Hell yes.

After logging out of World of Warcraft for just shy of two years, I finally upgraded my account with the Burning Crusade expansion (yep, still one behind the latest), and jumped headlong into resurrecting my level 42 Troll Shaman (name: Scoober) from the proverbial dead.

It’s been a smoother reintroduction than I thought it would be. Most things look and feel more or less the same, although I do miss whatever UI mod I used to use that expanded the Quests window from the default claustrophobic monstrosity into something actually usable. I think it was part of Cosmos, which no longer exists.

Of course, they’ve updated the Shaman talent tree several times since the last time I played, which meant that I got a free chance to “respec,”—to reapportion the finite number of talent points I had earned by leveling up—and a chance to decide which of the three talent trees I want to pursue.

At the moment I’m running up the Elemental tree, because the final skill “Thunderstorm” sounds entirely too cool to me. The problem is that I don’t have much patience for being a ‘caster, which is why I’m playing a shammy in the first place. I think I might just try to wear some really high-quality armor, get a staff with some crazy DPS, and try to figure out what the crap you’re supposed to do with these annoying totems…

For a long time I have been morally opposed to paying for Xbox Live. I’m a PC Gamer at heart, after all, and Valve isn’t charging me to hook up to Steam. So what’s so special about Xbox Live?

But recently, I was given both a copy of Call of Duty 4, and access to an XboX Live account with a good 6 months of playtime remaining, and I am weak. It’s possible that come the end of these six months, I’ll finally talk myself into shelling out real money for the privilege to play games with other people while not actually being social.

But all that aside, here’s a cool feature idea: savegame sharing.

Both my brother and I have a 360. We both have many of the same games. But when he’s over at my place, he can’t play his games unless he brings them over on a memory stick.

What he should be able to do is to log in to his Xbox Live profile and transfer his latest savegame to my console. Then he can kick some butt for a while, go home, and pick it up later right where he left off.

I would buy that service.

ps. why the balls is the 360 tuned to the same remote code as MCE? Did no one think that you would have both the 360 AND your DVR hooked up to the same TV??

I think it’s interesting that whenever a new videogames medium is introduced we have to recycle the whole genesis of games all over again.

The first thing that happens whenever anything new hits the market is that someone ports Doom onto it, no matter how ridiculous the control scheme ends ups being, a platform isn’t bona fide until it can play Doom.

Doom is then followed by an obligatory string if side scrollers, mini-RPGs, and probably a text adventure game or two (why aren’t the text games first? who knows).

If you want to see this in action, just look at what’s available on your cell phone. I bet it’s what you were playing on your PC 15 years ago. This is probably because your cell phone is more or less the same thing as your computer 15 years ago except that it’s a lot smaller and it doesn’t take floppys.

I love videogames.

I’ve been playing videogames on consoles and computers for basically as long as I can remember. I beat Zork. I coded my own text adventure games using QBASIC. I stayed up all night playing DOOM with headphones on, I beat Half-Life, Mario Bros, SSX Tricky, TIE Fighter, Halo, played the crap out of Guitar Hero (I, II, and III), Civ IV, Heroes of Might and Magic, Splinter Cell, God of War, Prince of Persia, and the list goes on…

But I find it really really hard to write about video games.

That’s because the collective realm of video game blogging, journalism, and forum contributions can be broken down using this chart. Guess which part I’m interested in:

Not to mention the fact that as soon as you mention “videogames,” most people over 40 roll their eyes yell at you to get off their lawn, damn kids and their noise.

ps. most of the people reading this post are in that .00005% category.

Last friday I went to Seattle Lunch 2.0, hosted by Parker Services and featuring a short speech from Big Fish Games.

I mention this because Big Fish Games is one of the big success stories in casual gaming. They make over $51 million in revenue.

That’s pretty big money for something that people tend to toss aside.

It looks like the big media companies are starting to notice that the market for casual games is extremely compatible with television. The New York Times has an article today about how Nickelodeon is planning to launch hundreds of casual games to tie in with their kids shows.

I have always thought that the term “casual games” is a bit of a misnomer. It should really be something more like “lightweight games” or maybe “pausable games.”

What’s really interesting to me though is how critical Nickelodeon sees their gaming outreach to be in terms of their overall business:

“What video is to TV, games are to the Web,” Steve Youngwood, the executive vice president for digital media at Nickelodeon, said in an interview. “For us to be relevant to our audience, that is where we need to put our investment.”

I think he might be right.

Like the whole blogosphere has been saying for nearly a year, the iPhone is a great gaming platform. It could kill the Nintendo DS, and look what the DS did to the competition.

