The Sandbox

The big news, broken on the weekend I assume to be digested for the market on Monday, is that Vivendi and Activision have merged, and will be known as Activision Blizzard, leveraging the two names in this transaction that mean anything good at all to gamers.

Eighteen billion dollar deal. Are you ready for Guitar Hero: Eurovision Song Contest? Me neither.

Finally grabbed Bioware's first major RPG (let's not include Bioshock here) since being swallowed by Microsoft.

If anyone has played the Knights of the Old Republic games, he/she will feel an immediate and continuous sense of deja vu. The feel is almost exactly the same, if the gameplay has significant differences.

The Good:
-- Excellent animations, especially in conversation modes; the lip sync is phenomenal
-- Strong writing and voice acting
-- Deep story elements and character interactions
-- Interesting and ultimately satisfying combat system (although difficult to get into)
-- The sense of really being a part of a larger universe
-- Fun character development
-- Good role-playing options

The other day, I blogged about the impressive revenues of the game industry - and suggested that Hollywood, currently embroiled in a strike over digital distribution, could have something to learn.

Seems I'm not alone. Today, the bloggers over at Spong hip us to a story in Variety, which details just this point. Spong makes an interesting case for why the game industry consistently cashes in on sequels, which are sometimes such a dicey, and expensive, proposition for movie studios: "While sequels are a pricey business for Hollywood, they're efficient for games. This is borne out by nine out of 10 of this year's top games in the US being sequels, compared to only five out of ten films being follow-ups. While as gamers we might find that depressing, studios clearly see this as profitable."

The Salem witch hunt over videogames never ceases to amaze me. Don't the critics understand that videogames - even the violent ones - aren't real? That two players shooting each other in multiplayer Call of Duty 4 are just engaged in a 21st century version of cops 'n robbers? Other expressions of youth culture - rock 'n roll, comics, Dungeons and Dragons - were once scapegoated for corrupting kiddies, but now of course those fears seem absurd. But the moral crusade against game wages on - on, at least, until Generation Pong takes over.

In the meantime, word comes this week of politicians calling for more transparency in how the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, the vidgame industry's voluntary group, assigns ratings to games. Why aren't they making the same request of film and TV ratings boards? Why should the government be involved in this at all? For an ever-erudite view on this trend, keep tabs on the high-quality blog: GamePolitics.com Also, the documentary history on videogames continues tonight on the Discovery channel at 8pm EST (I think I'm in this episode that covers violent games and Doom, but I may be wrong).

Gametap.com has Daikatana available to play for free until December 31st, which I discovered reading this retrospective linked from CNN. (I hope having Daikatana FOR FREE isn't indicative of the quality of Gametap, which I haven't tried. If Daikatana, in 2007, is supposed to be a draw, there's another fiasco in the offing, here.) Released in 2000 with expectations and press that really didn't get equalled until perhaps Halo 3, it did nothing close to the business it was required to do. Which everyone who was part of the industry knew, at the time.

Game companies are filled with people who are good at math, and when a game is delayed for as long as Daikatana was, with as many people employed by Ion Storm, in the most expensive office space in Dallas,... it was an obvious disaster, awaiting realization. That fiasco assessment doesn't even begin to address what was already known about the game prior to release: its design was supposed to be revolutionary and amazing, but "Superfly Johnson"? Really? What possible interest could there be in a design where "Superfly Johnson" is not an ironic character?

A sad, cautionary lesson, Ion Storm.

So, I continue to plug away at the sprawling Mass Effect.

Last night, during a session of medium length, at the end of a fierce and difficult battle, just before I was able to save my game...

KER-ZIPPPPP!

...down goes the Xbox 360 for the count.

Admittedly, I had been worried listening, as I had been, to the constant hum and whine of the machine whenever Mass Effect was in the drive -- worried indeed about overheating the unit.

So now I'm a couple weeks into Rock Band play, and it duly rocks indeed. I haven't had this much fun in a multiplayer game since the first time I played Marathon deathmatch in the mid-90s. As you've probably heard, the game lets you play in a virtual band on "real" instrument-shaped controllers: drums, guitar, bass, mike. You have to play in sync with the cartoon band on screen. At the right moment, when you're, say, mid-way through the Pixies' "Wave of Mutilation," you actually feel like you're in the band, like you're making the music. It's weirdly transporting, and maybe the most convincing alternate reality experience around.

There are problems too. Despite some of the marketing, this game is not newbie-friendly. It still takes gamer instincts to grok the hand/eye coordination, etc. I wish the developers had put in some options below the Easy tier, particularly songs for kids. I mean, come on, shouldn't there be a few Hannah Montana songs in the game? This is actually a frequent gripe of mine - that games are too hard for non-gamers, and keep the audience from growing. The vocalist in Rock Band probably has the lowest barrier of entry. Me? I'm all about the guitar and drums. Although taking the bass on "Gigantic" would be tempting, if only that Pixies tune was in the mix.

Courtesy the intrepid bloggers at Kotaku, Aeropause is running a sort of science fair style analysis on the wattage usage of Sony's Playstation 3, Nintendo's Wii, and Microsoft's Xbox 360.

Want more power consumption goods? Check out this report on HCW.

