blood Feast (1963) and Wizard of Gore (1970) just for starters -- that Ellen Page and Jason Bateman marvel over in Juno. Think that's cherry picking? No more or less than cherry labeling a game "the king of violent video."

To Fox's credit, they had former Eidos president Bill Gardner on to comment. Well, that's what I thought when I saw his name flash onscreen. Unfortunately, Gardner turns out to be astonishingly obtuse. He proceeds to uncritically agree with the Fox reporter's assessment that the game "should have parents concerned," followed by a preternatural focus on only the so-called negative aspects of the game, with virtually no discussion about what it might be doing to, oh I don't know...reset the bar for interactive entertainment? The clip's disproportional focus on the "negative" is tantamount to taking a movie like Atonement and spending five seconds suggesting it might have been worth the Oscar, five minutes hand-wringing about the "luridness" of the milliseconds-long rape scene.

And Gardner further confounds the issue by claiming that "these games aren't the old Super Mario or Street Fight kinds of games that were out there."

Did he say Street Fighter? Really? A game that -- unlike Grand Theft Auto IV, where much of the violence is in fact optional and play-style determinative -- requires gamers to beat the living stuff out of each other?

Gardner continues, attempting to back up his point by claiming "the graphics [in GTA IV] are much greater intensity, the level of gameplay, the plot, and the story." So "much greater [graphical] intensity" makes the game somehow more, what, affective? Problematic? Dangerous? Could a claim be any more vacuous?

I don't need to say much more, do I? Gardener's comments are obviously hugely problematic, sweeping generalizations based on made-up assumptions about the relations between graphical "realism" and aggression. Even the fairly games-critical Iowa State aggression researcher Doug Gentile has pointed out that the correlation between games and aggression has more to do with "intending to harm someone who'd rather not be," not the level of graphical realism. By aggression research's definition, butt stomping mushroom-creatures in a game like Super Mario Bros. turns out to be far more likely to trigger aggressive feelings than, say, passively watching photographically explicit violence toward others, but which you're not actively causing or participating in.

(I'm not suggesting anyone stop playing Super Mario Bros., by the way -- I'm just dispelling the mythology that seems to suffuse "common sense" knowledge about games. And for the record, I salute Gardener's secondary point -- though it's sadly the only salient point made in the entire piece -- which is that parents need to be cognizant of the ratings on a game, as well as of what those ratings mean.)

Lastly, Fox uncritically plasters a comment full-screen from Tim Winter, President of the Parents Television Council, which reads:

This brutally violent video game must be kept out of the hands of children, and we are calling on all major retailers to reconsider any decisions to sell this game... Since the first version was released in 1997, the Grand Theft Auto series has lowered the bar for graphic and grotesque video game content.

Nonsense, utter and total. The only thing that's lowered the bar for grotesque content is in fact Fox's segment, which grotesquely misrepresents the game and leaves parents foundering in a sea of feckless, fact-less hype.

(You can contact The Live Desk at Fox here.)

Second: Did you see this CBS spot on the game? It starts with the broadcaster sternly, even warningly stating that "many parents and educators remain upset about [Grand Theft Auto's] violent content...they contend it's downright inappropriate, even harmful." The shot cuts to CBS's Anne-Marie Green, who misleadingly juxtaposes the game's controversiality with a demographic generalization that "it remains very...popular with boys and young adults." The sequence then shows a young male described as "a Grand Theft Auto fan," who says he plays it because it's about "getting away with all the things you wouldn't be able to do in real life." The reporter cuts back in with:

...Things like murder, sex with prostitutes, driving drunk -- all part of how to play the game in the latest edition of Grand Theft Auto.

The shot cuts back to the young male, who says he doesn't "think it carries over into real life." But the piece swiftly counters with someone extremely critical of the series, a representative of Mothers in Charge, whose son, we're told, was murdered, though we're not told how (which of course instantly invalidates the relevance of the detail). This person proceeds to claim that young people can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, that "they don't understand that if they go out and kind of act on that, that that person doesn't get up and walk away."

Okay, I know lots of people hold irrational views about child psychology, but it's pretty upsetting that a CBS news affiliate would put such an obvious non-expert on the air and amplify such an unstudied opinion.

Even when they finally bring in Lawrence Kutner, co-author of the new book Grand Theft Childhood (which I'm currently reading, and on the verge of raving about) to counter, he's a disembodied voice on a phone with a few lines -- to his credit, economic and poignant ones -- that nonetheless feel overshadowed by the rest of the piece's foreboding bogeyman tone.

Another unhelpful info-bite, in other words, that probably just created a new batch of "Did you hear about that scary violent video game that lets you have sex with prostitutes?" GTA-ignorant non-gamers and paranoid parents.

(You can contact CBS 3 -- CBS's Philadelphia affiliate -- here.)

And finally: Jack Thompson made his flailing grab for attention by writing a letter to the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida demanding that legal action be taken against Take Two and retailers for selling the game in the first place. He further labels the game "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio" before calling for a "vaccine" in the form of "criminal prosecutions" by the U.S. government.

Patently absurd, I know, but I figure it's better when we know what the absurd among us are up to, especially when outlets like Fox occasionally tag them as "an expert in school shootings."

Thompson incidentally follows in the storied footsteps of media "critics" like Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German-American psychiatrist who railed against comic books as a cause of juvenile delinquency in his pseudo-scientific polemic, Seduction of the Innocent. As Wertham's claims about comics, so Thompson's claims about games like Grand Theft Auto IV -- baseless and bizarre. Also: Thompson's prescription that the government should be even more involved in regulating cultural aesthetics -- standing in for responsible parenting -- should be offensive to all of us, whether on the right, left, or anywhere in between.

(You can't contact Jack Thompson, as far as I know, and that's probably for the best.)

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Grand Theft Auto IV: Open Paper Bag, Insert Head

You know, it's almost a question worth asking -- are people so wound up about Rockstar's opus that they're pill-popping to cope with the countdown stress? Silly me to say so, right? I'm probably providing aid and comfort to the enemy, who'll no doubt cite this blog as evidence that Grand Theft Auto IV increases the use of SSRIs and benzodiazepines.

Speaking of discombobulation, you have to admit the hype machine's pretty impressive -- nigh Borgian. From The New York Times to some 518 articles in the Google News aggregator at midday tally -- even the Beeb's getting into it.

I have to forego reviewing the reviewers because it's frankly a little distressing reading some of them -- not that the reviews are "right" or "wrong," but because for all the extra pages of text unnecessarily bloating up the screen, there's such a proportional lack of insight packaged, just giddy play by plays that feel like watching Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus in Gladiator responding -- all thumbs -- to cue cards that read "cell phone," "lines of dialogue," "level of drunkenness," "Easter eggs," "number of missions," "shoot controls," and so on. (If, however, you are craving a slap fight, Kotaku's Luke Wilson bravely indulges with his "GTA IV Reviews: An Exercise In Hyperbolism.")

Speaking of hyperbole, our own Scott Nichols points out that it's a rare occurrence for games to receive perfect scores, but that GTA IV's got more pouring in than the filmic love child of William Wyler and James Cameron. True enough. It's also kind of funny watching sites dangle a "perfect" 10 or 100 just out of reach, with the sort of grade school parochiality about A's as tops for mortals, and A-pluses reserved for the omniscient-only. Like aesthetic sensibility works on an absolute scale or something.

Someone, somewhere, is going to eventually make much of the fact that aggregators like Metacritic and Gamerankings could end up listing GTA IV as the highest scoring game in their respective databases (the highest score, like, ever). At Gamerankings, that honor most recently belonged to Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64, which with 32 reviews beats Super Mario Galaxy (68 reviews) by .414 percentage points. Which in turn beats Super Mario World (5 reviews) by .574 percentage points. Which all told as you whittle your way through decimal points drives me barking nuts about aggregators. Why? Because they take what's already a problematic marriage of deterministic math and pliable aesthetics and amplify the discord by kludging disparate scoring systems together and assigning an arbitrary rank deceptively tethered to an objective ruler-bar. There's a personality profile that feeds into this stuff, of course -- the sort that can fill message boards with blather about the difference between 95 (of 100) points and 100, as if five points could be the difference between "Great!" and "Earth-Shatteringly Awful." The tragedy's that these people care less about issues like "Does GTA IV offer an interesting, remotely accurate portrayal of a former East European citizen?" and more about whether it's going to arbitrarily topple a totally unrelated late 1990s game on a glorified data-mining/cubing site.

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled (and your long knives sharp) for self-appointed pop gurus waiting in the wings like opportunistic loonies to accuse the game of everything from encouraging kids to go on crime sprees and do drugs to alien abduction. And watch this space for a rigorous, lively engagement of the game in the context of what's turning out, as I read through it, to be the best book yet written on the subject of violence in games. If you care about the issue as much as I do, consider picking up a copy, then reading it along with me, since I'll be returning to it repeatedly in the coming weeks and months.

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Monday Gamewatch

You don't need me to tell you what you'll probably be playing this week if you own an Xbox 360 or PS3, but in case you're having none of that, this week's PC lineup should pique the interest of armchair baseball buffs and ancient warfare strategy enthusiasts. As usual, note that days listed are ship-to-store dates, and these games are more likely to be available the day following.

Tuesday

Baseball Mogul 2009. I'm not much of a traditional sports gamer, I've never participated in a fantasy league or collected the cards or memorized all the exotic info that accompanies simulations rife with miscellany like rosters, stats, ticker tapes, scouting reports, pitch-by-pitch modes, lefty-righty tracking, starting defense, batting order, and pitching rotation. But if any of that sounds like heaven to you, Baseball Mogul is the eleventh version of a storied fantasy league PC sports series, now claiming improved play-by-plays, sound effects, user interface, depth chart and pre-game screens, a new season scheduler, updated 2008 rosters and stats, and an improved "Baseball Mogul" encyclopedia. Howzitplay? Baseball Mogul 2009 lets you kick off any day of any year you choose between 1901 and 2008, then manage a 25-man major league roster with up to 100 additional minor league players. Click here for a detailed features list, or here to try the free demo version.

