Is the iPhone Gaming's Next Big Thing?

Like the surge in recent years of casual and female gamers, mobile gaming is one of the industry's unsung lions, a demographic that's literally exploding as headline-snatchers like the Wii, 360, and PS3 trundle magnanimously behind. Even the stratosphere-skimming Nintendo DS, with some 78 million units sold worldwide -- poised to surpass even the vaunted PS2 -- is rarely covered with the kind of relish the games media dishes when it comes to Microsoft or Sony products. The worldwide mobile internet market has in excess of 800 million subscribers, and recent estimates suggest the mobile gaming market could hit $4.1 billion worldwide by 2012. But when it comes to mobile gaming, no one's really talking about it.

Except when it comes to the iPhone, which the games media doesn't cover, but the mainstream press tends to fawn over en masse.

But wait, the iPhone doesn't really do games, does it?

Think again. Last Friday Forbes's Chris Morris got John Carmack to all but confirm id Software's celebrated Doom series is coming to an iPhone near you. According to Carmack, "We have a title we want to develop exclusively for iPhone... I'm not announcing anything specifically, but it would be a graphical tour de force." (According Anna Kang, president of iD Mobile, "it would not be a new IP," so either Doom, Quake, or Wolfenstein, though I'd lay odds 100-to-1 we're talking Doom, and speculated as much already back in March.)

Carmack also compared the iPhone to the PS2 or Xbox in terms of its horsepower. As good or better than your average PlayStation Portable, in other words. Keep in mind this is John Carmack we're talking about, not a guy given to hyperbole when making tech analogies.

According to a report out today from business intelligence consultant Screen Digest, the world's top four games publishers -- EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu, and THQ Wireless -- have seen their global market shares increase from 11% to 22% in 2007.

The iPhone "could revolutionize the [games] market" claims the report, continuing (with my emphasis):

Released in the same month that Apple?s iPhone 3G went on sale, the report reveals the potentially revolutionary impact that touchscreen handsets could have on mobile gaming. In particular, Screen Digest expects that the iPhone will drive the growth of the North American market raising it to the leading global market by revenue next year.

From the perspective of both games developers and mobile users, these units have the potential to be the number one device for mobile gaming. This is supported by recently released retail sales figures that show 10 million applications were downloaded from the Apple online store in the three days after the iPhone 3G went on sale on July 11.

According to Screen Digest, The global mobile games market is about to explode, with North American leading the charge.

The biggest challenge? According to Screen Digest, that would be "technical challenges for developers, limiting the sophistication of the games on offer which in turn restricts audience retention." Translation: Apple needs to get off its duff and roll out a "Games For iPhone" initiative (analogous to Microsoft's Games For Windows push). John Carmack was himself highly critical of Apple last November, when he lambasted the company for not being supportive of gaming on any of the company's platforms.

The good news: Apple released its iPhone Software Developers Kit earlier this year, earning thumbs up from game developers across the spectrum.

Apple's iPhone debuted in last June and sold over a quarter-million units in the first 30 hours. According to Apple, the new 3G iPhone which debuted on July 11th sold over a million units in just three days. Analysts predict Apple will sell around 15 million iPhones in 2008, and from 15.5 million up to 40 million iPhones in 2009.

Whatever the actual numbers, most analysts agree: expect a dramatic increase in iPhone sales in 2009.

And expect a deluge of iPhone games to follow in its wake.

Games With A Purpose? What the Heck are GWAPs?

Imagine playing a game that had the power -- not abstractly or symbolically, but definitively -- to make the world a better place. Really. Now stop imagining, park your browsers at www.gwaps.com and, you know, get to work.

Except it's not work, it's actually a game, or rather a collection of games. No kidding. Casual word association and matching games with titles like "ESP" and "Tag a Tune" and "Verbosity" that as you play siphon off results to accomplish tasks semantically obtuse computers simply can't. Call it GWAP, or Gaming With A Purpose. But whatever you do, don't call it "goofing around."

That's because it's not. It may be diverting, even mildly addictive, but it gets serious, quantifiable results. Results designed to "degauss" the noisy chaos of today's online info-labyrinth. Think of it a bit like the electric current that powers a bicycle light, battery free, generated in realtime as a consequence of cranking the pedals and setting a bicycle into motion. The electricity to power the light isn't "free" from a physical standpoint, but it's definitively free from a conceptual one.

Take GWAP's deceptively simplistic "ESP Game." After signing up for an account (it's fast and free, no validation required) you and a partner are presented with random images as a clock ticks down. Bound by a two-word maximum, you're asked to "tag" the picture based on "what you see." If you see a slightly messy bedroom with music equipment like drums and a computer, you might type "amateur studio" or "music lab" or even something a tad more eclectic like "jam crib."

When you and your partner agree on a tag, you move on and get points. If you don't seem to be agreeing, you can just pass and move on anyway. At the end of a session, GWAP records the tag matches and associates them with the images. According to GWAP, "Now a search engine will have a better idea of what's in those images." Short and sweet.

Now imagine whatever it is you're doing right now (at work, silly) redesigned as a form of interactive entertainment, where instead of sitting in tedious meetings or battling bureaucratic nonsense, you free associate ideas and accomplish determinative tasks (in particular, tasks oriented around categorizing or contextualizing data) by simply playing a game.

Time to rethink the old adage "all work and no play"?

I first read about GWAPs after encountering an article entitled "Designing Games With A Purpose" in the August issue of CACM (Communications of the ACM) by Luis von Ahn and Laura Dabbish. These two authors -- one an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, the other an assistant professor of information technology, also at Carnegie Mellon -- write in academic detail about an emerging form of entertainment in which people play "not because they are personally interested in solving an instance of a computational problem but because they wish to be entertained."

The article continues by analyzing existing GWAPs and outlining templates for would-be GWAP developers, then proposing metrics for maximizing GWAP success "per human-hour spent playing the game."

Fascinating. "Entertainment value" translated into a sort of "soft" currency, tradable for tangible, perhaps even profitable output. Symbiotic work-gaming.

Industrial psychologists, start your engines.

Impressions: Space Siege Demo

Aside from Diablo 3, all's been pretty hush on the hack-n-slash front of late, but today the drought's been provisionally lifted per Sega's 957MB PC-only Space Siege demo. Make that Gas Powered Games' Space Siege demo, actually -- published by Sega, but still very much from the desk of Chris Taylor, i.e. the brains behind Total Annihilation (great), Dungeon Siege (alright), Dungeon Siege 2 (much better), and Supreme Commander (slightly better than alright).

You can download the demo from Nvidia's nZone.

I gave it a couple run-throughs on my Macbook Pro in Boot Camp mode running Windows XP SP3 (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB SDRAM, 8600M GT w/256MB), where it ran just fine in a mid-sized window with shadows turned down. While it's not inciting me to toss any adjective-bombs like "mind-blowing," "genre-redefining," or "wanna-have-its-baby," it's really not half bad. Heck, even "not bad at all."

I clicked through the intro, but what I glimpsed looked awfully tasty, including a few things about "space colonization" and "an-expedition-too-far" and "holy-aliens-batman." Cue action-adventure with ray-guns, tracer-lit corridor crawls, and lotsa "critters-n-stuff-go-boom." After aliens breach your ship during a space battle, the demo hands you the reins and bids you move around by left clicking or fire by right-clicking repeatedly as insect-reptile love-children pour into a container room.

The good news? Unlimited ammo! Hold down the SHIFT key and you can target anything (well, not your buddies, who just ignore you...where's a throaty "Zug Zug!" when you need one?). Light a barrel on fire, blow up some crates to spawn goodies, then hit the Z key to hoover the room, lickety-split. The message is clear: Don't sweat the small stuff, we've got your back, focus on pointing, clicking, and fragging the bejesus out of the enemy. Nothing wrong with that. There is a rudimentary physics engine that jostles stuff around, but before you get excited, it only seems to support a two-stage damage model, i.e. unblemished crate, vandalized crate. Too bad, though shooting cans of compressed air (or gas, or whatever the heck) that fly off on random trajectories occasionally yields amusing results.

Early going, you'll find a cybernetic arm lying in a room. Pick it up and you launch the game's "moral dilemma" shtick: Upgrade your body at "cyber-installation units" and you'll run faster, punch harder, etc. All the while, a "humanity" meter which starts at 100% creeps toward zero. I have no idea why it matters, other then some rubric about a "bonus" near the end, only available if you remain human (no idea if there's a minimum percentile required). After dropping my humanity down a couple dozen points to about Steve Austin levels, I say to heck with being human: cyborgs definitely have more fun.

In addition to stats like health, energy, power, science, armor, and fire / electrical resistance, your G.I. Starship Trooper has special melee abilities that slot on a drag-and-drop toolbar at the base of the screen. Per usual, those abilities deplete energy and have counterbalancing cooldown rates. It's all very World of Warcraft, right down to the DPS (damage per second) rating on weaponry.

There's also an elaborate skill tree divided into two columns, one for "combat," the other for "engineering." Also very World of Warcraft, with icons mapped to abilities and the option to raise multiple levels per ability before you sidle over to more advanced ones.

I couldn't figure out how to save (I suppose you probably can't in the demo -- it's grayed out) but according to the map, the save stations coincide with "aid stations," which let you walk into a luminescent apparatus ala Metroid Prime and zip back to full health. Work benches in these rooms let you upgrade weapons and armor, as well as manufacture special items like grenades.

It's possible to carry up to two weapons in the demo and swap between them with a key-tap or mouse-click. I'm not sure how this pans out in the full version, but in the demo, you're switching between a close-quarters electric sword-thingy and a couple of long range blasters. And if you choose to "borg" yourself, you can even pick up the cybernetic chaingun and totally wail on the bad guys.

Color me cautiously optimistic (seems like the case with everything anymore), but I have high hopes (if not expectations). It's been long enough since I played a really decent hack-and-slash on the PC -- the last would've been Titan Quest -- and I could care less whether it's derivative as long as it's progressively interesting. Diablo 2 bored the stuffin' out of me, whereas Dungeon Siege 2, well, didn't. Fingers crossed that'll be the case when Space Siege ships in exactly two weeks on August 12th for fifty bucks.

PlayStation 4? Xbox 720? Nintendo "Us"?

Real analysis costs money, but you can speculate without spending a dime. Case in point, peep this crystal-gazer by Chris Morris for Forbes, a cruising altitude accounting of current affairs with an eye toward things to come.

Remember Sony President Jack Tretton claiming at this year's E3 that consoles were on 10 year cycles?

Morris's position: Game machines typically follow a five to six year trajectory, but could peak this cycle closer to eight.

UPDATE: Morris dropped a note to further explain what he meant in his column:

Interesting thoughts on my latest column ? and I agreed with many. One thing I?d like to clarify: the column wasn?t meant to imply that the lifespan of a generation is only 5-6 years, but to point out that new hardware models typically roll out in that time period. As I?m sure you know, previous generation models often remain on the shelves (as we?ve seen with the PS2) and often outsell their successors for a long time. It?s just now, in fact, that the PS3 is taking a sales lead over the PS2. That doesn?t mean one system dies when the other comes out (well, except for Xbox maybe), just that the big three have traditionally begun looking to the future in that timeframe.

My position: It all depends on what the meaning of "cycle" is. The PS2's been around for just shy of eight years, development in the U.S. is down to multi-platform morsels (e.g. Madden, Tiger Woods, NHL, etc.) and what Tretton's really talking about includes tail-end sales in developing countries, which will be absolutely crucial to carrying the PS2 through magic number 10.

Let's look at the Forbes article's prognostications from developers, like this one from THQ CEO Brian Farrell.

One of the things I like about this generation is we are still very early and there's still a lot of room for growth?as we move down those price curves. Those engines have a lot of steam left in them. We think it could be seven or eight years before new machines start to roll out.

Me: Yep, developers typically take at least a year or two to work out the kinks and get up to speed on a console. That's not counting the time spent working with software simulators and early alpha or beta developer versions of the hardware prior to consumer launch. On the other hand, that totally misses the "design" angle. Mario 64 was vastly more important design-wise than Donkey Kong Country, but everyone remembers DKC for its pre-rendered 3D graphics, even if Shigeru Miyamoto famously remarked that "Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good."

Moving along, Epic Games President Mike Capps says new consoles will hit "somewhere between 2012 and 2018."

Me: A six-year spread? Isn't that like betting on red and black and numbers 1 through 36 simultaneously?

id Software's John Carmack, probably the smartest kid on the block, makes the smartest point as well:

The worst case is, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all pick a different interface. That's because you have to program so differently for [the different architectures]...if we end up with a diverse set of GPUs [graphics processing units], it would make life difficult.

Okay, second smartest. First place actually goes to Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, when he dismisses all the attention paid to the hardware in the first place, saying:

We are always preparing for the next hardware. We are under development...But the hardware is a kind of box that consumers reluctantly buy in order to play our games.

Me: Reluctant is right. I've said it before and I'll say it again: We play games, not hardware. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a totally irrelevant minority of us go out and take apart the hardware and blog about the integer and floating point power of the CPU or the fill rate of the GPU and futz with the operating system, whether out of a desire to illicitly pirate software or primordial "howzat-work?" curiosity. That latter group gets more coverage than it deserves because it's also a disproportionately large slice of the media.

The rest of us could care less whether Grand Theft Auto IV runs on Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony hardware. We might care whether we're playing on a desk in front of a 20" LCD or in front of a 60" HDTV, or on a mobile phone versus a dedicated handheld. We might care whether we're using a keyboard and mouse or a gamepad, a gesture-driven camera or a pair of motion controllers. But that's it. No one (in their right mind, anyway) gazes amorously at the clumsy-looking piece of glowing, whirring plastic crammed begrudgingly into their entertainment centers while popping heads off zombies in Dead Rising or slinking along surreptitiously in Metal Gear Solid 4 or leaping from planetoid to something even more geometrically improbable in Super Mario Galaxy. We care how much the hardware costs, what the operating system can do, and what games it'll let us play. Consoles (and for that matter, PCs) are software-enablers, not pets.

That said, one of the things developers like id's Carmack need to start looking past is the historical focus on mainboards and "render-ware." "Every hardware needs some revolutionary features," says Nintendo's Iwata. He's not talking about CPUs and GPUs, and he's absolutely right. Developing for a system like the Wii has much more to do with how you use the Wii Remote and Nunchuk in relation to the games themselves, than the system's GameCube-plus-one CPU/GPU architecture.

Down the road, we'll probably glance back at companies like Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, and see that a shift occurred in the early twenty-first century. A shift away from muscular graphical leapfrogging to a fundamental rethinking about the way we interact with what we're playing. I don't pretend to know what comes next, and it'll probably at least in part be driven by "render-ware" advances, but it's also going to have to be more than just another spectacle involving $600 boat anchors with only marginally better-looking graphics and games that play exactly like the prior generation.

Get Your PS3 "Greatest Hits" Fix for $30 a Piece

Get 'em while they're hot, Sony just launched its first wave of "Greatest Hits" for $30 each in brand new candy-apple red cases.

What's on the list?

- Assassin's Creed
- Call of Duty 3
- Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
- Fight Night Round 3
- Motorstorm
- Need for Speed: Carbon
- Ninja Gaiden: Sigma
- Resistance: Fall of Man
- Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas
- Warhawk

On my personal list of to-dos: Warhawk, Fight Night Round 3, and since at some point I'll probably have to review Assassin's Creed 2, Assassin's Creed. Like a lot of you, I ran around and broke stuff for a couple hours in the latter, got to Jerusalem, then completely lost interest.

Dream a Little Dream, No Matter What You Play

Violent sleeper? Nightmares much? Don't blame games or TV, according to new research that finds no link between what kids view or play and their dreams of skittering arachnids, monsters under the bed, and the eminent closet-haunting bogeyman.

