Exposing my socks to the world

An article on Kotaku just made me remember that five years ago today I bought a copy of the original Neverwinter Nights. Technically, since I pre-bought the game, I bought it 5 years ago as of a couple of days ago, but let’s not split hairs. I still have the spiral-bound manual and cloth mapkin. Five years later, I’ve repurchased the game and some expansions, and still haven’t made it past Act 2 (out of 5) of the main Quest, and haven’t touched any of the expansions’ content. But I did fool around with the campaign editor for several hours before I realized that I would need to learn a second language to make the scripting work.

Link!Bioware’s NWN Site
Link! (Kotaku)

Back in 1993 Hard Drivin’ introduced a ‘Ghost Mode’ feature that would allow you to race against your previous run. Since I never liked the game all that much, I was not aware of this. I was also not aware that a patent was filed and subsequently granted for the now ubiquitous feature, which must be licensed to anyone wanting to use the feature.

““It’s more of a unique [patent] than other things I’ve seen,” said Debbie Minardi, vice president of corporate development at Global VR. Minardi acquired one of those dozen or so ghosting patent licenses for a “Shadow Attack” mode in the arcade version of Need for Speed: Underground.

While Minardi acknowledges that the ghost mode is more original than some of the “you’ve got to be kidding me” patents she’s come across, she says it still probably doesn’t deserve full legal protection. “If it was me I’d never have given them a patent on it,” she said. Taking that conviction to court, though, is another matter entirely. “Patents like these probably are easy enough to argue against, but it’s expensive,” she said.”

Link! to the full Gamasutra article.

Apparently Scott Steinberg from Sega issued a statement to the press that he was “”concerned” about the “creative depth of the Wii pool.””

He’s since clarified his statements:

“That said, it’s a shared responsibility and opportunity for the whole industry to take advantage of the possibilities of the Wii. If we don’t realise its true potential, we will have missed a great opportunity to expand creatively and that is what I was cautioning against in the Reuters interview.”

Sounds like sufficiently vague backpedaling.

Link! to full article. (Gamesindustry.biz)

According to an interesting interpretation of an interview over at Spong, it’s being alleged that Mr. Miyamoto views Link from the Legend of Zelda series as somebody he’d like to hook his sister up with.

“Speaking in a recent interview, Miyamoto, the game’s general producer, said, “Finally, some words to my sister (laughs). Link is cute, really; particularly this Link with cat eyes.””

That’s not really what I got from those words, but I am also not a linguist.

Link! (Ha!)

The International Herald Tribune has an article up exploring the recent trend toward less violent, more all-ages friendly video games. The article is poorly written, but does bring up some interesting points.

“A number of top manufacturers recently created special departments to chase after potential family players. And they will stop at nothing to make a breakthrough, even using their own mothers, as one game developer, Igor Manceau, confessed.

“When my mother played our game she was fine and had fun,” said Manceau, who is developing “Word Coach” for Ubisoft from the company’s Canadian studios in Montreal. “But she needed me there to go through the game and select each one. So we started to focus on accessibility after that.””

Link! (via GoNintendo)