From GamesIndustry.biz:
Activists from the US Haitian community have joined in a protest against Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City at New York’s City Hall, claiming that the title “advocates the killing of Haitians as entertainment.”
Update: I’ve written more on this issue here.
At the request of Thaddaeus Frogley, whose real email address is… no, just kidding… I’ve looked into the whole email address thing.
Basically, if you give a URL and an email address, your email address is not present in the HTML. If you just give an email address, it is in the HTML, but its scrambled, which means humans can read it, but bots have trouble.
I’ve allowed anonymous comments on this blog now. If it causes trouble, eg comment spam, I will have to deactivate it again.
Is juggling all those game machines becoming too complicated? Why not put an Atari 2600, a Nintendo Entertainment System, a Microsoft Xbox, a Nintendo GameCube, a Sony PlayStation 2 and a custom PC into one box? If you’re contrarian, do the inverse by turning your Nintendo Entertainment System into a PC case.
Mark Barrett has written a new essay called Peer Pressure (you may have to scroll down if he has written something new by now), in which he writes very nice things about Lee Sheldon and about me. This filled me with great joy (I am easy to please), which is why I wanted to mention it here.
Jurie has worked in Germany, France and now Austria, in a variety of capacities that almost always underestimated his capabilities and talents.
This has led me thinking about effectiveness. Capabilities and talents are nice, but what’s the use if you cannot apply them? Recently, I had a really interesting discussion about this with a friend. I hope to write a blog entry about it.
If there’s anybody I’ve spent a lot of time talking design theory and practice with, it’s Jurie.
And I can say the same about Mark. We have literally written megabytes of emails and documents, digging into various issues of game design, often spending over a week just on one concept or word (”role” is a particular favorite).
Mark subtly alludes to my complete blackout for a couple of months, and then gives the best description of this blog I can think of:
While his posts are eclectic, he’s not a dilettante. Jurie knows a lot of the heavyweights in the business on both sides of the pond, he knows the core design issues we’re wrestling with, and many of his musings are concerned with the basic problems that our business is facing. Tag along for a few days and you’ll see what I mean.
I cannot fully shake the feeling that “eclectic” is a bit like “good personality”, but on the other hand I can’t deny it and don’t really mind.
But remember that I cannot really know which posts are the most interesting to my anonymous readers if I don’t get any feedback. Use that comment feature, people!
Today, I remembered that Gamespy’s Daily Victim column can be very funny. Especially the one about the guy who plays Majestic and the one about the undead parrot.
Gamespot has reported on a recent study of console gamer behavior by Zelos Group. It contains some interesting tidbits:
Just yesterday I had an interesting discussion with a friend who knows about these things about how you can make studies say anything you like and a lot of them use sloppy methodology… oh well.
U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray has published a report on the toy and video game industry. Of interest:
Extensive debate exists as to which stage of the video game cycle the market is currently experiencing. “We believe spring 2003 marked the midpoint of the current video game cycle, in terms of the product life cycle of current generation video game hardware,” said Gikas. “We anticipate the next generation of video game hardware will be introduced in autumn 2006, depending upon the competitive positioning of the video game console manufacturers and existing demand for current generation products.”
“In addition, we expect 2003 will be the peak year for unit sales of current generation hardware sales. We are forecasting that 22.3 million hardware units will be sold in North America in 2003, a modest increase from 21.1 million units in 2002 and will subsequently decline in 2004 to sales of 20.3 million units as the installed base of video game hardware becomes saturated.”
(Both links from Slashdot Games.)
On a less bizarre note, Ben Carter mentioned a fascinating Japanese game on a mailing list some time ago, and graciously allowed me to quote his description verbatim:
I thought I’d mention an interesting game I haven’t heard much about but picked up when I was in Japan recently.
Called “Operator’s Side”, it’s a “voice action adventure” for the PS2, the idea being that (almost) all your interaction with the game is through a voice headset. The game itself is a survival horror-type adventure, set on a space station, where you play the “operator”, who is trapped in the control room and must talk a woman called “Rio” through the process of escaping. I believe, incidentally, that some of the team who worked on ICO were involved in it.
It works surprisingly well - the voice recognition can cope with my (poor) accent, and accepts remarkably complex sentences. It’s context-sensitive, but there seems to be a pretty big vocabulary of accepted words and phrases. There’s even quite a bit of intelligence with regards to referring to objects and places - you can, for example, say “migi no koto wa nan desu ka?” (”what is that thing on your right?”), and the character will tell you (also, conveniently highlighting it so you can see the name).
They’ve used the voice system in some quite clever ways, too - in combat you give orders in realtime (eg - “dodge left, shoot it in the right eye and reload!”), and you can also hold simple conversations with the characters to find out information.
There are definitely flaws in the system - it has a tendency to misrecognise words it doesn’t know as ones it does, and sometimes it degenerates into text-adventure “guess the noun/verb” exercises (occasionally deliberately - one puzzle sees the central character unable to remember the name of a weapon, which leads to you sat there
reeling off the names of everything you can think of to try and find it!). It’s also quite simplistic gameplay - Resident Evil-style “find key to open door” puzzles form the majority of the game (as far as I’ve seen), and the combat is only difficult because of the control system.Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating and genuinely novel game in many ways - and great Japanese language practice, since it hasn’t been translated (and, I’d guess, probably never will be, sadly)…
Now that I’ve started writing about strange Japanese games - and since I have a reputation of eclecticism to uphold, about which more later - I am forced to confront the difficult task of talking about one of the strangest games I’ve ever come across, without using words or phrases that will make me regret looking in my referrer logs for months to come. That game is Chou Aniki.
I won’t try to describe it, not only because it defies description and because I haven’t played it, but also because other people’s descriptions are so funny.
Gamers.com writes about the PlayStation 2 version, which is called Chou Aniki Seinaru Protein Densetsu. They don’t really go into what the Protein in the title refers to, but they do ponder the question:
Are there that many gamers in Japan who get off on playing innuendo-drenched 2D shooters staring ugly nearly-naked steroid mutants?
This fan page goes into more detail on the mechanics:
But if you still have trouble taking down the enemies, don’t fret! Samson and Adonis aren’t just bodybuilders — they’re trained in Nude Ballet! Tap the other button, and your adept alter-ego performs a pirouette. While twirling, any bullets or oncoming enemies will simply slide off your oily, naked body.
Seanbaby has mentioned it in his hilarious Naughtiest Games of All Time article (hilarious if you don’t take his homophobic remarks seriously). An excerpt:
You start the game as a nine-story flying man in a speedo firing lasers out of your viking hat, and yes you read the beginning of this sentence correctly.
The official website does not feature any funny descriptions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not pretty strange.
Some day I’m going to play that game.
Gamespy has a column about Japanese games. This week it’s about game genres that are unsuccessful outside of Japan. It mentions dating sims, management sims (which is odd as they are are pretty popular in Europe), vehicle sims (again odd, as it is a lucrative niche market in the West - although I admit that the Tokyo bus game I saw in an arcade in Tokyo shows a deeper level of interest), pet raising sims and voyeurism games.
(From Slashdot Games.)
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