Studying a group of 250 students aged nine to 13, Sleep Laboratory head of research at Germany's Central Institute of Mental Health Michael Schredl asked the group to log how much time they spent per week on activities like watching TV and playing video games. Students were asked to record what they watched, as well as the details of any dreams remembered.

Surprise: "We found no correlation between the amount of TV watching and computer game playing and nightmare frequency," said Schredl. That includes "police and crime shows," which 14 percent of the children said they watched regularly.

Even more surprising: While games and TV appear to be off the hook, the study did suggest a correlation between reading and nightmares, though the researchers note the number of children affected was too small to be conclusive.

If the latter research could be validated -- and I assume someone's going to try -- it would have fascinating implications about the power of abstract symbols (words) over the conventional literalism of images and icons in motion, e.g. movies, TV shows, and many (though not all) video games.

And it'd be even more interesting to see someone run a study that tested the impact of older, more abstract games (e.g. text-only adventures) on children or adults versus today's graphically hyper-realistic ones.

Imagine: The possibility that Colossal Cave Adventure could somehow be more disturbing than Grand Theft Auto IV.

Pretty wild.

Did Rare Metallic Ore Fuel African "PlayStation War"?

Remember the 2006 movie Blood Diamond? Academy Award nominated flick starring Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly about conflict diamonds mined in African war zones and sold to diamond manufacturers to profit warlords and fund brutal wars involving shocking human rights violations? According to a report by progressive media site Toward Freedom, subtract diamonds and insert Sony's international sales-record-trouncing PlayStation 2.

Blame it on a dull black substance called coltan, also known as columbite-tantalite, also occasionally dubbed "black gold." Coltan has been a source material in the manufacture of cell phones, DVD players, computers, and you guessed it: game consoles. Earlier this month, Toward Freedom claimed the metallic ore had exacerbated a decade-old conflict in the Congo, controversially rebranding it "The PlayStation War."

The allegations include charges that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of coltan was stolen from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during its bloody 1998-2003 conflict, mostly by Rwandan military and militias supported by the Rwandan government, but also by several western-based mining companies, metal brokers, and metal processors that allegedly partnered with the Rwandan factions.

Contesting allegations of impropriety, Sony claims the company has taken steps to ensure it is in fact not using illegal coltan. According to Sony spokesperson Satoshi Fukuoka, the PlayStation 2, PSP and PlayStation 3, "are manufactured mostly from independent parts and components that manufacturers procured externally."

While Toward Freedom's article focuses on Sony, it's important to note that the DRC produces only a fraction of the world's total coltan output.

In the Congo, the 1998-2003 war is more commonly known as "Africa's World War." While it technically ended in 2003 following a peace accord, reports from the eastern DRC continue to highlight conflict flare-ups and widespread sexual violence against women. The issue today, according to Toward Freedom and London-based NGO RAID ("Rights and Accountability Office") remains unpunished Western-based mining companies that continued to operate in or purchase minerals and metals allegedly stolen from the DRC during the war.

When the war launched in 1998, says Toward Freedom, "millions of Americans were still waiting for a PlayStation 2...which Sony says was having manufacturing issues." Sony needed electric capacitors badly. These capacitors were manufactured using coltan-derived tantalum, a powdered substance which can withstand extreme heat, thus sending worldwide demand for the material soaring. Between 1999 and 2001, the price of tantalum skyrocketed from $49 to a staggering $275 a pound. Enter the Rwandan army in 1999, which invaded the eastern DRC and took its coltan mines by force, going on to secure over $250 million selling DRC coltan to mining companies and metal brokers.

"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," claims British politician Oona King, a Labour Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow from 1997 to 2005.

A few notes about coltan: Technically, the material derived from coltan is called tantalum, a dense and highly conductive element used in the production of electronic components. According to a 2005 report by metals and markets information service Roskill, the tantalum market is characterized by lengthy periods of stability punctuated by sharp price rises created by strong global demand and fears of raw material shortages. The majority of the world's tantalum comes from Australia, with contributions from mines in Brazil, Canada, China, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. According to a 2006 United States Geological Survey report, the DRC produces less than 1% of the world's tantalum.

Still, says David Barouski, a researcher and journalist from Wisconsin, he's certain that the coltan from the DRC conflict is in Sony video game consoles around the world. "Sony?s PlayStation 2 launch [spring 2000] was a big part of the huge increase in demand for coltan that began in early 1999," says Barouski. "Sony and other companies like it, have the benefit of plausible deniability, because the coltan ore trades hands so many times from when it is mined to when Sony gets a processed product, that a company often has no idea where the original coltan ore came from, and frankly don?t care to know. Statistical analysis shows it to be nearly inconceivable that Sony made all its PlayStations without using Congolese coltan."

Is your PlayStation 2 harboring "conflict coltan"? Sony's Fukuoka admits the company uses tantalum in some of its parts, but says it's satisfied with responses from suppliers the tantalum the company uses is not "illegally mined Congo coltan."

While coltan is now priced at pre-1999 levels as the demand for "black gold" has tapered off, the biggest concern rolling forward, says Barouski, are alternative Congo resources taking coltan's place as the next "hot commodity," with future African resource wars in its wake.

UPDATE: GamePolitics is linking to a story by the Panafrican Press Association suggesting presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama gets the coltan issue wrong, while Republican senator Sam Brownback gets it right.

The PC World Games For Windows Live Interview, Part Two

In which we chat with Microsoft's Kevin Unangst about the media death knell over PC gaming, the digital distribution boom, the new PC-centric GFW Live interface, what's coming in DirectX 11, and the possibility of Xbox Live free.

Game On: When the press sounds the death knell for PC gaming based on retail sales declines, guys like Gabe Newell (Valve, Steam) and you respond by claiming online sales are picking up the slack and in fact booming. But we never really see the actual hard data. Do you have any tenable numbers you can share?

Kevin Unangst: We've looked at the analysts who've been both projecting and reporting the data, we're working closely with NPD, and we're as excited as I think many are to see NPD do their analysis and actually start their definitive reporting. When you look at folks like DFC and scrutinize their projections, it gives us I believe a pretty fair estimate of where the growth of PC gaming is actually happening on a worldwide basis.

The other thing you need to do is talk to the Nvidias and AMDs of the world, because when you see them continuing to sell, although it's not directly related to digital distribution, they're still selling a lot of graphics cards, selling a lot of GPUs. And we're seeing nothing but growth on those sides. [GO: See the second part of my January interview with Nvidia for more on this, "189 Million GPUs: Nvidia Unplugged and Uncut, Part Two."]

So I think that when you look at every indicator except U.S. North America retail PC game sales, worldwide PC game sales are blowing growth right out of the water, and in fact I think continue to look like they're going to lead for the foreseeable future. The simple fact that we're reacting with Games For Windows Live and Marketplace reflects that trend, reflects the fact that we see that growth happening online, and we're going to continue to invest and make sure our focus is there.

Look at World of Warcraft. You may buy World of Warcraft in a retail store once, and then you're going to continue to buy those upgrades all digitally. How is that revenue being attributed? The same type of model is going to happen, we believe, with the rest of the PC gaming market, where the monetization as well as the delivery of additional content which may be completely free is going to happen online and through various services. That's a big part of why we're moving in this direction.

Insert: The following PC games sales numbers were provided post-interview by Microsoft representative Paul Levy:

- The PC gaming market is predicted to grow 73% from 2007 to 2013 (DFC Intelligence)

GO: Can you talk a little about the new PC-centric GFW Live interface. How are you planning to make it more keyboard and mouse friendly?

KU: First, the emphasis is going to be on how you interact with the service. And then there's differentiation in the kind of content you'll see. We're not talking in detail about content differentiation at this point, but it's important for readers to know that we view these services as connected yet distinct, meaning that this is not some one-size-fits-all approach. The Xbox Live team is going to build the best service they know how to for a console in a 10-foot, controller-based, you know, living-room style experience. Whereas we're [the GFW Live team] looking at the PC to say "How do you really make this a mouse and keyboard friendly environment?"

A very tactical example is in the existing Games For Windows Live service. Before today, before the fall update, the menus pop out of the middle and it's very blade-like, and you navigate with a controller. With the new version, the menus will drop down from the top. You've got close buttons, you've got forward and back and home buttons. The navigation is completely different, so you've got accelerator keys and you can just navigate it like a PC user would expect to. Again, it's all about listening and studying and doing usability research with PC users to say "How do you want to interact with a game service?" and not necessarily bifurcating the two.

The new interface drops down from the top of the screen instead of obstructing the game by blocking the middle.

Drill-in on the top-bar, showing the Gamertag, score, online status, number of friends, messages, etc.

GO: Are you still focused on keeping GFW Live and Xbox Live players interacting?

KU: We had to do the hard work of bringing the platform over, and when you do that, when you re-lay the foundation, there are things you may carry over that are not 100 percent the right fit for that audience. A year later we've done all that work and I think you're going to see that iteration. Likewise, over time you're going to see both services [GFW Live, Xbox Live] have different features. They won't offer all the same content, and there'll be exclusive things that happen on Games For Windows Live that are available to Windows gamers that won't show up on the Xbox and vice versa.

Where it makes sense, we'll still enable that crossover. You may be able to get a game on both services because some games are universal. Cross-platform play is still an important part of what we want to make available. If you want to incorporate that as a Windows developer, we're going to make sure that's supported. We're going to keep both services compatible, but the way people interact with the services will be optimized for each platform.

GO: Let's talk about DirectX 11, which you also just announced. Most gamers would probably say they saw a pronounced difference transitioning from DX8 to DX9 back in the day, but that it was less so going from DX9 in XP to DX10 in Vista, especially since DX10 it was more of a baseline code-rewrite to benefit developers. With that in mind, what's the story on DirectX 11?

KU: You know, I think if you look at contrasting the changes between DX9 and DX10 versus DX10 and DX11, the size of the change [in DX10] where you're rewriting the graphics engine and rewriting the driver architecture and hardware wasn't available until closer to Vista's availability from a development perspective. That made it really challenging for these developer partners to write code. The fact that you had to develop on Vista because DX10 wasn't supported on XP, things like that contributed to the fact that it took longer to get really exploitive content out there.

With DX11, I think you're going to see a significant acceleration in that, because we're bringing DX11 back to Vista and we're going to support the DX10 and 10.1 hardware with DX11. So all the investment developer have been making and accelerating forward with DX10 is going to happen on DX11, as well as the fact that we're not doing that kind of a driver architecture shift again. We've made the big leap, and now we can focus on letting the developers take the time to use the quality improvements and really show the differentiation.

Games like Age of Conan, for example, are going to be really interesting, where they [Funcom] took the approach of "do the best job they could with DX9, focus on great gameplay," and then they'll be introducing DX10 enhancements at some point in the future that'll just be a natural update to the gameplay. And I think for a developer who's had the time to work and really take advantage of those tools, you'll start to see some more differentiation, and all that work will be leveraged in DX11.

GO: Should PC gamers expect to see more radical shifts in the visual architecture of DX11 games?

KU: You're going to definitely see with the transition from DX10 to DX11 and the availability of DX11, games more easily able to take advantage of the graphical improvements and the differentiation, because developers will have more tools and more lead time to make that a natural part of the gameplay, versus trying to tack it on based on some schedule.

GO: Are the changes coming in DX11 more hardware or driver/software driven?

KU: There will absolutely be DX11 features that down-level to DX10 and 10.1 hardware and of course several new features that are unique to DX11. We're not detailing all of that breakout yet, but for example, you'll see things like the ability to do better multithreading and multi-core support. All that's going to be universal among DX10, 10.1, and 11. There'll be some shader improvements and a few other things we've done that I think are going to make it much easier for developers and consumers to get the benefits on existing DX10 and 10.1 hardware, even on Vista.

GO: Let's turn to the million dollar question: Will Xbox Live eventually go completely free, too?

KU: The GFW Live announcement has no bearing at all on what we're doing with Xbox Live, and I think if you look at the Xbox-related announcements we just made at E3, we're going to continue to deliver even more value to Xbox Live gold subscribers. Frankly, Xbox Live members are going to get more people to play with as a result of the GFW Live announcement, and I think that community will get exponentially larger as a result of what we're doing on Windows. They're different services designed for difference audiences that happens to be connected and share a Gamertag.

In some ways you can think of it like Zune, where Zune uses the same Gamertag, same friends list, and you can use the points that you may spend on Xbox Live or Games For Windows Live Marketplace to buy songs right on Zune. I think you start to see that we're going to take that underpinning of the Live service, then on the console we'll deliver a new experience, add more things like the Netflix announcement, things like the party chat and the one-versus-one-hundred, etc. Likewise for the GFW Live service.

GO: Is Xbox Live "for free" even a hypothetical though? I'm probably inviting a "no comment," but say at some point the digital distribution model is generating enough revenue and Sony's offering the same basic online functionality for free.

KU: I think you predicted my answer on that, which is, "There's nothing I'm going to speculate on that front."

GO: Thanks Kevin.

The PC World Games For Windows Live Interview, Part One

Did you catch the news yesterday that Microsoft's Games For Windows Live online service, which used to cost $50 a year for multiplayer privileges, is now completely free? We caught up with Microsoft Senior Global Director of Games For Windows, Kevin Unangst (pictured above) to talk about why the company chose free now, what it's planning with its new Marketplace service, and how it's attempting to redefine the PC as the premier gaming platform in the entertainment industry.

Game On: Can you talk in general about the new Games For Windows Live announcements and how they'll impact PC gamers?

Kevin Unangst: Sure, so the new announcement's of course making our multiplayer completely free, as well as I think a general shift on our side over the last year, all the learning we took, all the listening from both gamers and game developers on the PC side. How do we make this service, you know, something that PC gamers are really going to want, and developers are going to want to include in their games.

So the big change is moving to free, making the interface itself and the actual way you interact with the service much more designed and optimized for the PC. More mouse and keyboard friendly, drop-down menus, you know, not something that looks like it was from the Xbox and was brought over. These are all changes that when you get a team of people that are focused on PC gaming, who think about nothing but gaming on Windows, and iterate on the service in that way, I think we're super-excited about what we're doing this week.

GO: What prompted the decision to make the service free?

KU: It's us listening since we introduced the service last year, not only to the PC gamers, but also developers and saying, look, you know, the model on the PC is simply that baseline multiplayer is something consumers expect. They don't pay for that, they pay for the games. And I think we've continued to invest in technologies, we feel we've got the best multiplayer matchmaking system on the planet, whether it's on the console or on the PC. And we wanted to make that available to, simply put, the largest number of people possible. So following the model on the PC made sense, and is what got developers very excited about adding Games For Windows Live to even more of their games.

The other point is, and I'm not sure if this was crystal clear, but I think it's important: It's not just for new games moving ahead, right, although we're thrilled with games like Fallout 3 and with Dawn of War 2 and Battlestations Pacific that were announced at E3 that are coming and using Games For Windows Live. We also made the change for all the existing Games For Windows Live games, just on the back end, so even those existing games, Universe at War, Gears of War, you name it, those games automatically already as of yesterday, you don't have to have the gold subscription to access all the multiplayer features in those games.

In addition, there are two things we've done. One is on the server, we've been able to make that change on the back end, so the game developers didn't have to go back in and change the code. Those games just work now. You can access all of those features and the service thinks and knows that they're free. The other thing we've done is for people who did subscribe, for Windows gamers who bought a gold subscription and played only on Windows, we're actually proactively working right now to give those folks a refund of their gold subscription because we've changed the business model. So they'll be getting communication from Microsoft shortly. We're going to take care of them because we've changed the model.

GO: Drilling in on the downloadable content, at E3, as you know, Sony announced plans to offer shorter episodic extensions to existing first-tier franchises. Is that a part or component of what the new Marketplace is attempting to do?