But TUAW is apparently surprised:

Next up was Travis Boatman from EA who showed an iPhone version of the eagerly-awaited game Spore (also shipping for Macs later this year). It’s clearly cut down from the desktop version, but as Johnson said of the dog walking on his two hind legs: “it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all!” Considering that EA had two weeks, this suggests the iPhone has the power to be a serious gaming platform.

omg really?? ;)

That said, I am super-duper excited for Teh App Store (June, sigh).

Remember my five tips for iPhone game developers? This guy has definitely followed parts 2, 3, and 4.

I suspect that he’s paid attention to numbers 1 and 5 as well. It looks like a damn cool evolution of some popular casual games. Check out this video:

Also, I’m not sure what he’s patenting.

I’ll be severely disappointed if the US patent office calls “using an accelerometer to determine game orientation” a non-obvious development.

So many videogames have bad controls.

In some cases I’m more or less ok with it. In an RTS, it’s more or less not an issue; precision and reaction time are not critical factors.

But if you are making a fighting game or a shooter, for the love of God, make sure your controls are responsive.

I’ve been frustrated with DOA4 recently because there’s a delay between when I hit a button and when my character reacts. In a fighting game that’s pretty unacceptable. The only game I’ve played with perfect response is Counter-Strike (Half-Life).

It makes all the difference in the world to me.

Since I got myself an iPhone about a month ago, I’ve been waiting anxiously to play games on it.

I take it with me almost everywhere, unlike my Nintendo DS (which I wish I took everywhere). The battery life is exceptional, the screen is gorgeous, and the touch-screen is responsive and accurate. If that doesn’t spell “b-e-s-t. m-o-b-i-l-e. g-a-m-i-n-g. d-e-v-i-c-e. e-v-e-r,” I don’t know what does.

Unfortunately, I’m too much of a ninny to jailbreak my iPhone and install any of the games that are currently on the market, so I’m waiting for the official SDK and “legal” 3rd party software.

Here are my tips for those developers when the time comes:

1. Don’t price yourself out of the market – legal or not, the free market will still exist (and thrive) for iPhone customers. Don’t overcharge for games that are basically available for free.
2. Remember that the iPhone abandons all traditional input methods, and you should too – stop yourself from making touchscreen recreations of d-pads and A-B-Y-Z buttons.
3. The best iPhone games will be ones that can be “insta-paused.” In other words, people will be playing games for minutes (or possibly seconds) at a time, so the most successful games will probably be like Myst, where you can keep going in small chunks, or like Snood, where quitting doesn’t really mean abandoning anything.
4. Don’t exceed the “system requirements.” One of the reasons the iPhone feels like such a great phone is that Apple has been very careful not to let the CPU feel underpowered. At most I have to wait a second or two for a screen to load. Laggy gameplay will make the iPhone and your game feel clunky.
5. Battery life is king – you could have the greatest game in the world, but if it kills my battery life, i’m not likely to play it. While I recognize that gaming is far more important than communicating with the outside world, the iPhone is still my phone. If it won’t last me a full day, what’s the use?

OK let’s not mince words. Videogame violence undoubtedly has an effect on kids. It has an effect on anyone, the same way Pavlov’s bell has an effect on dogs.

Because I’m curious, I want to know which of the following statements about video game violence you think most aligns with your opinion:

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I’m also going to note that I think there’s a very big difference between a game that creates a protagonist out of a normally “despicable” character (GTA *sigh*, I hate to use that example) and a game wherein the protagonist struggles to do “right,” while sometimes resorting to violence, which in turn has consequences throughout the game (Deus Ex).

For the purposes of this poll, consider what you think to be the more prevalent use of violence in videogames.

Check it out. Looks like the graphics on most DS ports from “big” console games.

Thanks Peter for posting the footage:

When I got my most recent PC Gamer in the mail last week (the March issue already – WTF?), I thought for a bit that I really was cooler than everyone else because the demo disc came with a complete copy of Sam & Max Episode 4: Abe Lincoln Must Die.

As some of you may remember I have meant to pick up one of the Sam & Max games multiple times, having always been thwarted by the fact that I don’t like to spend money. Imagine my delight when I realized that I was part of a select club of people who were selected—no, entitled—to a free copy of an actual computer game.

Well it turns out that I’m not so special. Anyone is welcome to purchase the full game for the high price of “Free” on the Telltale Games website.

I’ve played about half an hour of it so far and I’m already stuck. Granted, I was never the world’s greatest puzzle solver, and I give up too easily anyway, but I have extremely fond memories of the original game from way back when, so I owe it to myself to put in some good time with the new ones.

The off-beat, witty dialogue is there, of course. The strange characters, funky locations, and wack-o reality is exactly as it should be. I highly recommend picking it up, especially since it’s free.

