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Know Your Onions

Sunday, October 12th, 2014

One of my English teachers in high school liked to say that at that level, we’re not actually learning history, we’re actually just learning History’s Greatest Hits. At the time I just laughed it off as a silly joke (he made lots of those), but, over time, I realized he was right. You go through school and get an overview of history (and just about every subject) by hitting the high points so you’re not completely ignorant of how the world and the US got where they are today. But the thing is, there’s so much history (and more of it all the time!) that it’s impossible to know it all. If you’re interested, though, you will go beyond the bare minimum required to pass your high school (and even college) classes. Most of us, though, probably don’t care about that kind of history enough to do more than watch the occasional documentary on PBS, or whatever Drunk History counts as. So, we know some history, but historians, people who love history, know lots more. That sounds obvious, but they do more than watch documentaries in order to feel smart. They do research: they read books (the horror!), they talk to other historians, they visit historic places, and so on. They know that there is more to history than everyone was required to learn in school, and they know that knowledge is out there, they just have to go get it. A lot of times they’ll specialize in one particular area and learn everything they can about it.

You probably think that being a hardcore historian is probably not for you, though. You may not care if Shakespeare actually wrote all his plays or not. You may think that Socrates is just some dead Greek dude who was the subject of a few jokes in the first Bill & Ted movie. Besides, you like video games (well, if you’re reading this site, there’s a pretty good chance that you like video games). Video games are way better than boring old history any day of the week.

But what about video game history?

Felipe Pepe wrote an intresting article on Gamasutra the other day lamenting that a lot of so-called ‘hardcore gamers’ don’t know much about the history of video games past five or ten years or so ago.

That is a disappointing realization.

Video games are becoming (or maybe have already become) a mainstream form of entertainment for everyone, but they’ve been around in one form another since at least the late 1940s. No, that’s not a typo.

Warning: From this point on, I’m going to probably sound like either a hipster or an old man yelling at a butt. You have been warned.

When I say “retro gaming” or “old video games” what do you think of? I’m going to guess that it’s Super Mario Bros or The Legend of Zelda. Maybe just the NES, Super NES, and maybe even the Genesis. Possibly Pong. You may even know that Pong was a big deal in the 80’s. It was, but it was an even bigger deal when it came out in 1972.

You may have heard about the Commodore 64, but do you know anything about it? Can you name five games for it without looking them up? Have you ever heard of the VIC-20? The PET? The Commodore 16? The Commodore 128? The Amiga? Do you know who Jack Tramiel was? Do you know why Bill Cosby is an important figure in Commodore’s history?

You might have heard about the Atari 2600, but what about the reissued Atari 2600 Jr.? The Atari 7800? The Atari 8-bit line? Do you know who Nolan Bushnell is?

Did you know that Texas Instruments had a line of computers that played games? Did you know that the TI-99/4A is actually a revised model of the TI-99/4? Did you know it supported a voice module to enable real actual speech? Do you know who its spokesperson was and why that’s important?

Do you know why games like Diablo are called ‘rogue-like’?

More importantly, have you ever actually played these games that are more than 5 years old? How about 10? 20? Further back? I don’t mean ‘load them up in an emulator and fart around with one for five minutes’, I mean actually play them for a decent amount of time. Try to finish one or set a high score (without abusing savestates, natch). Did you play something outside of the games you’ve heard of (the ‘video games greatest hits’)?

The Problem

While doing some independent research on Ironsword, the game infamous for having Fabio on the label, Wikipedia cites a GameSpy article that says:

You wouldn’t know it from the cover, but IronSword is actually a sequel to Wizards & Warriors. But thanks to the presence of Fabio on the cover, gamers got confused and thought they had accidentally picked up one of their mom’s romance novels.

It also posts a cropped picture of the label (with Fabio’s Fabulous Hair) with the caption that “Anything Fabio is involved in becomes automatically bad.”

I suppose the author was trying to be funny, I get that. But it’s pretty clear that the image was cropped to make that joke, since the full image clearly has, “Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II” at the top of the label. And, I guess I could mistake a video game for a book if I had never seen a book or a video game before. And the game itself is actually pretty good.

