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Archive of "Gaming" Category
The Hard-Hitting Questions
In game journalism it’s a war zone. Relentlessness, determination, getting all mucky in the mire of underbellies, yep that’s what’s needed in the trenches of gaming. That’s why when it came to interrogating Mike and Robert under the fluorescent lights of PAX 2009, I asked the important questions. Questions about “paint” and “line” and articles like “the”.
Yes, people, nearly two years later Paint the Line has been announced!
What game should I play next…
Have you ever posted a forum thread like this? Do you have trouble deciding which socks to wear or when to blink? Penny Arcade’s Decide-o-tron is on its way – and will help you with at least one of those things.
The gist: build a library of games “you like and own” and then it tells you what you should play next. You may never have to assume responsibility for anything ever again.
Here’s hoping it works better than those Amazon suggestions, which seem to work like, “You just bought underpants? You, sir, are a connoisseur of underpants! You must want to buy MORE UNDERPANTS! Here is a virtual blizzard of underpants for you to choose from!!”*
*Note from my Sense of Feminine Pride: I borrowed this example from my husband. I have never bought underpants on Amazon.
3 Indies, One Booth
Spy Party, at the time in Alpha build, was a favorite at PAX Prime 2010 and will be back this weekend (and with an unlimited play station!). Booth 3002 is packing more than Spy Party punch as both Saturday and Sunday morning will feature two additional indie titles – the as yet unannounced title from Fat Princess dev Carbon Games and Miegakure, Marc ten Bosch’s 4D puzzle platformer.
Add this to your PAX calendars:
Chris Hecker’s Spy Party, Booth 3002 all darn PAX -y weekend
Carbon Games (game TBA): Saturday, 10-11 a.m.
Marc ten Bosch’s Miegakure: Sunday, 10-11 a.m.
See you there!
The Fastest Way Around a Con is in a Straight Line
PAX Site is finally updated* with their maps. Feast your eyes on Level 4 and Level 6, the dual-hearts of PAX Prime 2011′s beast.
*Why finally updated? Do you have any idea how hard it is to schedule efficient meetings at a multi-level convention with off-site rooms to boot? Especially since, of late, I’ve lost my ability to “hustle”. Overburdened=Half-speed all the time, regardless of armor attributes.
Sandboxing
Finished L.A. Noire yesterday, and with the PC announcement got to thinking: Why did I finish L.A. Noire? Or rather, why did I finish L.A. Noire but not Red Dead Redemption?
Because Red Dead was more fun.
Admit it, you spent hours hunting cougar and rattlesnake, riding around on your beautiful steed and saving (or murdering) fellow countrymen on your travels. Along the way to a mission objective you were easily derailed by a passing herd of horses, or a pioneer in need of help, or maybe some treasure hunting – and after a week or so of this, you forgot why you were out there, where you were supposed to go, and what the overarching plot was… and rode off into the sunset. Even with a rattlesnake bite and a bad case of sunstroke, Red Dead sure was a good time.
L.A. Noire has had zero exploratory appeal. Sure, I hop in the occasional car (mostly fire trucks, ambulances and pest control vehicles) just to amuse myself while on a case, but beyond that it isn’t fun to go roaming around the city. Everywhere you go you get yelled at. While driving up an empty dirt road well off a main strip I was hunted by the sounds of invisible pedestrians screaming as I passed, of nonexistent boxes breaking – L.A. is too L.A. for its own good.
This left me with only one thing to do: finish the cases and unlock Free Roam, so that I could drive around causing all sorts of consequence-free mayhem and city damage. Now that the opportunity is upon me, however, I just don’t wanna. The entire game experience, case-by-case, is devoid of a sandbox feel, so I’m taking my shovel and going home.
Pottermore=More Potter (Duh)
Harry Potter fans, come October there will be…Pottermore.* Rowling and Sony have partnered to create an “online reading experience unlike any other.” Reading, so why is this filed under “Gaming”? Because where should we file “experience”? Er…
According to the Officially Official Website:
Pottermore is a free website that builds an exciting online experience around the reading of the Harry Potter books.
…and there will be a Beta:
Come back on 31st July to find out how you can get the chance to enter Pottermore early.