Thursday

Great War Nations: The Spartans. DreamCatcher isn't known for publishing critically heavy-hitting stuff. The last time it was even sort of newsworthy, Dungeon Lords (2005) was nosediving into the 7th or 8th circle of critical hell, as possibly the worst press-hyped RPG to come down the pike, well, ever. My sense for these guys is that they're largely an aftermarket outfit, taking at best better stuff like the Spellforce and Gothic series and cramming them into convenient (if paperless) slats of cardboard -- great if you need a quick backup copy of something you've loved a little too roughly over the years. Bearing that in mind, The Spartans is one of those games that's only been previewed by one or two sites, and then in a screenshot-only capacity (no text, bare minimum of information about much beyond the publisher and ESRB rating -- Mature, if it matters). According to DreamCatcher's blurb, it's a real-time strategy game set during the pre-Roman period in which Greek city-states "clashed for wealth, peace, and glory." You control either Macedonia or Sparta through two seven-mission campaigns to become "more powerful than Alexander the Great." Features: 60 "great heroes of ancient Greece," troops maneuverable in three strategic formations, weapons scavenging and outfit customization, and the ability to command and control buildings and vehicles. I can't figure out who the actual developer is for a rep-check, so caveat emptor -- it wouldn't be a cheap mistake for $40.

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Nintendo Doubles Profits, Nets $2.5 Billion in Single Year

Think Nintendo can't break anymore records? Think again. According to this Forbes report, Japan's Nintendo operating profit more than doubled on strong game and hardware sales, resulting in record operating and net profits for their fiscal year ending in March. What's that translate to in dollars? Try from $2.2 to $4.7 billion in operating profit, with $2.5 billion of that net. And this is a company famous for having uncommitted billions in the bank already.

That's astonishing, and I say that as someone who's been skeptical (if also frequently admiring) of the Nintendo Wii. On the other hand, I have to wonder whether a lot of the Wii's success may turn out to be owed to the sort of impulse consumer who buys stuff like exercise equipment with all the good intentions in the world but dubious follow-through. A lot of people (including me) pick up games like Zelda and Mario, play them, then forget about our Wiis for months on end.

Still, my cynicism about that's starting to wear thin, because if there's a turnaround point lurking around the corner for the Wii sales-wise, we've all been dead wrong predicting where or when it'll be. And at a certain point it'll all be moot anyway, right? Before you know it, we'll be staring at a brand new generation of machines.

Speaking of which, my PC World colleague Danny Allen thinks Nintendo may have a hardware add-on up its sleeves, something along the lines of Sega's 32X. Don't let either the word "Sega" or "32X" put you off the possibility. Doesn't it make a certain amount of sense? Think about it. The Wii's a runaway success train, so what chip manufacturer wouldn't want to give Nintendo a break to be the nucleus of a power-boosting add-on? It wouldn't have to be extraordinarily powerful, either -- just enough to compete with Microsoft and Sony's second or third wind, something that two years ago might've cost $500, but today could be had for less than half that (and half again in two more). A piece, in other words, that might only cost consumers a hundred bucks or so in a year or two. And Nintendo could ensure it's success by bundling it with a killer "name" game, say the next Zelda or Mario or Super Smash Bros.

Sound ludicrous? Maybe. No one (least of all Nintendo) wants another Virtual Boy. Still, I wouldn't put an add-on in advance of a brand new system past them. A company pulling billions in net revenue annually -- revenue driven largely by a technologically "inferior" (but perhaps creatively "superior") platform -- could take the industry almost anywhere.

And if Nintendo's proven anything over the past few years, it's that they will, with bells on.

Update: Says Videogamer.com: Nintendo's forecasting it'll nearly strike 50 million Wii's sold by 2009, and upwards of 100 million DS's. The latter would put the DS in spitting distance of Sony's legendary PS2. A year ago, I would've called Nintendo nuts. Now, if anything, I'm inclined to think they're forecasting conservatively.

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If You Pirate Grand Theft Auto IV, God Kills a Kitten

So don't, okay? Because the news is that Rockstar's imminent blockbuster leaked early to the newsgroups and torrent sites, and that Microsoft's sales in particular are going to take a hit because DVDs are a snap to dupe while Blu-ray discs aren't (yet). That's too bad, even granting the cynical reaction that it was bound to happen anyway.

Why? Technology lets us to do things that confound convention. The speed of silicon isn't stepwise, it's logarithmic, and that tendency for "tech" to outpace "tenet" has inarguably challenged the relationship we have to the things we consume, along with the creators of those things.

But just because we today have tools that allow us to circumvent convention doesn't give us the right to do whatever we want. No one in a free society is ever entitled to do "whatever they can get away with." It's not that something like piracy's objectively right or wrong, it's not even that it's patently illegal (though it's certainly largely that), it's that -- as far as I'm concerned -- it's just plain selfish. It's someone saying "Screw the social contract, I want what I want and everyone else can go hang."

Talent isn't free. Van Gogh didn't put food on the table by giving away paintings. (In a different world and time and society maybe, but not this one.) And whether claims of PC piracy rates as high as 70-85% are true or not, it's almost certainly the case that piracy's contributed to the demise of plenty of independent developers, who've either gone buh-bye entirely or been swallowed by exactly the sort of creativity-stifling corporate monoliths pirates are always claiming to be railing against.

Let me disabuse anyone who thinks piracy is about some nobler-than-thou quest to free information (because information "just wants to be free!" etc.). The guys ripping games like Grand Theft Auto IV and passing them along to newsgroups and torrent sites aren't a clan of benign free-info advocates. They're not part of some ethical underground movement to wrestle art back from the Evil Kung Fu Grip of stultifying corporations. No...they're nothing more than macho thieves, whether out to profit monetarily by reselling the software in an underdeveloped market, or to build social cachet in an admittedly talented but fatally shortsighted online creature culture.

And still people pirate, at a rate of 22 percent in the U.S. according to the BSA, all the way into the high 60s when you look at Central and Eastern Europe.

During a walk around Gellert Hill here in Budapest earlier today, I saw a guy hunkered down on the balls of his feet shifting tiny cups on the ground as a couple of betting tourists egged him on with handfuls of cash. A little further down the path I encountered a sign that read: "Games of chance played in this park aren't -- You cannot win! Don't play!"

There's a sucker born every minute. When I was in Lithuania and Russia seven years ago you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a pirate stand crammed with burned and color-labeled copies of the latest PC game releases. At the time the big news was Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal, the expansion pack to BioWare's award-winning D&D spinpoff. I picked one up for a couple bucks, then ended up using it in a feature on PC piracy I wrote for Computer Games Magazine. It sure looked legit.

Don't be a sucker. Wait a few more days. Plan to finish something else you've been meaning to this weekend. And if it's a money thing, remember there's nothing wrong with giving Rockstar their full due (or any other developer, for that matter). We spend enough time griping about all the disappointing games that cross our desks. Here's one that -- if all the media crowing's even remotely on point -- may turn out to be worth patronizing several times over.

Update: This just in...beware false messengers bearing "official" statements about the game's release date. Stories are popping up (and thankfully, disappearing) that suggest Rockstar's okayed early sales of GTA IV. All of these are 100% false. According to Rockstar, "The official April 29th release date will not change." Why not, if some people are illicitly playing it early? Because -- Rockstar deserves a legitimate day-one sales number, which it forfeits if it changes the date this close to sell day.

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Jeanne D'Arc for PSP: Henry the Possessed, I Am, I Am!

Know what's great about traveling anywhere? Two words, or three if you're French -- Jeanne D'Arc. I know it came out last fall for the PSP, but I've only now (finally) had time to play through this pseudo-historical tactical RPG everyone was flipping about last August. If you've already played it, excuse me as I retroactively rave about this loose retelling of the Joan of Arc legend that, to be totally honest, has been tearing my attention away from castles, labyrinths of caves, postcard-perfect bridges, opera houses, basilicas, more castles, spa baths inside ancient structures, "house of terror" museums, fine art galleries, and yes, even more castles.

"Loose" as in magic spells and bracelets and enemies like necromancers and skeletons and orcs and goblins. Oh, and King Henry VI of England's possessed by demons, which, you know, could explain a lot about the Hundred Years' War. Undergirding that's the familiar story we all heard in grade school about a French girl putting on armor and sparring with those poncy rule-it-all Brits.

Jeanne D'Arc employes a 3D turn-based tactical grid that lets players maneuver parties of characters against the forces of the pesky monster-ranked British.

What's great about Jeanne D'Arc, aside from its tidy no-frills interface and cute dipped-in-a-rainbow look, is that it manages to pull off the job system complexity of a game like Final Fantasy Tactics by giving you loads of skill options, then letting you rebuild them between individual battles on a character by character basis pretty much any way you like. And it's pure about it, meaning no superfluous mini-games or whatever else to distract you from the battle-driven bottom line.

All the usual stuff's here, e.g. lateral and vertical terrain distinctions, front versus flank or rear attacks, variable attack ranges for weapons (not just obvious stuff like "melee" versus "missile" either -- lancers can, for instance, attack from two spaces away), stones (in lieu of skills) that you equip to launch lightning strikes and fireballs or improve abilities like attack power or number of hit points. The upside of the latter is that you're not locked into traditional RPG one-way skill growth -- you can entirely reconfigure a character's skills between battles by simply swapping stones. How cool is that?

Like most tactical RPGs, Jeanne D'Arc doesn't let you explore a fully-realized world, but instead sets you jockeying between battle maps interposed with narrative cutscenes (in this case, some pretty impressively produced anime with idiomatic hysterics blessedly muted).

What's more, each character has an elemental affinity (Sol, Luna, or Stella) with incumbent strengths or weaknesses (Sol beats Stella, Luna beats Sol, etc.). Call it "meta-Rochambo," it's played by juggling element-augmenting skill gems in each character's limited array of skill slots. One more thing you have to take into consideration when maneuvering characters, because as far as I can tell, it's totally random, and not a matter of creature type.

On top of that, you've got really original stuff like map-based attack bonuses called "burning auras" that manifest dynamically after an attack. Step into one of these and you'll add extra oomph to an attack, which since these things disappear at the end of a turn, makes getting good at coordinating attacks on the fly essential, especially as the game starts trotting out its enemy HP tanks, who can take a half dozen rounds to slaughter (battles have turn limits) if you're not ganging up. Oh yeah, there's kind of a cool "unified guard" bonus that kicks in whenever one or more characters are adjacent to each other and an enemy attacks. And I haven't even talked about the way you can eventually fuse skill stones together to make new ones, or the magic armband that temporarily tranforms Jeanne into a super-powered Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger.

It's not an "epic fantasy drama" until someone's village burns down.