The problem is threefold:

  1. Old consoles are hard to find, take up room to store, and emulating games is questionably legal.
  2. A lot of writers for big sites are in their 20s. That’s not necessarily a problem, but a lot of these games came out before they were born, and since old consoles are tough to find, they probably won’t bother. They just rely on Wikipedia, cruddy Youtube videos, and other sources of second-hand (or even third-hand and fourth-hand) information.
  3. Since old consoles are hard to find, and a lot of people won’t bother trying to find or buy them anyway, the echo-chamber effect starts to take over. For instance, Phalanx for SNES usually gets lambasted as having a dumb box featuring a hillbilly playing a banjo. The game must be terrible, whatever it is, right? Wrong. It’s a passable shoot-em-up. Or, ET for the Atari 2600 is the worst game ever made, right? Nope. ET isn’t even the worst game on the Atari 2600 (Sneak ‘n’ Peek, for example). Custer’s Revenge gets a bad rap as one of the worst games ever made (and it is bad, don’t get me wrong), but it was one of those porno games, like Bubble Bath Babes on the NES (don’t Search for these games at work). It was never sitting on the shelf at your local Hills next to Kaboom and Chopper Command.

What all this means is that we have a lot of people writing authoritatively on things that they know very little about. It’s like if you were writing for a music website, but the only thing you knew about music older than 10 years is the songs from your local radio station’s 80’s dance mix, and you just assume that everything pre-1970 is either The Twist or the Foxtrot.

So, what’s the solution?

Unfortunately, I can’t demand that everyone writing about video games broaden their horizons in any meaningful way (if only). But what I can do is demand excellence, both from myself, and from the publications that I read. At the risk of being labeled a pedant and a hipster and a fogey, I can point out why your top whatever list is dumb and wrong, like this list of the 100 best games of all time that only has one game made before 1990 on it (which is Mega Man II. That’s not even the best Mega Man game on the NES).

I don’t want the industry, the consumers, or the media to forget what got us here. I don’t want the past 50+ years of games distilled down to Pong, Pac-Man, some NES stuff, and then everything else. I want to be able to discuss Pix the Cat as being a cross between Pac-Man Championship Edition and Flicky without someone not knowing what I’m talking about. We need to have one eye on the past and another on the future. And a video camera on the present, I guess? I’m not good with metaphors. Video games have a vibrant history, and a lot of that history directly shapes what we have today. Several of those experiences have not been duplicated. They may have been refined or cast off as the medium evolves, but when we study them, it helps us to know why things are now the way they are.

Posted in Arcade, articles, atari, blog, classic gaming, confessions, conjecture, culture, duh, editorials, games, gimmicks, history, Internet, Misc, Nintendo, old news, old school, opinion, Pac-Man, Pinball, reactions, site news, video games | 2 Comments »

Glitchi-NES

Sunday, October 5th, 2014

Some time back I slapped together some hardware for the express purpose of capturing and streaming video game footage, which I’ve done a fair amount of (and I even managed to raise a couple of dollars for charity).

Lately, though, I’ve been going through some of my old NES games, getting them cleaned and testing them, and capturing some short clips for one reason or another, and then this happened.

The picture started freaking out. I played it anyway for a few minutes just to check out the scrambled mess that resulted, put it on Youtube, shared it around, and had some fun with it.

Then, the next night, I moved on to Castlevania III, and it happened again, worse, somehow.

So, why is this happening? Well, my NES is about 30 years old now, so the age of the hardware could be an issue, but that’s only a part of the problem.

Problem #1 – A worn out internal connector. The ‘Toaster’-style NES is probably the one most recognized by just about everyone who has even a passing interest in the NES. It had a funky method of inserting the games where you inserted the cartridge, and then locked it in the ‘down’ position via some internal hardware. This bends the receiving pins slightly every time you insert a cartridge, and, thanks to metal fatigue, they eventually don’t spring back into place as well any more. This means that eventually, those pins will fail completely and no games will work. Before that, though, they’ll just get intermittent.

Problem #2 – The 10NES lockout chip is fussy. You may not have heard about the 10NES lockout chip, but if you’ve spent a lot of time with the NES hardware, you’re probably familiar with one of the tell-tale symptoms of it being fussy: the flashing title screen. There’s lots of information about it on the Internet if you want to look it up, but most of the information seems to imply that you should just disable the chip completely, which I may do someday (sorry, Nintendo).