Damn you Scrabulous! I should be able to play Metroids:

If “video games” were a widely recognized musical genre, it would be my favorite. My ringtone has been the original gameboy Tetris theme for years. I remember going into .WAD files to pull out music from Diablo (is there any better ambient music than the town music?), although I was really after the audio clips from Franham the Drunk.

Last Saturday I went to see the Seattle Symphony’s production of Play! A Video Games Concert. Yes, it was awesome. And that picture up in the corner? That fuzzy spotlight-spot? That is Martin O’Donnell.

I have a lot of respect for what composers do in general, and in some cases the specific challenges that composers* who work with video games face. As many other entries in this month’s round table have already pointed out, the biggest of these challenges is the non-linear format. When you start writing music for an interactive medium, a lot of the control you have in, say, movies, goes flying right out the door.

There are workarounds, of course, like scoring in-game cinematics, but I think the real accomplishments happen when music is hardwired into the right game.

The truth is that while music is an awesome addition to some games, it can really pull me out of the experience in others. I started to draw a line at First Person Shooters, and then I thought about Halo and realized that I’d have to say First Person Shooters on the computer. But then I thought about Deus Ex, and realized that I pretty much had to say just Half-Life.

For most video games, I think the music stands apart from the game itself. It’s still seen as a great way to accompany film-like portions of games or draw out emotions (FF VII anyone?) And I’m glad that video games have brought about such great music (which in turn, lead to an awesome concert). I’m not sure there’s any finer accomplishment than writing a theme that can be heard on endless loop for decades and not get old (hello there, Mario Bros.).

What I’d like to see going forward though, is more linkage between a game and the music. As a basic example, the original Deus Ex had two tracks for every location: they had an ambient track for cruising around, and an action track for fighting.

For those of you who don’t know much about Deus Ex, it was essentially a conspiracy-theory RPG built into a First Person Shooter engine. You spent a lot of time sneaking around and discovering things, and occasionally you got spotted, called out, or just decided to shoot some guys.

Whenever you did something that triggered the enemy AI, the music would jump into overdrive. Eventually it’s almost list hearing the skid before the crash. The music makes the adrenaline flow – where are they coming from?

In the end it’s really very simple, one-level integration. But even the subtle shift to situation-based music makes such a big difference over just having events or locations triggering a track. I’m not sure what the next step is, but I’m going to be excited when we figure it out.

And in closing, here are a few video game tracks I enjoy.

Myst III: Exile – Main Theme
Halo 2 – Peril
Deus Ex – The Illuminati (Ending Credits)

——
* by composers, I mean to include everyone who writes the music. Doesn’t have to be a “score.” It can be trash80 for all I care.

Come on, people, you’re running a tech site!

Video Games have always been hitched oddly to the internet and tech advances, sort of like the guy in a motorcycle sidecar.

The first reason I ever used a modem was to play Warcraft II with my friend (and current roommate) Loren. Now Steam lets you buy and play videogames without leaving your computer chair. Blogging and web 2.0 are happening all over the place, and the PCGamer web site still looks like the inside of the Hindenburg after it “landed.”

So now somebody in the mobile gaming space decided that this “viral marketing” might be for them too.

Yesterday’s GamesPress had a press release about it:

Viral marketing continues to grow in popularity as new services such as MoConDi’s MeYou platform continues to expand its worldwide reach in Europe and the U.S. MeYou allows and encourages content purchases to be shared with friends and social networks for incentives via mobile devices and is one to watch in 2008.

With MeYou, users are rewarded for purchases and recommendations, which result in a purchase with redeemable credits. Friends receive mobile message recommendations that contain a message from users, a download link for the content and a link to install the MeYouTM application.

To be honest, that sounds like a really good idea to me. If I played mobile games, I’d be all over a system like this, where I can recommend games to my friends and if games are recommended to me, I can choose to download it right there on my phone, no worries. I even get rewards for doing what I’d do normally.

I think more gaming companies and services should embrace the gamer recommendation system. I’m betting that nothing will drive your sales like making it really easy for gamers to pick up the games that their friends are playing.

Haven’t you always wanted to be the most evil, conniving, dastardly Sheperd humanly possible?

My roommate David recently embarked on a quest to go through Mass Effect doing only the most “renegade” of possible things, and just figured out how to fill up his Renegade bar at level 13.

Check out the video:

For the record, the process you need to follow when talking to Loric Qui’in is:

-> Matriarch Benezia
-> Another Question
-> Testify against Anoleis
-> (Damn right I will)*

* you need at least a few points into intimidate before you can pull this one off, but I’m guessing you’ve already put some in.

