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A sea of mediocrity

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

If you do a search for the words “video game blog” on Google, you’ll get around 253,000,000 results.

That’s a lot.

But, more importantly, that means that if you want to get any kind of following that you’re going to have a tough road ahead of you. When I started this site way back in 2001, the barrier to entry was already ridiculously low (if you had a little bit of technical expertise), but now with services like Blogger and WordPress (and dozens of others), the barrier to entry is so low that it’s virtually nonexistent.

Which is a good thing, for the most part. Anyone (and I do mean anyone) can throw up a website and start talking about essentially anything they want. No fact-checking required.

Which is still great. Until…

People just kind of peter out. Sometimes only after a few days, sometimes months or years later when they come to the realization that:

Most people will never make enough money blogging to earn a living.

Once they figure that out, their pet projects turn into labors of love, which get neglected, and eventually stagnate to the point where they’re just kind of sitting there. Which is why I’ve tried to do a little something different with this site. I try to put stuff up here that’s interesting to more than just me, and that’ll (I hope) be interesting over time. That way, if I ever do move on to something else full time, the stuff I have up here will be an interesting read for someone else down the road.

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Game Mastery

Monday, November 16th, 2009

I’ve mentioned that I occasionally kind of get fixated on whatever game is the flavor of the month. But whenever the luster wears off the game, of I finish the main story, well, that’s it. I typically shelve the game, and move on to the next. Even when games were simpler, I played them off and on for a while, and since there was no ending, I just kind of gave up after a few days or weeks, depending on what they had at the game rental stores, and what was in the local arcades. Since I knew that the games were essentially endless, I kind of gave up trying to master them. (Can you truly master a game that’s supposed to be endless?)

I suppose that makes me some kind of Gaming Locust, which is rather unappealing, but unfortunately, kind of accurate.

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Light Guns

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

There are several different kinds of games you’re going to find in your local arcade (well, assuming you even have a local arcade any more). Most of them are the ‘stand up, waggle the joystick and mash the buttons’ kind of game, then there are driving games, pinball games, and light-gun games. Most of these have made the transition to the home consoles… except that last one. Well, until the Wii came out that is, though there are still relatively few of the things for it.

And what that means is that my pointing and clicking skills, without the aid of a reticule, are beginning to languish. Which is a shame, because I used to be halfway decent at shooting cardboard cutouts of gangsters.

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RAD Video Tools

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

In lots of PC games, if you get bored and start poking through the installed files of your favorite title, you might look into the folders that have the sounds and video files. And I’d estimate that just over half the time, those video files will have a .bik extension. “So what?” you might think, “Those files are some kind of proprietary format that I can only look at when I’m playing the game.”

And that’s where you’d be wrong.

Those files are actually encoded with the Bink codec, which probably doesn’t mean that much to you. The important thing to know is that you can go to this site and download a player made specifically for playing those files (Windows only, I’m afraid).

Even better is that you can use that tool to convert an audio or video file into lots of other formats. All for completely free!

Which just happens to be my favorite price, especially for something that’s pretty useful.

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Not all activities translate well to video games

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Over my gaming career, I’ve worn a lot of hats. I’ve vicariously led armies in campaigns across real and fictional lands, rolled marbles through a series of mazes, wrestled for the world title, shot lots of zombies in the face with heavy artillery, demolished buildings, been mayor of a city, gone fishing, explored dungeons, and dozens of other things. And across all of those games I’ve realized that not all activities translate well to video-game forms.

For instance, I managed to find a copy of the King James Bible for the original Game Boy, and because if its novelty, I was compelled to buy it. And, aside from some really terrible games, the only thing to do with it is to read the Bible… on a 2 inch screen that can show about 40 words at a time, and according to this page, there are 783,137 words in the whole thing. Which means you’re going to go crosseyed trying to work your way through the thing. Though, thankfully, you’ll probably run out of batteries first.

Or we could consider something like video slot machines. With the mechanical arm taken out of the picture, and the tumblers reduced to video game representations, we’re left with just pressing the ‘insert coin’ button and then the ‘spin wheels’ button over and over and over and over.

Yee. Haw.

Of course it goes the other way, too. I mean, could you imagine a non-video game version of something like Tetris Attack?

Because I sure can’t.

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Text Overload vs. Voice Acting

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

We’re at an interesting place in the evolution of video games. It’s now possible to have hours and hours of high-definition spoken words played back in your game. This is a far cry from just 20 years ago when hearing a couple of words compressed nearly to oblivion was considered pretty amazing. Like in Blades of Steel.

So, since space was at such a premium, if you wanted lots of dialogue, you were limited to text, lots and lots of text. Which never bothered me too much, it was a limitation of the media.

But games have now evolved where multi-minute scenes are played out (with varying levels of talent, but that’s fodder for another discussion), and text-heavy exchanges are becoming more and more infrequent.