KU: Yeah, I mean absolutely Marketplace is focused on making sure that Windows game developers can extend their games, can add on to their games, can either give them away for free or make them available for sale. They determine that, not us. Any enhancements they want to make, whether it's episodic content, whether it's just trailers and demos, you name it, that's the purpose of Marketplace, to make sure we start that focus on how do you extend the game experience in whatever way the developer wants to do it, and Marketplace is going to give them a simple way to make that happen.

GO: Do you plan to offer full downloadable games for sale as an alternative to retail?

KU: If you look at the trend in the PC market, offering digital distribution in any form is where the growth is, where the long-term revenue opportunities are for publishers. And so clearly with Marketplace, we're taking a pretty big first step, enabling game content, add-ons, demos, trailers, all those pieces. That is digital distribution. Certainly full game distribution is on our roadmap, and I think is a natural evolution, but not something we plan to deliver in the fall update of Games For Windows Live.

GO: Would you ever consider offering vintage PC games through GFW Live, e.g. something along the lines of the recently announced GOG initiative by The Witcher developer/publisher CD Projekt?

KU: Any time when you open a store, we always look at what kinds of things you're going to assort in that store, and there's a whole library of PC content that we could choose to use and make available. I think we haven't ruled out anything at all in terms of what kind of compelling content we bring to consumers. So no plans detailed on that particular direction yet, but I would say this week's announcements are the first great steps we're taking to making sure we have a service that really has a strong appeal to PC gamers. And whether that's new games, or catalog games, or anything else, like arcade games, you name it, there's all kinds of things we could do at some point in the future.

GO: Would you ever allow anything to be downloaded from the Marketplace that wouldn't bear the GFW logo, or does it by definition have to bear the GFW seal?

KU: By definition, our starting point, Games For Windows Live, is a superset of the Games For Windows requirements for quality and compatibility. So our initial focus of course and for the foreseeable future will be on games that meet that bar. The great news is we're seeing a whole lot of momentum in games that are meeting that bar. We've got over 85 titles that have either announced or shipped, some of the biggest titles of last year as well as some new titles coming up. I think we feel great about stuff like the new Call of Duty: World at War for example, and Crysis: Warhead. They'll all carry the branding.

GO: Are there any compatibility issues with GFW Live using a GFW title purchased through another download service?

KU: That already happens today, so I believe you can buy something like Universe at War on Steam today and it works just fine. No issues at all.

Next: The media death knell over PC gaming, the digital distribution boom, the new PC-centric GFW Live interface, what's coming in DirectX 11, and the possibility of Xbox Live free.

Nintendo Wii: Banned in the USA?

No, I'm not kidding, it's not a gratuitous headline hit-grabber, Nintendo is in fact facing a serious ban on several of the controllers for the Wii as well as GameCube after it lost its legal bid to scuttle a $21 million patent-infringement verdict. Microsoft was also on the hook at one point, but settled before trial. Nintendo went to trial and lost, and on Thursday, June 26, 2008, District Judge Ron Clark (U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas) denied Nintendo's claim that the $21 million payment to Anascape was excessive. Clark also threw out Nintendo's bid for a new trial.

Blame Anascape Ltd. Or blame Nintendo. Or just blame luckless entropy if you think it's all just some great big coincidence.

Who's Anascape? Some firm in Texas without a listed web page, for one. Also the owner of patents 5,999,084 ("variable conductance sensor"), 6,102,802 ("game controller with analog pressure sensor"), 6,135,886 ("variable conductance sensor with elastomeric dome cap"), 6,208,271 ("remote controller with analog button"), 6,222,525 ("image controller with sheet connected sensors"), 6,343,991 ("game control with analog pressure sensor"), 6,344,791 ("variable sensor with tactile feedback"), 6,347,997 ("analog controls housed with electronic displays"), 6,351,20 ("variable conductance sensory"), 6,400,303 ("remote controller with analog pressure sensor"), 6,563,415 ("analog sensor with snap through tactile feedback"), and finally, 6,906,700 ("3D controller with vibration").

Did you really just read through all of that? I'm sorry.

But glancing at a few of those, you can kind of see where the issue(s) might be, whether you come down on the side of "to heck with all this silly anticipatory patent law" or all the way over on the other end with a hearty "to heck with Nintendo flouting all that silly anticipatory patent law." Or something.

Here's the skinny on what it actually affects:

- The GameCube or WaveBird controllers, which Nintendo no longer makes.

- The Wii Classic Controller (Nintendo's Charlie Scibetta says the company will still be able to sell it pending Nintendo's appeal).

Here's what it doesn't:

- The Wii Remote (unless paired with the Wii Classic Controller)

- The Wii Nunchuk

The judge in the case is supposed to issue his ban today.

How's Nintendo get out of this one? They'll have to either post a bond or put royalties in an escrow account to avoid a sale halt, according to Anascape's lawyer Doug Cawley. Nintendo of course plans to appeal the verdict, claiming it didn't use Anascape's technology.

Would someone just get on with it and put us out of our misery by patenting the universe already?

Welcome to Microsoft Games For Windows Live, Now For Free

You know that absence-of-any-news-whatsoever sound (kind of like a tree falling in the woods) that's dogged Microsoft's $50 Games for Windows Live online multiplayer service for PCs? The service much-ballyhooed by Microsoft back in May 2007 with the PC debut of Halo 2, but which pretty much fell off the radar after perquisites like "You mean I have to pay for multiplayer services that used to cost nada?"

Well now it's free. As in no more $50 Gold-tier subscription fee if you're not already an Xbox 360 Gold member. As in no more quibbling about pay-for multiplayer matchmaking, achievements, and cross-platform gameplay.

As in: Bravo, Microsoft.

Let's break that down in case you're not a member, or a member but not entirely clear about the former differences between the service tiers.

Here's what you used to get for free with a "silver" membership:

- Single gamertag
- Common gamer profile
- Common gamerscore
- Single player achievements
- Private chat via text and voice
- Common friends list and online presence
- PC only multiplayer including browsing a list of active PC games

Here's what you now get for free, and which previously cost $50 a year with a "gold" membership:

- All Silver membership features
- Multiplayer matchmaking with friends
- TrueSkill matchmaking
- Multiplayer achievements
- Cross-platform gameplay

What else? According to Microsoft, the Games for Windows Live interface should be imminently getting a makeover to no longer resemble a screen-scrapy console hand-me-down. Instead, it'll look like...well, something custom-tailored for a keyboard-'n-mouse PC.

Thank goodness, says me. I've had it up to here trying to navigate console-like interfaces on my PC symptomatic of quick and dirty ports, of having to use a keyboard and mouse to click around button-driven dialogue boxes and swallow spatially snarled layouts designed to look fabulous on an NTSC or PAL TV, but which feel cramped and kludgy on a typically high-res PC monitor.

It sure sounds like Microsoft's finally wising up.

Now we'll just have to see if that wisdom extends bilaterally to the Xbox 360, where dropping the $50 annual "Gold" membership fee would be logical, competitive, and in the absence of a permanent console price drop, timely.

Fingers crossed, and more about this after I've spoken with Microsoft tomorrow.

ESA: 2008's Essential Facts About the Video Game Industry

Each year the Entertainment Software Association releases an audience-friendly collection of demographic stats about the habits and predilections of US video gamers.

What's new for 2008? Let's have a look.

For starters, gamers are getting older. The average game player age is 35 (up from 33 in 2007) and the number of game players under 18 decreased from 28.2% in 2007 to 25% in 2008, while gamers 18-49 and over 50 years old increased from 47.6% to 49% and 24.2% to 26% respectively. The average age of the most frequent game purchaser crept up from 38 to 40.

The ratio of female to male players is on the rise. In 2007 38% of gamers were female versus 62% male. That's inched up to 40% female and 60% male in 2008. Women age 18 or older also represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33%) than boys age 17 or younger (18%).

The number of U.S. households with game consoles rose notably, up from 33% in 2007 to 38% in 2008. (While the ESA doesn't list it here, no doubt almost all of that growth can be attributed to expansion driven by the demographically outreaching Wii.)

Game sales by ESRB rating remain virtually unchanged, with the lion's share going to "Everyone" (45%), followed by "Teen" (28%), "Mature" (15%), and "Everyone 10+" (12%).

Video game purchases by genre and according to units sold tend to be unreliable indicators since they're driven less by what people want than what's available in a given year, so take these next numbers with a grain of salt. The biggest shift occurred in "Family Entertainment," which leapt from just 9.3% of genre share in 2006 to 17.6% in 2007. Everything else (Strategy, Adventure, Shooter, Role Playing, etc.) either rose or dropped a statistically insignificant one or two percentage points, though "Action" games saw a slightly broader 5 point drop. Computer games (differentiated presumably from console video games) experienced minimal genre shifts, the most notable in "Role Playing," which jumped from 13.9% in 2006 to 18.8% in 2007. (I'm assuming that last is probably mostly MMO-driven.)

Refreshingly, 63% of parents believe games are a positive part of their children's lives, up from 55% in 2007. (It's worth bearing in mind, of course, that this is the games industry's official trade association handing these numbers down, if the "Whose interests do these figures serve?" question's on your mind.)

If you want the rest of the study, you can get it here (links to PDF), and for comparison purposes, the 2007 numbers here.

No Cure in Sight For the E3 2008 Hangover

Another E3's come and gone, and that flatline drone you're hearing is the sound of the media, defib paddles in hand, proclaiming that the patient is dead. Well, sort of. You wouldn't know it from all the giddy coverage last week, i.e. the chummy liveblogging and live web video and OMGWTH FINAL FANTASY FOR XBOX 360? bleating. If E3's dead, you've still got an awful lot of gravediggers pitching tents in the cemetery.

In any case, the press this morning is circling around comments Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter just made suggesting that E3 is "headed for extinction, unless the publishers and console manufacturers wake up to the fact that nobody cares about the show anymore."

Writes Pachter:

The show was small in scope, and the spectacle of E3 is dead. The Los Angeles Convention Center concourse was as quiet as a college library during summer, with little to attract media attention. The main game display area was similar in size to a school cafeteria (as compared to filling the entire convention center), and the "fireworks effect" of past shows was reserved for the evening parties.

...We believe that show is ill-timed, coming after most major holiday announcements are out, and landing during ?quiet period? for most of the companies (making meetings with investors near-impossible). The lack of a spectacle will likely keep media away in the future, the lack of surprises will keep retailers away, and the lack of interaction with management will likely keep investors away. Without these three constituencies, the show will likely lose its relevance. We strongly believe that E3 should be held no later than early June (when companies can meet with investors and when some ?secrets? have yet to be revealed), and believe that the spectacle should be restored by increasing the size of the show space.

He's right, of course, though the notion that we need more spectacle sounds a little too Disney for my blood. Give me boring substantiveness over flashy superficiality any day.

NPD: Nintendo Maintains Blistering Pace, Sony Doubles Hardware Sales

June's 2008 NPD numbers are in, and while news that Wii and DS sales continue to cruise the stratosphere should only astonish rock-dwellers, the arrival of stealth-action game Metal Gear Solid 4 drove Sony's PlayStation 3 to impressively double its May sales figures.

In one of its biggest monthly sales leaps since debuting in November 2006, Sony's PlayStation 3 roared ahead of the Xbox 360, selling through 406,000 units bolstered by sales of 775,000 copies of Konami's broodingly postmodern Metal Gear Solid 4 -- even more impressive considering MGS4 actually debuted mid-last-month. Add in bundle sales of the 80GB Metal Gear Solid 4 PS3 and MGS4's total tally rises to nearly one million units.

"Platform-exclusive content usually fuels hardware system purchases, and PS3 sales certainly reflect the impact of Metal Gear Solid 4," said NPD analyst Anita Frazier, adding that "PS3 unit sales were the highest of any month outside of that recorded during previous November/December holiday timeframes."

And then you have Nintendo, a veritable force of nature, continuing to shatter industry and pundit "novelty" prognostications. While the Wii dropped negligibly from 675k unit sales in may to 667k in June, the DS jumped an incredible 42 percent, from 453k unit sales in May to 783k in June on strong sales of Vicarious Visions' Guitar Hero: On Tour.

"The Wii has taken the lead in total sales of current generation console hardware at 10.9 million units sold at retail life-to-date in the U.S.," said Frazier of the Wii's recent . Finding something positive to add about the Xbox 360 -- up 15% over its May numbers -- by noting the platform's driven "just under 8 software units purchased for each unit of hardware, on average." Microsoft's still beating the pants off both Nintendo and Sony when it comes to software attach rates, i.e. "where it counts," in other words.

The numbers...

Hardware

783k - Nintendo DS
667k - Wii
406k - PlayStation 3
337k - PlayStation Portable
220k - Xbox 360
189k - PlayStation 2

Software

775k - Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3)
422k - Guitar Hero: On Tour (DS)
373k - Ninja Gaiden 2 (360)
373k - Wii Fit (Wii)
359k - Wii Play (Wii)
347k - Battlefield: Bad Company (360)
322k - Mario Kart (Wii)
295k - LEGO Indiana Jones (Wii)
268k - LEGO Indiana Jones (DS)
260k - LEGO Indiana Jones (PS2)

Frazier on the industry as a whole...

The video games industry continues to perform in the face of an ever-increasingly difficult economic environment as many turn to more in-home entertainment. Even if growth slows over the back half of 2008, the industry is poised to achieve record-breaking revenues of over $22B for the year.

Looking at historical data, hardware price reductions have been a good incentive for a broader consumer base to invest in a new-gen system, which encourages continued industry growth across all categories.

E3 2008: Sony Says 'Harder To Have Third-Party Exclusives'

During a roundtable discussion at E3 earlier, Sony's Jack Tretton pinned his disappointment at losing exclusive publishing rights to Final Fantasy 13 on Microsoft spending money to "curry favor" with third parties. Bold, intriguing, and of course completely unverifiable claims, but leave them aside for a second, because I think they're only half as interesting as the ones he went on to wrap with:

I think software companies look and say 'there's no check big enough for us to do exclusive development'... I think it's going to be harder and harder to have third-party exclusives as we move forward.

Harder to have third-party exclusives...hmm. Start of a trend? Or recognition of an existing one?

News flash, we're in the throes of a social networking transition. Anyone can see that. A lot of us are sick of hearing about it, and some of us are completely overwhelmed by it, but it's happening, and I don't think we'll be backpedaling anytime soon. Call it whatever you like, e.g. the millennial-mobile-instant-social-cachet-etcetera era, but it's accumulating speed at a kind of compound interest, be it MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, or what I'll call "venture social capital," e.g. stuff like Nintendo's Mii Network, Microsoft's Xbox Live, Sony's PlayStation Home, or PC games like Blizzard's World of Warcraft and Will Wright's upcoming Sims-killer, Spore.

What does that have to do with third parties going multiplatform?

Simple: In the future Jack Tretton's hinting at, hardware vendors like Microsoft and Sony won't sell games, so much as places to play them.

Square Enix's ballyhooed Final Fantasy 13 is, for the first time in the company's history, going to be available at launch on two mainstream competing consoles simultaneously. One thing's certain: The experience of playing either version will nonetheless remain notably different...but not for the reasons you're probably thinking.

Forget the vile, adolescent fanboy squabbling about niggling visual or performance differences. What'll distinguish one version of a multiplatform game like FF13 and others going forward is going to be their "meta" experiences. Voice chat, party play, friends that can follow you in or out of the game, avatars, and whatever other little extracurricular tie-ins to each company's proprietary environment a developer cares to cater to. We saw this in its infancy with Rockstar's "exclusive downloadable content" for the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto IV. It requires virtually no imagination to see where that goes when you start taking all the new "meta" services Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft and more are developing into account.