I’ve always found game reviews to be entertaining to read and a pain in the ass to write.

First, you have to play the game. That’s OK as long as it’s a game you really want to be playing. Or a game you don’t have to buy. That’s one of the reasons you so rarely get to see me write game reviews here, despite the fact that they are the staple of all game journalism ever written.

My brother’s friend Peter Graham recently asked me if he could contribute to the blog by reviewing games. He works at GameStop, and they apparently let their employees rent any game they want long enough to play it through. As far as job perks go, that’s a pretty good one.

I told him we’d give it a shot, so he pulled the new Ratchet and Clank off the shelf, played it through, and wrote up a review. You’ll notice this post appears with his byline (or you would if I could get the author template tag to work. Sigh – JP). Any future reviews will follow the same rule.

Hope you enjoy,

– Jason Preston

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Ratchet and Clank is a pretty long series of games that started back on the PS2. These games have been a hit with many game reviewers and gamers alike, however some are turned away by the “cartooney” style of graphics and the fact that it isn’t dark and violent. However, this if the first of the series on the PS3, and it has made a fantastic transfer.

Gameplay

This is one of the most polished games I have played in terms of tight controls. The character movement, camera, and shooting controls are all very responsive, to the point of perfection, and my only complaint is the six-axis controls, but thankfully, they are rarely used and are completely optional. The basic Mechanic of the game is run around and shoot enemies with crazy, varied guns in 3rd person.

You travel to dozens of different planets (somewhere around 30), all being completely unique, all looking awesome. When I say there are crazy guns, I mean turn your enemies into penguins, shoot lava, and fire 30 missiles at a time crazy. All of the weapons can upgrade 5 times in your fist play through, and you use a currency in the game, cleverly named “raritanium” to upgrade the weapons further. The other currency is bolts, which you use to purchase weapons, and sparse armor upgrades. This is a fast paced, extremely addicting combat system, which I have enjoyed since the first game.

Graphics This is honestly the coolest visual experience I have had with a game in a long time. It honestly looks like you are playing within a Pixar movie. The game will have lush forest environments, with huge, moving cities in the background, all in full HD, without a single drop in the frame-rate. The art style is fun, and always entertaining to look at. It may not attempt to look “realistic”, but that does not stop it from looking amazing.

Story/Sound

First off, let me say, that the voice acting is very good, and the dialogue, while not as good as some previous installments, is still witty and funny. The Story of the game, is significantly more interesting than the other games, involving ancient robots, and a hilarious little alien, who is bent on destroying an entire race.

The Sound effects, are all awesome. All your guns make crazy noises, and the explosions and smashing sounds just make you feel like you are tearing everything apart. The music, while not a highlight, serves its purpose as decoration, and seeing that the game is never too serious or sad, it never takes away from the experience. I will say this however, the ending, as is becoming a pattern in every freaking movie and game released nowadays, sucks, and leaves you waiting for the next game.

Complaints?

The few things I question about this game are pretty nominal, but here you go. First, why is there no multiplayer. There was great multiplayer in the 3rd major installment on PS2, and with the PlayStation Network struggling for good games, I question why they didn’t include online multiplayer in the package. Also, the game is a bit easy.

While you’re too busy having fun to notice, there are few times, besides some tough boss battles, and some tricky enemy set ups, in which you cant blast everything to bits with your insane weapons. The game doesn’t really do much new, however, it doesn’t need to since the formula is as close to perfect as your gonna get.

Why this game is cool (start with a bias, eh? ;) – JP)

Besides the graphics and tight controls, this game delivers one of the most fun, stress free, and addicting experiences in a while. The collecting of bolts, and constantly adding crazy, exciting weapons to your arsenal is a blast. These are literally the coolest weapons in any video game ever.

The enemies vary and change throughout the planets, and you really don’t get bored, or sick of an area. The game also keeps you using all the guns with a leveling system. What’s so great is, you get new armor, weapons, and power-ups, but the game never feels like an RPG. You rarely go into the menus, unless your saving, and you don’t have to stress about what you should equip in each situation.

A unique weapon leveling system makes you want to try out all your different weapons. The game also never feels stressful, and the environments never close in on you, you explore mostly open environments, with cool visuals surrounding them.

Posotives
Amazing Graphics, Witty Banter, Awesome weapons, Great Combat.

Negatives
A bit easy, No online.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Posting has been light partly because of my shiny brand new Xbox 360. I haven’t had one in my home for about four months now, and the return of next-gen console gaming has been glorious.

Halo 3 is, however, a disappointment to me. It’s basically the same as the previous two games. Here’s my one-line review:

why they changed that button I do not know. That was gloriously stupid of them.