Problem #3 – Blowing in the cartridges. This is something that everyone (really, everyone) who played video games in the NES heyday knew about: game not working? Blow into it to ‘get the dust out’. Which, it happens, did work. For a while. Eventually, it stopped working, or it took more and more tries to blow out the ‘dust’. It turns out that blowing in the cartridges wasn’t such a great idea. It worked in the short term because the breath from your lungs contains some moisture, which got on the contacts, and that made them more electrically conductive, to the 10NES chip was satisfied and you went down the road playing whatever. But, electricity plus moisture can equal corrosion, and that’s what a lot of NES games are suffering from now.

Problem #4 – Improper cleaning. Since a lot of these cartridges are now quite old and many have not been maintained well, it’s not uncommon to find one with lots of corrosion or dirt or worse fouling up the pins. So, you’ll, of course, want to clean them to give them the best chance (and to not foul your system). The cleaner that I’ve always used and recommend is some isopropyl alcohol, a cotton swab, and some elbow grease (maybe also a screwdriver with a security bit, for good measure). That will take care of most forms of gunk that accumulates on cartridges. If you come across something that that won’t handle, you can work your way up to stronger stuff like pencil erasers, and even high-grit sand paper(!) in extreme cases. Some people advocate using things like stove cleaner as a routine step, but that makes me extremely nervous. I’m a huge advocate of using the least-potentially-damaging material first, and then working my way up to the tougher stuff if needed. Some people like shortcuts, though, and I get that. So, it’s possible that I got a cartridge that belonged to an overzealous cleaner who damaged some of the connecting pins on the cartridges.

Now that I look back on it, with the possibilities of everything that could and did go wrong, I’m impressed that I could even get the NES to work at all. Then or now.

Posted in articles, blog, culture, duh, Misc, NES, not news, old school, opinion, pro tip, relics, stageselect, storage, updates, video games | Comments Closed

Indie, Indie, Indie (Games)

Sunday, September 28th, 2014

We live in a weird time for video games. They’re becoming (and some might say, have already become) mainstream entertainment, and as they grow and mature, and grow, and then grow some more, we start to see some interesting things happen. The barriers to enter the video game market are as low as they’ve ever been, anyone with a computer, programming reference materials, time and passion, can make a game and get it to market, but budgets for so-called “AAA” games are bigger than they’ve ever been, and are getting bigger all the time. Bigger budgets mean that there’s more of a needs to recoup any costs, and doing that means playing it safe. Do what worked in the past, tweak it a little bit, increment the version counter, and then sell it again.

The downside to this is that there is less risk-taking, less variety, and more homogenization. This is good, if you like the current blockbustery flavor-of-the-month game, which I usually don’t. If you’re anything like me, and I’m starting to think that very few of you are, then you want something new once in a while. Something with new characters, new settings, new gameplay ideas, and new concepts.

This is where ‘indie’ games have started to step up their game. Apparently, the only real qualification to be an idie game is that it is developed without backing from a publisher. In the traditional model, a game company would either have an idea, get it to a prototype stage, and search for a publisher to fund the remaining development of the game, or they would be approached by a publisher about making something and then they would get funding to make it. This is weird, since a big-name developer can develop a game and technically it would still be ‘indie’, even though the idea of ‘indie’ seems to be a small team slaving away in a tiny studio somewhere, that’s not always the case.

*I feel like I should note at this point that indie game developers have been around since removable media was invented. You might remember something called ‘shareware‘.

So, what all this means is that, if you want to look for them, there are lots of games being released outside the traditional channels. They won’t necessarily show up in stores or on your favorite video game “news” site. But they’re out there. In fact, there are so many indie games out in the wild now that it’s quickly becoming impossible to even attempt to play them all. And, if you want to develop and release something into the Indie World(tm) you’re going to almost immediately get lost in the shuffle. Unless, of course, you generate buzz.

How do you generate buzz? Word of mouth works, if your game is truly amazing, and you can get a critical mass of people playing about it in the first place, and those people actually tell other people about it, and those people actually download the game and like it, and then continue the cycle (which is much harder than it sounds). Or you can try to get some coverage on one of the millions of game blogs out there. Or you can try to get your game into one of the dozens of ‘indie bundles‘ floating around the internet. Or, etc., etc. All while combating piracy, providing technical support, and maybe trying to work on whatever’s next, all while trying to put food on the table and make sure bills are getting paid.

This means that for every Minecraft or World of Goo or <insert_favorite_indie_game_here> there are dozens of games like Kairo, Goat Simulator, or Dungeon Hearts that just aren’t very good (if you liked them, fine, I’m not here to start an argument), and finding the gems in the firehose of mediocrity is extremely difficult.