Anyway, can you tell I dig this game? I won't go insanely out on a limb and call it better than Final Fantasy Tactics (or paint a NORAD launch target on my forehead), but it's definitely in the same league as that game. If you're into tactical RPGs and you missed Jeanne D'Arc somehow because it wasn't called "Final Fantasy: Jeanne D'Arc" or "Disgaea: Henry the VI's a Demon (He is! He is!)" you have the word of a Final Fantasy fanboy that it just might be the best thirty bucks you'll spend in a month. Shy, of course, of the $60 you're already planning to on Grand Theft Auto IV next Wednesday.

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Grand Theft Intro: GTA IV's First Seven Minutes

Alright, so who's got their review copies already but not allowed to tell, raise your hands please. Nobody? Unless you're on Rockstar's Super Special Secret Friend's List (or you're a scum-of-the-Earth pirate) you're not supposed to have these in hand until next week Monday. And you're certainly not supposed to be videotaping the introduction of the game and posting it a week in advance just to get hits on YouTube.

Well who am I to deny some random account its fifteen minutes of forgotten-forever-by-next-week fame? Watch if you will (it's harmless enough -- it's just the intro plus a bit of sloppy driving). Warning, click play below and spoilers (plus some really crappy video capture) abound.

[Video removed from YouTube. If you want to track the appearance/disappearance/reappearance of the video, you can follow it here.]

By the way, did you catch the part in 1UP's blowout interview with Rockstar's Sam Houser where he suggests future GTAs could be too big for the Xbox 360? How fast you want to bet Microsoft hitches up to the Blu-ray bandwagon if Rockstar makes GTA V Blu-ray exclusive? Assuming the latter's no more than two or three years away, what makes anyone think they (Rockstar) won't?

Update: Looks like the video's gone into permanent whack-a-mole mode, meaning you'll probably find it popping up intermittently then disappearing again for the next several days. Those of you who absolutely can't stand not to be in the know probably know how to find it if you want it.

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More Random Gaming Relays for a Tepid Tuesday

Bad news for PS3 fans looking for a smarter way to interact online. Sony's PS3 Home has been delayed again, moving the open beta back from this spring to fall 2008. How delayed is too delayed? Any more than this fall -- already a full year behind -- and Sony could be asking for serious trouble.

GamePolitics.com has this oddly enough story about GTA IV ads being pulled from Chicago buses due to pressure from more clueless politicians. Hey Chicago readers, do us a favor and stop voting for these guys. What kills me is we're talking the same city that has plenty of prominent billboards hawking strip clubs and adult video stores all over the city. Go consistency!

Videogamer.com brings news of claims that High Voltage Software's new Quantum 3 Wii game engine will yield "Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 visuals on the tiny Wii console." Who's High Voltage Software? The guys behind Ben 10: Protector of the Earth, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, and Family Guy Video Game! Not exactly promising credentials. Probability? Don't hold your breath.

Someone's suggesting Gears of War 2 "might suck." What's funny about the piece is the way the guy goes out of his way to head off the trolls by claiming he's "a rabid Gears of War junkie." I say why bother. I have no great expectations of Gears of War 2. Gears of War was good but nothing great in my book, not at all as tactically interesting as some made it out to be, and arguably largely about wowing people who'd just dropped major change on a "next-gen" console.

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Random Gaming Relays for a Tepid Tuesday

Did you hear that Epic's president Mike Capps called the Wii "like a weird virus"? Is he serious? It is a virus! Think about it. After people play something like Wii Fit, they're supposed to be pretty winded. What's more, they also tend to lose weight. Physical duress, weight loss...sounds viral enough to me. Of course the part where Capps says "everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on" sounds a little sour to me. Just because Gears of War 2 has not a prayer of beating Super Smash Bros. Brawl in either opening day or sustained sales is no reason to pick on Nintendo's cultural phenomenon (Then again, I am one of those people who own a Wii and, save for the occasional game review, almost never turn it on.)

Microsoft's doing its level best to convince you the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV's the one to get. A couple thoughts here. First, I'm betting that most of you who own a 360 or PS3 own one or the other and not both. Not yet, anyway with those price tags. That said, we have 11.5M American Xbox 360 owners and 5.2M PS3 owners. Question is, how many first-time console purchases will GTA IV drive? Just remember, if you're already own a 360 or PS3, the versions are going to be far more alike than dissimilar, whatever Microsoft and Sony are boasting about "exclusive" downloadable content. No reason to pick up the competition, in other words, or capitulate to silly PR hype.

Speaking of hype, you recall all the noise about Microsoft betting on video downloads in lieu of a dedicated Blu-ray player for the Xbox 360? Did anyone seriously think Sony wouldn't counter with its own video download service? The Los Angeles Times (by way of GamePro) claims Sony's going to announce something this summer, perhaps in July at E3. Whether at E3 or GCDC (I'd politely quibble that E3 is "gaming's largest worldwide press event" -- I believe that designation belongs to GCDC in Leipzig, actually) you can probably count on it.

1UP has an amusing pic of someone modeling the new batch of instruments Guitar Hero IV's adding to counter the runaway Rock Band train. Well, kidding about the modeling part, but the news that Guitar Hero IV's going to add extra instruments is confirmed by Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, who told Conde Nast Portfolio "Adding more instruments to a music-based game seems like the next logical step." So where's my Didgeridoo, guys?

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Grand Theft Auto IV: The Variety Interview

Since you obviously can't get enough Grand Theft Auto IV in your diet (even at a computer site technically devoted to PC-specific news) how about an extended interview with Rockstar guru Dan Houser courtesy Variety.com? Ben Fritz has the scoop, and it's pretty good, insightful stuff, including this bit in which Houser very politely slaps the business angle of his industry:

A lot of our competitors in the game sphere ? all they want to talk about is business. Because they have creative guys making the games but they run it like, ?how can we compete?? We want to kill that stuff in some ways. We want to have very successful launches. We?ve had successful launches before but our angle is always creativity.

The full interview's available here.

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Monday Gamewatch

I know, that you know, that everyone else knows no one cares much what's coming out this week with Grand Theft Auto IV sold out at a store near you just eight days away, but here's the week's PC games lineup just in case.

Tuesday

Turok. Stop me if you've heard this one: Bunch of military hoo-hahs land on a planet that just happens to be swarming with dinosaurs, then somehow manage to dial down the locker room bravado long enough to wrestle with the local fauna and get picked off one at a time while you more or less hang on for the by-the-book ride. Instead of a time-traveling warrior chasing pieces of a mystical chrono-scepter (ala Acclaim's original 1997 Nintendo 64 sensation) Propaganda's re-imagined version has you as a black ops hard case fighting raptors, bugs, and the occasional compulsory T-Rex. Only problem? Two, actually. First, this game is to Acclaim's hit original as The Lost World to Jurassic Park. To paraphrase a line from my SCIFI review of the PS3 version, witnessing reptiles pounce, growl, and slither in games anymore has all the force of watching 1980s action stars in aviator's shades with shoulder-length hair waving uzis in front of giant fans, i.e. in this version of Turok, you don't hunt next-gen dinosaurs so much as 1990s-gen cliches. Second, the shooter mechanics with the hallmark knives, guns, and rocket launchers couldn't be blander. Run through outdoor "areas" less like jungles than tunnels with trees, popping enemies that fight like signposts with guns. Creep through indoor caves knifing dinosaurs that spill from fissures like packing peanuts. Defend yourself from lunging dinos by obeying timed button pop-ups that make your guy arbitrarily tattoo reptile jugulars. Etcetera. Unless you're hot for a totally average shooter, nothing to see here, move along. (Note: Play magazine gave it a 9 out of 10, so here's an alternative opinion if you like.)

Wednesday

Lineage II: The 4th Anniversary Edition. I've never played Lineage II so I can't say much about this five-year-old MMORPG, but it's still around and that's a feat in and of itself given the audience-gobbling phenomenon known as World of Warcraft. Like most MMORPGs, you control a single avatar, fight in a medieval-themed world with traditional human-elf-orc fantasy races and wizard-warrior classes, run quests, raise pets, and mostly fight a lot. The hook appears to be PvP (player versus player), which purportedly vamps off a sophisticated socioeconomic matrix. $15 a month seems a little steep for a game that only clocked 611k users in March 2007, but for $40 one-time retail, you can give the "premium service" a whirl for 30 days totally free.

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TGIF: Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword Blows, Literally

You get some pretty interesting looks on an international red eye during lights-out movie time hunched over a Nintendo DS held sidewise like a book in one hand, the other frenetically tattooing the screen with a custom sword-stylus, occasionally swearing out loud. Alright, I admit it -- The part early in Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword where you run into the sleepy guru parked cross-legged on the bridge and can't progress until you wake him up? Stumped me for all of an hour, retracing my path and looking for missed clues. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap and all he does is snore at you while everyone else spouts blithe aphorisms about calling his name. Call his name? Doh. Now imagine me finally realizing how to solve that little puzzle in my sardine-class economy seat betwixt crabby fellow travelers trying desperately to sleep.

I should've known better (or remembered better, anyway). I had this same problem dousing the candles in Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

That's Nintendo for you, making you think outside the box (and look a little foolish nearly kissing your handheld in public).

In any case, Dragon Sword may be one of the best Nintendo DS games I've ever played, maybe even my favorite in the Ninja Gaiden series. The controls are absolutely superb and at the risk of sounding entirely mad, I may just prefer them to finessing buttons on a gamepad in the regular series. They're interesting enough, in fact, to make you wish Ninja Gaiden 2 was coming out for the Wii instead of the Xbox 360.

You control all of Ryu's (the protagonist) maneuvers and calligraphic spells by tapping or slashing the touchscreen with the stylus, which I know sounds weird given Ninja Gaiden's precision-control pedigree. But like the most successful Nintendo DS translations (Metroid Prime Hunters, Zelda Phantom Hourglass) somehow it just works.

Moving's as simple as point-and-tapping. You trigger basic attacks by dragging the stylus down or sideways across enemies, then transition to combos by slashing in various directions. Tag an enemy then whip the stylus up and you'll fling your opponent skyward, then finish with a body-slam. Tap a target rapidly from on the ground or in the air and you'll launch a stream of throwing stars. Leap then slash down or sideways and you'll trigger various special moves. Scribble madly over Ryu and -- if you can avoid taking damage -- he'll start buildings power levels to launch his screen-ravaging "Ultimate Technique." The list of abilities grows as you progress, along with your sword and spell-casting power, both of which can be upgraded by spending yellow orbs absorbed from slain enemies.

