Exposing my socks to the world

Here’s where I’ll be posting reactions to the 2007 Video Game Awards.

In 10 minutes.

8:02 PM CST: We have some acrobats acrobat-ing around the place. A little weaker than last year’s opening.

8:06 PM CST: Mostly naked women, the King of Kong, and Video Games Live. Sounds perfectly geared to young males. And we’ve already heard the first ‘Super Mario Bros. is a drug-induced game’ joke.

8:07 PM CST: Kristin Bell is ‘Hottest Newcomer’. I assume this means the newcomer to the video game industry with the most promise.

8:09 PM CST: Mindfreak guy introducing some Tom Clancy footage. I suppose I don’t pay enough attention to the world of illusion to know who this guy is. But I’m pretty jazzed to see a world premiere trailer of a game that doesn’t show any footage.

8:10 PM CST: LARPing intro, time to go get a snack.

8:18 PM CST: Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show nominees. I can’t believe that Stranglehold was even nominated. Simpsons game won, no surprise here.

8:20 PM CST: Tony Hawk introducing the Foo Fighters, and since I just got snacks, now’s a good time to go wash my hands, use the bathroom, or paint the house.

8:24 PM CST: I’m pretty excited to finally hear the Video Games Live guys. Too bad every time they play something, all we can hear are announcements instead of what’s actually playing.

8:30 PM CST: Samuel L. talking about the video game based on Afro Samurai. I only managed to sit through one episode of the series. And the trailer doesn’t show us much other than lots of blood.

8:32 PM CST: Mad TV guy (I should probably pay more attention to these peoples’ names on the other 364 days a year) introducing a sketch about the different types of gamer. Sounds familiar. Best Team Sports Game is up now. Winning Eleven Soccer doesn’t have a chance. NFL 08 takes it. Good for them.

8:35 PM CST: I’m told this guy is Chingy. Gran Turismo 5 footage. Looks like intro movie footage.

8:37 PM CST: Hottest Mobile Game? Ugh, I guess. None of these games look any good. I honestly don’t care about any of these games at all, every game I’ve ever played on my phone was pretty trashy. Except for puzzlers, so long as they’re not Bejeweled.

8:43 PM CST: Stan Lee… He’s still a crazy old man. And we get to see some Iron Man footage. I’ve never been a real big Iron Man Fan, but this looks like it could be pretty good.

8:45 PM CST: Ah, the fat guy from Last Comic Standing who makes nothing but fat jokes. This guy’s never been funny. Good thing he’s only out here for 3 minutes.

8:46 PM CST: Best Individual Sports Game, it only took us 45 minutes to get to an implied masturbation joke. Classy. Skate wins, didn’t see that coming.

8:48 PM CST: The Angles, some wrestlers coming out to introduce the new TNA game. Finally some stars that I actually know something about. Too bad they’re only on for less than a minute. Too bad wrestling games usually suck, this one looks decent.

8:50 PM CST: Recapping some of the awards not important enough to actually show:

Best RPG: Mass Effect
Best Hand Held Game: Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
PS3: Ratchet And Clank: Tools of Destructions
Best Graphics: Crysis
Best Action Game and Best Wii Game: Mario Galaxy
Best Riding Game: Dirt
Best PC Game and Breakthrough Technology: Valve’s Orange Box

I’m really surprised that some of thees categories weren’t important enough to show.

I’m also very surprised to see that Mario Galaxy beat out Twilight Princess for best Wii game.

Crysis looked good, but the demo was absolute crap, I couldn’t even make it all the way through it before I gave up on it.

I still haven’t played any of the games in the Half Life series past the original generation, so I don’t really know if these are any good or not, but they probably are.

8:56 PM CST: Brian… something. And we’ve hit our second masturbation joke… and the first Wii = genitals joke of the evening.

9:00 PM CST: Studio of the Year goes to Harmonix. Making marginally talented game players think they’re super talented rockers. If only I’d thought of it first…

9:02 PM CST: Tia Carrere, a bit less hot than I remember her. Introducing Kid Rock for the second band performance of the evening. It’s a little early, I don’t have to use the restroom again yet.

9:05 PM CST: Please let the Kid Rock medley end soon, I’ve run out of things to throw through my TV.

