Sign up to receive a free hand, because touching is good and creeping out your friends and family is probably a lot more fun than Pokémon Dash. Plus you can send in movies you make with your new hand by May 6th and win a DS or money.
Wednesday, March 30th, 2005
A post by Alice made me remember this crazy Korean golf game called Pangya that I played a bit of some time ago. It’s pretty fun for awhile as long as you don’t mind getting pounded into the ground by people willing to pay money to upgrade their characters (yes, real money). I found out about it via the Something Awful Forums, and someone there made The Quick and Shitty on Pangya for us lazy gaijin. Ah yes, and if you don’t want to wait in lines at Fileplanet you can download it direct here.
Tuesday, March 29th, 2005
Ars Technica, The Website You Can Trust Because The Name Is All Full of Latin And Shit™, has just put up an in-depth review of the Sony PSP. If you’ve got a hankering for some mobile gaming and want to know where to blow your hard-earned tuppence, take a look.
Science fiction author Cory Doctorow, who you may know from the popular group blog Boing Boing, will be discussing his newest book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in the online game Second Life sometime in July. Yes, in-game, as in he’ll be chatting just like any other player and be subject to the OMGs and ROFLs of the common folk. In case you haven’t heard of Second Life, here’s a blurb from Wikipedia:
Second Life is an open-ended virtual world created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab. It is similar to There, another such world created around the same time, in that one of its primary focuses is socialization, but the similarity ends there. The brain child of former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale, Second Life gives its users (referred to as residents) tools to shape its world. A large majority of the content in the Second Life world is user-created, and one of the unique things about Second Life is that users retain the rights to the objects they create.
Additionally, as an author considerably more hip to the notion of filesharing, Doctorow sent a text file to this guy to allow players to read it in-game. In line with the player-created content theme, he’s running a contest to see who can come up with the best in-game representation of the book’s text, as decided by the community.
Next up, J.D. Salinger will be holding a reading of his newest work in City of Heroes.
Monday, March 28th, 2005
Mario and friends have always inhabited a very special place in the hearts of many players of games, giving rise to creations in almost any medium you can imagine. Flash music videos are pretty popular since a popular song + sprites rockin’ out = forwarded to everybody you know and their loved ones. Kotaku pointed to a Mario Bros. rendition of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. That’s great and all, but better things are afoot at Something Awful’s Flash Tub.
Exhibit A: Super Mario Playset – some genius, some madness, some a little of both, all courtesy of a Flash kit. Just make sure you see “Happy Halloween”, “TNT”, and “Average Man”.
Exhibit B: Mario Paint Music Contest – who knew such great works lay hidden in such a simple exterior? Mario Paint was one of those games I always pined for but knowing now that my creations could never have compared to these makes me glad I never had the chance to create my mockeries of sound and vision.
Saturday, March 26th, 2005
If you’re like me and you regularly drown yourself with video game coverage, both in the form of websites and forums, the PSP’s launch can’t seem like anything but an unqualified success. Reviews for most of the games are positive, the system itself is a stunner… how can it not do great? Conditions out in the real world may not be so rosy, however. IGN has received reports that stock may be sitting on store shelves after anticipation of a flood of demand. And really, with some people camping out in Star Wars fashion outside of the store to get your product, who can blame them?
Maybe these are just the hatas showing up to rain on Sony’s parade. We won’t know for sure until sales figures are released next week and the fanboy flamefests with comparisons to the Nintendo DS can begin in earnest. It’s one of the few pleasures available to we few too cheap to buy either. For your convenience, here are some quick facts for future reference:
- 500,000 US sales in the first week (source)
- 5 million sales worldwide as of 3/17/05 (source)
- “Touching is good” has yet to become a national catchphrase
- Fourth bullet point
Personally I’m torn. Nintendo seems to be succeeding with the DS in spite of itself with the drought of games, let alone good ones. (I know, I know, they’re coming) Meanwhile the PSP has the sexiness, the hardware muscle, the online, the games, and so much more… but why did it have to take form of: expensive bundle? I just can’t see spending that much on a portable and then dropping more on a decent sized memory stick and some games. At least if sales are flat we may see price drops sooner rather than later, although the gaming public’s ears will collectively perk up once games like the new GTA drop. Also Jack Tretton, SCEA executive, is a cold cold man:
GS: What has the response been to the $249 price point?
JT: Extremely positive. I can be a little bit selfish and bottom-line mindful and say, would it have any impact at all if we went out at $299 on day one? In my opinion it wouldn’t, but I think again talking about this 10-year product life cycle, talking about the big picture well beyond the first million units, we’re trying to seed this to the entire mass-market community, and we really wanted to hit a price point that wasn’t even remotely a barrier. I think the line outside [the Metreon] is a testament to that fact. If we said, “Guys, I’ve got some bad news, it’s going to be an extra $100,” not one person would get out line. I think $249 is a great value.
In the end, if the PSP does fail, at least we’ll all know who to blame.
It certainly took far less time than anyone expected for a web browser to be released for the PSP – there’s already one included with Wipeout Pure, in fact. Uncovering it involved messing around with DNS settings and other geekery you probably don’t care about. Get all the juicy details on the hidden web browser complete with screenshots and video.
Sunday, March 20th, 2005
Greg Kavasin at GameSpot has an interview feature with five of the biggest names in games storytelling:
What would you say to someone who told you that games have universally terrible stories?
Chris Avellone: I’d say game stories can be a little formulaic at times and a little unpolished, but then I would point up at the sky and say, “Holy shit, look at that!” And when they do, I would punch them in the gut, and while they were gasping for breath, I would lean down and go, “You are wrong. There are several games with compelling stories, stories that achieve greater strength because it’s a story you can interact with. Thus, the experience is even more personal than reading a novel, where you are basically watching the characters go about their adventures without any participation from you except flicking your eyes across the page.” At this point, the person would be about to get up, so I would kick them in the shins and then run.
As somebody who has the occasional fantasy of writing stories for games it’s heartening to hear from these people. Much of what they have to say is manna from heaven. Textual gold that is, Texas tea.
Related links:
Tuesday, March 15th, 2005
“There’s nothing new out there!” you say. The Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (right down the street from the Institute of Rainbow and Unicorn Research) says it doesn’t have to be that way: 1 semester + 50-100 games = … well, a lot of games, if nothing else, but I do know that some of these are pretty damn fun in their own way. I could definitely see Square Off getting developed into a commercial-release caliber product. They also have post-mortems for each game on what went right and what went horribly awry. Take these under consideration when you’re crafting the next Katamari Damacy.
Rockstar North, not to be confused with Rockstar Leeds who’d take such affrontery with a stiff upper lip, stormed out of the Game Developers Conference award ceremony after getting shutout, according to the Guardian’s Gamesblog . The subsequent whereabouts of Gabe Newell’s car is still unknown. [via]