Other than my own ineptness with the puzzle mentioned above, the only trouble I've had with Dragon Sword is that the stylus sometimes cramps the screen given the ubiquity of the action and the ease with which Ryu dashes around the screen. That, and the whole affair's simply too short. I know Tecmo, that's the mobile demographic, mobile gamers play in fits and starts, etcetera. But as far as I'm concerned, there's no reason this game couldn't be 26 levels long (instead of just 13 short ones). When your game's this good, six hours start to finish feels almost criminal.

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U.S. Economy Slows, Games Industry Revenue Grows

No surprises to report in NPD's official March 2008 numbers, and as predicted, Super Smash Bros. Brawl kicked Nintendo into hyperdrive, catapulting Wii sales to 31 percent of total industry dollars. It looks like Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter's numbers were spot on for both the Wii and DS, which together accounted for more than half of all competitor sales combined.

"Super Smash Brothers Brawl along with a greater supply of inventory helped the Wii to capture the highest single month unit sales of any platform outside the holiday timeframe," said NPD analyst Anitz Frazier. "NDS sales were most likely spurred by a combination of increased retail promotional activity along with a greater supply at retail, which is now allowing some of that pent-up consumer demand to be satisfied."

In fact things are looking pretty darned rosy across the board for all the doom and gloom about the flagging U.S. dollar. "You'd never know that the U.S. economy was under distress by looking at the video games industry sales figures," said Frazier. "Year-to-date growth is a rock-solid 27% through March 2008." Everything's up over last month by enormous margins, from hardware (up 13 percent) to software (up 29 percent) to video game accessories (up 16 percent) to March 2008's total 57% surge over the same period last year.

Hardware

721K - Wii
698K - DS
297K - PSP
262K - Xbox 360
257K - PS3
216K - PS2

Pachter had Sony besting Microsoft by 55K units, when in fact it looks like Microsoft just inched past Sony by a numerically insignificant 5K. Of course Microsoft public relations is making hay of the turnaround after the PS3 bested the 360 in both January and February -- Microsoft's still blaming the prior downturn on console shortages and suggesting that March's numbers would have been better, but that "some key U.S. retailers were still experiencing the trickledown effect of Xbox 360 console shortages." Microsoft says it "expect[s] retailers to be fully stocked with Xbox 360 consoles in time for the Grand Theft Auto IV launch" right around the corner. Also, Microsoft says March's NPD data shows a U.S. Xbox 360 software attach rate of 7.5 -- a new record.

Sony's response? The PlayStation 3 "continued the strong momentum with 257,120 units sold in March...[representing] a year-over-year sales growth of over 98%" along with "more than 1.9 million software units...representing a year-over-year growth of 139.2%."

"All platforms, aside from the PS2, showed significant increases when compared with March 2007," said Frazier. "The industry realized great growth last year and so far this year, that momentum is carrying through."

And look at the DS go. It nearly outsold the Wii despite SSBB as well as the fact that not a single DS title made the top 10 (compared to #5 God of War: Chains of Olympus and #6 FFVII: Crisis Core for Sony's PSP, both of which broke 300K in sales to propel PSP hardware sales to a 22 percent increase over February).

Software

2.7M - Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
752K - Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (360)
606K - Army of Two (360)
410K - Wii Play (Wii)
341K - God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP)
302K - Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (PSP)
264K - Guitar Hero III (Wii)
237K - Major League Baseball 2008 (360)
237K - Call of Duty 4 (360)
225K - Army of Two (PS3)

Of course you don't want to forget that save for Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Brawl with its chart-eclipsing 2.7M copies sold, Microsoft's kicking tail in comprehensive software sales -- 1.8M total -- with four of March's top 10 spots off three March releases plus one old faithful (the indefatigable Call of Duty 4). Compare that to three for Nintendo (two March releases plus Guitar Hero III from last October) and just one for Sony (Army of Two). Given that Blu-ray sales just passed the 9 million mark -- 3 million during the first 11 weeks of 2008 alone -- it looks like a lot of Sony's hardware momentum is still Blu-ray and not games driven.

"The amazing year-over-year increase in software sales isn't just explained by a few top games," adds Frazier. "As compared to last March, twice as many SKU's achieved sales in excess of 100K units this month."

It'll sure be interesting to see how front-loaded SSBB's sales were in the coming months, once the year's nuclear option, i.e. Grand Theft Auto IV, finally lands.

Be sure to check out suggestions by EEDAR that lower-than-expected sales of the Xbox 360 and PS3 could be indication both systems are plateauing. Once the GTA IV monster runs its course, says EEDAR, we could be looking at price cuts for both systems as early as June.

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Microsoft Claims Xbox 360 Sales Double in Europe

Coming to you from Budapest, Hungary, this story caught my eye whilst speed-scanning a few feeds in a smoke-choked coffee shop (yeah, they actually still have those over here). According to Microsoft (by way of Pocket-Lint), sales of the Xbox 360 have more than doubled in Europe.

?Xbox 360 is truly the next-generation console of choice among consumers, and today?s numbers are proof that we are delivering on our commitment to achieve critical mass in Europe,? said Microsoft Europe VP Chris Lewis.

?The highly competitive ERP, coupled with entertainment content that?s appealing to everyone in the home, makes Xbox 360 the ultimate high-definition entertainment choice, and it?s clear that we?re already seeing this resonate with consumers.?

Microsoft's also claiming the Xbox 360 is officially the number one next-gen console in Europe, with 42 percent of the market in life-to-date revenue.

Microsoft cut the price of the 360 last month, dropping the Arcade to ?160, the Pro to ?200, and the Elite to ?260. It looks like the company's hopes that those cuts would drive sales up dramatically have been momentarily realized. Now it's down to whether upcoming exclusives like Ninja Gaiden 2 -- plus a marketing team that's been working overtime to convince the public the 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV will rate superior to the PS3 version -- can maintain the system's formidable software sales momentum.

Alright, more soon, but right now I have to get out of this place. My eyes are beginning to feel like they've been tumbled in a bin of charcoal dust.

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Variety: GTA IV to Break Record, Snatch $400 Million First Week

You can't swing a Liberty City cat without hitting a story about Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV these days. The game comes out end of this month, but it's already pretty much been reviewed -- all praise, no surprise there -- unofficially and in online interviews by everyone Rockstar flew in to play and finish the game a few weeks back. As usual Future Publishing has the print mag exclusive(s), so if that exclusive early-access relationship works for you, I think you can get their "10 out of 10" scoop in the latest issue of Official Xbox Magazine UK.

Show of hands? How many of you plan to wait, or even to bother reading reviews of this game, before picking up a copy? Okay, I know, there's that segment of you that likes to see if we in the media are half as smart as you when it comes to academically detailing every little pick and pan in a game after you've fanatically obsessed over played it and compared it to the average word-throttled article. But how about in more general terms: Do any of you fans of this 70 million total copies sold to date series seriously plan not to buy this game unless the score's a freak functionally negative integer?

Assuming it's as good as everyone's going to say it is (I know, I'm a veritable Kreskin!), I have just this one request: To those of you already yearning to pick apart whatever critical nuances could possibly exist between, say, an 8.9 and a 9.1, a 9.0 and a 9.2, a 9.0 and a 9.5, a 9.5 and a 10.0, etc., do us all a favor and lurk instead.

And finally regarding the post title: Ben Fritz over at Variety has a provocative piece up today claiming Grand Theft Auto IV is going to shatter records by selling $400 million in its first week, something Fritz notes could be "the biggest debut for an entertainment product [ever]."

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The (Critically Disregarded) Evolution of Video Game Music

The other day I was driving back from the mall listening to the radio and I tuned into NPR at the part in "All Things Considered" where they run clips of readers responding to prior segments. I came in late, but what I caught was a letter written by someone claiming to be a musician, reacting negatively to a segment on the evolution of video game music that aired on April 12, and basically blasting away at the medium as junk that gets too much attention, where "serious" music gets virtually none.

At which point I nearly spit out my drink and half-reached for the phone to call in. I totally respect NPR's attempt to play good cop, bad cop with the letters, and to be fair, they had one other that was reasonably positive about the segment. But in terms of the dissenter's opinion...talk about not seeing the forest for the tree trunk.

What's interesting to me about video game music in the 21st century, speaking as someone who's been academically involved with the piano since the age of four, is that the stuff on exhibition today and particularly in cinematic games, is just as theoretically sophisticated and thematically interesting as some of the very best film scores. Also interesting? That no one on the academic side of the music industry I've talked to seems to entirely get that.

The NPR story talks about Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu who could certainly be accused of occasionally soaking his compositions in sentimental schmaltz. But has anyone taken a listen to "Decisive Battle," track 14 on the piano collection compilation of songs from Final Fantasy X? How about "Besaid Island" or "Song of Prayer" from the same disc? Sure, it's obvious to anyone with any music training at all that he's a disciple of Debussy, but on a scale that runs from Row-Row-Row-Your-Boat all the way out to John Cage's and back again, Uematsu's in my opinion doing some remarkable, largely unnoticed (by at least Western establishments) things. Does anyone care? Is anyone that thinks video game music is still nerdy "beeps" and "boops" even paying attention?

If these people did more listening instead of "Space Invaders? Seriously?" knee-jerking, I think they'd find there's a hugely important new medium practically exploding all around them, one in which composers like Hitoshi Sakimoto and Kumi Tanioka and Takeharu Ishimoto are turning out amazingly ear-opening stuff, to say nothing of BAFTA Award-winning composer Jeremy Soule, whose contributions to a game like Oblivion are right up there with anything Howard Shore or James Horner or John Williams are up to.

All I'm saying, is that whether you can subdivide a Bach Invention into theoretical "cells" and think Arnold Schoenberg's the dodecaphonic bee's knees or not, you have no business pedantically dismissing wholesale an idiom you've never even bothered to take the time to get to know, or to understand, in terms of its astoundingly broad (and exploding) international breadth.

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Nintendo to Smash Competition in March U.S. Sales

Make March Nintendo's, with Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter teasing an industry sales boost of 47 percent to $850 million for March driven primarily by sales of Super Smash Bros Brawl, the Wii, and DS. As usual, industry trade site Gamasutra has the scoop on Pachter's predictions ahead of NPD's March sales numbers due out this week. I'll have that data for you tomorrow, but in the meantime, here's what Pachter's forecasting:

700,000 - Wii
700,000 - DS
365,000 - PlayStation 3
320,000 - PlayStation 2
310,000 - Xbox 360
300,000 - PSP

Last year's March totaled $579 million, making this year's upswing tremendously impressive, all led by a single company (Nintendo) whose combined hardware sales (Wii, DS) alone would, by Pachter guesstimate, account for more than half of all competitor hardware sales combined.

