Alive since 2004
I love playing games with friends. There is something about playing a game with someone next to you, or even accross the country, who you are both going towards a common goal (be it against you, or a cooporativly). Some of my most memorable experiences playing have others tightly involved with how my experience was shaped and how the memory was formed.
What does multi-player mean to me? Why should you even care? Continue reading “Bring along your friend – Pt. 1”
Here is a fun flash game that is hard to explain, but it’s kind of a puzzle on how to get the little red ball to get the treasure box at the end. Very entertaining.
I saw this posted over on slashdot. The author talks of how games today are made with so many hands that having one “auteur” behind the whole game can be misleading and that in looking for authorship for a modern game one must look past a quick name on the box.
I’d agree that with some games and some game houses there is more of a colaboative effort into how the game is made and how it eventually reaches the market. With companies like Valve and Blizzard, we recognize the combined efforts of the staff to reach that goal, without having an actuall producer or author to credit the success of the title. This lessens the effect of an author as an artist, but then in a way with a game house like the above you can claim that the game house as a collective has the right to be the “auteur”.
He asks some great questions at the end:
Are there really different types of authorship with contemporary videogames? How should we categorize, if we should? What do we need to know to talk about authors (or auteurs)?
How do we distinguish the true vision behind a game and really whether or not there really is a singular vision anymore that brings a project to fruition. I think there are still a few people out there who are capable to do so, and there are probably more that no one has ever heard of behind the developer logos. You’ll hear endlessly about Hideo Kojima, Peter Molyneux, Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto. About their vision for the games that they’ve made. In some cases it just ended up being their name on the box to sell the product.
I don’t see much changing though. There will be personalities who control and guide their vision to completion and there will be those who will guide a collaboative team to a stunning vision as well. It means though that through this new game journalisim we’ll have to not count on literary models to construct how we talk about games, but in the end create a new way to talk about them. It’s coming, and I’m looking forward to reading it.
– A history of Mario Sprites, from his Donkey Kong roots to his more ugly pixelated recent Mario vs. Donkey Kong game. Some good commentary, but just fun to see all the different versions of our favorite plumber.
– SpaceShipOne made it up and back safely. This is great to watch. Their next flight is scheduled for October 4th and then the X-Prize will be theirs. Fun part is, a friend of mine works for Dynon Avionics, who has some of their systems in the SpaceShipOne.
– Here’s an excellent guide to where trojans and malware hide on you system. Pretty much I’m going to check my system when I get the chance. AdAware on gets so much of the junk.
– From RandomURL, comes this link to a electoral vote predictor based upon how the polls are in the different states. I see this changing as the debates go on, but time will tell. Breaking my own rule on not talking about politics, when is middle America going to realize that our president lied to them so he could go to war and change American foriegn policy and the world view of us forever? On another note, this guy makes arguments against the electoral college. He’s got some points, but then everyone has their arguments.
I found an excellent article summing up software copy protection. It’s written by Brian Hook, who’s site has a number of well written articles that I may cover later. But onto copy protection.
Like most of us, I love digital technology. The possibilities that it presents for the future are amazing, and the ability to preserve the past and make it available is also one of my favoite features of the digital medium. With the growth of the download speeds in the US with broadband connections, the ability to get intellectual property (music, movies, games, software in general) for free over the net has increased. This is all well known and well documented, and also better covered by thousands of sources out there. Moving on.
Brian Hook’s article covers software protection. He mentions at the beginning of his article that most any computer user has “pirated” at least $50 worth of software sometime in their user experience. Probably a copy of MS Office, or getting a copy of Warcraft II from your dorm buddy. Thinking back, I was way over that $50 before I was even a teenager. My friends and I readily traded back and forth games and their schemes for copy protection (usually some sort of manual look up (oh do I remember the days of “Page 32, Paragraph 3, Line 4, Word 13”)). It was natural almost. It’s not that we didn’t buy games, but it was generally understood that if we bought games, somehow our friends had copies too.
Fast forward to the 90’s where games got bigger (whoa, multi-media) and making copies was unfeasable, and my dialup was certianly not going to get me the latest Tie Fighter expansion. I bought during this period, after playing demos of games that I was interested in. Quake, Diablo and more. I played, knew it worked well on my system, and wanted more, so I bought it. I had the disposable income to do so in a few ways.
Nowadays though, sigh, I wish I could say I bought all of the software on my system. It’s not the case, and while I know I’m only one of hundreds of thousands with something I didn’t buy on my system, I know there is room for improvement. Taking a look around these days, if I need a new application to help get something done, I’ve started to look on Sourceforge first to see if there is an open source option for the program I’m interested in. Be it an FTP program, browser or random editing tool. I love this option. Also as my system ages, I like the option of demos for games. Independant software developers have always been good at this and I love the trend.
Back to the article, Brian does a good job of covering excuses, complaints and reasons of software piracy, but as well covers how improvements might be made to prevent losses, and as well as prevent alienating their paying user base with intrusive copy protection schemes and authorizing features. Excellent read, and worth the time.
– Curmudgeon Gamer has posted the final article in their series covering the Midway Arcade Treasures Vol. 1. The author has gone and covered in depth each of the games in the collection, and presents relevent strategy.
– As if India’s software growth continuing wasn’t completely obvious.
– Apperently Intel think’s the the Interweb is dying and can only be saved by them!
– Even better, a new self-propogating computer “Worm now installs a packet sniffer so it can send back information, like passwords and logins. Great.
– Game commercials from the 80’s on for practicaly everything! Fun for nostalgia and more.
So a while back I used to have a website I called JAPAN (Just another page about Nintendo), and I helped a few people out by hosting their recently dumped NES games. Was great fun. TheRedEye and I even had a Christmas spectacular together. Eventually things happened, I lost my original hosting, then lost my new hosting and JAPAN was retired.
Fast forward to today, and I’m hosting a few French language games for Ranma, from Sardius’ board.
JAPAN – I give you the return. Sad.
Lost Levels is back again with a new article. Frank Cifaldi delivers a look as the game Secret Ties.
Created in a time of many Ninja Gaiden clones, it plays and looks very similar, but ultimately it offers nothing really new. Still it’s a great look back in time and it’s another lost game rescued from obscurity and brought to light. Enjoy.
Found Liberated Games.
So you might have heard that some companies have released some of their game data to the wild world. Things like source code (Quake) or even whole games (Grand Theft Auto). The site owner, jvm, has collected quite a few games, and links to resources. He’s looking for more, and is open to suggestions. Go and check it out and try out some great games that companies have freed for you to enjoy.
I saw on 1up that Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo’s new marketing guru, was speaking at the Ziff Davis Games Summit. 1up was kind enough to publish the transcription of the speach too. How kind.
I think I like this Reggie. His speach of course is very pro-Nintendo, but still maintains an air of “we don’t think the PSP is bad, we just think ours is going to be better.” He covers some of they “whys” of the Game Boy’s past success, and what he belives the philosophy is for the new system. Convergence is the key, or at least the prediction. People want multiple things in one small package, the problem is no one has been able to do it right so far. Both the PSP with it’s video and music playback and the DS and it’s dual screens and stylus gaming, are interesting concepts that will make the next few years exciting.