9:11 PM CST: Hot Girls with Cheat Codes. One kid of hot girl talking about a cheat code for a game I don’t have.

9:12 PM CST: Patton Oswalt introducing the most addicting game (fueled by Mountain Dew). Love product placement.

9:14 PM CST: Wii Sports got a nomination, even though it came out last year, and the Burning Crusade didn’t get a mention. Weird. Halo 3 wins, no surprise here. It also won Best Multiplayer Game, way to consolidate the show.

9:16 PM CST: Some exclusive Red vs. Blue footage. I never found these guys very funny.

9:17 PM CST: An ‘Opposing Viewpoints’ sketch. Meh.

9:18 PM CST: Border Lands footage. From the footage, I don’t have any idea what this game’s about.

9:20 PM CST: Finally get to hear Video Games Live. Doing a tribute to ‘classic video games’, which sounds pretty good, but doesn’t include any games made after Tetris.

9:28 PM CST: Don King in a video game? Oh Lord. He’s here to present the award for Best Rhythm Game. And we’re rife with fart jokes.

9:30 PM CST: Rock Band beats out the two Guitar Hero nominees, and get Best Soundtrack. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t care less about any of the nominees in either of the categories. Mostly because I’m not a rhythm game player.

9:32 PM CST: Oh crap! A surprise introduction of the Foo Fighters again. They haven’t improved in the last hour. Time to get a refill of my delicious beverage.

9:40 PM CST: The head of the UFC, apparently there to announce some more announcers. I’d probably know more about them if I followed UFC.

9:42 PM CST: Talking about the preponderance of World War 2 games, and a Wikipedia joke.

9:43 PM CST: Best Shooter Game, did Halo 3 get nominated for every category? Call of Duty 4 wins, unexpectedly.

9:45 PM CST: Two people I’ve never heard of talking about a game that I don’t care about in the slightest. ‘Prototype’? Looks like it might be fun for a few minutes.

9:50 PM CST: Two more people that I’ve never heard of here to introduce some footage for Little Big Planet. I’d probably know who these people are if I spent less time with the video games and more time with the movies and tvs. Not likely.

9:53 PM CST: Finally time for the ‘most important award of the evening’, Game of the Year.

9:56 PM CST: Bioshock wins, also won Best XBox 360 Game and Best Original Soundtrack. I’m pretty glad that the viewers only voted on one category, otherwise all of the categories Halo 3 was in, it would have won. Ah, and we get to see the Gamecock guys.

9:57 PM CST: And one last look at the mostly nude womens. Gratuitous at this point, I think. Looks like we’re not going to get to see the kill screen on Donkey Kong that they’ve been building up to all night.

9:59 PM CST: And we’re finally done. It’s amazing to me that they find ways to feature less and less video game information each year.

This Sunday marks the 5th annual Spike TV Video Game Awards. Honestly, I’m shocked that the show has lasted so long, given that historically it’s been nothing short of a two hour commercial, geared to people who think they’re hardcore gamers because they ‘play teh Haloz (LOL!)’.

Nonetheless, I’ll be tuning in, mostly so I can see what the ‘normies’ think about video games and the people that play them, and, barring equipment failure, liveblogging it here.

A while back I linked to a contest in which classic video game characters battled it out in a series of ‘who would win a fight between…’ hypotheticals. Each year GameFAQs does a similar exercise, but it’s for fun and prizes.

In years past, the contest would consist of a single-elimination tournament where two ‘combatants’ would go up for voting and whichever one got the most votes would ‘win’ and move on to the next round. I’ve participated in filling out the brackets and trying to predict who would win the thing in years past, but never actually won anything. This year, though, I decided to pass on the competition. It was changed slightly to feature four characters per day with the two highest performing characters going on to the next round.

Too many variables for me.

Imagine my surprise a couple of weeks later when the voting rolls around to the finals and I see that this venerable icon has made it to the Big Dance:

I checked the poll results and see that not only was it winning, but it was winning by a significant margin. I chuckled, threw another vote on the pile, and went on my way. Today, it’s official. The tetrimino has overcome the odds and beat out heavyweights like Mario and spiky-headed melancholy guy Cloud.

I’m equal parts amazed, saddened, and amused. It’s a bizarre emotion to be sure.

If you’ve registered for this site and have never done anything, you’ve been banned. Plead your case if you like.