Interestingly, Pachter also released a second set of estimates from video game prediction site The simExchange, which still favor Nintendo, but by a much smaller margin.

593,000 - Wii
593,000 - DS
327,000 - PSP
301,000 - PSP
296,000 - Xbox 360

Explanation? Says Pachter:

The Wii supply situation has made forecasting unit sales quite difficult. Since April 2007, Nintendo has manufactured 1.8 million Wiis per month, implying that U.S. share should be somewhere between 720,000 - 900,000 units per month (40 - 50% of total units produced). We believe that Nintendo has diverted a significant portion of its available supply to Europe since April, as the weakening dollar has made U.S. sales less profitable for the company.

Pachter says his 700,000 unit forecast assumes Nintendo's going to keep U.S. supplies at the low end of its historical market share, but says things should improve in the coming months.

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60 Hour Countdown to Sony Japan's Red, Rainy Surprise

What in the name of swearing, screaming, deluging, bloody-red Flash animations could this mystery countdown on Sony Japan's official PlayStation site be all about? Warning, if you visit and bother to listen, you'll hear plenty of sailor talk. The answer (or whatever Sony plans to reveal when we hit six chronometric zeroes) is coming in slightly less than 60 hours.

Here's my guess at a transcript after a couple listens. I'm sure I've got some of this wrong. Feel free to fill in my blanks or correct any mistakes below.

(Downpour, thunder)

(Muffled dialogue and sounds of gunshots)

Any guesses about what this could be? Everyone at Ultimate PS3 (warning, all in French) thinks it's going to be the third game in Sony's stealth/survival-horror Siren series. The first game was released in the US and Europe as Forbidden Siren back in April, while the second never made it across this side of the pond. If it is a Siren sequel, question is, are we talking PS2 or PS3?

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The Little Big Deal About LittleBigPlanet

What's teeny and plush and floppy, comes in twos, threes, and even fours, can heave isosceles boulders into mounds of jostling rocks, launch itself kite-like from toothy cogs, party on curling wood slats pegged to rocking trees, and whiz around a screen like a cartoon balloon venting steam? If you're lost, so am I, but that's what's in store with Sony's LittleBigPlanet, coming exclusively to a PS3 near you this September.

A little background on Mark Healey, the guy who launched the studio designing this thing. He's a former Lionhead Studios artist and the guru behind Rag Doll Kung Fu, a couple years old PC fighter featuring string puppets whose many appendages (well, the legally displayable ones anyway) can be manipulated almost limitlessly. According to Healey, it's "a kung fu fighter with string puppets, except you don't have to worry about getting the strings tangled up, and you don't have to have a kung fu fight." The game nabbed a couple indie award nominations and quietly made the rounds before getting picked up by Valve and Steam. Healey left Lionhead in late 2005 to form development studio Media Molecule in Guildford, UK, and the new team immediately began work on an action game conceptually similar to Rag Doll Kung Fu, but dramatically expanded for the PlayStation 3 and dubbed oh-so-endearingly LittleBigPlanet.

Imagine the primitive physics-based mechanics of a 2D fighter like Rag Doll Kung Fu transmogrified into something broader, wilder, endlessly cuter, and even more freakishly realistic. Well, real inasmuch as that word can apply to a bunch of puppet-doll-sack-things flopping around with gigantic soccer balls and oranges or bounding in front of papery crayola'd houses and launching themselves up into storybook castles, swinging on stars, tag-teaming snail shells, and racing down launch ramps on skateboards. Still lost? Check out this trailer from last year's GDC and you'll have a sense for how sui generis this one's shaping up to be.

The LittleBigPlanet GDC 2007 online co-op trailer. Dig that funky music.

Sony's demo of LittleBigPlanet Sony at GDC 2007, highlighting the ease with which a couple players can quickly and easily create incredibly cool, unorthodox levels together.

Update: New trailer released just today (serendipity) and embedded below. It somewhat abstrusely recapitulates Sony's talking points. Hey, if anything, it's worth watching for a few of the new build/play sequences.

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Do We Really Need a New Nintendo DS?

Do we need another version of the Nintendo DS that isn't just a lipstick-colored eye-catcher wrapped around the same-ol-same-ol hardware? How about the ability to play back music and movies either via increased local storage, wireless streaming, or perhaps even both, along with a new slot for external hardware plugins? The wireless streaming bit's my own speculation, but the original rumor about media playback and the plugin slot was started by Hirokazu Hamamura of magazine publisher Enterbrain. Last week you maybe read about a "new and improved" Nintendo DS showing up at E3 in July? That was these guys.

How credible is Hamamura's claim? No one knows. We on the one hand have Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime stirring up hype like "All I can tell you is what we announce during E3 is gonna be fantastic." On the other, we have the fact that Nintendo last updated the DS in 2006--two years after the original in 2004--along with Nintendo's history of updating its portables at two year intervals back and through its GameBoy line. With Apple's iPhone hypothetically vying for handheld gamers' coin and Sony's PlayStation Portable in the ascendant (it's actually outselling the DS in Japan) 2008 certainly wouldn't be too soon for Nintendo to give it's gaming mainstay a booster shot.

The current Nintendo DS dubbed the "DS Lite" and true to its name (smaller, cute as a button, etc.) but functionally identical to the original DS, set the handheld world ablaze. Since 2004, it's sold around 70 million units worldwide, making it the second bestselling platform going after Sony's PlayStation 2.

You could certainly make the existing DS Lite "lighter," but I doubt anyone would notice, and it's possible to make something like this too light. People associate a certain amount of heft with quality, and the DS Lite already feels a little flimsy and breakable to me -- especially around the hinges -- compared to the PSP.

The question, then, is whether anyone's really going to care if they can use their DS as an audio-video playback device. Most of you with audio needs have miniscule iPods (my Shuffle's the size of a postage stamp), don't particularly care to watch movies on tiny 2-3 inch screens that run any longer than a YouTube clip, and by the way, didn't we already see portable movie playback fail with Sony's attempt to put movies on UMD discs? Let's get serious. It's been possible for years to load movies on PSP memory sticks, but I don't know anyone who does it regularly. I'll be on a plane to Budapest come Wednesday toting both my DS and PSP, but even in economy class the airlines make it so easy to watch dozens of the latest movies and TV shows on the backs of the seat in front of you that squinting at a handheld electronic device for hours at a time sounds about as appealing as having my eyeballs massaged with a leather strop.

Now what would be interesting? Let's shoot the moon: A power boost, something that would let the DS compete directly with the PSP in raw horsepower. And how about a resolution bump for seconds? The current DS has two screens running at a mediocre 256 x 192 pixels. The PSP's single widescreen runs 480 x 272 pixels at up to 16.7 million colors. Wouldn't it be something if Nintendo released a "DS Advance" with two PSP-like screens and the processing oomph to deliver a game as complex as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in your pocket?

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What Would Happen if Electronic Arts Just Went Away?

By EA CEO John Riccitiello's barometer, it'd be a catastrophe on the order of Disney going under, NBC capsizing, or who knows, Mount Vesuvius letting off another Pompeii-sized burp. In an interview with the Financial Times, the 48-year-old Riccitiello said "Interactive entertainment is going to determine one great company and I think it's this one." If you square things off to revenues alone, it's hard to argue with that proposition. But for the same reasons guys like Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay are ridiculed by film critics who favor the Paul Thomas Andersons and Julian Schnabels, I don't know that EA's critically mediocre intellectual property history is doing Riccitiello's prediction any favors.

Test the hypothesis. What would happen if EA suddenly vanished? We'd almost certainly see a destabilization of the speculative investment aspect of video gaming with publicly traded media giants like EA rising and falling on the whims of pundits and misty-magical psychology-driven brouhaha (not such a terrible thing as far as I'm concerned) as well as a whole slew of suddenly unemployed, highly talented designers (a very bad thing, of course). To be sure, the bad would almost certainly outweigh the good for at least the short term, so let's get this much straight: I'm not advocating EA's dissolution, and I'm thoroughly on record by way of reviews celebrating happy events like Crysis, Rock Band, and Command & Conquer 3.

But aside from those, what exactly would we lose if EA folded tomorrow game-wise? EA's long been a stagnant "me-too" publisher in the minds of the gaming press -- clearly not a risk-taker -- and most gaming diehards are sick to tears of the company's perennial sports refreshes, something I think Riccitiello to his credit acknowledges when he admits "We're boring people to death...there's been lots of product that looked like last year's product, that looked a lot like the year before."

When was the last time a sports game -- any sports game -- made the cover of a magazine or was the subject of a prominent insider story about the industry? Does anyone else find that, I don't know, a little bizarre given the attention paid to the real deal in this country? I remember back in the early 1990s when Sierra/Dynamix was still in the ring and boxing with their Front Page Sports series, there used to be genuine buzz around the release of a new sports franchise or even just an uptick in an existing one. Today most of these games are EA-fueled and viewed cynically as shameless roster updates under a modest visually enhanced glaze.

Move over to everyone's favorite design luminary Will Wright. While The Sims games roll cheerily along in the monthly top 10, no one talks about The Sims anymore. Of course the sales are fabulous, but the buzz on the series, whatever it'll be worth to posterity, is long since "been there, done that." Take the Sim-spinoffs, like 2007's SimCity Societies, a casual facelift to Wright's once-beloved municipal tinker-tool, turned out to be a lazy bore that literally played itself--the ultimate bimbo-fication of that series. In fact the only game I could name off the top of my head that's of any significance coming from EA in the next six months is Wright's Spore. Sure, that one's probably going to raise the sun and lasso the moon and set all the celestial bodies into alignment, but you don't build an innovation empire on the back of one guy who turns out just two or three genuinely clever hits over the space of two decades. (Though, as EA's proved, you can certainly build an empire by figuring out how to plug the gaping cracks between with loads of filler.)

If Riccitiello was serious about innovating and being "a great company" like his heroes, Disney, CBS, and NBC, he'd for starters immediately burn EA's exclusive licensing deal with the NFL and NFLPA and let some fresh air into that very stale, very musty room. In his own words, responding to interest in EA's bid for Take-Two, "I don't think you ever want to buy to fix a problem." Just like you don't ever want to buy innovation right out of the market to fix "problems" like healthy competition, right?

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Is Capcom's Resident Evil 5 Trailer Racist?