So, where does all of this leave us? On one hand, we have formulaic games coming out at a rapid clip with high production values, high cost, and high marketing budgets, and on the other we have games that come out and absolutely insane pace, have production values all over the place, cost a bit less (usually), and have marketing budgets so small that you couldn’t use it to buy a Big Mac. The signal to noise ratio is about the same, but “news” about blockbuster games falls into my lap, and I have to work to find an indie game I might like.

I don’t really know what the solution to all of this is. Maybe there is none. But I do know that the video game landscape is changing faster than the media covering it has been. Weren’t blogs supposed to be faster, and more agile than print media, without the physical limitations? Weren’t they supposed to be able to react and adapt to change, while still covering what’s important?

I’ll tackle that can of worms next time.

Posted in blog, blogs, classic gaming, confessions, conjecture, development, duh, dumb, editorials, marketing, opinion, video games | Comments Closed

Video Board Gaming

Sunday, September 21st, 2014

Making video games from board games always seemed weird to me. You can either buy and play the board game, or you can spend the equivalent of two or three times the cost of the board game (not including the cost of the console to play it on) to play the exact same game on a television instead of on a table.

For instance, the cost of the analog version of Monopoly is about $16, and the price of the video-game adaptation is about $30.

So, I’ve decided to run down a few of the differences to see why buying one over the other might be the better deal.

Video game versions are (usually) smaller – There are always exceptions, of course, but in general the video game version of some board game these days is going to be in a container that’s roughly the size of a DVD case. The board-game version, though, is going to be the size of several DVD cases. I’m discounting things like card games because a deck of cards or something like Uno or Rook might technically take up less room, a collectible card game might very well take up a great deal more room, so I say it’s a wash. +1 point video game versions

Video game versions have AI or Internet opponents – If you have a hankering to play a board game, but don’t have anyone handy to play with, you can always go up against computer-controlled players. Sure, it’s not the same, it’s hard to trash talk the computer or beg for favors or team up on whoever the winner is, but it will generally do in a pinch. And if a game is playable over the Internet, there’s a good chance that someone out in the world is ready to play right now. +1 point video game versions.

Analog versions let you bend the rules – Most people who have played Monopoly have a house rule about Free Parking: money collected from fines goes there and is collected when someone lands on it, is the one that I’ve heard the most. But, the thing is, that’s not a part of the official rules. House rules can make things more fun, can make things more interesting, and can make things balanced in the case of a skilled player going up against novices. They can also make the game longer, more boring, and less fun if used improperly, but so can a bad choice of radio station to listen to while the game is going on. +1 point analog games.

Analog games are cheaper and more portable – Of course, there are exceptions to everything (collector’s editions, themed editions, etc), but, in general, $20 or so will get you the full experience of the board game. On the other hand, to play the electronic version, you need the game, a console, some extra controllers, a television, and electricity. You may argue that you already had all of that stuff to make the game work, but if you take your electronic copy somewhere else, those things might not be available. But the traditional version will work in the middle of the Mojave desert, although, you need to ensure that the jackrabbits don’t abscond with your pieces. +2 points analog video games

It’s harder to lose the pieces to a video game – Getting deep into a game of Mousetrap and realizing that the rubber band has gone missing, so you can’t actually complete its setup and the game is unwinnable is disappointing. Trying to play anything with a deck of 51 cards is a non-starter. +1 point to video game versions.

That brings our grand total to:

  • Analog board games – 3
  • Video board games – 3

This isn’t as cut and dried as I expected it to be. I’d say that having a mix is probably the best way to go. Video games are great (no, really!), but it’s nice to unplug once in a while, too. Besides, nothing beats an evening with good people, good food, good music, and friendly competition in the same room at the same time.

Posted in analog, board games, conjecture, crummysocks, duh, site news, updates | 1 Comment »

Backlog, Schmacklog

Sunday, September 14th, 2014

As recently as a month ago, I was making grand proclamations about how I was going to knuckle down and get my backlog under control. I was going to pare down that list bit by bit and eliminate it once and for all. That was a good idea, in theory, and I am still making progress toward that goal, but I very quickly came to a realization: No matter what I do, my backlog is probably never going to be zero.

And I’m okay with that.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m giving up and am going to let myself drown under an ever-growing pile of unfinished games. That would be crazy. But I did go through my backlog and I identified three kinds of games in there and my likeliness to get them finished as a good first step.