Starting immediately, I’m removing the Sitemeter statistics from the sidebar. The information was only kind of helpful, but digging around today I noticed that at some point Sitemeter has begun sending out tracking cookies along with the bit of code required. The tracking cookie is fairly low-risk, it tracks some of the sites you go to on the Internet, but it is something that needs to be made known, and was pushed out without my knowledge or permission, which is very wrong.

Apologies to the two or three of you that looked at the statistics, I may have other publicly-available stats at some point. No tracking cookies required. You can get more info here if you wish.

Nearly 5 years ago, I wrote a piece about my perception that video games are getting easier, and implied that the degrading difficulty makes the games less rewarding to complete. I’ll admit that it’s supremely frustrating to make it to an end boss or a particularly tough snag and lose a hundred times (or more) in a row, but the draught of elation you enjoy when you finally clear it is made all the sweeter when it’s chasing so many mugs of bitter defeat.

Games that provide a genuine challenge are one of the main reasons I like to keep my old systems around. The games and their tasks present a set of goals to achieve rather than a ‘to-do’ list on your tour of the virtual game world, slogging through the elements that break up the story.

There is a rather lengthy feature over at Gamasutra with a retrospective on some of the most difficult games and what they can teach us about designing games today. Though he paints games like Defender in a more favorable light than I would he makes a lot of good points. I particularly liked this bit:

“But this is not to say that games must be easy. The impulse to make video games easier can be traced to a fundamental change in perception over what a game should be. The older school of thought, which dates back and beyond the days of Space Invaders to the era of pinball, is that a game should measure the player’s skill. Arcade games, in fact, must make it difficult for a player to last for any great length of time in order to keep money coming into the coin box. The newer concept is that a game should provide an experience to the player. The player is to feel like some character, or like he’s participating in a story, or that he’s making some difference in a fictional realm.”

Of course, there is room for both. Indigo Prophecy wasn’t hard in the slightest, but still very good, and by all accounts Ninja Gaiden was supremely difficult while simultaneously a whole lot of fun.

The article is certainly worth a read, especially if mentions one of my favorite overlooked games, Mischief Makers.

Cross-posting from my other site today so that this story will get a few more eyeballs. Enjoy!

While not technically a game, the XBand modem was certainly a unique piece of hardware that deserves recognition.

The XBand itself was a large purple cartridge that stuck out of your Super NES by about twice the amount that a regular cartridge did, and you put a game on the top of it, creating an impressive tower of plastic. Once you turned on the system, you had several options at your disposal: a buddy list, newsletters, email, and a matchup service, plus several more sundry activities that I’m not going to go into here.

The feature that I used most frequently was the game matchup feature. You could choose to search for an opponent either in your local calling area or nationwide. If there was an opponent waiting to play someone in the same game you were seeking with, then your SNES would dial up their SNES, you would connect, and play would begin. Sure, that doesn’t sound too impressive now, but this was before most people had even heard of the Internet, much less had access to it outside of their local library. The system, it should be noted, did not use the Internet at all, but rather directly dialed your opponent. This was fairly important as it helped reduce latency (the time between when you press the buttons and when it appears on the screen), but caused two big problems in my house:

1. When I was in the queue, folks would dial my number to play. If I didn’t tell everyone in the house what I was doing, there was a near 100% chance that someone would answer the phone, completely screwing up the connection.
2. While dialing out, I could disable call waiting by prepending a sequence of numbers to my dial-out number. This was fine unless I had to wait on a call. When someone called me, I had no way to disable call-waiting. This meant that inevitably someone would call, there would be beeps on the line, and I would get disconnected

Each match you won gave you a certain amount of points, these points weren’t really for anything except for giving you some meaningless ranking on your profile screen that only you could see. Unless, that is, you had access to the Internet. The site, which is now long-defunct, allowed you to look up players by name and see their stats. It was pretty bare-bones, but pretty useful for seeing if the person that trounced you in Game X was a veteran or just getting started.