When I first read about Newsweek's N'Gai Croal reacting critically to what he calls "imagery that dovetails with classic racist imagery" in Capcom's Resident Evil 5 trailer, I wasn't sure what to think. When I saw the trailer for the first time myself last summer, I admit that part of me was a little shocked -- and I'll use that word, because it's personally accurate -- by at least some of the imagery. I take full responsibility for my reaction, of course. It's not necessarily the one you had, or should have had. And while I think Croal has some very salient points, I do take issue with his inability to at least acknowledge his own prejudices in the interview. When you make blanket statements like "clearly no one black worked on this game" to drive your point, you sound less like a journalist and more like a reactionary, and that's not where this dialogue, which is extremely important, should be occurring.

Incidentally, Croal's not the first to raise his hand over the trailer, in case any of this is news to you. Back in July 2007, a blog called "Black Looks" fingered the trailer as "problematic on so many levels," indicting things like "the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that [the] video game is marketed to children and young adults." You'll have to make up your mind about the accuracy of that last point, since technically there's not a chance in the universe Resident Evil 5 won't be rated M for Mature. On the other hand, there's also not a chance in the universe it won't be purchased and played by millions of underage U.S. gamers.

Now while part of me recoils at the way racist innuendo is too often wielded as a sanctimonious hammer in media discourse, like Bonnie Ruberg writing last July for the Village Voice, I can't pretend I wasn't on some level "strangely disturbed" by the trailer, and I don't mean just because of the creepy glares and eyeball hemorrhaging and throngs of sickle-waving zombies. Sure, that's disturbing, for the same reasons any moldering dude in rotting button-up and slacks speed-shuffling across a room drooling blood and baring lipless teeth is liable to make someone jump.

The E3 2007 extended Resident Evil 5 trailer.

When I say "disturbed," I'm not talking about the notion that Chris Redfield, who's been part of the series from the beginning, is a white guy fighting what appears to be African villagers in...well, you know, quite probably Africa, where it stands to reason the predominant ethnicity isn't going to be Slavic or Laotian. I'm not talking about superficial analyses that chastise the game for employing blacks as zombies, because the last however many Resident Evil games have focused predominantly on whites as zombies (and Spaniards in Resident Evil 4) and where was the outrage then?

I'm talking about something subtler. Take for instance a moment at 0:29 seconds into the trailer of a seated man -- not a zombie -- the whites of his eyes emerging from behind dark smoke as he turns toward the camera -- arguably and in the context of the shot editing -- glaring at us like a spiteful, "soulless corpse." Ruberg points out that "it's not just that these zombies are black, but that the uninfected black villagers are zombie-like too...it's as if race itself were a disease...the white protagonist has to fight back or be infected."

It's possible I'm reading too much into that moment. That Ruberg is too. It's possible, even probable, that the developers were just trying to create a hostile, hopeless atmosphere, the same sort of hostile ambiance that suffused Resident Evil 4, whether Leon was dealing with the occasional uninfected Spaniard acting psychotic, or the headless, tentacle-flailing, infected variety. Regardless, I think Croal's exactly right when he says:

This imagery has a history. It has a history and you can?t pretend otherwise. That imagery still has a history that has to be engaged, that has to be understood... If you?re going to engage imagery that has that potential, the onus is on the creator to be aware of that because there will be repercussions in the marketplace.

September 11, 2001 has a history. So does Pearl Harbor. Now it's okay, today, 67 years later, to make epic war movies in which all kinds of people get killed and ships blow up at a Hawaiian naval base. But Manhattan's twin towers were scrubbed from the first Spider-Man movie, the issue of 9/11-based imagery on TV and in film is still hotly debated, and to this day it's still impossible to crash a plane properly in Microsoft's post-9/11 versions of Flight Simulator. The point? Imagery with historical proximity to sensitive issues can't be trotted out carte blanche. It has complex cultural baggage. The attack on Pearl Harbor is long past. Racism and racial stereotypes aren't. Which, as far as I'm concerned, makes Croal's point about imagery and history relevant and worth bearing in mind when you see a trailer like this.

I'm as aware as any of you that Resident Evil 5 is intended to be a survival horror game, not some insidious racist credo, and intentions certainly matter. But it doesn't hurt anyone to at least take another look, pause, and reconsider what the images are going to mean -- how they'll resonate -- with a culture like America's, which has a unique history with them.

Further reading:

- NPR has a show from September 6, 2001 discussing "Racism on the Silver Screen" and noting the following:

Some observers say the lack of minority images in the movies is even more destructive than the stereotypes. When minorities do appear, critics say, they tend to be in the background, or cast as expendable sidekicks to white male star.

I list it here because it raises another point for consideration: Does the casting of blacks as theoretically prominent and foreground in a game like Resident Evil 5 actually contravene the older-school Hollywood stereotype?

- The Atlantic Online has an interesting article on "Gone With the Wind and Hollywood's Racial Politics" from December 1999 up here. Interesting, because it elucidates the ways in which even Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick's attempt to "come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger" (in relation to the depiction of blacks in that film) can get that depiction sorely wrong.

- In February 2008, New Scientist noted "an unsettling" new study published the week of February 11 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which suggests that...

...Americans of various races still unconsciously dehumanise their black fellow citizens by subtly associating them with apes. In an experiment in which students were subliminally flashed a photo of either an African-American or a European-American face and then shown a blurry picture of an ape, those shown the black face were quicker to recognise the ape. More troubling still, this association is not just confined to psychologists' tests: it also appears to bias people's judgements about whether specific instances of police violence are justified.

The question then being, if the study's bolstered by further research, should this place any special considerations around the ways in which designers craft stories and imagery (in games or elsewhere) where the material engages racially charged imagery?

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The PlayStation 3 80010514 Error Debacle (That Wasn't)

Various sites have started squawking about a new error thrown by fussy PS3's, an error somewhat obliquely referred to as 80010514. It turns out the error's been around for awhile, and that when it happens, it manifests with some pretty broad causal latitude. Customers posting last year on the Official PlayStation Community (currently closed, but you can read the cached pages) report that the error occurs when inserting game or Blu-ray discs, but not DVDs.

The complete syntax of the error message:

An error occurred during the start operation. 80010514

One customer on the cached page reported that "Ratchet & Clank froze (several times) and now when I try to load a game it gives me this error." Another on a different forum suggests the problem occurs when running a firmware update on a system from a non-matching region. Still another user on Sony's official PlayStation message boards speculates wildly that it's "the blue-ray diode... it burns out in that model of the system." Don't you love how anonymity turns everyone into an armchair electrical engineer?

After confirming with Sony support that the error is in essence a catch-all for a system reset and noting that a factory default reset doesn't solve the problem, GameRevolver speculates (without confirmation) that it's "one of two things":

- A faulty sector on the internal hard drive.

- A bad firmware install.

Their recommendations to avoid the error are a little too general to take much stock in. Dust your PS3, make sure you have a stable internet connection, update your firmware properly, etc. Common sense, in other words, though it's not going to help any of you already getting the error -- the other allegation is that once the error occurs, you'll need a replacement PS3 from Sony. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Speaking anecdotally -- anecdotally, mind you! -- I've never seen the error (or any other) after over a year of frequent use. I've had three Xbox 360s go to pot (and had all three replaced, thank you very much for the first class customer service Microsoft) but I'm still on PS3 numero uno, and just in case it matters, I run both systems side-by-side inside a large wooden cabinet without proper ventilation, and yes, they both get quite warm and fan-blade-whiny in the summer after extended play time.

If you do get the error, the best thing you can do is probably ignore most of the above, stay away from the junk speculation on most of the boards (unless you're into wrapping systems in towels and doing rain dances and lighting votive candles to resurrect the mechanically dead), and give Sony a call. Unlike Microsoft's Xbox 360 "red ring of death" error, which several retailers were claiming was causing failures in the 30 to 33 percentile range, the 80010514 reset issue appears to be rare and occurring within the acceptable failure range for any piece of electronic equipment. If that changes, I'll be right back on top of it here.

Also, it's worth noting that the PS3 can (and does) throw a slew of error messages, some of which you'll find referenced in this thread. 80010514 probably occurs more often because, as noted, it's a "catch-all" general reset.

Whatever the case, it would behoove Sony to get out in front of the "issue" in one form or another, before the rain dancers and candle burners start threatening ye obligatory class action lawsuits.

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Fiddling With Petroglyph's Universe At War for Xbox 360

I shucked the plastic off a copy of Universe at War: Earth Assault tonight and lit up my Xbox 360 for the first time in weeks to see whether developer Petroglyph's RTS transliteration from PC keyboard-and-mouse to gamepad is up to snuff.

First impressions? The controls are actually pretty comprehensible once you've worked your fingers and thumbs through the roll-around menus and gotten comfortable doing stuff like right-bumpering to quick-select available groups of units from dial-up options, or lobbed all sorts of plasma fun-toys at enemy units by squeezing the left trigger, tap-selecting, and targeting swathes of toothsome victims. Lots to memorize, of course, but nothing worse than mapping out a laminated card's worth of hotkeys on a keyboard. You just have less independent buttons and more one-plus-two combinations to keep track of here. Kudos to Petroglyph on the paint-in-lieu-of-lasso option, by the way, where you build custom squads by "painting" the cursor over desirables, then hit the "back" button to lock and load your new motley crew.

I've spotted a couple reviewers making rookie errors in terms of their critiques of at least one aspect of the interface, pillorying the camera because, for whatever reason, they think they're smarter than a designer about things like the game's intentionally "limited" view of the battlefield. When you're talking classic Command & Conquer style isometric gameplay, that's a little like calling your Dungeon Master a jerk for covering up hexes you're not supposed to be able to see on a tactical battle mat. That "limited" view is part of the challenge, in other words, and if you think the challenge doesn't justify itself, the issue at least deserves more thoughtful criticism than a couple confused, nondescript bellyaches about the zoom level. There's a reason, for instance, that the maximum fire range of all the units I've employed so far is equal to or less than a single screen's length.

What else. Since I skipped the PC version, I'm bumping into curiosities like the mechanical Novus faction's "flow" teleports for the first time -- well, not literally teleporting, but in practice they're pretty darned close. Goodbye sneaker time between build and rally points, hello spider-webbing maps, which I have to say is pretty frigging cool.

Only first-play complaint? Flimsy plot, amateurish cutscenes, and the sense that I'm playing a glorified add-on to some bigger, woulda-shoulda-coulda-been-better narrative than the hasty machinima montage on display here.