Stop thinking about future consoles wars as Halo 3 versus Metal Gear Solid 4 or frame rate versus visual quality, in other words, and start thinking in terms of service providers versus service providers. What does my play-space look like? What can I do with it? Where can I go today? How many ways can I extend the developer intended experience out into all these other meta layers? Can I take it with me on the go? And does it flow seamlessly from one aspect of my life to another?

So I think Tretton's exactly right about third-party exclusives going bye-bye, or at least dwindling in the wake of a divided market. I also think he deserves a clap on the back for having the courage or clarity or even indignation to say so.

(Turning briefly back to Tretton's comments on Microsoft "currying favor" to secure Final Fantasy 13...because Sony didn't do any of that when it came to securing Blu-ray as the de facto HD optical media format, right?)

[Thanks, Gamasutra]

E3 2008: Is Nintendo Spurning Hardcore Gamers?

So the controversy du jour seems to be that because Nintendo didn't launch a new Mario or Zelda game (they merely confirmed stuff's in the works) at this year's E3 2008, we're supposed to be freaked out or something. I guess if all you care about are Mario and Zelda, perhaps justifiably. The "hardest" it got for the company that made a chubby mustachioed plumber an international icon was a glorified social networking game (Animal Crossing: City Folk) and a version of Grand Theft Auto for the DS. And even there, somehow I'm not seeing the DS version including the option to hit on hookers with your stylus.

I think the more poignant question isn't whether Nintendo's spurning hardcore gamers, but whether you can really blame them if they are. If the Wii's demographic status at the outset was debatable, it's certainly not anymore. Hardcore gamers get crumbs, mainstream gamers get half an entree, and casual gamers get the rest of the buffet all to themselves.

What's so terrible about that? With this newly tapped, ostensibly burgeoning casual market driving game revenues into the stratosphere, who said Nintendo had an obligation not to take advantage of it? Development cycles have to conform to market demand. I mean, is it somehow 20th Century Fox's fault that millions flocked to see a gonzo alien invasion movie like Independence Day, thus helping to ensure that the ratio of blockbusters to serious artsy sci-fi flicks would remain something like 100 to 1?

Blame consumers, in other words, not Nintendo.

Nintendo's always had something of a casual mystique. There's nothing new about that. Whatever their relative challenge, games involving Zelda or Super Mario or Donkey Kong are nothing like Crysis or Gears of War or Metal Gear Solid 4. "Hardcore" isn't just about Really Tough Gameplay, it involves far less structurally tangible stuff like content and genre as well, which is one of these obvious but often overlooked points. A game like Viva Media's The Immortals of Terra couldn't be easier gameplay-wise, but it's about as "hardcore" in terms of its mechanics and content as PC-based sci-fi operas go. Put another way, "hardcore" in the sense most people use that word today reflects aesthetic taste as much as functional complexity.

Nintendo's conference left me personally underwhelmed, but then I'm generally a hardcore/mainstreamer who only occasionally dabbles in casual fare. Nothing wrong with that, just like there's nothing wrong with Nintendo catering predominantly to the casual crowd.

E3 2008: Hands-On with the New Sony PlayStation Video Store

It's smart, it's got fantastic curves, it's got sexy moves and grooves, it's -- wait, you thought I was talking about the PlayStation Video Store? Well yeah, actually, I am. What were you thinking?

The ballyhooed PlayStation Video store lauded by Sony at its E3 2008 press conference yesterday went live last night, stuffed with some 300 movies and over 1,200 slices of TV content. Nope, you don't need to download a thing to get to it, just have the latest 2.41 firmware installed, a PlayStation Network ID selected, and you can dive in with a simple tap on your XMB's PlayStation Store icon.

Once you're in the PSN, the actual video button that takes you to the store is oddly inconspicuous, a tiny capsule icon sequestered out of the way in the upper left hand corner next to "Games," and unless you're looking for it, easy to miss. I've encountered dozens of posts on various forums in the last several hours from confused PS3 owners along the lines of "It's up? Where???" because they're looking for something a little splashier and obvious.

Cursor up and give it a tap and you're whisked into a sleek "sort-by" interface with banner ads popping in like boxouts on a conventional web page and category selection options on the left divvied into the following:

New Arrivals
Movies
Television
Anime
Available in HD
Rental
Purchase
Top Downloads

Getting around from there's pretty straightforward and works exactly like the rest of the recently updated PlayStation Store. Just click on something and you drill down, or tap the "back" button to pull up again. One deficiency I noticed, though, was a lack of hierarchical labeling to give you a sense of where you're at. To be fair, you can only drill in three or four layers at any given point, so it's hard to get lost, but since you can access the same content from multiple nodes, it's impossible to quickly tell whether you're looking at a movie like Hellboy via New Arrivals, Movies, Available in HD, Rental, etc.

Consider how easy it'd be to run a single line of text along the top of the screen. Something, say, like...

Movies --> Science Fiction --> Hellboy --> Hellboy HD

It'd be nice to see an index like that in a future store iteration, if only as a friendly way to help us keep our bearings. Given the mangled way hitting SELECT to read the service's "about" info works, I gather Sony's challenge is screen real estate (the two or three word subheads for the "about" section have to scroll left-to-right just to be legible, making its menu-bar look like a sloppy collision of letters and dots).

'Top Downloads' is currently empty -- no surprise, and I'll bet Sony gives it a week or more to let the numbers aggregate.

As for the content itself, it's pretty much what you'd expect from a startup offering, mostly recent fare from shlock-blockbusters like Cloverfield and 10,000 BC all the way over to stuff like Juno, 3:10 to Yuma, Napoleon Dynamite, and one of my personal favorite films of last year, The Darjeeling Limited. You've got a sprinkling of older films too, from Dances With Wolves and Hoosiers to Hannibal, Donnie Brasco, Child's Play, etc. and the option to view by movie genres or even individual studios, e.g. Disney, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Sony, etc.

Drill on a movie and you're presented with options to buy or rent either SD (standard definition), or as available, HD (high definition) content. As reported, costs for rentals range from $3 to $4 in SD, $6 in HD. I checked a couple dozen films and found the size range for HD movies tends to run between 5 and 8 GB versus 1.5 to 2 GB for SD versions. Expect those numbers to be notably higher if Sony starts offering 3 to 4 hour long stuff, e.g. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings' director cuts.

While most shows include basic info like release dates, length, size, language, and cast info, it's still but a fraction of what you can get on IMDB, which is too bad, because if ever a service screamed for that kind of interactivity, this is it. It's also not possible to see exactly what specific resolution HD content you're dealing with. 720p? 1080i? 1080p? Roll the dice, I guess.

Even odder, you can't actually buy HD content, you can only rent it. Rentals are for 14 days with a grace period of 24 hours once the content starts playing, whereas SD purchases range from $10 to $15. SD can be upscaled, of course, but not letting you optionally buy HD content's a huge dealbreaker for me. I absolutely refuse to play SD content on my 1080p LCD, upscaled or no, because it frankly looks like washed out junk. Is this Sony's way of keeping attention away from the obvious issue of storage capacity? You can probably cram around 30 1.5 GB SD movies onto a 60 GB PS3, but only 8 or so 6.5GB HD versions.

The TV component works more or less the same as the movie one, including a very smart option to browse by TV network (A&E, History Channel, Adult Swim, Discovery, etc.). Think Family Guy, Prison Break, Afro Samurai, and tons more. But the service also has its own stack of oddball gotchas.

For instance: All three seasons of shows like Arrested Development are available, but bizarrely missing episodes like the first and thirteenth of Season One. The first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are up, but not the latter five. And some shows that are regularly broadcast in HD like "Deadliest Catch" are only available in SD here. Are these accidental oversights? Licensing issues? Or simply a case of Sony overreaching and playing catchup?

Store performance should be less of an issue for those of you on really fast connections, but satellite owners and anyone with a 1.5Mbps or slower connection will experience notable load times as the system draws and redraws scads of thumbnails. Thankfully you don't have to deal with any annoying auto-loading video ads, but the architecture apparently doesn't cache those thumbnails, so moving around as quickly as you'll naturally want to can turn into a sluggish waiting game.

There's more to say here about downloading and PSP syncing, but I'll pause to spare your eyeballs and say more later. Overall, I'd probably rate it somewhere in the B / B-minus range, leaning toward a B-plus for effort. With threadbare video info, sluggish load times, sequentially incomplete shows, no HD version purchase option, etc., it feels a little rough around the edges. Expect to see dozens of tweaks in the weeks and months to come as users weigh in on what's hot versus what's not.

In other words, like anything else these days, file it under "Work In Progress."

(Did you know you can view the store with a PC browser? Check it out, though you'll need a PlayStation ID to login.)

E3 2008: Did Sony's Press Conference Underwhelm?

It came and went with virtually no surprises, mostly just confirmations of long known rumors, but are we being too hard on Sony? No two ways about it, the company's been rolling a stone uphill (both ways!) for the last couple years, and with few exceptions (Metal Gear Solid 4, I'm looking at you) the media's cut the company no breaks. Hey, I love my PS3, play it pretty much daily, and I'm seeing plenty to get halfway excited about after today, but just as much to stifle a yawn over.

Let's start with the 80GB PlayStation 3, same as the 40GB PlayStation 3 for $400 this September. 80GB good, of course, even if it's still not spacious enough to let you archive your video collection digitally. But still, 80 GB = better than Microsoft's 60GB = better than Sony's original 40GB. What I still find baffling, though, is the lack of PS2 backward compatibility after it shipped in the initial versions (like my 60GB original). I don't get it. What's the message here? "Buy a PS3, but keep your PS2?" "Don't play PS2 games, they're really obsolete?" "Stop playing PS2 games on your PS3 because we're not selling enough $60 software?" I don't know, and Sony's not saying, so you're left to sort of marinate cluelessly in your own disappointment.

God of War 3 came and went, a one minute trailer with lots of cool stuff crumbling and blowing around, illuminated by CGI lightning and crackling thunder and His Royal Surliness, Kratos himself growling "In the end, there will be only chaos!" but little more. Check out the trailer for yourself:

No gameplay equals no "game of the show" awards from any of the trade sites, so I guess we're just supposed to be thankful it's happening at all. (Which, of course, I very much am.)

The other big PS3 title was inarguably Resistance 2, including actual footage from the game, also including footage of the Brumak--err, I mean Really Big Lumpy Thing that doesn't need to leap tall buildings because it can simply barrel through them. Check out the trailer:

(Did you see those long shots of those floating, lumbering, city-sized ships? In realtime even?)

There was good news for anyone still thinking about investing in a PS2 and also hot for a little Caped Crusader. Literally little, and kinda blocky too. As in LEGO Batman plus your friendly neighborhood PS2 for $150 in a box (which is so much better than Justin Timberlake in a box). Color me a touch bored by this announcement though. I mean, LEGO Indiana Jones was kind of a ho-hummer, no? Still, this could make a solid gift for the kiddies, whose brains haven't yet congealed into a mealy sardonic paste from playing the same idea over, and over, and over...and did I mention it's got Batman?

Over to the PSP, we've got a new Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters pack laser-targeted at youngsters. For $200, they'll get a silver PSP bundled with the game, a 1GB memory stick, a voucher to download the 3D puzzler Echochrome from the PlayStation Network, and a UMD copy of National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets. You know, I had to watch that flick on my flight over to Budapest earlier this year and the hideously embarrassing-to-admit truth is, I almost enjoyed it more than Indy 4. I know!

The only really Potentially Great News for PSP owners was Resistance Retribution, an over-the-shoulder shooter and alternative take on the whole aliens-ate-your-baby (your family, your friends...the world) franchise due next spring. I say "potentially" because the PSP's single analog stick makes aiming and moving simultaneously a pain in the butt. You know what I'm thinking, right? Where's our dual-analog PSP? The PSP's overdue for a facelift, and no, just knocking a couple grams off the base model doesn't really count. But alright Insomniac, you get your turn in the grinder: make me a believer.

My favorite news of the show was of course LittleBigPlanet, the World's Cutest Game I've been gabbing about for some time now, and which I'll be covering extensively for PC World when it finally ships this fall. It'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." Can you say where-can-I-try-that-please-and-thank-you?

My second favorite reveal was Sony's push into smaller casual-priced games based on first-tier franchises. First up, Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest For Booty, a pithier version of the popular platformer for $15 bucks. The episodic content shtick's ancient history, but when a company like Sony hops on the bandwagon and drags its first party property into the fray, pay attention. I'm thinking quite a few years out, but imagine a system where you buy a game in installments instead of all at once. I mean more than just episodes, but like the whole game, sliced into cake layers. Want the first few levels of Resistance 3 or 4? Grab 'em for $15 a pop instead of $60 for all 15, etc. If you want it all, maybe you get a discount.

Either way, it's auspicious stuff for studios who want to extend existing franchises, even if all it amounts to are quick little prologues, epilogues, or companion pieces to full-blown releases.

And finally, I'm stoked about Sony's TV/movie service, but no one in either Sony or Microsoft's camp has said a word to put my mind at ease about potential storage space issues. Are we supposed to delete stuff as we go to make room for new stuff? Will we be able to download videos as many times as we like, or is it one-time and if you don't back up your downloads, sayonara digital bits, sorta like Apple's iTunes? I keep coming back to full seasons of popular TV shows on Blu-ray and wondering how in the heck we're supposed to fit all that on a trifling 60 or 80GB. Or maybe that's not the demographic Sony and Microsoft are after. But I wish they'd clarify this by offering more than the usual "TV and Movies! Downloadable! Yahoo!" Don't you?

Update: Check out Danny Allen and Darren Gladstone's onsite coverage of the event for another look at the conference.

E3 2008: Good God of War 3 and Holy 80GB $400 PS3

You knew it was coming, I knew it was coming, even my dog knew it was in the pipe (and hey, you know what you get when you spell dog backwards). So God of War 3, no gameplay to speak of (just a CGI trailer) but that's okay. I guess it's enough to know it's officially happening, and there's always the potential director David Jaffe and crew are saving up something to appease the Europeans at GCDC 2008 in Leipzig, Germany next month.

In other news, not as big but notable, Sony just dropped a press release confirming a new 80GB version of the 40GB PS3 this fall, virtually identical, interestingly, to Microsoft's little 40GB bump to the Xbox 360 20GB model on Sunday. Everything else, including the increasingly upsetting lack of PS2 backward compatibility (especially since it's a simple software update away) will be exactly the same. If you've been waiting all this time to buy a PS3 solely on the basis of a 40GB bump, the 80GB model's got your number.

Per my last post, I can't help but react a little to Jack Tretton's lofty wrap-up:

Jack Tretton: If this is year 2 of the PS3 life cycle, imagine what year 10 will bring.

Me: The three or four year anniversary of the PlayStation 4!

E3 2008: Sony Says Consoles Have 10 Year Lifecycle

Jack Tretton launched Sony's E3 press conference today by claiming the stress of today's big Sony PR event has taken two years off his life. Now just imagine the stress for all those fretting fanboys. (Doesn't two years convert into something like 12 in FanYears?) It's the only upside to fanboy-ism: they shuffle off this mortal coil faster. But I digress...

During his intro, Tretton at one point claimed consoles have (or ought to have) a 10-year life cycle. Say what? No they shouldn't! Err, I mean yes they should? I guess whether you agree with Sony on this extremely bold assertion depends on whether you think the PS2 was a one-hit wonder or the heady prognosticator of things to come. Me, I say the PS2's going to be around into the next decade, but I'll eat my mouse and Macbook if we're still talking about either the Xbox 360 or PS3 in 2015 and 2016 respectively. The PS2 hit a window of opportunity (and then some), but, umm, err...there's this thing about technology tending to speed up, not slow 'em down.