There was a fair selection of games supported by the service, though the only ones I ever played were Super Mario Kart, Kirby’s Avalanche, Killer Instinct, and Super Street Fighter II. There were also several sports games like Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball and NBA Jam, but I couldn’t imagine tying up the phone line for the length of time it would take to complete just one matchup in those games. Late in the life of the service, support for Super Mario World and Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past was added, though neither allowed you to play the games. Mario let you dial up a random user and chat with them with the built in chat interface (think Instant Messenger with only one person available at a time), and Zelda allowed you to compete with someone else in a silly maze game. These late additions, in hindsight, were probably meant to bolster the use of the system.

Even at its peak, which is right about when I joined, I had trouble finding people to play with. There were virtually no other players in my local area, there were two other then the three I made buy one, and searching nationwide took upwards of 10 minutes to find an opponent, if I could find one at all. After a couple years, the service tanked and the company was absorbed by MPlayer, who was, in turn absorbed by GameSpy. The system was immediately shut down, and now exists only in the memories of those that played it. If you look hard enough, though, you’ll find the occasional player whose eyes will light up at the mention of the ground-breaking service.

I made a fairly significant update to the innards of the site today, and am still ironing out some of the nagging issues. If you want, you can let me know if you find something broken.

To-do list:

• Fix the captchas
• fix the images not showing up on the posts
• tweak the stylesheets (partially done)

Destructiod ‘writer’ Reverend Anthony has a piece up today pining the use of live actors in video games. Live actors are able to convey a greater range of emotion than traditional animated characters can, and as far as we’ve come in representing characters, they’re still plainly virtual. Throwing in live actors, if done right, can make the game seem more ‘real’.

Human performances, by their very nature, have the potential for a greater, more realistic range of expression than any virtual performers can or will have for at least the next ten years (Alyx Vance, and all other female protagonists who resemble her notwithstanding).

Of the innumerable games that I’ve played, I can only think of two that I spent any significant time with that had full motion sequences with actual live actors: The Dame Was Loaded and Don’t Quit Your Day Job, both of which I’ve written about in the past. Those two games are just about as far from each other on the spectrum as you can get.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job it easily one of the worst games I’ve ever played. For a game about comedy, it somehow managed to be almost completely unfunny. The full-motion bits consisted of various comedians telling a couple of jokes to the hucksters just off camera, who would throw out a few chuckles. To be fair, I haven’t played the game in several years, so the only joke I really remember was some comedian that I’ve not heard of before or since remarking about how much space was on the CD (like he was actually in the computer!) and that he was going to take a leak inside my computer.

Gold. (Get it? It’s a double entendre that I’m not going to bother explaining. Almost as funny as this game.)

Taking a completely different approach is The Dame Was Loaded. This game used full-screen photographs intertwined with full screen video footage to tell a surprisingly compelling detective story. The screenshots of the game hardly do it justice. The game ran in 256 colors and the individual frames look pretty atrocious. Animated, though, they look acceptable. The entire game is a point-and-click adventure seen through the eyes of the main character. The actors were a bit overdramatic and the solutions to some of the issues gravitated toward the obtuse more often than not, but the game did an admirable job of drawing the player in.

The obvious question, then, becomes ‘Were these games enhanced by the inclusion of video, and would the absence of the video diminish them in any way?’

In the case of Don’t Quit Your Day Job, humor aside, the game is certainly enhanced by having the actors in it. In a game about stand-up comedy starring stand-up comics, having the actual comics make appearances in the game made it feel more authentic. In The Dame Was Loaded, I couldn’t see the game realized in any other way.

Why is that? Is it that when CD-ROM technology was brand new that we just needed ways to fill up the disk? Is it perhaps that games, even now, are still woefully unable to render an actor with photo-realism in real time? I’d say it’s probably due to both of those factors. No matter how good an artist or animator is, usually scenes in games just look slightly wrong. Though this can be mitigated somewhat with better in-game physics.

Done well, games with live actors can be quite good, and it’s quite a shame that they’ve fallen from favor in recent years. They tended to be limited in scope, and typically quite short, but their quirkiness cannot be doubted. And I’m a sucker for quirky.

Link! (Destructoid)

Gamasutra has a quite lengthy article up detailing the history of one of the most inexplicably addictive games to be spawned from the mind of Sid Meier, Civilization.

Civilization is the game that is responsible for me wearing a smooth spot in my Super NES Mouse pad, and was the game I spent the most time with on the system. It’s amazing to me that the game has still managed to maintain that level of quality and addictiveness after so many years an iterations.

Link! (Gamasutra)