I'm sitting here in a hotel room in Shreveport - the unlikely home to one of the greatest start-up stories in gaming history, id Software. Not far from downtown, the future creators of Doom and Quake got their start here moonlighting on games while working at Softdisk, a software developer that had been here since the 1980s. Commander Keen, id's first big shareware hit, was made using "borrowed" computers from Softdisk, which the guys - including John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, John Romero, and Tom Hall - brought to their lake house late into the night. In this interview excerpt for my book Masters of Doom, artist Adrian Carmack tells me how he got lured into the moonlighting work - and drafted into id's start-up plans:

Perspective on my opinions which follow:

I got back into digital gaming some 11 years ago because of the evolution of the crpg into a viable narrative delivery system with fluid and engrossing gameplay. Fallout, Baldurs Gate, Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2 (hated diablo at the time) were the springboards back into the virtualities of the computer and console.

I deeply enjoyed KotOR (ME's more than spiritual predecessor) for its storytelling and character building/role-playing aspects. Obviously, the jedi powers were also fun.

I truly disliked KotOR II mostly because of its clunkiness and the total gameplay rehash of the original.

I never got into Jade Empire for the same reasons. Plus, it was FAR too easy and the combat was goofy and unbalanced.

Gamespot reports that the rumors of a new MMORPG in the works have been semi-confirmed by a Blizzard employee. Job postings have been out since early spring, prompting much speculation.

Now that we know it's an MMO, we can narrow our guesses: new intellectual property? World of Starcraft? World of Diablo? What we can be relatively sure of is that there will be no huge gameplay advances, but the final product will be polished, addictive and downright irresistable.

A few years ago, I visited the Institute for Creative Technologies - an Army-funded research and development facility in southern California. The ICT unites top Hollywood screenwriters and vidgame developers with military personnel to create game-like simulations for education and training (and, in some cases, commercial distribution). Yes, it's a wild place. And of course the military has been making use of games for training for years - from a mod of the 1980s arcade title Battlezone to one of Doom.

Now comes word via Gamespot that the Army is sinking even deeper into vidgame development The service is opening the Training and Doctrine Command’s (TRADOC) Project Office for Gaming, dedicated to making games for soldier training. I find this nugget from the story in the Training and Simulation journal particularly interesting: "TPO Gaming is creating an Army simulation tool kit that allows users to build and customize their own training scenarios without needing a contractor to do it for them. 'We will empower that soldier to build his own scenario rapidly so he can train for his specified task,' said Robert Bowen, civilian chief of TPO Gaming.'"

Looking for the real vidgame deathmatch this holiday season?

Kotaku has been chronicling the battle of the music games: Activision's Guitar Hero III and MTV's Rock Band. The issue: getting GH III controllers to work with Rock Band. And apparently the companies just can't get along on this.

Personally, I really really need this to happen because GH III has wireless controllers and Rock Band - though I love it - has turned my living room into an intestinal tangle of cords. Seriously, the room is a mess - cables everywhere, people tripping, stuff getting unplugged. We need wireless Rock Band, now please.

Highs:
Part 1
The next-genning of 2 amazing games from past years: Resident Evil 4 and Ninja Gaiden. The Wii version of RE4 so greatly improved my experience that it became almost a whole new game altogether. Gone was the struggle with the controls; welcome was a new depth of immersion and appreciation.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma probably didn't blow away a lot of people here who had already played through a couple of upgrades, but for me it was like experiencing the whole thing all over from the beginning -- with the same sense of wonder and achievement. NG's one of those games where, when you "beat" it, you can really say you've accomplished something. Seems like gaming, for better and worse, is moving away from this difficulty model.

You are, if you like, able to download a teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever. iD has released Quakes 1, 2, 3, and 4, and Doom 3, in the time it has taken for this Duke Nukem sequel to generate something that might be a trailer with some game assets. The first version of Battlefield came along several years into the DNF vigil, and it has several sequels. And of course, no release year is given: just "Stay Tuned". For a game that will be a first-person shooter, which is a well-solved game genre, it's just mystifying what could possibly be at issue preventing release, aside from, "No one has actually been working on it, at all."

I'm sort of at a loss. I mean, picking on DNF as "vaporware" is the gaming industry's equivalent of jokes about airline food: there's absolutely nothing worth saying about it anymore. So why do I post? I'm just weirded out by the release of a trailer that does absolutely nothing to suggest that anything has changed about DNF. Nothing is imminent, that I can tell, nothing is clearer. It's just silly.

Now's the season for "best of" lists, so here's my top ten list:

Here's something to chew over during the holidays courtesy of Kotaku, the boom in sales in Japan of Sony's PSP handheld.

And also note the rule of Nintendo's DS and Wii. Next year will be an interesting one for Sony as some long awaited innovative offerings - LittleBigPlanet and Home - finally hit.

Stay tuned.

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.

Okay, this is just awesome - and a great way to blow your holiday time - making fake labels for fake Atari 2600 games.

One of my corny hopes for 2008 is that there will be more strides to revive/retain gaming history. It's been encouraging to see platforms such as the Xbox 360 (Live Arcade) and Nintendo Wii (virtual console) find a way to distribute classic titles. But I want it all. We should be able to quickly access/play any vidgame ever made, just as we can do the same for books now on Amazon. Of course there are emulators around for PC gamers, but to me it's not user-friendly enough. Without quick plug n' play retro gaming we risk losing - and forgetting - the titles that made this medium great.