Sony's new mantra--err, I mean Big News today is "shorter, cheaper" games. Otherwise known as Xbox Live Arcade, aka the Nintendo Virtual Console. Okay, that's just mean, and actually only partway accurate. What Sony's really getting at, and it's been trotted out by cranky pundits and developers more and more in recent years, is that the future of gaming lies not in these huge multi-million mega-epics, but in shorter nigh-episodic installments. Take "Quest for Booty," a "continuation of Ratchet & Clank: Future," according to Sony. Don't want to pay $60 for a 15 hours of gameplay? How about $15 for maybe one or two? (Just don't tell those 60-70 hour JRPG Square Enix guys, or, you know, pretty much anyone living in Japan.)

True to their word, Sony's also got you covered with its new movie and TV download service. Effective immediately, think $2 starting for TV shows, $10 to $15 for movie purchases, and $3 to $6 rentals. Movie partnerships: Disney, Fox, Funimation, Lions Gate, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Turner, Warner, and more. Pull 'em down to your PSP as you like, though again, no surprise there, since we've been ripping audio/video on our own for years. Still, kind of nice if you'd rather not mess with optical media. I just want to know where Sony intends us to stash all this stuff. Time to start thinking about plugging an external terabyte drive into our PS3s?

E3 2008: Wii Speak, You Listen Says Nintendo

Leave it to Nintendo to take technology as old as dirt and tease it into a brand new "groundbreaking" peripheral. Put the hammer down and step away from the furnace: It's called the "Wii Speak," and it's -- wait for it -- a microphone for your Wii! Surprise from Nintendo's E3 2008 press conference! And cool in that kind of I-shouldn't-care-but-I'm-compelled-to-in-spite-of-myself way. Oh, and not a headset, but something that claps onto your TV set, so you can get more than one person in on the conversation (whether you want to or not, I guess).

The Wii Speak is going to be doubly intriguing if you're an Animal Crossing fan, because Nintendo just revealed it's bringing that storied franchise to the Wii this year courtesy Animal Crossing: City Folk. Sit around, do whatever you like, and talk 'n stuff. Visualize a bunch of unruly Miis fishing and goofing around and, you know, laying it on like the kids on South Park. What, you think a bunch of unsupervised kids are going to just gab about roses and flowers and puppy dog tails? I guess the "no privacy" TV-mounted angle for the microphone is supposed to cover Nintendo's safety-first angle.

So Animal Crossing: City Folk, i.e. World-of-Animal-Crossing-Craft without the grinding and emphasis instead on the goofing around. Alternatively known as PlayStation Home, aka The Sims PlayStation, aka Third or Fourth Life. Sheesh. Keeping up with all the overlap these days is as hard as remembering whether Deep Impact or Armageddon came first.

What else.

You've got your new Zelda and Mario titles on the way, because that's really a surprise. No word on the who, what, when, where, and since this is the Wii we're talking about, how. Any bets on whether we'll see a MarioZelda crossover that's not Super Smash Brothers Free-For-All?

Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime says the DS is kicking butt and taking names, which of course it is. The company expects sales to surpass 100 million, something I've been saying for over a year now (and again I say, is anyone surprised?). Now if they'd just fix those cheap plastic hinges on the Lite and figure out how keep human finger-dirt from browning up the buttons. Same problem on my wife's white plastic Macbook, incidentally.

You read about the Wii MotionPlus yesterday, right?

The finger-sweat's hardly cooled on Guitar Hero: On Tour's multi-color note-nubs and already Nintendo's announcing Guitar Hero: On Tour Decades, which inexplicably lets you share songs over the network. Huh? Oh, and with that 100 million sales number looming, it's a no-brainer to see Rockstar finally showing some DS love with Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Rockstar's claiming the game "brings a new level of interactivity to [the series'] sprawling open envirionments." Sprawling? Open? On the DS? Now this I have to see.

Most unsurprising surprise? Nintendo's own version of GuitarRockHeroBand, called Wii Music, which lets you combine the Wii remote (and optionally, the Wii Balance Board) to play along with various songs and try to hit the correct notes. Think sax, piano, guitar, violin, drums, and more.

All in all, a trifle underwhelming in that I'm-overwhelmed-in-spite-of-myself-because-it's-Nintendo kind of way.

Update: For pictures and more hands-on impressions, be sure to check out Darren Gladstone and Danny Allen's coverage of Nintendo's conference: Wii Resort, Wii Music, Clone Wars and Flight Info, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and Animal Crossing, Speaker Phone.

E3 2008: The Day the Sony Hype Machine Didn't Stand Still

Now that we've had a day where we've said a few snarky but mostly adoring things about Microsoft's E3 data dump, what can we expect today from Sony's inexorable riposte? Let's see: PlayStation Home stuff, check...buncha cool exclusives like Killzone 2 and LittleBigPlanet and Resistance 2, check...Mass Effect 2 coming to PS3...err, huh?

Nah, just kidding about that last one, but pursuing at least the figment of my imagination for a minute or two (visualize a dog chasing its tail) consider the fact that Bioware only sold around 2 million copies of Mass Effect total on the Xbox 360. I know. Only. But still, look at how much better Sony's doing in Japan, and after all, it is an arr-pee-gee. Of course they'd have to add in all the PC fixes, and...alright, alright, it's not going to happen. Remember, I'm exactly zero percent as accurate as Kreskin about these things.

As for what Sony's really going to reveal today, you can bet it'll either be a few earth-quaking humdingers or a whole bunch of pebble-jiggling yawners. What's clanging away in the rumor mill? Well there's the hypothetical God of War 3 debut for one. If anything has the potential to grab all the attention away from Square Enix's jaw-dropping announcement yesterday, it's this ineluctable tertiary installment in director David Jaffe's towel-snapping hack and slash. Then there's Sony's PlayStation Home (i.e. The Sims Sony, i.e. The Sony Mii Channel). Even with the recent and significant 2.4 update to the PS3's XMB interface, the company's probably been keeping its strongest cards back for this week. I certainly would.

Regarding Final Fantasy. Don't sweat it, Sony owners. Square Enix is too big and expending too much effort (three or four year development cycles) to drop a game like Final Fantasy 13 on less than half its potential sell-to market. Look at it another way: Sony didn't lose a major exclusive, so much as Square Enix made an extremely smart business decision. And everyone wins, because everyone gets a crack at the game. Which, by the way, we're all just assuming is going to be amazing. It's not like Square Enix hasn't dropped the ball before.

Secondly, Final Fantasy is surely my favorite game franchise, but it may not be yours, and popular as it is in Japan (and increasingly more over here in recent years) it's certainly no Gran Turismo 5 (GT4 sold 9.4 million, GT3 about 15 million, and GT5: Prologue's already at around 2 million and climbing). Sony has plenty of other exclusives left, too, including majors like the Resistance and Killzone franchises. And then there's Sony's inevitable response to the Microsoft/Netflix streaming video deal.

So stick around. Sony's press conference is today at 11:30am PT -- our fearless two-man ground team will be live-blogging it from Today @ PC World -- and by this time tomorrow, all our best attempts at second-guessing Sony will probably look like a cockeyed crapshoot.

E3 2008: First Final Fantasy 13, Next Metal Gear Solid 4?

The moral of today's historic defection by Square Enix to the Xbox 360 goes something like this: "Help, I've dropped a critical exclusive and I can't get up." So what's to stop Konami from offering Snake-in-Depends (pardon me, I mean "muscle suit") to Xbox 360 owners next? Is there any reason Xbox 360 owners wouldn't oblige by paying a fat wad of dough to watch some really old dude with Marlboro-Man-face get the crap kicked out of him for a couple dozen hours?

With Square Enix nice and cozied up to Microsoft based on the cold calculus of install base numbers, why wouldn't Konami do the same? I mean at least on this side of the pond, where the 360 owns twice Sony's install pool?

Before we get too "whither Metal Gear Solid 4?" let's remember this is Konami we're talking about. You know, the same guys who think reviewing a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 only takes like half a day or something, and who waited until the game was pretty much in stores and gamers could've cared less about some numbskull's write-up to send out the actual review copies.

So no, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they took a look at Microsoft's U.S. Xbox 360 base and decided it was all just some clever Microsoft ruse. A game console that can't sell to save its life in Japan couldn't possibly be doing favorably overseas, right? More media tricks!

And in response to Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg with his "That's a question for Konami," I'd say forget Konami Aaron and go ask your Xbox 360 install base. I'll bet you lunch they're up for it.

E3 2008: Sony Teases Mystery Gadget, Adds Movie/TV Support to PSP

Could Sony be teasing a laptop-sized PS3? Lemme nip that in the bud by saying probably not, but check the curves and colors on the teaser shot above scraped off the SonyStyle home page. The company's supposed to announce a new product tonight at 9pm EST, according to I4U, which speculates it's probably actually an Intel Atom based netbook.

But hey, a netbook-sized PS3 would certainly be cool, no? (Ain't baseless speculation fun?)

In other news, PlayStation LifeStyle is claiming that Sony's Eric Lempel was beating around the bush when he said new effects had been added to the PSP's visual player. Apparently PSP firmware 4.05 -- just released today -- also adds support for the new PlayStation Store Movies and TV video service.

Cool, except for the part where I'd really rather have news about new games (or downloadable original-PS games!) in lieu of movies. Have you tried watching feature-length movies on a PSP (or for that matter, an iPod)? Uh-huh. My point exactly.

E3 2008: Play Xbox 360 Games From the Hard Drive?

Put the disc in the drive, copy the game to your hard drive, leave the disc in for copy protection only, and presto, instant your-Xbox-360-works-like-a-PC-o. No drive spinning noise, faster load times, etc. That's the news from Microsoft's Marc Whitten, who just sent out a note to Xbox Live members expanding on John Schappert's portion of Microsoft's E3 presentation this morning.

Cool! Now all we need is the new 3D interface (also revealed this morning) to be called 'Aero', a beveled START button, and an 'Add/Remove Programs' icon before we're calling it the Xbox PC!

Only caveat? Storage. Imagine installing a monster like Lost Odyssey on a 20GB hard drive. Or a 60GB drive. Or even a 120GB drive. Even allowing for redundant asset and data removal, a four-DVD game could still take up as much as 10-15GB of space per install. Okay, okay, it's optional, and one thing we love about Microsoft (ahem, Sony guys) is that the company absolutely rolls over to give its customers options.

Now we just need one more thing, guys, and it begins with 'B', ends with 'y' and has 'lu-ra' in the middle.

E3 2008: Final Fantasy XIII Jumps to Xbox 360

More out of the blue totally-didn't-see-that-one-comin' news from the sidelines at E3 this afternoon is that Square Enix's long-awaited Final Fantasy 13 will no longer be PlayStation 3 exclusive. Yep, you read that right, it's July 14th (not April 1st), and I'm fresh out of hyperbole: Xbox 360 fans are getting Final Fantasy XIII.

Will wonders never cease.

According to Shacknews and others, who caught the story during this morning's Microsoft's E3 press briefing, the title's coming to Xbox 360 at some undisclosed future point:

"Available on Xbox 360 at launch in North America and Europe," said Square Enix. "We believe that bringing the game to Xbox 360 will allow us to provide a game to even more fans in North America and Europe."

Good on Square Enix. I mean hey, with all respect to the relationship Sony's cultivated with Square Enix since last century's Nintendo huff-and-puff, the PS3's install base plus the Xbox 360's currently six-million-larger install base don't exactly add up to chump change, y'know?

Also: Does this imply anything wobbly about Square Enix's confidence in the PS3's salability? Neither company would ever come right out and say directly, but it sure looks that way.

Update: The latest story coming out of Square Enix's press conference today is that the game will only see its way to Xbox 360s on U.S. shores, which makes a certain amount of sense when you consider Microsoft's failure to secure even half a beachhead in Japan. (It's also a surefire way to ensure that situation doesn't change.) Also: Final Fantasy Versus XIII, an action-RPG entree in Square Enix's polymorphous "Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy XIII Compilation," remains 100% PS3-exclusive.

E3 2008: Nintendo Surprises with Wii MotionPlus

Plug a little accessory the size of a memory card into the tail of your Wii remote and Nintendo says you can have dramatically better motion control. According to Nintendo's pre-E3 press splash, the Wii MotionPlus attaches to the end of your Wii Remote and, in conjunction with the accelerometer and sensor bar, lets the system keep better track of your arm's position.

How much better? Nintendo claims an astonishing 1:1, arm to screen. That's like a dozen points higher fidelity than the current system, which works great for casual stuff like rhythm and puzzle games where you can sort of slop through the activities, but it's always been kinda touch-and-go with more serious stuff like Zelda and Metroid. You should hear what comes out of my mouth when my system's infrared bar loses the pointer in a game or just plain locks up. It happens fairly often, too.

So this is kind of an interesting, maybe even intriguing development. It also raises questions like: Will Wii owners flock to an add-on accessory? (Depends almost entirely on price.) Will Nintendo sell a version with the MotionPlus integrated? (They definitely ought to be thinking about it.) And is this intended to catch potential third-party competitors off guard by stealing a clap of E3 thunder? (Magic eight-ball says "indubitably.")

Stay tuned. Our E3 boots-on-the-ground (Danny Allen, Darren Gladstone) should be along with hands-on later this week.

Could a Final Fantasy VII Sequel Be In the Offing?

Note, importantly, that I said "sequel" and not "remake," something radically different from the annual rumormongering about this most famously venerated installment in Square Enix's inexhaustible roleplaying series getting more than a little nip and tuck. Devotees of Final Fantasy VII beg perennially for a remake, but what if Square Enix decided to do a true sequel and call it Final Fantasy VII-2?

That's what fansite FinalFantasySeries is speculating based on a nonspecific teaser dropped by Tetsuya Nomura (FFVII's character designer Final Fantasy VII Advent Children's director) in an interview about the upcoming Blu-ray release of Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete. Says Nomura:

FFS: With that notion, does ACC [Advent Children Complete] have any announcements?

Nomura: The release date will be announced. There is also a big announcement elsewhere, please look forward to it.

Note that Final Fantasy X-2, the sunnier singalong followup to Final Fantasy X (i.e. "10"), was the first time Square Enix attempted a full-on sequel using the same characters, locations, and plot points of a prior installment, including a wrap-up that resolved X's loose ends. So to put it all legal-like, we definitely have precedent.

But do we have motive? I don't know, but pressed, I'd have to say nope. In fact I'd venture a guess that the guys with the say-so at Square Enix are probably a little sick of hearing about Final Fantasy VII. I mean, think about it. You're talking about a developer that just spent the last several years designing and releasing a massive "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII" love-letter to fans project to celebrate the original's ten year anniversary in 2007. The lineup included:

- Before Crisis (mobile phone game)

- Dirge of Cerberus (PlayStation 2 action/shooter)

- Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode (mobile phone game)

- Crisis Core (PlayStation Portable prequel to FFVII)

- Final Fantasy VII Advent Children (CGI-animated movie sequel to FFVII)

- Last Order (animated movie prequel to FFVII)

So let's say you're a Square Enix producer and you have access to this massive pool of creative talent and a palette limited only by your imagination -- would you keep circling back over the same terrain?

Or would you strike out and try to make your mark with something new and even more memorable?

Would The Beatles be as musically beloved if all they'd ever done was re-release Please Please Me and With The Beatles?

Everyone jokes about Final Fantasy being anything but (yuk-yuk), and yet we're talking about a franchise where each successive game totally reinvents the core gameplay. No one else in gaming has managed to repaint the mechanics of multi-party battles in quite as many colors, whatever you think of the results. The difference between the combat system in FFVII and its prequel alone are analogous to EA releasing Madden '08 as an NFL football game, then Madden '09 with something like international rugby rules.

That said, I do have to politely quibble with FinalFantasySeries' assessment of the "mature" ramifications of a Final Fantasy VII remake. True, Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation -- a sea change to more graphically mature content for the series back in 1997 -- managed to squeak by the ESRB's reviewers with just a Teen rating. To date, the franchise had managed to elude a more controversial 18-and-over Mature.