Sorry, I'm spoiled after the glorious schlock-fest that was Command & Conquer 3.

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Misconstrued Symbolism: Toddler Beaten to Death with Game Controller

A lot of people are murdered around the world in a given 24 hour period, killed in unthinkable ways. It takes a culture -- and, by proxy, media -- voyeuristically obsessed with violence to laser in on something like this story, which, tragic though it is, has been getting unusual attention because the perpetrator allegedly used a video game controller to beat a two-year-old girl to death. The implication, unwritten but there by virtue of the coverage, is that the game controller is somehow culpable in the act for simply being a game controller.

Is there a story here about video games? Don't know. No one does at this point. But I'm betting not, just like there wasn't a story about video games around Cho Seung-Hui, the Virgina Tech student who went on a shooting rampage last year this month, killing 32 people and wounding many more.

The only relation this story has to video games at the moment, is that a thug reached for a game controller instead of any other blunt force object when he came unhinged in the presence of a defenseless child. His choice of weapon was probably random. It takes someone else to assign meaning to that game controller for simply being a game controller, and to elevate the story in a way that -- had he used something like a statue or TV remote or vase -- the media simply wouldn't.

It's not the things people use to commit a crime that make the crime unspeakable, it's the act itself. We're eternally searching for something external to blame, so that we don't have to ultimately blame ourselves or take responsibility for our actions. Worth bearing in mind, with the one year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting looming (coming up next Wednesday, April 16) and all the junk psychology and science out there infecting the games/violence "issue."

Update: Joystiq has an editorial up that takes a similar tone.

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R.I.P. Games For Windows Magazine, Welcome GFW Online

Count 'em down but hardly out, as Games For Windows magazine (nee Computer Gaming World for 27 years) goes online-only in a transition just announced following publisher Ziff Davis's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in early March.

1UP's VP of content Simon Cox says "the announcement today that we are closing the print publication Games For Windows: The Official Magazine has nothing to do with the Chapter 11 stuff" on his blog. Instead, the company's citing the movement of readers away from print to online news sources. The final issue (April/May, pictured above) is on newsstands now.

You might remember the atypically hard-hitting and well-written Computer Games Magazine closing shop around this time last year. When that magazine folded -- allegedly due to lawsuit damages incurred by publisher TheGlobe.com that had nothing to do with the otherwise profitable magazine -- a few of its writers hopped over to GFW and made a great magazine even greater. With GFW The Print Magazine now history, that means PC game print aficionados are -- as far as mainstream newsstand availability's concerned -- pretty much down to Future's PC Gamer or bust.

"The end of an era, but the start of a new one," reads the subhead of this note from 1UP's Sam Kennedy.

Here's hoping it's an epoch, guys.

(Check out GFW editor Jeff Green's blog for the straight-no-chaser version of the story.)

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Microsoft Developing Wii-Like Remote for Xbox 360?

If you've got two brain cells to rub together, you know that adding a Wii-like interface to an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 equals (a) a reasonably cheap motion-sensing control schema and (b) games designed to take advantage of it. Granted crafting head-turning games that require (as opposed to merely heed) a motion control interface is easier bragged about than done -- just look at most of the games available for the Wii you've never heard of and probably never will -- but creating an add-on motion sensing peripheral alone? For "thin" PCs like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with industry standard wireless and USB, comparably easy-peasy.

Now an anonymous developer's told MTV that that's exactly what Microsoft-owned developer Rare (Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie) has been up to, and what's more: we may even see such a creature by year's end. The source even provided MTV with what appears to be a crude MS Paint sketch of the controller, which doesn't reveal much beyond its suggestion that Microsoft's blatantly copying Nintendo (who, to be fair, blatantly copied anyone who's ever built a TV remote).

MTV's awfully vague on the sourcing, stating only that it "confirmed Microsoft's active interest in developing a motion-sensitive controller with other industry sources." Also, the source in question sounds an awful lot like someone at the end of an info-chain, given their colorful description of the purported initiative as "a colossal cluster-[fill in the blank]." (Way to get behind your employer's agenda, fella.)

Is this the future of motion-control for Xbox 360 gamers?

Assuming any of this is true, is the timing right? It all depends on the games. Nintendo has a few motion-control-driven greats for the Wii -- games where the motion controls are so tightly integrated you can't imagine playing the game without them -- but the rest are kind of dodgy. If Microsoft's about to throw its hat in this particular ring, it's going to need more than some Wii Sports equivalent to stave off media cynicism about the company's proclivity to clone first and innovate later.

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Sony Says Microsoft "Has Already Leveraged All Their Big Assets"

That's Sony's VP of marketing Scott Steinberg whipping the waters and dissing Microsoft's '08 lineup. But will 2008 be the year of the PlayStation 3? Let's analyze what Steinberg's saying and see for ourselves.

Claim #1: The Blu-ray format's recent victory has lent the PS3 enormous momentum. True? Probably. Relevance? Very.

For at least the past two months, despite the PS3's unit sales surge, Sony's been losing the software war, with only a single title making the top ten sales list in January and February. Implications? People are buying the PS3 as a Blu-ray player first (or even only). No one's buy the Wii or Xbox 360 at this point as anything other than a video game machine. As long as the high-def market keeps a-growin', that's a built-in stealth delivery system for long term PS3 game sales.

Claim #2: The PS3 has "entertainment leverage" as a media hub, e.g. for "music and movies" playback. True? Not really. Relevance? Not very.

Except for Blu-ray playback (something easily remediable if Microsoft ever opts to sell an add-on player) the Xbox 360 is every bit as capable as the PS3 of being a media hub for "anything" playback. Microsoft may seem a little out of touch with its "no Blu-ray, all downloadable content" angle given current broadband speed and access issues, but up-selling the PS3 as having "entertainment leverage" over the Xbox 360 simply doesn't add up.

Claim #3: Sony has a back-library of PS1 and PS2 games it can release for download. True? Absolutely. Relevance? Prove it.

We're over a year into the PS3's life and the PlayStation Store's downloadable games library boasts mostly unglamorous yawners like Warhawk, Wild Arms, Crash Bandicoot, Gauntlet 2, Mortal Kombat 2, Destruction Derby, and Wipeout. Where's the FinalFantasyGodOfWarJakandDaxterGrandTheftAuto beef, Sony? Stop with the trickle and turn on the faucet already, s'il vous plait.

Claim #4: Sony's 2008 IP lineup is going to result in "a monster year" for the PS3. True: Looking more and more likely. Relevance? Huge.

Sony's 2008 lineup includes...

...Metal Gear Solid 4. The Metal Gear Solid series has cumulatively sold somewhere in the 17+ million range worldwide. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty alone broke 5.6 million. Metal Gear Solid 4, with its epically hyped story, visuals, and interface makeover (on the order of what Shinji Mikami did to Resident Evil 4) could easily sell more than any game in the series to date. Want a number? Try at least six million copies worldwide.

...Gran Turismo 5. Gran Turismo's a no-brainer, a series with nearly 50 million in total worldwide sales. If anything stands a chance of beating Grand Theft Auto IV (in PS3 sales, anyway), it's GT5 Prologue and GT5 itself.

...Resistance 2. The sequel to first-person alien shooter Resistance: Fall of Man, which sold a respectable 2.6 million copies worldwide, and that was back when Sony had far fewer consoles in circulation.

By comparison, Microsoft has...

...Ninja Gaiden 2. Should do well, but it's worth remembering that Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox was more of a critical than a commercial success. This complex overtly difficult fighter is definitely more of a niche property, not the sort of game everyone rallies around like a Halo, Mario, or Gran Turismo.

...Halo Wars. A console RTS born of a joint collaboration between Halo developer Bungie and the guys behind the bestselling Age of Empires RTS series on the PC. Unless they somehow louse it up (and since it's a console RTS, they very well could) this should sell well on name recognition alone given the Halo series' 23 million in worldwide sales to date.

...Fable 2. Fable was all sorts of good, bad, and so-so. Still, the original sold 2.6 million worldwide, and Xbox 360 owners could really use a great new RPG.

...Gears of War 2, which if it makes its rumored November 2008 release should counter Metal Gear Solid 4's numbers nicely. The original Gears of War sold over 5 million copies worldwide.

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Stephen King: Proposed Videogame Ban Made Me "Hit the Roof"

I can't help but love it a little bit (or maybe even a lot) when someone like Stephen King comes along and uses his pencil-pushing moxie to sock the ball right out of the ballpark. The ball in this case has to do with HB 1423, the Massachusetts bill that would seek to restrict or ban the sale of video games that depict violence to buyers under 18. Among other things, it seeks to define "harmful to minors" in terms of whether the game is "obscene" (whatever that means), or...

(1) describes or represents nudity, sexual conduct or sexual excitement, so as to appeal predominantly to the prurient interest of minors; (2) depicts violence in a manner patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community, so as to appeal predominantly to the morbid interest in violence of minors; (3) is patently contrary to prevailing standards of adults in the county where the offense was committed as to suitable material for such minors; and (4) lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.

Videogames and violence, violence and videogames... I'm as sick as you are of bringing it up. But as long as there's a single politician out there in la-la land trying to shovel what's right and wrong in the service of "American Values" down our throats, I'll use my position anywhere they'll let me to point out that legislative demonization and proxy regulation of our popular culture is always, always wrong, capital double-u, whether we're talking James Joyce's Ulysses, the Margaret Sanger film Birth Control, or Rockstar's Manhunt 2.

And remember, if they get away with it? We only have ourselves to blame.

(Wondering if you can do anything about HB 1423? Why not send a letter?)

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The End of Discrete Video Cards for PCs?

At the Shanghai IDF, an Intel Graphics and Gaming Technologist told TG Daily that "multi-core CPUs will put an end to multi-GPU madness" and that people "probably won't need" discrete cards in the future.

Self-serving on Intel's part? Perhaps. Probably. But I think he's right that if you find even the one discrete GPU in someone's setup, you'll only rarely find someone with the kit for two, and virtually never the means for exotic configurations that support four or eight and beyond. Who needs that kind of trouble anyway? Have you seen the requirements? 1300+ watt power supplies? Cases the size of shipping crates? Running your PC from inside your refrigerator? It's fun to read about or YouTube someone's homebrew supercomputer, but who's got the kind of dough necessary to pull that off? And let's not forget how many games don't work or exhibit a performance increase when you simply throw GPU muscle at the problem.

Eight cores and no discrete GPU = the future of PC gaming?

