Exposing my socks to the world

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.