But I don't see any reason why FFVII couldn't maintain a Teen rating. In fact I can think of at least two reasons it'd be a no-brainer.

The first one's simple: What was Teen in 1997 is no longer so in 2008, for the same reasons stuff that would've garnered an R-rating at the movies a decade or two ago routinely slips by with a PG-13 today. (Does anyone think a comedy like Jason Reitman's Juno would've managed a PG-13 in the 1980s?)

The second one's even more compelling: Advent Children, which actually enjoyed a special one-time theatrical release in April 2006, was rated PG-13. Advent Children's scenes of gore-free violence make the Matrix's seem like kid's stuff, not to mention the creepy "geostigma" plot thread, where a prancing Sephiroth knockoff (Kadaj) pied-pipers whole flocks of disfigured children and tries to turn them into anti-planetary weapons. What ratings boards have never quite figured out is that showing a blood-drenched sword roiling around in someone's gut is half as freaky as not showing the gore and instead honing in on the facial grimacing and blood-curdling screaming. The imagination's a trillion times more powerful than a squirmy mess of fake intestines slathered in buckets of dyed corn syrup, after all.

Back to FFVII: Stuff like a major character's death scene was only shocking to extremely young players who've since grown up, but with blinkered fanboy notalgia, perpetuated a videogame myth about the moment's serious but nonetheless cartoonish significance. A more visually detailed and maturely edited remake could still elude a ratings debacle by simply observing the Hitchcock-ian maxim that you don't have to show a thing to disturb the bejesus out of everyone. Anything more lingering would just be rote voyeurism anyway.

Other stuff:

- A character who commits suicide by jumping off a cliff is far less disturbing in FFVII than the scene near the end of The Last of the Mohicans where Alice Munro (played by Jodhi May) defiantly follows her lover over the edge. And even that scene in The Last of the Mohicans is at best PG-rated. (It's not like you have to show the body knocking around on the way down, or eventually going splat, something Mohicans director Michael Mann instinctively understands.)

- The Shinra plate collapse which cruelly buries untold numbers of Sector Seven's inhabitants is all sound and fury in the PlayStation version, focused far more on the plate's collapse than depicting the death of all the citizens below. A remake could correct this shortcoming by actually driving home the import of a corporate megalith's sociopathic proclivities without dwelling on the squishy stuff. If a PG-rated movie like Star Wars can depict the Death Star wiping out an entire civilized planet, I think a lifelike version of FFVII could easily pull off the plate collapse scene without pushing into M-rated territory (incidentally, the MPAA laughably calls Star Wars's PG-rating "sci-fi violence," as if it ought to be any less disturbing to eliminate billions than to graphically behead just one or two).

- So FFVII has a few swear words. So what. First off, the PG-13 rated 1980s Transformers movie had someone dropping at least one S-bomb, so there's your Teen (13+) ratings precedent. Or Square Enix could just leave the gutter-lingo out. Thematically sophisticated shows like Lost are certainly no less compelling without it.

- Did someone say sexual innuendo? Seriously? The very most FFVII bandies about isn't even approaching the kind of stuff you can get for free and nightly with stuff as seemingly innocuous as Fox's The Family Guy.

The most important point to take away from any of this is that the efficacy of a remake comes down to directorial choices. It's naive to assume graphical progression somehow equals a proportional increase in thematic or graphical intensity. A smart director would use a remake to enhance relationships and political themes without teetering over into spectacle. A bad one would simply use today's higher-fidelity visual palette to shock and titillate.

Whether they're planning a remake, a sequel, or nothing at all, you can bet Square Enix understands the difference.

Microsoft Unveils 60GB Xbox 360, Obsoletes 20GB for $300

We knew a price cut for Microsoft's mid-grade Xbox 360 was imminent, but who knew it'd be such a tempest in a teapot? Instead of a permanent price drop on its "Premium" 20GB $350 model, it turns out that Microsoft's merely discounting that model and selling it for $300 "while supplies last."

In its place, the company says it'll sell a new 60GB version for $350, identical to the 20GB version except for the 40GB bump.

Check the gigabyte delta here: With just 40GB more at a $50 markup, your upgrade cost per gigabyte (CPG) comes out to a whopping $1.25. Now that's technically the wrong way to estimate "true" CPG, but it appropriately drives home the magnitude (or should I say triviality?) of the update. By comparison, the CPG on a $130 250GB 7200rpm 2.5" SATA hard drive is about fifty cents.

A trifle underwhelming, no?

Back in 2002, at a roughly analogous point in the PlayStation 2's life cycle, Sony dropped the PS2's price by an astonishing third (from $300 down to $200). The PS2 was leading 10-to-1 at that point, but Sony took the potential threat from Microsoft's Xbox seriously, and as history now illustrates, that kind of thinking paid dividends. Today, Microsoft's leading by a much smaller margin than Sony had back in 2002 (the Xbox 360's only up by about 6 million systems worldwide). Why Microsoft isn't willing to make a summer price commitment to consumers is anyone's guess, but if ever there was a time to get aggressive, it's now (and pre-E3). Playing "wait-and-see" while peddling a token storage update is about as un-intrepid as it gets.

Regarding the 20GB closeout sale, get 'em while they're hot, then pop one of those 250GB third-party drives into your enclosure and you'll be sitting pretty. Sure, the Arcade's still $70 cheaper, but you're getting the HDMI and component cables, a headset, and most importantly: the hard drive enclosure you'll need to do the deed.

Then ship that 20GB relic to a museum.

In-Games Avatars that Walk Like You, Squawk Like You

Imagine playing your favorite MMO and barking out a sneeze, only to witness your game avatar suddenly whip back its head, wrinkle up its eyes, and emit a hearty a-CHOO! According to New Scientist, researchers in the UK have been developing software that could let future computer-based avatars do just that.

Recording the facial expressions and voices of four performers who laughed, sobbed, sneezed, and yawned for optical motion capture tools, the researchers then correlated the data with facial motion-capture data. The result? An animated facial model that could "mimic" these expressions automatically when played a new laugh or cry.

Today's in-game approximations of us are staggeringly dull. They trek from location to location, running, fighting, riding, and flying. But when we pause to engage in text chats with friends or party members, our avatars tend to resemble stony bookmarks, empty vessels for our intellects momentarily frozen in time.

And even with "emoting", i.e. accessing canned in-game expressions to make an avatar laugh or cry, bow or salute, your hands can only do so much to compensate for the translational chasm between a robotic off-the-shelf chuckle, and one you actually emit, laugh lines and all.

Imagine the social ramifications of an MMO where the in-game avatars were capable of responding realistically and diversely to non-linguistic player cues. Marry that with the character design quality of a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 and you'd almost have a revolution on your hands.

Forget expansion packs with new level caps and instancing tweaks, and think instead about the startlingly enhanced possibilities these kinds of tools might yield for meaningful social interaction in online worlds that still today, for all their virtues, tend to feel like wandering through fields of empty-eyed, phlegmatic mannequins.

GOG to Offer On-Demand Classic PC Games

Wanna play out-of-print PC games you can't find without paying an arm and a leg to a bunch of price-gouging hucksters on Amazon and eBay? You may want to bookmark a little site that's about to launch this August in beta called GOG.com.

GOG, which stands for "Good Old Games," appears to be an attempt to offer a glut of old-school PC goodies for on-demand download, ranging just for starters from stuff like MDK and Operation Flashpoint to Fallout and Freespace 2.

All XP and Vista compatible, and all completely DRM free. As the site says, "you buy it, you keep it." Buy once, download many. Anywhere, on any PC, without intrusive, privacy-compromising "go-online-and-register-every-time-you-play" schemes.

All relatively cheap, too. We're talking just $6 to $10 a pop.

According to the press release:

GOG.com is poised to become the center of the classic-games universe with a huge community section including forums, user reviews and ratings, as well as insightful commentary and editorials from some of the industry?s most beloved writers. A closed public beta of the site is scheduled for launch on August 1st, and excited old-school gamers can sign up for more info and a chance to enter the beta by visiting GOG.com.

GOG.com has already lined up agreements with such publishers as Interplay and Codemasters to make their games available on the site. Among the titles those companies are bringing to the site are in-demand classics like Fallout, Freespace 2, Operation Flashpoint: Game of the Year Edition and TOCA Race Driver 3. Negotiations are in progress with several other publishers, with the ultimate goal of GOG.com offering a comprehensive collection of classic PC games from the 80s, 90s and 2000s.

?Our main goal is to create a user-friendly site with the best classic PC games for a price that might be considered impossible to achieve,? said Adam Oldakowski, Managing Director of GOG.com. ?The people behind GOG.com are gamers and we all know how difficult it is to find a lot of classic games. So we?ve started building a great games catalogue, gotten rid of the copy protection that gamers hate so much, optimized the games to work on modern operating systems, and made them cheap enough that piracy seems like a rip-off. It?s so easy to buy, download and install a game and then get deeply involved in the community; we?re very confident that gamers will absolutely love the site.?

Sign me up, then give me just about everything from Origin Systems and Looking Glass Studios, fast as you can and pretty please. The Ultima series? Wing Commander? System Shock? Terra Nova? Thief: The Dark Project? Ultima Underworld? Wings of Glory? Privateer? Strike Commander?

Assuming the beta goes well, the service is poised to officially launch sometime in September.

Sound off, all you legacy PC gamers. What else would you like to see a service like this resurrect?

Is This Really the Xbox 360 'Wii-mote'?

British games market media site MCV claims it's found official footage of the Xbox 360 'Wii-mote', even though the tabloids broke the news about the two-piece, six-degrees-of-freedom, motion-sensing Motus "Darwin" months ago. For reasons unknown, MCV has elected this morning to label the openly agnostic third-party motion-sensing peripheral we've known about since April "an Xbox 360 motion-sending pad" based on a few demonstration videos of the controller in action with games like Lego Star Wars II and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Check out the videos for yourself. I don't think it's possible to discern which system(s) they're demoing on. Could be Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, or even a PC.

The MCV article continues -- bizarrely -- to state that "it is not made clear whether Motus is planning to release the peripheral as a third-party product, or if Microsoft has done a deal with the company to make it an official Xbox accessory."

Not clear? I guess I'm stuck way back at the point where we have a shred of evidence suggesting they were planning an exclusive deal with Microsoft in the first place. Motus has made it pretty clear in past interviews that it views the Darwin as a platform-agnostic peripheral. But even if we speculate that it's all a smokescreen for a first-party announcement at next week's E3, why in the world would we assume they'd do their first-party deal with Microsoft, say, and not Sony?

For the record, here's what we've known about the Motus Darwin since April:

1. The company's been working on a motion-sensing Wii-mote competitive peripheral that doesn't use an external infrared sensor, and which, according to Motus chairman Satayan Mahajan, "works on console as well as PC."

2. According to Mahajan, "If you look at the rumor mill... it looks like Microsoft is coming up with something, and we have something... So motion-based control is needed on the other consoles, as well as PC." Unless he's just playing coy, which is always a possibility, he views the Darwin as at best, a unique third-party offering, and at worst, a competitive player in a market Microsoft's planning to enter on its own at some point independently.

3. Neither Microsoft nor Sony would allow actual video of an unannounced first-party peripheral to run like this. Leak, maybe, but not sit front and center of a company's website. The video you're seeing at Motus's site is classic promotional fodder, designed to pique curiosity as much as anything.

4. Mahajan claims there are publishers in studios using the Darwin right now. Which could mean anything, but which sounds a lot like we're staring at a third party peripheral and not a first party partner to me.

Think about that last point. Does it make sense for Motus to do a first-party deal if it can sell the Darwin across two sets of platforms for multi-console releases like the ones demoed in those videos? Neither the Xbox 360 nor PS3 have all that terribly impressive install bases at this point. Why in the world would Motus want to throw half its potential revenue away by signing on to just one platform? I certainly wouldn't. Not unless Microsoft planned to buy me out for a pile of dinero -- certainly a possibility, but I don't think a very likely one.

The Wii-mote's a pretty elementary device that unexpectedly resonated with consumers. Everyone knew what it did and how well in advance. The surprise wasn't the technology, but the way the technology lit a fire under casual gamers and -- temporarily or permanently -- carved out a new market virtually overnight. Reverse-engineering and building on the technology itself ought to be a snap for Microsoft internally. Matching Nintendo's cultural gravitas, on the other hand, is a different task entirely.

I've argued repeatedly that adding a Wii-mote competitive peripheral to the 360 or PS3 would be relatively simple. Getting developers to make games worthy of such a device, making the 360 or PS3 more price-competitive with the Wii, and convincing a now more than ever price-sensitive public "you can have it all" by spending more is of course exponentially more difficult.

We'll know one way or another whether there's a story here by this time next week. In the meantime, though, don't believe everything you read.

5 Things That Bug Me about Final Fantasy VIII

Okay everyone, pack your bags and cram into my DeLorean, let's take a little trip down memory lane circa 1999. That's the year Squaresoft unleashed Final Fantasy VIII for the original PlayStation on North America, a console RPG that went on to sell six million units worldwide in less than a dozen months, eventually outpacing even the great and powerful (and to this day better-remembered) Final Fantasy VII. They even released a Windows version with 3D card support for smoother visuals in early 2000.

And somehow, I totally missed it.

Blame my days-into-nights job as an on-call systems engineer plus weekends hammering out a graduate degree. I've been a series fan since Final Fantasy II (actually numbered "IV" in Japan) for the Super Nintendo, so picking up VIII was a no-brainer, but I never had time to do more than blunder through its introductory Fire Cavern mission. I think I beat Ifrit (the mission's Big Bad) and wandered around Balamb a little before throwing in the towel and going back to simpler stuff (like, you know, Rayman 2). I've since sold and repurchased the game at least two or three times, but never gotten around to actually completing it.

It's a shortcoming I'm finally remedying this summer, and as of last night with 34 hours on the clock, I'm on disc number three (of four), putting me somewhere near the three-quarters mark if the game guides I'm using are close to accurate.

So how does director Yoshinori Kitase's "incredibly cinematic" opus hold up nine years later?

Surprisingly well. Surprisingly well visually, too, if you're willing to run it on a standard 4:3 proportioned CRT, anyway. Yeah, if you've ever thought about resurrecting a PlayStation game on your new super-fly HD setup, forget about an LCD or LCD TV, both of which strip Final Fantasy VIII's otherwise vibrant pre-rendered backgrounds of all their color and interpolate the low-res polygonal characters into blocky shimmering blurs whenever they move. Nothing a pair of component video cables and a flat-glass CRT won't fix right up, if you can stand the technological backpedaling.

Did I mention the beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds? I miss those. Lots. Even today, the most eye-popping 3D vistas decked with all the FX-shellacked trimmings fail to move me as much as a piece of original, hand-drawn, hand-painted background art. Think what someone could do today with up to 1920 by 1080 lines and however many more pixels to work with.

I've been less thrilled (if not entirely surprised) by stuff like the mediocre English translation, the awkward and inexplicable narrative leaps (nope, I'm not talking about the Laguna sequences), the uneven music lineup by series vet Nobuo Uematsu, and the grab bag gameplay.

Let's break that down into five quibbles, starting with...

...Your inability to filter magic trades with other characters by "junctioned" versus "non-junctioned" magic. In Final Fantasy VIII, characters don't have magic points or favored magic-casting classes, but instead "draw" magic spells from tiny sparking nodes or directly from enemies during battle. Additionally, you can link or "junction" spells to a "pet" creature called a Guardian Force. This, in turn, allows you to link elemental magic spells to a character's attributes to boost their ability in a given area.