Game developers worry too much about pushing the over-represented enthusiast-minority-defined envelope and not enough about making interesting games. Take Crysis with its impressive kilometer-sized jungle areas and emergent gameplay that sadly narrowed as the plot unfurled, right down to a single boxy aircraft carrier and a great big gimmicky light show with the denouement's obligatory Contra-style alien that was all pattern-driven spectacle and brain-cell-free. It sure was pur-dy, though, wasn't it?

Maybe if designers spent a little less time trying to get in front of the latest gee-whiz plug-in technology and signing up for intro video brand-awareness marketing plans, we'd enjoy games more as games and less as light shows. Consolidating everything onto a single chip wouldn't entirely fix the problem, but it might help by simplifying and simultaneously narrowing the focus points in the design process.

I know what Nvidia's probably thinking about all this, but how about you? Is PC gaming headed toward single-chip, multi-core, all-in-one processing, or will we still have discrete multi-GPU setups in the next 5 to 10?

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All Time High: 72% of U.S. Population Plays Video Games

Nearly three-fourths of consumers living in the United States say they play video games, according to a recently released NPD Group report. That's off a notable if not quite barn-burning increase of roughly 8 points to 72 percent, up from 64 percent in 2006. Of the 72 percent majority, over half say they play games online. In fact the report concludes that "the PC platform continues to be the driving force in online gaming, with 90 percent of online gamers stating they use a PC to play games online."

Bear in mind that "online gaming" means any game played online, from Sudoku to Peggle to Counter-Strike -- there's no distinction made in the press release accompanying this study. What's more, a 2006 Nielsen study found that 62 percent or nearly two-thirds of online gamers are actually female (and a majority of female gamers are casual gamers). So while the NPD's numbers bode well for female casual game aficionados, it's hard to say exactly what it means for mostly male enthusiast and hardcore PC gamers who'd like a little variety in what's become a predominantly Blizzard-ian sphere.

If you don't count World of Warcraft and Maxis' perennial Sims spinoffs, total enthusiast PC game sales in the U.S. are markedly lower than total console software revenue, which -- paired with casual/female gaming data -- helps contextualize numbers like "90 percent of online gamers [state] they use a PC to play games online [as opposed to] 19 percent [that claim] they use a video game system (console or portable)." That 90 percent is a number so broad and undefined it's difficult to take seriously. It may be interesting to internet service providers, for instance, but it's of dubious value to the average enthusiast PC gamer looking for assurance his/her hobby is on the rebound.

Here's another interesting number: Kids ages 2 to 12 are driving over 25 percent of online gaming, while 18-24 year olds only represent 10 percent of online gaming. I have no idea what a 2 year old plays online, but it's safe to assume it's not your average MMORPG.

What else? The Xbox 360 unsurprisingly ranked first in "top system used" for online gaming, with 50 percent of 360 owners saying they play games online, outpacing both the PC and PS3 in "time [spent] per week." Xbox 360 owners spend more time gaming online per user than a larger population of casual/female online PC gamers, in other words.

Be a little skeptical of all this data, of course, since you'll find startling disparity between like demographic groups in studies conducted by different groups representing different industry agendas. The ESA's 2007 study claims only 47% of all online gamers are female, while Nielsen claims the number's 62%, for instance.

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Goodbye SIXAXIS, Hello DUALSHOCK3

So my PlayStation 3 DUALSHOCK3 controller arrived in the mail today, and I have to say, it's actually kind of heavy. No, no heavier than it ought to be, no heavier than a PS2 DUALSHOCK2 or Xbox 360 controller or anything like that. But given how accustomed I've become to the featherweight SIXAXIS controller -- especially when winging it around in games like Heavenly Sword or Ratchet & Clank -- I'm a little weirded out by the heavy if "higher-quality" feel of the new DUALSHOCK3. Weight tends to be pretty subjective, but it's hard to argue that an increase of almost a third (137 grams for the SIXAXIS vs. 193 for the DUALSHOCK3) won't alter your perception of things.

Anyway. The good news, if you haven't been following the controller, is that despite Sony's calculated lawsuit-related excuses public claims that rumble was a "last-generation" feature a while back, the DUALSHOCK3 in fact supports both force feedback and SIXAXIS motion sensitivity. I can't find the quote where someone purportedly said combining the two was "impossible," but given that the Immersion vs. Sony patent lawsuit ended on March 1, 2007, it's hardly a surprise that Sony's engineers figured out how to put the two together.

How well it works in practice and whether the rumble motor affects the motion-sensitivity features at all remains to be seen. I'll weigh in if I have any problems, but I'm assuming it shouldn't since, like Nintendo's Wii, the motion sensing fineries in these things are pretty broad and loose.

In the meantime, a couple more things:

- The DUALSHOCK3 doesn't come with a USB cable, which isn't a big deal for most of you, but I'm still a little grumpy that the default PS3 cable's barely long enough to tie a knot in. On the other hand, at $55, the DUALSHOCK3 is only $5 more than the $50 SIXAXIS, which makes it a pretty good deal if you're not cynical about the fact that you had to wait over a year just to get your hands on one.

- The DUALSHOCK3 rumble engine is literally identical to the DUALSHOCK2's. But the fine print on the DUALSHOCK3's packaging reads "The vibration action when playing compatible PlayStation and PlayStation 2 format software on a PS3 system may be different from when playing on a PlayStation system or PlayStation 2 system." Could this have something to do with early feedback that the vibration amplitude is weaker on the DUALSHOCK3? If that's the case, is it to save battery life? Avoid interfering with the motion-sensitivity controls? Both?

- You can turn the vibration function on or off from the PS button menu.

- You'll need software version 1.94 or later to use the controller with PS3 games, but software version 2.00 or later to play with PlayStation or PlayStation 2 games.

- And lastly, here's the current list of DUALSHOCK3 compatible PS3 games:

Formula One Championship Edition*
MotorStorm*
PAIN
High Velocity Bowling
MLB08: The Show
Uncharted: Drake?s Fortune
Resistance: Fall of Man*
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Go! Sports Ski*
Folklore*
Heavenly Sword*
Warhawk*
Super Stardust HD*
Snakeball
Toy Home
PSOne Emulation
Piyotama
PixelJunk Monsters
Blast Factor*
Condemned 2: Bloodshot
Lost: Via Domus
Tom Clancy?s Rainbow Six Vegas 2*
Burnout Paradise
Dynasty Warriors6
Devil May Cry 4
DragonBall Z Burst Limit
Turok

*Titles will be given rumble functionality through an update.

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Hating Video Games, and Why That's Okay

In all the ignorant media coverage, the finger-wagging psychobabble, the misinformed depiction and blatant caricature, one place dyed in the wool gamers go tragically wrong is reciprocating in kind by taking any word unkind about their pastime personally. Sure, gaming's often tossed under the bus by oblivious pop-ologists, and yes, it's tragic those who've never given BioShock or Crysis a whirl would see games as a perennial first-person shooting slog. Granted. But video games aren't for everyone, and why should we expect them to be?

Case in point, in an op-ed for The Times and the wake of the Tanya Byron report, Giles Whittell writes:

I hate video games, on or offline. I hate the way they suck real people into fake worlds and hold on to them for decades at a time. I hate being made to feel hateful for saying so, and I hate being told to immerse myself in them before passing judgment, because it feels like being told to immerse myself in smack and teenage pregnancy before passing judgment on them.

This is not because of anything wrong or bad about video games or heroin or teenage parents. It's not even because of game-induced homicide or web-grooming of little girls by perverts - serious problems, but statistically low-risk. It's because, compared with everything else on offer in a kid's life, video games and heroin and teenage pregnancy are a colossal waste of time.

Okay, so the part about equating heroin and teenage pregnancy and gaming smacks of wacky-tabacky, but if I'm generous, Whittell's message is really no different than any other traditionalist technophobe's. I see no reason to drag him through the mud and score an easy high-five from like-minded gamers.

Instead?

"Kill them with kisses," as an old friend was apt to say in the presence of trenchant, generationally-challenged orthodoxy.

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Five April Fool's Day Apparent Hoaxes That Aren't

Start with news that Sony may be planning yet another PlayStation 3 model per an FCC filing submitted last Saturday. GamePro reports that model "CECHE01" could end up being just a quiet update to the existing architecture, but points out that Sony requested the filing be kept mum "to avoid premature release of sensitive information prior to marketing or the release of the product to the public." If the speculation turns out to be true, it would make this Sony's sixth iteration of a console barely 1.5 years old.

Did you hear about Grand Theft Auto IV having at least eight hours of cutscenes, making it longer than four feature films? Apparently that's what they submitted to the BBFC in the process of earning a coveted "18" rating (as opposed to being out-and-out banned). Potentially nuttier, who knows how much more they didn't submit. Ay caramba, Rockstar.

I can't verify this next one either way, and if it turns out to be an April Fool's Day joke, it's a pretty lame one, but DIGITIMES reported today that Lite-On IT is actively developing Blu-ray drives for the Xbox 360. No idea if we're talking internal or external here, but Lite-On currently supplies some of the Xbox 360s internal DVD-ROM drives. Let's hope it's true, either way, because you'll catch me downloading only-halfway-HD-720p videos to my pint-sized Xbox 360 hard drive when Microsoft quits making operating systems, or hades freezes over -- whichever happens first.

We already knew guitar manufacturer Gibson had it in for Harmonix and Electronic Arts for allegedly infringing on a Gibson patent for "technology to simulate a musical performance." Now Gibson's adding retailers like Target and Wal-Mart to their list of targets, according to MMR news by way of MCV. Coming soon: Gibson's lawsuit against anyone caught singing or dancing.

And last but not least, it's not a CGI trick, it's actually someone tossing a PSP from a second story window, running it over with a motorcycle, hurling it against a brick wall, just to see what flushing a couple hundred bucks down the toilet looks like. (All performed to the plaintive sounds of someone warbling Ave Maria!)

Revealed: The Real Causes of Vista Crashes

Our own Scott Nichols reported just yesterday on recent reports that the primary cause of Vista crashes are -- drum roll please -- wonky video drivers. That's probably not really news to all you high-end gamers who spent the better part of 2007 with your 8800-series GPUs screaming bloody murder at Nvidia, but maybe you didn't see the latest breakdown of causes for Vista crashes per Ars Technica last week:

Here's Ars Technica's original chart:

Now for the shocker. Here's that same chart just updated with the latest statistical data:

Is anyone really surprised?

(Who's Justin Long? Robert Anton Wilson?)