Type 1 – Games I got as a part of a bundle that I didn’t really want in the first place. There are way, way too many game bundles floating around on the Internet. Lots of these game bundles are ‘pay what you want’ with special plums if you pay over a certain dollar amount. The big problem is that you get a game that you want, that is maybe pretty good, and you also get four or five (or more) other games that you’ve never heard of, didn’t really want, and may never play. I have lots of these artificially inflating the number of games in my backlog, so it looks worse than it actually is. It’s tempting to get rid of a lot of these games, but since most of them are digital-only, I’m stuck with them.

Type 2 – Games that looked interesting or were recommended, but it turns out that I didn’t like. Games like 3D-Dot Game Heroes get moderately favorable reviews, and look interesting enough for a try (or were in the bargain bin), but on putting them in, it turns out that they’re just not very good. I’m sure that to someone somewhere these games are good, but I’m not going to waste my time slogging through them if I’m not having any fun doing it.

Type 3 – Games that are just too long. Probably until I either retire or hit the lottery, my time for playing games is limited, and even when I do get a chance to play, I may not be able to play in long stretches. Some weeks I can manage six or eight hours, and other weeks it’s a bit less (like zero). That time may not be in big chunks, either. Some days I might only have a few ten or twenty minute chunks of time that I can devote to a game, other days it might be two or three hours. If I can’t pick up a game and put it down after a few minutes, I may end up putting it down and coming back to it just after never. If a game takes 40 or more hours to complete, and I can work in 10 hours a week playing it, it’s still going to take me a month or so to get to the end.

What are the odds that I’m going to finish these up? Type 1 is very unlikely. I might play it once to see what it’s all about, or I might never look at it. I didn’t really want it in the first place, so these don’t count toward my backlog. I can write them off.

Type 2 games can also be written off. I’m not going to force myself to play something I didn’t like. If I gave it a try and didn’t like it enough to finish it, or at all, then I’m knocking it out of the backlog.

Type 3 games are an interesting category. Games that I liked, probably, but took so long to play that I just got tired of playing them every free evening for a month or more. These games I’d like to get back to, but the odds of me doing that are directly related to how long it’s been since I played it last. A game that I last played a month ago? There’s a decent chance I’ll give it another go in a couple of weeks after I’ve played something short to ‘cleanse my palate’, so to speak. Something I stopped playing in 2007 two consoles ago? Assuming I remember that I have a saved game, and the console is still hooked up to my television, I might play again. But, realistically, we can take these off the list, too, if they haven’t been played in the last year.

And, just like that, my backlog goes from insane and completely unmanageable to slightly off-kilter and kind of manageable.

It’s a start. I’ll take it.

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Posted in achievements, articles, blog, classic gaming, collecting, confessions, crummysocks, culture, difficulty, duh, editorials, General, guides, howto, lists, Misc, pro tip, time wasters, updates, video games | Comments Closed

Operation: Get Stuff Done

Sunday, August 3rd, 2014

I’ve written on more than one occasion about how ponderously large my video game backlog has gotten. I would tell myself, “I’m saving up so I’ll have something to do when I retire.” Jokingly at first, and then semi-seriously. I kind of stopped saying that when I realized that the backlog had gotten so enormous that, at the rate I’m acquiring games today, even if I retired tomorrow, I might not be able to finish them all.

I mentioned before that a big reason that my backlog has almost taken on a life of its own has to do with the social component. Most of my friends and I have diverged in what kinds of video games we play, so there’s not as many things we can discuss about whatever game we’re playing, and there’s no friendly rivalry to see who can get all of the Gold Skulltulas first, or whatever.

But I think that’s only a part of the equation.

The second part is that there are just too many video games. There are so many video games coming out these days, and between the ludicrous number of bundles out there the wallet-destroying digital sales (Steam, Origin, GOG, etc.), it’s very easy, and sometimes very cheap, to quickly get so many games so quickly that the sheer number of the things hits you like a tidal wave. It looks daunting, but you can steel yourself. You know you can do this, you’ve been playing video games for years.

So you start trying to figure out what you want to play and analysis paralysis sets in. Do you want to play something relatively short, or do you want to play something that will take dozens of hours to complete? Which of these looks like it will be long enough, but not too long? Will I have time to play it around the times where I have to do Grown Up Stuff(tm)? Will I be able to put it down for a couple of days or even weeks and then be able to come back and remember where I was? What if it’s no good? The critics were all over the place with some of these games, what if I wasted my money on it? What if my instincts were right and I find that a game is actually good, in spite of the critical score. What if it was critically acclaimed, and I thought it was boring?