This will also mark the first (legal) availability of Harry Potter ebooks, and Rowling herself says she will be participating to reveal new information about the Harry Potter universe.
*I tried registering this morning but received error messages. [insert Squib joke]
Writers Blocked
Been trying to write something worthwhile about Modern Warfare 3 for N4G, but here’s what it boils down to: If you like COD, if you like Modern Warfare, if you’re the sort of gamer that buys shooters because you just can’t get enough, you – and millions like you – are going to buy this game, the game is going to sell.
Which is probably why the Modern Warfare 3 demonstrations to the press were so completely phoned in. Activision could have sat us in a room, fed a monkey a banana and sent us on our way – the game is going to sell like fiery hotcakes.
Instead, Activision made us wait 25 minutes past the appointment time, then showed us a presentation that was 50% previously shown footage (at the Microsoft press event). Why? As with everything Activision, because they can. The game is going to sell itself to unborn children.
Hungry for Patronage
As mentioned back at the beginning of May, the National Endowment for the Arts has expanded its grant description to include video games. Since then, this news has picked up some steam, been reported on widely, and in the case of the E3 2011 Into the Pixel reception, been cited as evidence of video games’ growing acceptance in the arts field.
This grates – that the industry is seeking a stamp of approval and legitimacy not only from an external source, but from the government. It’s just so unnecessary, and a symptom of our patron-hungry culture. Art in the United States does not have a widespread system of patronage like days of yore, a large reason why sites like Kickstarter are flourishing. The arts in American are starving for patrons, but the video game industry is not.
What follows is a piece I wrote some time ago for a print publication targeting the non-gaming populous, and since it has some relevancy here it seems a good time to get it digitized.
2011 Into the Pixel Winners Announced
The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and the Entertainment’s Software Association today announced the winning pieces of the 2011 Into the Pixel collection. There are seventeen works in total that will join the permanent collections, and include artists from Naughty Dog, Insomniac Games, Valve Software, Bioware and Big Fish Games, to name a few. The works will be unveiled and on display at the 2011 E3 Expo from June 7-9 in the Concourse Foyer.
The Pelican Inn (Pub) by Andrew Kim, UNCHARTED 3: Drake's Deception™ Naughty Dog, Inc.
A juried exhibition, Into the Pixel is in its eighth year of collaboration between the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and the Entertainment Software Association. Martin Rae, president, Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences spoke on video games as art, remarking, “Now that public institutions have accepted video games as a legitimate form of art, there is no question that video game art has and will continue to have a place in the contemporary art scene.”
Flemmeth by Matt Rhodes, Dragon Age 2, BioWare
Glenn Phillips, Senior Project Specialist & Consulting Curator, Department of Architecture and Contemporary Art, Getty Research Institute went on to say, “Into the Pixel showcases the incredible creativity, skill and artistic talent that pervades in the video game industry. You really see that there are great artists working across every genre of video games, and at every stage of the production process.”