Load up on 100 tornado spells and junction them to a character's "strength," for instance, and you might add thousands of damage points to a melee strike. Or link the spell to defensive elements to grant your character virtual immunity from an enemy using that element in its attack. Sound complex? It is, even for a Final Fantasy, a problem exacerbated by the clunky exchange system. Say you've assigned six or seven spells to character A and want to pass along all non-assigned leftovers to character B. You either have to swap them across one at a time (the game has potential dozens, so this can take forever when you're configuring a party of six) or just give character B the whole enchilada. But if you give them everything, you sever all the assignments made with character A (the exchange-all takes everything, assigned or not). A simple "exchange non-junctioned magic" would have shaved hours off party manipulation, which ends up being a time sink for all the wrong reasons.

Worse, the game has a misleading way of labeling crucial configuration screens. Instead of explicitly labeling the screen you're on, it opts instead to tell you where you're at in relation to something else (for FF8 vets, I'm talking specifically about the "element" and "status" junction screens). How stupid is that? I spent the better part of the first two discs completely backwards about which screen corresponded to which function. A quick scan of various game forums and newsgroups turns up scads of gamers who've had precisely the same issue over the years.

...The Triple Triad card game song. Nothing, and I repeat nothing in all the Final Fantasy games, is as irritating as this piece of tripe. Every time it kicks in, my wife glowers and nags me to either kill the sound or use headphones. Have a listen yourself. Think the Doctor Who theme song with cheesy hand claps on the downbeats and a fat, waspish synth lead pounding out a boring motif over a lumbering twelve-bar blues. And you have to listen to it every time you scare up a game. Which, since I actually dig Triple Triad enough to pester everyone I see for a match, adds up to half a dozen hours playing in silence after thumbing the mute button. Fun! (Sorry Nobuo, you're still the shiznit, just not on this particular number.)

...Magic can be drawn much too easily once Squall (the main character) hits level 50 and you get your SeeD (elite soldier) rank up to about 15, at which point your automatic salary's so ridiculously high you'll always have 100 of everything. At these levels, you can pretty much pop a squat in battles and suck down nearly every spell the game offers in all of a couple hours, making your party virtually invincible by the time you hit the start of the third disc (out of four).

...Instead of casting spells or opting to melee, characters in Final Fantasy VIII can summon Guardian Forces (think "pet" capable of launching a powerful elemental attack). Critics made plenty of noise about the lengthy attack animations in 1999, each of which take at least 20-30 seconds to cycle, i.e. about 19-29 seconds too long. It's so irritating I generally avoid summoning altogether unless I absolutely have to. Head-slappingly easy fix: An option to abbreviate these, click through them, or just turn them off altogether. I mean, duh.

...The game drags you kicking and screaming down a halfway interesting narrative path, then at about its midpoint, pulls the rug out in a way that feels incredibly cheap. I realize everything about Final Fantasy eventually boils down to brothers fighting brothers, or sisters, or fathers and mothers, but the way the story in this one abruptly shifts gears -- the way it's handled, and especially the tepid way the characters react -- comes off too woodenly. After all the sentimental hand-wringing and explosive clanging in Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII's plot twists feel comparably halfhearted.

Alright, that reads a bit grumpier than intended. I actually mostly like the game, warts and all. I'm digging the deck (of cards) building, peeping new area art, scrounging for dino bones and moon stones and star fragments to cobble together super-powered weapons, uncovering new guardian forces, and mixing spells with attributes now that I've had to learn the game's fussy junctioning system for real.

Fallout 3 Banned From Sale Down Under

What could possibly be so controversial in upcoming E3 2008 headliner Fallout 3 that the Australian government would impose a dreaded "RC" rating on Bethesda's upcoming tertiary post-apocalyptic RPG? No one knows for sure, but speculation is that the optional use of drugs in the game -- specifically the option to employ morphine as a stimulant -- may underly the Aussie classification board blacklisting. Bizarrely, this sort of activity would be allowed in films, but unlike films, games in Australia are refused an R 18+ or X18+ classification, reducing everything to an MA 15+ or below, or bust.

In a recent fan interview posted on the official Fallout 3 message boards, Fallout 3 producer Todd Howard admitted the game includes:

Slavery, children, drugs and addiction more than the others, as those factor for [sic] into the setting more. In regards to nudity and child killings, no, it features neither of those, as they don't really add to the flavor of the game... I think if you look at Fallout 1... Fallout 3 is pretty much the same... no more, no less. Drugs and drug addiction play a larger role perhaps, as it's a key gameplay device. I think the heart of this question is "has the harshness and maturity of the world of Fallout 3 been tempered from the earlier games?" and I can certainly say "No, it hasn't been."

RC, which obdurately stands for "Refused Classification," is a rating typically reserved for titles like "Busty Beauties No. 61," "Audrey: Sexual Freak 8," and "Faces of Death 4." Games as well as films slapped with these two dreaded scarlet letters "cannot be sold, hired, or demonstrated in Australia" according to the Classification Board's FAQ.

A little history: In 1996, Duke Nukem 3D was refused classification because of minor nudity (recall the highly pixelated topless pole dancers). When a censored version of that game accidentally shipped with the nude scenes intact, the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) attempted to have it recalled. In 2002, Grand Theft Auto III was tagged with an RC-rating until Rockstar removed the option for players to solicit sex from prostitutes. Players could of course still kill them, underscoring the bizarre intercultural disconnect between wanton murder (AOK!) and the biological act of procreation (impolite and evil!).

To give you a flavor for the Aussie board's latitude here, an RC rating may apply to films and games that:

- Depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that they should not be classified.

- Promote, incite or instruct in matters of crime or violence.

I spoke with Pete Hines at Bethesda by phone this morning, but his hands are tied. All Bethesda's willing to say at this point is: "We're not going to comment on it."

What'll most likely happen: Bethesda will have to censor the offending scenes and/or mechanics and coax an MA 15+ rating out of the OFLC.

Stupid? Or stupider?

Pre-E3 Price Rumble: PS3 versus Xbox 360

We already know the Wii's flying off shelves like half-price Oreos, but how are things shaping up in the feature-value scrimmaging between Sony and Microsoft? Last October I plugged some numbers into a spreadsheet for kicks and discovered the PS3 was in fact marginally less expensive than the Xbox 360 once you took into account all the stuff you have to buy to make Microsoft's much accessorized system more or less feature-equivalent. Never mind the nickel-and-dime nitpicking over limited-time bundles and special deals, the notion that Sony's $400-$500 system was a relatively decent buy with all the negative press about Sony's pricing was a minor revelation.

Is that still the case? Let's take a look.

(Bear in mind this comparison doesn't take into account limited-time offers or special deals or "refurbished" pricing or whatever else your local retailer's doing to incentivize you to pick one or the other up.)

Thoughts...

- Curiously, the Xbox 360 "Arcade" is more expensive than the "Premium" model once you accessorize it. Jump up to the 120GB hard drive and the price leaps all the way up to an incredible $630! (And without the Premium's included component and HDMI cables.) No surprise: As with the discontinued "Core" system the "Arcade" replaced, you pay in the rears (and then some) for the perquisites of investing a smaller amount up front.

- Sony ought to start thinking about including its DualShock 3 (force-feedback) with the PS3, considering Microsoft includes the equivalent with its entry-level model. And no, SIXAXIS doesn't (yet) differentiate the controller enough to warrant special mention as a gotta-have-it feature. (Don't make me talk about Lair again, okay?) Oh, and throw a bluetooth headset in the box while you're at it. UPDATE: The system desperately needs a bundled HD cable, at minimum a $20 component option, if not an HDMI piece de resistance. Note that while a Sony HDMI cable will set you back upwards of $60, you can pick one up from a third party vendor for as little as $16.50. And no, you shouldn't add the cost of both component and HDMI, since you'll pick one or the other, making the PS3's high-def cable delta (shopping frugally) about $20.

- The Xbox 360's upgrade pricing -- already laughably high when the system debuted relative to comparable market part pricing -- needs to drop immediately and dramatically. The notion that customers would pay $90 for a paltry 20GB (much less $180 for 120GB) when you can get a 250GB 2.5" SATA hard drive for $130 (and slap it in your PS3) is ludicrous. So is paying a hundred bucks for an 802.11g USB wireless network adapter worth less than half that in the form of a PC USB key.

- What's the difference between HDMI 1.3a and 1.2? Everything and nothing. Everything in the sense that I can count over a dozen new features jumping from 1.2 to 1.3a. Nothing in the sense that it's all barely incremental technical mumbly-jumbly even A/V-philes would have difficulty sussing out (if you want to know anyway, AVS Forum has a nice breakdown here).

- I've removed Microsoft's external HD-DVD player (closing out for as little as $30 in some places) from the bundle for obvious reasons, with apologies to HD-DVD holdouts. Now: Microsoft owes its customers a dedicated Blu-ray player, and I'm still betting money we'll see an actual part, or at least one announced, by the end of 2008. If it happens, given Microsoft's accessory pricing, don't expect it to be cheap. Bear in mind that a decent standalone Blu-ray player baselines in the $300 range, something I'm not representing in the chart above, and a point that weighs dramatically in Sony's favor if you care at all about HD optical media.

- The sooner Sony opts to make PS2-nerfed PS3s backward-compatible, the better. We're still seeing new and significant PS2-only games (like Persona 4) in the queue, for goodness sake, and what self-respecting PS3 owner really wants to clutter up their TV's A/V ports with an eight year old piece of space-hogging hardware?

- I opted not to include the 80GB PS3 MGS4 bundle because most stores aren't carrying it at this point, and the ones that are report it being "sold out" and "not available" for store pickup.

- Should I be including annual power cost estimates? Some of my readers think so. I don't know how much an Xbox 360 costs in electricity per year (it can't be cheap), but according to a study by Australian consumer group Choice I mentioned in early June, it costs $250 a year on average to power the PS3 (the study claims the Xbox 360 comes in second, though the original article doesn't say by how much).

Summary:

What's changed in roughly 10 months? Not much. Sony, which at one point had three versions of the PS3 on the market, is virtually down to one, while Microsoft continues to chip away at the market with an unvarying tiered approach. While I've been harsh on Microsoft for its inflated component pricing, I still think the way the 360 offers customers an "acclimation model" trumps Sony's monolithic "buy the farm" approach. Sure, you get integrated Blu-ray out of the box with the PS3, but why force buyers to swallow the entire buffet in one sitting?

What's more, you've probably read the rumors that Microsoft's planning to drop the price of its $350 "Premium" system by $50 ahead of E3 (the blurry ad in circulation suggests the magic date is next Sunday, July 13th). If it happens and we see a sustained summer sales uptick for the 360, expect retaliatory pricing from Sony as early as autumn.

PC Gaming Set to Spin You Right Round

You can say anything for free, it doesn't cost you a single penny. Ergo politics and it's twisted sister, public relations, two facets of a three-sided coin (did you forget the press?) in the race to persuade you that what someone says, is.

Case in point: PC gaming is dead. Or it's thriving. Or it's been permanently upstaged by consoles. Or it's actually growing faster than consoles in software sales. It all depends who you talk to in this information shell game, where now you see it, now you don't.

The one thing everyone's quietly in accord about: the lack of a unifying set of sales figures to put the argument to bed, one way or another.

Where are they? Private online "e-tailers" like Steam and Direct2Drive along with data miners like NPD have yet to figure out how to aggregate and accurately represent the online PC games market (that, or they're not ready to share the data with us). That's a hugely important point. When you see those monthly NPD reports, you're only getting a slice of the total sales picture.

What's more, when people claim PC games are all boom or bust, they're clear as mud about whether they mean "diehard," "enthusiast," "mainstream," or "casual" buyers.

Just last week, the senior global director of Windows gaming for Microsoft, Kevin Unangst, told Venture Beat:

There have been a lot of trend pieces about how PC gaming is dying when that is absolutely not happening. It?s growing exponentially, thanks to online games, and even faster than the rest of the market.

Faster than the rest of the market? Which one? You certainly can't tell from a sound bite like this, or the rest of the story for that matter, which offers an array of claims without so much as a single statistical qualification. That's fine if you want to know what various industry movers and shakers are saying, but don't mistake any of it as necessarily accurate or actionable.

With all the misinformation about PC gaming circulating, what should you do?

Start by ignoring all the unqualified talk about PC games trending, whether it's coming from me, your best friend, your best friend's favorite blog insider, or a source like Microsoft. We have enough wild opinion masquerading as analysis in our lives, and I'm sure you're as weary as I am of unverified claims that read less like disclosures than dares.

Play the PC games you like. Follow the ones that float your boat. Don't worry whether there's going to be a Gears of War 3 or a Crysis 2. Buy what looks interesting, and if your store takes returns, return the stuff that isn't. You owe the PC games industry nothing beyond your wallet vote.

And remember, the idea that we'll sink or save PC gaming by graffitiing up comment fields and message boards or running splashy headline-grabbing save-the-PC feature stories is just dumb. We're all going to do what we're going to do, and it's up to Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, etc. to convince us with ideas -- not generalized claims or polished statements -- to stick around.

Scalpel, Forceps, Wii-mote? Video Games for Surgeons

When it comes to sticking tiny knives, telescopic lenses, and fiber optic video cameras into our guts, practice makes perfect, right?

Right and then some.

According to research conducted at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center, playing games for about an hour prior to entering the operating room hiked surgical proficiency by nearly 50 percent. In the test, eight doctors-in-training were tasked with performing "virtual" surgeries on a 2D screen using the Nintendo Wii's remote to make precise hand movements.

Laparoscopy, aka "minimally invasive surgery," has in fact been around since the early 1900s, but didn't come into its own until relatively recently with the introduction of tiny computer-driven TV cameras. It involves making a small cut in the patient's skin and inserting a rod-shaped telescope with a camera attached into the abdomen. It's primary benefits are allowing surgeons to examine and/or operate on problem areas or organs while minimizing patient trauma and increasing recovery time.

Sounds wonderful, but practice is absolutely crucial. According to one doctor, the skills necessary to perform laparoscopic surgery are "like tying your shoelaces with three-foot-long chopsticks."

Cost of professional laparoscopic training technology? Hundreds of thousands.

Cost of a Wii? $250. (Well, if you can find one without resorting to eBay, anyway.)

Getting to play video games before scrubbing up? Priceless.

The biggest drawback to date: Lack of haptic feedback. Haptic, from the Greek word for "touch," is a way of describing technology that simulates "contact" with a virtual surface by employing highly sophisticated force feedback. Which sounds like a perfect opportunity for haptic games pioneer Novint to bring its Falcon peripheral to a Wii (or an OR) near you.

Don't give Nintendo all the credit, of course. Stories about video games boosting sawbones skills easily predate the Wii. In 2004, research indicated that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who didn't play video games.

Japan: PS3 Catches Up to Wii, Xbox 360 on Life Support

In Japan, the Wii's lead over the PS3 shrank from six-to-one in May to just one-point-seven-to-one in June, according to Japanese magazine publisher Enterbrain. According to the publisher, Nintendo sold 235,990 Wii in a five week period ending June 29, versus PS3 sales of 139,494 and a dismal 10,964 for the Xbox 360.

If Reuters Japan's translation is accurate, I think Enterbrain's being a tad shortsighted when it claims that "[the Wii's] lead is fading" based on 30 days of numbers. The Wii's been in the lead for seven consecutive months, and it held onto that lead despite the earth-and-heavens-moving release of Konami's Metal Gear Solid 4, which is really the only reason the PS3 has suddenly (and, I believe, only temporarily) managed to almost catch up.

Why so upbeat about the Wii? Metal Gear Solid 4 was released on June 12 worldwide. It managed to hold the top sales spot for only two weeks before Super Smash Bros. Brawl (a 22-week-old game) and Wii Fit (a 31-week-old-game) managed to knock it from its perch. MGS4 has only sold just shy of 600,000 copies so far in Japan. This week, the number-two-selling Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World outsold the eighth-placing three-week-old MGS4 by over 135,000 copies.