And, to be honest, I hadn’t really given that a whole lot of thought either, until I was watching some video game review show or another and one of the reviewers actually gave the game a lower mark because he had to read too much. He was of the opinion that technology had progressed to a point where everything can be voiced, so everything should be voiced.

But does it really add that much to the experience? Yeah, it’s great to hear what the developers think the characters should sound like so I don’t have to improvise voices in my head, but I can actually read far faster than most people talk. So if I come across a game that has the audio subtitled, I end up skipping over the dialog and reading the text instead. Which ends up sounding pretty herky-jerky and unbelievable.

So, for me, the jury’s still out. I don’t mind doing a lot of reading, but, I have to admin, having big blocks of text punctuated by the occasional voice-acted section (for the important plot points) is kind of nice.

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Interacting with the Interactor

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

It’s been pretty well established at this point that I like gimmicky things… well, as far as video games are concerned. So it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that I’ve accumulated several wacky things in my gaming journey. One of the wackiest is the Aura Interactor.

The Interactor is a vest that you strap to your back. You then plug the audio into a brick that you’ve plugged the sound from your favorite audio device into (usually a video game console, but you could also plug it into anything that outputs sound: portable game console, stereo, iPod, Walkman, whatever).

And no, I don’t have any pictures of me wearing the thing, it’s kind of snug these days.

But the general idea is that the brick takes the sound from whatever you’ve plugged into it, filters out everything but the bass (which supposedly just leaves impacts from punches, kicks, cars, spaceships, or whatever), and then transfers a spine-rattling rumble to the backpack. And I do mean spine-rattling. The thing rattled me so hard that my vision actually wobbled. It was definitely a unique experience, and predated the N64’s Rumble Pak by quite a few years.

I could only find two problems with the thing:

1. They didn’t make it in an adult size and
2. Since the device filters out everything but the bass-sounds, you don’t really get any of the sounds from the game. So you’re playing a mostly silent game and getting clobbered in the back every few seconds… Which is weird, yeah.

If you really want to get some more information about the thing, you could check here.

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The missing manual

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

I’ve been playing games for nearly as long as I can remember, and I’ve amassed a sizable collection of the things over the years. And for each of the games, there’s a tiny (and sometimes not so tiny) booklet detailing the story behind the game, the controls, and the basics to get you started.

But I have a confession: I don’t even look at them.

It seems to be counter-intuitive. I mean, games have exponentially increased in difficulty, length, and complexity in the last several years, but the humble instruction manual seems to be little more than a vestigial remnant of a bygone era.

Take a game like Neverwinter Nights for the PC (the 2002 version, not the older one). First releases had a spiral-bound tome that spanned well over 200 pages to give you the ins and outs of the game. And now, the latest game by the same company, Dragon Age: Origins, has a manual that limps in at a scant 30-ish pages, with just barely enough information to tell you how to turn the thing on before it turns you loose.

Now, do you actually need to read such a beast of a manual to get the proper level of enjoyment out of a game? Eh, probably not. Unless you’re the type of person who needs to have step-by-step instructions detailing how you’re supposed to have fun, you’ll probably figure it out. Heck, with as many tutorials that are getting built in to games these days, you’ll get all the hands-on training you’ll ever need from the first few hours of the game anyway.

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Pre-order goodies

Monday, November 9th, 2009

For a long time any time I’d hear of some great new game that I just had to play I would prepurchase it at whichever local store was first willing to take my dollars early. I did this for two reasons: 1. so I could get the Flavor of the Month on release day, and 2. I’d get some kind of little junket to play around with until the actual game came out.

But, times change.

I figured out that there isn’t really a shortage of games on release day. Unless I think the game’s going to be particularly popular, I can go to pretty much any store, walk in, grab it, and be on my way in less than half an hour. Or I could stand in line for hours to grab my game at midnight, take it home, then go straight to bed because I’ve got to be to work in the morning (and, honestly, what sense does it make to release a game on a Tuesday anyway?).

And those ‘premiums’? Yeah, they’re mostly pretty worthless. You can only use so many rooster hats, comic books, stickers, and other crap that ceases to be useful the minute you get it home. Which might be the reason that I see more games going to in-game stuff instead.

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Catching them all

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

Earlier today I made my way out to my local Toys ‘R’ Us to participate in the latest Pokémon giveaway. It might not come to a surprise to you, but I was the oldest person there with DS in hand. Was I embarrassed? No, not really. I’ve been playing the series since 1998, if I was going to get embarrassed, it’d have probably happened while I was in college.

In those 11 years I’ve kind of decided that I like the games, but not enough to play them on anything resembling a competitive level. I just don’t have the patience to get down into the nitty gritty of breeding, optimizing EV points, or the time to min-max my team. I’ve got other crap to do. Of course, that didn’t stop me from putting over 197 hours into the Diamond edition.

The only kind of weird thing is to think that the game is primarily directed at people who were born the year the first game in the series came out… when I started college.

And no, that doesn’t make me feel old.

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