Cronos Battle by Tyler Breon, God of War® III, SCEA/Santa Monica Studio
Into the Pixel 2011 Winners:
Title of Artwork Artist(s) Game Company Amorphous Drake Lucas Graciano Legends of Norrath Sony Online Entertainment The Bridge Erik Zaring & Anders Gustafsson The Dream Machine Cockroach Inc. The Cottage Hamzah Kasom Osman Drawn 3 Big Fish Games Cronos Battle Tyler Breon God of War® III SCEA/Santa Monica Studio Dead Walking Chris Moffitt, Brad Crow, Nathan Stefan, Bart Tiongson Orcs Must Die! Robot Entertainment The Dragon Play Brian Thompson and Hamzah Kasom Osman Drawn: Dark Flight Big Fish Games Flemmeth Matt Rhodes Dragon Age 2 BioWare Good Friends Matthew Halpin, Andrew Matthews, Matthew Preece, Radek Walachnia, John Laws Kinectimals Frontier Developments Ltd Grim Exploits Colin Foran, Claire Hummel, Ryan Wilkerson Trenched Microsoft Game Studio/Doublefine Incident at the Workshop Ivan Simoncini Alien Swarm Valve Software Market Fire, Columbia (Shop Sweeper) Ben Lo BioShock Infinite Irrational Games Normandy Mikko Kinnunen Mass Effect 2 BioWare Oktonok Cay Cannery David Guertin Ratchet & Clank®: All 4 One Insomniac Games Paper World Say Oh and Damian Kim Paper World Namco Bandai Games The Pelican Inn (Pub) Andrew Kim UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception™ Naughty Dog, Inc. Stahl Arms Jesse van Dijk Killzone® 3 Guerrilla Swamp Skull Jeff Haynie Mystery Case Files: 13th Skull Big Fish Games Into the Pixel 2011 Jurors:
- Glenn Phillips, Getty Research Institute, Senior Project Specialist & Consulting Curator, Department of Architecture and Contemporary Art
- Nora Dolan – Independent Curator
- Ryan Wilkerson, Microsoft Game Studios, Senior Art Director
- Matt Hall, Timbuk2 Studios, Senior Partner Production Designer
- Brian Moore, Microsoft Game Studios, Art Director
Dragon on Dragon (on Dragon)
My friend Kyle pointed out that there will be unlimited dragons in Skyrim. Unlimited dragons. On one hand, the completionist in me wants to kill all the dragons – on the other, unlimited dragons. Either way, it’s almost like they have a dragon giving its scaly middle finger to games with “Dragon” in their name that have fewer dragons than unlimited.
Reviewing Free [to Play]
Back at GDC over lunch with Christine Yeo from Perfect World Ent the notion of reviewing free games came up. This is something a bit of brain space has been devoted to, so now comes the waxing speculative.
Largely with the dawn of iPhone app reviews (and apps), the decision of whether or not to review free apps came up. With an inbox full of review requests for paid apps, time management was an issue and the answer was clear: No thank you. A free app costs only as much as the player’s time, and there was little value to be added to the equation by reviewing such an app – while simultaneously trying to quantify the value of time versus the app. Nope, the math was just not working out.
Free-to-play MMOs, however, are increasing their presence in the Western world and so the question comes up again – is it relevant to review what is free? Here the answer is yes. Where time commitment on a free app runs something like 20 minutes maximum before determining if the player wishes to continue, the time likely to be invested in an MMO before its worth can be sussed out tends to run higher. Certainly, some just won’t run or are broken beyond reviewing comprehension, and in those cases the less WPM spent on the debacle the better (as with any lame app). Without reviews, doesn’t the MMO player find themselves adrift in a sea of time-eating possibility?
While LOTRO may or may not make your butt look big, finding the right free-to-play MMO seems a lot like trying to find a good pair of jeans – you want back-up.
Video Games Included as Art by U.S. Government
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) includes video games in grant description:
Projects may include high profile multi-part or single television and radio programs (documentaries and dramatic narratives); media created for theatrical release; performance programs; artistic segments for use within an existing series; multi-part webisodes; installations; and interactive games. Short films, five minutes and under, will be considered in packages of three or more.
The grant category was previously titled “The Arts on Radio and Television” and is now “The Arts in Media”.E3 2011 Ubisoft Media Briefing
Ubisoft has added to the presser-happy Monday of E3 with their briefing:
Harmonix Seeking CM
There are droves of listings for CMs, but relatively few are in the gaming field and even fewer for companies as recognizable as Harmonix. So if you’re an out of work CM or looking to make a change, Harmonix is hiring!
Harmonix, the studio that created blockbusters Dance Central and Rock Band, is looking for an experienced Community Manager to engage with fans of our games. Community Managers represent Harmonix online as well as at live events. When working with our development team and partners, they act as the voice of our community. The ideal candidate will be an outgoing and highly motivated self-starter with a positive attitude. High tolerance for the nerdy, quirky and bizarre, as well as possessing a good sense of humor, patience, and a thick skin are essential to being successful in this role.
No worries, though – Aaron a.k.a. @HMXhenry isn’t going anywhere!
About
I’m Community Manager for N4G and Admin for the NewsBoiler Network, home to N4G, TechSpy, AnimeShinbun, FilmWatch and 11×2. There’s more words strung together on the N4G Blog.
Check out my about.me profile!
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