All of these whatifs were really slowing me down. I’ve been getting dragged down into analyzing the minutiae of my potential game experience and hemming and hawing about what game to play so much that instead of playing games, I’ve just been thinking about how nice it would be if I could play some of these games in my backlog, but I just don’t have time.

Or is that really true?

I wasn’t sure. I mean, I have more responsibilities now than I did when I was younger. I have a full time job, a house, I have to do my own laundry, buy and prepare my own food, maintain my own vehicle, and so on. But I’m not actively doing one of those things every moment of every day. For example, I do sleep on occasion. But what do I do with all of my time? Where does it go? I decided to find out by my typical method: overanalyzing the situation, to find out. And that means, making a chart.

Pretend there’s a chart here that shows what I’m likely to be doing at any given hour of the day.

The chart was interesting. It showed me that I have about 30 hours per week where I’m doing nothing in particular. It also showed me that even though I don’t have an 8-5 job any more, that I’ve still got my sleep schedule set up like I do. And that means that I’ve got a couple of hours that I’m spending idle every morning that I could be using for something besides sitting around waiting for time to go to work. I also have more time during the weekend than I originally thought, even though it’s pretty well scattershot through the day.

That’s encouraging.

That means that I do have time to get some game playing in, and I can slowly whittle down my backlog if I can manage to shoehorn it into the timeslots I have available. But, there’s another problem.

Motivation.

It’s weird to think that I would ever need to get myself mentally motivated to play video games, an activity that I have enjoyed for most of my life, but sometimes that motivation just isn’t there. I could play a game anyway, and see if that forces me to get motivated to play it more, but I don’t think I want to do that. Forcing myself to do something when I don’t really want to seems like a good way to sour me on the whole thing, which seems like a bad idea. But I can use that time to do other things related to games. I could update my blog (see the last few weeks’ worth of updates), I could read something, watch a video, create a video, and so on.

*A very important aside, I know that loss of interest in activities that you used to enjoy can be a possible sign of depression. I’m pretty sure that I don’t have that, but if you think you might, nothing I say in this article is going to help except this: I encourage you to find someone qualified to help with depression and they will help you. Depression is a serious issue, and not something that this article (or any other article on a crappy blog site) is qualified to help with.*

I also want to set some goals for myself so that I can revisit this post somewhere down the line and see if I’ve actually made any progress in whittling down the backlog. Feel free to follow along or add your own:

  • Play something for a few minutes every day.
    • Even if it’s something that I’ve played to death, playing something for a few minutes is going to keep my momentum going to tackle something bigger
  • Ignore the Backloggery
    • The Backloggery is great, but it’s a pain to remember to go update it when I buy something, when I finish something, when I 100% complete something, when I start playing something else, etc. etc. Plus, there are no penalties for failure, and no real reward for succeeding, either
  • Don’t go for 100% completion.
    • I wasn’t doing this much these days, anyway, but I need to avoid trudging through a game, trying to collect ant heads or whatever for some unlock or a trophy or something.
  • Don’t rush through the game, either
    • I’m weird, I know, but I hate rushing through a game the first time I play it. I like to soak in all the ambiance and immerse myself into it if I can.
  • Play one new game per month
    • This one is going to be tricky, and my not be sustainable. But the idea here is to at least try something in the backlog instead of letting it sit there and rot, especially if it’s one of the shorter games, to see if it’s even something that I’ll like. I’ve bought some duds before, and didn’t find out about it for over a year because it took me that long to get to them.
  • If a game is terrible, shelve it
    • This goes hand-in-hand with the above. If I try out the new game and it stinks, well, then I just won’t play it any more and I’ll move on to the next one. I don’t need to force myself to slog though it to the end, hoping it will get better. It might, but I don’t really want to waste my time not having fun now for promises of something that might be kind of fun later. I need to trust my instincts, if it’s not fun now it probably won’t be fun later, either.
  • Limit MMORPG time
    • MMORPGs are great, but they will sink and steal time like no other activity I know. And, since they never really end, there’s always something for you do to in them. I had to kill my World of Warcraft subscription a while back because that was all I was doing with my free time at the time. Now, since there are so many MMORPGs that are free to play, it’s incredibly easy to get lost running around a virtual world doing things for hours and hours without actually spending a dime. That’s almost worse than a paid subscription. A paid subscription makes you feel like you need to play something to get your money’s worth out of it, a free subscription is always there, waiting on you to have an hour or three to kill, and that can be dangerous.