"Fading" implies "withering, wilting, drooping, dimming, growing faint." Much as I love my PS3 and think the boost is absolutely great news for Sony, it's just dumb to call this the start of a trend. Look at the numbers any way you like, there's about one chance in a million the Wii's lead is "fading."

On a side note: I feel pretty badly for the Xbox 360 overseas, because it's a fantastic system with some terrific exclusives (from my West-blinkered perspective, anyway) and a fantastic software attach rate in the U.S. (something like 5-to-1). Why's it doing so badly in Japan? Is it a sense in Japan that Microsoft doesn't "get" Japanese gamers? The fact that the system's launch lineup was shooter, racing, and sports heavy? The lack of dating sims and RPGs and fighting games? The failure of HD-DVD to become the de facto optical format? Was it because 212 Xbox games were backward-compatible at the 360's U.S. launch, versus a paltry 12 in Japan? Did the red-ring-of-death scare that affected some 33% of earlier-gen Xbox 360s scare off Japanese consumers? Is it as controversial Ninja Gaiden 2 director Tomonobu Itagaki suggests, that in fact "economy policies" are somehow behind the 360's extremely poor Japanese showing?

Trigger Happy: Square Enix Resurrects Chrono Trigger on Nintendo DS

Heaven help me, I somehow managed to completely miss Chrono Trigger -- one of the most popular console RPGs in gaming history -- when it debuted on the Super Nintendo all the way back in August 1995. Blame it on a little gray box with sexy red-yellow-blue logo atop a round waffle-iron lid and visions of 30-frames-per-second Namco racers dancing in my head.

Darn you, original Sony PlayStation.

"Sacrilege!" I can almost hear some of you howling. "Blasphemy!" And like that guy growls at the end of those Pace Picante commercials: "Someone get a rope."

Guilty as charged. Embarrassed even. And you know what's really super-weird? With no prior knowledge of today's announcement, I'd just dropped about $100 to pad out my collection of Square Enix classics, some stuff I've played, but mostly stuff I haven't, or hadn't to completion anyway.

Let's see, I ordered:

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (Game Boy)
Vagrant Story (PlayStation)
Final Fantasy IX (PlayStation)
Kingdom Hearts (PlayStation 2)

And...drum roll please...

Final Fantasy Chronicles (PlayStation). Which, as some of you know, comes with Final Fantasy IV and an anime-enhanced version of Chrono Trigger.

Seriously. I'm looking at the "items shipped" list, and it went out on June 30th.

And now Square Enix says it's releasing an updated DS version that'll avail itself of the little-portable-that-could's dual screens and wireless multiplayer mode, as well as slipstreaming in a brand new dungeon.

Care to wet your pants, Chrono Trigger devotees? Then have a look at this.

Who'd-a-thunk?

Am I totally non compos mentis for missing this over a decade ago?

PlayStation 3 System Update 2.4 Impressions

Now there's a surprise: Everyone says Sony's servers are getting hammered, but I just sucked the entire update down through a high latency one-point-five Mbps satellite straw in all of 15 minutes. The weird thing about all my Sony updates is, they only get to 50% before completing. Super-secret-Sony conspiracy to overthrow the 100 point scale and make 50 the new A+? Hey, you never know.

Okay, so if you didn't know about the 2.4 update or don't actually own a PS3, the big news slots into two categories here: In-Game XMB access, and Game Trophies. I'll get to trophies in a second, but first let's talk about XMB.

XMB, short for XrossMediaBar (pronounced 'CrossMediaBar') refers to both the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable's GUI-based navigation system, which, as it sounds, is essentially a shiftable X and Y bar you can move left-right to access function category icons and up-down to access features within those categories. Until 2.4, the XMB was only accessible when a game wasn't playing, but with 2.4, you can now pop the In-Game XMB menu up as an overlay in PS3 games and access features without abandoning whatever you're playing.

What can you do with it in 2.4? For starters, you can exchange text messages with friends without exiting games by simply hitting the PS button (pausing the game) and scrolling over to the XMB's messaging area to do your business. Okay, no biggie, and I don't know a single PS3 owner or fellow game writer who does much texting on a gamepad, but it's a notable leap forward from having to chuck whatever you're into just to answer incoming texts or pop off a friendly quip or two.

On the cooler side of things, say one of your friends with a Bluetooth headset just came online and wants to jump into whatever you're playing. You can now bring up the XMB bar (again, pausing your game), go into settings, get your own Bluetooth headset ready (if it wasn't) and roll right on forward, all without relaunching or reloading a thing.

What else. You can check download progress, view image folder thumbnails, check the clock/date to remind you that it's 6:00 a.m. and time to go to bed, and in probably the most noteworthy feature of the entire XMB update, swap your own music tracks stored on the hard drive in for the soundtrack playing in your current game.

Outside games, the XMB update adds a Google search button that lets you pop up a text input interlay and query term which automatically pops up the browser and search results -- cool if you're on the go, though an in-game version of this with an overlay mini-browser would've been cooler, say you just want to check some factoid or other you're debating with a friend over voice chat without having to pop out of the game first. And finally, Sony added a power-off button to the 'settings' menu, though why you wouldn't use the PS button to do this, something you've been able to from the start, is beyond me.

Note that the XMB works with PS3 games only. PS2, Blu-ray, and DVD In-Game XMB isn't (yet) supported.

Thoughts: I'll be perfectly blunt. XMB Access In-Game should have made its splashy debut when the PS3 shipped back in 2006, because allowing for minor differencing, Xbox 360 owners have been enjoying this functionality for over two years. Now technically the In-Game XMB's been around since before the PS3 launched, but the feature was temporarily shelved for technical reasons. So while PS3 owners have something to celebrate (and should), it's worth bearing in mind that most of these features are competition catch-up work, not vanguard trendsetting.

Also: The continued absence of voice message and private chatting remains annoying at best, onerous at worst. Sony explains this in its Firmware v2.40 FAQ, stating:

We are evaluating the opportunity to offer voice chat, but for this update, we wanted to focus on text messaging as the key priority for communications that our users have asked for.

Really? They've been clamoring for slow-type stuff on a gamepad more than voice conversation?

Before we hit trophies, let's quash a rumor: Did the 2.4 update add backward compatibility to 40GB models for PS2 titles? Is it one of the rumored "unlisted" features? Don't bet on it. The update might (and I stress because this is pure speculation might) add PS2 backward compatibility updates to models that already officially support the feature, but the chances that Sony wouldn't list a 40GB fix-up as an official feature are pretty much goose-egg-percent. (Nevertheless, as they say, a rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.)

On to Gamertag Points, err, I mean Trophies. The point is to award you for your accomplishments in game by handing out decorations that correspond to bronze, silver, gold, and platinum tiers, each of which correspond to a behind-the-scenes value that adds up to your player level. Accessing Trophies is pretty simple: On the XMB's game menu you now have a "Trophies" button which lists games that support the feature and a percent-unlocked index off to the right.

The hitch? Out of the gate, you only get Trophy support in the following games:

BUZZ! Quiz TV
LittleBigPlanet
MotorStorm Pacific Rift
NBA 09
PAIN
PixelJunk Eden
Resistance 2
SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation
Warhawk

The other hitch? Microsoft's Gametag Points system is about as simple as it gets: one number to rule them all. Everything else is just a point derivative of that. With Sony Trophies, you have to think about four trophy tiers, which in turn correspond to background values, which in turn correspond to your player level, which altogether sounds like lots-o-fun for Sony wonks, but a little clunky compared to a simple, singular numeric.

Bottom Line: Like I said earlier, this is mostly Sony playing catch-up to the competition. That's fine, and there's no reason not to huzzah the update for all it gets right. Besides, no one's knocking World of Warcraft for stealing flagrantly (but oh-so-gracefully!) from every other MMO in existence. But PS3 owners hoping to see Sony take the lead in terms of defining and not just reacting to breakthrough game functionality will have to wait and see what the company has in store with its delay-plagued PlayStation Home community-based service, currently in beta-testing, and due either later this year or early next.

UPDATE (7/2/08, 4:35pm CST): It seems Sony has pulled the update from its servers due to complaints on the company's official forums stemming from numerous users having serious issues with their systems post-install. Standby, and I'll run an update as soon as we have something official from Sony.

UPDATE (7/8/08, 10:26am CST): The 2.41 update's out as of this morning, and our own Scott Nichols has tested and pronounced it "just fine."

What's Wrong with the Cutscenes-in-Games Debate

When it comes to game design and cutscenes, everyone has an opinion, even your friendly neighborhood Game On grumbler. Case in point, I've had a read through Martin Herink's think piece at Gamasutra entitled "The Problem of the Cutscene" and with respect for the effort and agreement on several key points, I'm not sure I can get behind the fundamental premise.

First, what's a cutscene? According to my Macbook Pro's dictionary, it's "a scene (in computer games) that develops the story line and is often shown on completion of a certain level, or when the player's character dies."

Close enough for jazz, so let's start with the impetus behind the article. Herink's purpose in writing the piece hinges on his rejection of the notion that the "problem" of the cutscene is one of "structural functionality."

...rather...[it] appears instead to be a question on the propriety of decisions made by designers regarding issues of perspective relatively easily resolved in the framework of editing, rhythm, and aesthetic expression.

Right away I'm put off by that last bit, which even Herink acknowledges in his next sentence as "rather cryptic." It certainly is, mainly because those terms are incredibly vague, but also because they're too nonspecific to serve as persuasive contrast. Of course the resolution to game/cinema discord involves proper editing, rhythm, expressiveness. Proper, as he explains in further detail shortly thereafter, as a function of integration, proportionality, and proximity to (before, after, etc.) specific game goals.

Another way of describing "structural functionality," in other words, a subversively all-encompassing phrase-concept which poses serious problems for the implied dichotomy in the opening argument.

But let's move past my gripe with the thesis and advance to a more fundamental issue: the question of what a cutscene actually is in relation to gameplay.

According to Herink:

...a cutscene means an injection of purely contemplative material into a fundamentally kinetic experience...the game is meant to be an interactive experience.

I think I understand what Herink's after here, but disagree with his choice of terms, which are misleading. Cutscenes aren't "contemplative," i.e. "meditative" or "expressing or involving prolonged thought." (What a strange choice of adjectives!) What's more, I would argue that cutscenes are in fact fundamentally kinetic. In today's multi-dimensional game environs, game directors use a melange of cinematic techniques to advance traditional linear narratives. These scenes are typically non-interactive (as Herink notes) compared to interactive gameplay, but -- and this is much more than merely a semantic quibble -- both are always intensely kinetic. That is, they both depend overtly on various kinds of motion (literal, figurative) to achieve a desired effect.

As we've seen in recent games like Metal Gear Solid 4, cutscenes -- like multi-angle viewable DVD video -- can also be substantially interactive. If you haven't played MGS4, I'm talking about the way the game lets you "edit" the flow of visual information in realtime during lengthy mission briefings in all kinds of ways, including optionally abandoning the primary mise en scene altogether.

Now I wouldn't necessarily identify those interactive embellishments (PiPs and zooms and camera swaps) as gameplay, but those scenes are importantly distinct from non-interactive ones because you actually have the ability to change the apperceptive narrative flow. No, you can't alter the physicality of the world, knock things off tables, push over chairs, shove characters out of the way, or make them behave any differently, but you can dramatically alter the way you visualize each segment. And as any filmmaker or psychoanalytic theorist (or policeman taking witness statements at the scene of an accident) knows, what you see and how you see it is everything when it comes to assembling and reflecting on an event.

The very word "cutscene" implies a kind of rending of the veil, an interruption, a fissure in an experience that is, at least traditionally, supposed to be primarily interactive. Cutscenes are also a chance to engage in a kind of narrative tete-a-tete with players. You go, then I go, then you go, then I go, etc. More accurately: You play and explore and deconstruct my linear narrative, I realign or reorient or re-structuralize it, you pull it apart again, I put it back together, and so on.

And what's wrong with that? Who said games were supposed to be 100% interactive? 99.5%? 87.56%? 50.1%? That gameplay should be seamless and without authorial interruption (in the form of a cutscene)? Who can call that not a subjective choice, but an objective rule? Face it: Nothing about game design, either theoretically or philosophically, requires that the very best most progressive games somehow avoid the sort of authorial intervention cutscenes and other forms of realtime intercession like event triggers impose on the player.

How does one differentiate between something that's "mostly a game" and something else that's "mostly a movie"? To paraphrase the late British historian J.M. Roberts from his History of the World, it's a little like talking about an "educated person":

Everyone can recognize one when they see one, but not all educated persons are recognized as such by all observers, nor is a formal qualification (a university degree, for example) either a necessary or infallible indicator.

In other words: Everyone can recognize a game or movie when they see it, but not all games or movies are identified equally as such by all observers and in all contexts.

For instance, I've seen several people reject Metal Gear Solid 4 as a "game" and describe it instead as a kind of "interactive cinematic experience." Most critics on the other hand accept without questioning the "game-ness" of Hideo Kojima's action-stealth opus. No one asks (seriously) whether it belongs in the games and not the movie section at the local retailer.

So how do you get at what works and what doesn't? What's the magic ratio? How do you figure out what's not enough or too much of any of it?

Go to film school. Get a degree in literary theory. Study the historical and contemporary impact of different media techniques on consumers. But in the end, you'll always come back to needing a system that's congruous, that jibes with its own lofty parameters, that's unremittingly internally consistent.

My friend and 1UP editor Shawn Elliott is fond of calling that, "an experience that doesn't violate its own grammar." I think that's exactly right. Not one system to rule them all, importantly, but a mandate that each game have an internal symmetry, or as a writer might put it, an approach that feels "earned" throughout.

Moreover, that means we as gamers owe it to our hobby (and our capacity to not be obstinate lunkheads) not to hop on anti- or pro-cutscene bandwagons or gripe that someone's not "innovating" when they borrow from another form of media like film or literature, but to consider instead whether a given device or mechanic works in its own right, and in synchronicity with all its contextual elements.

Minnesota to Cough Up $65k in Legal Fees to Game Industry

The state of Minnesota, land of ten thousand lakes, home to Neil Gaiman, Garrison Keillor, and the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince, just had its hands slapped for attempting to fine underage buyers of M-rated video games. According to the Entertainment Software Association, the state of Minnesota will pay out "$65,000 in attorney fees and expenses incurred as a result of [the ESA's] successful challenge to Minnesota's unconstitutional video game law."

What law? Try one which would have put tradition topsy-turvy by fining underage buyers and not sellers of M-rated games $25 for each violation.

Ouch state of Minnesota legislators who tried to foist this on its citizenry. It's not a lot of cash, sure, but I'll bet it smarts just the same. That's what you get for trying to drag taxpayers into a quarrel that ought to be settled in a voting booth come election time, and then only after the public's been sufficiently and forthrightly informed about what's scientific and what's not when it comes to violence in media and its impact on children.

Check out Judge James M. Rosenbaum's statement on the matter back in July 2006, when he issued a permanent injunction halting implementation of the law:

...there is no showing whatsoever that video games, in the absence of other violent media, cause even the slightest injury to children...several other states have tried to regulate minors' access to video games. Every effort has been stricken for violating the First Amendment...the Court will not speculate as the motives of those who launched Minnesota's nearly doomed effort to "protect" our children. Who, after all, opposes protecting children? But, the legislators drafting this law cannot have been blind to its constitutional flaws.

Best part of the statement: "Who, after all, opposes protecting children?" Who indeed. What these nutty political crusaders don't get is that opponents of laws like these want to protect children just as much as they do.

But with good science, not bad.

If you want to know more, GamePolitics has a nice summary write-up here.