Of course, these are only guidelines. Who knows if I can actually stick to them or not, but I won’t know if I don’t try. I’ll be refining them as I go on, seeing what works and what doesn’t. I don’t expect to ever have a backlog of zero unless I just sell all of my games and consoles (fat chance of that happening any time soon), but I can do more to get it pared down, it’s just going to take some work.

And, who’s afraid of a little work?

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28% of people with internet access play games when bored.

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

Next-Gen is reporting that over a quarter of the people that use the Internet go to an online gaming site now and again.

“With one in four Internet users visiting a gaming site, playing games online is extremely popular. The fact that these websites are pulling in over a quarter of the total worldwide Internet population shows what a global phenomenon gaming has become,” said Bob Ivins, EVP and managing director of comScore.

“The potential of the online gaming arena should be especially appealing for advertisers, as the average online gamer visits a gaming site 9 times a month,” he added.”

To be honest, I would have suspected that number to be far higher. It seems that every person I’ve ever worked with either professionally or in the computer lab was playing some stupid Flash game or other at some point, and especially when a project was due the next day.

Link! (Next-Gen)

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People who play games the most, buy the most games

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

In a recent NPD study, the group discovered that those gamers that play the most (40 hours a week or more) are also the ones that tend to buy more games. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

“[T]he smallest section is the most hardcore of all. Although they make up just 2 percent of the gaming public, “Heavy Gamers” own an average of 2.8 consoles and 1.9 portables. They play a whopping 39.3 hours a week, mainly on the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, and buy a budget-busting average of 13.1 games every quarter–or roughly 4.5 games each month.”

I find it interesting that the article calls 4.5 games a month ‘budget busting’. I’ve easily eclipsed that some months, but my figure would include one current game and several bargain bin games. This study kind of implies that this mythical super-hardcore gamer subset buys 4.5 full-price non-budget titles a month. Kind of makes me think that I’m in my own demographic.

Link! (Gamespot via Kotaku).

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Some movies make terrible games

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

For some reason, I’ve been seeing a glut of articles telling me things that I either already know or are so obvious I should already know.

Case in point, Thomas Tull of Legendary Pictures offers this word of advice:

During his keynote speech on the second day of the Hollywood & Games Summit Tull said, “Not everything translates. Just because a movie comes out and does well, if there isn’t a good story or a compelling reason [to create a game], it is a very dangerous thing to take a brand, slap it on a box, and just say ‘Well, people will buy it.’

“If you rely solely on the brand itself, and not on the gameplay, I think that’s a mistake,” he continued.

“I have very strong feelings from the movie side… Making videogames into movies just because they have sold well is a pretty bad idea.”

I’ve played my fair share of movie tie-in games, and they’ve by and large been pretty crappy. Games like The Grinch and The Chronicles of Narnia were pretty terrible. I actually have tried to steer away from games based on movies as much as possible. Though things like the Half-Life mod for Underworld give me hope that somebody out there knows how to make a proper movie tie-in, even though the movie was pretty terrible.

Link! to article (Gamesindustry.biz).

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Educational Games not as fun as Non-Educational Games

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

The Slate has up a rambling almost non-article where the Justin Peters bemoans the fact that games that are designed to be educational are not as fun as games where education is an added feature.

Any child of the 1980s and 1990s will remember Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Math Blaster Mystery: The Great Brain Robbery, games that promised to make skills acquisition fun. They’ll also remember ditching Mavis Beacon for something with guns as soon as their parents’ backs were turned. Making games educational is like dumping Velveeta on broccoli. Liberal deployment of the word blaster can’t hide the fact that you’re choking down something that’s supposed to be good for you.

I’m a child of the 1980s and I’ve never played either of those games, and I enjoy a good cheese sauce on my broccoli. So I’ll concede that he may not be talking to me.

He also posits some rhetorical questions such as: “Can a game still be called a game if it isn’t any fun?” Which, if you’ve ever played a game off of the $5 or under rack, you know the answer.

Though the article itself may or may not be the greatest in the world, it’s an interesting thought exercise.

Link! to the full article (via Joystiq)

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