The Sandbox

This article at CNN points out something that most gamers have known for a long time, that games can be great ways to connect with other people, that they can foster good social relationships, instead of being the tools of isolation that they're accused of being.

The au courant love to dish on the PS3: sales have been less than hoped for, Sony's losing money on each console, Kutaragi was moved out as CEO and chairman, and the vaunted performance over its rivals hasn't been as much of a differentiation as hoped. It has produced insecure fanboys, and fanboys who mock them.

But what's the real problem?

No, it's not a wireless guitar for playing the most excellent Guitar Hero. It's the Messenger Kit for XBox360. Thirty bucks, and if Microsoft is smart, they'll quickly make it standard in all XBox360s.

Why standard? Because then developers will actually develop for it. Whole genres of multiplayer games open up when you have a keyboard to chat: games where lots of people want to talk, and network performance makes voice a non-starter. Now please excuse me while I go get a contract to put the Infocom adventures on XBox Live...

Yes, I should be posting about E3: it's the biggest video game show in the US, and it's going on right now. Even though it has been moved to a gas station bathroom in Santa Monica, apparently, it's still a big deal. No more roaming for unknown gems in the wilds that were Kentia Hall anymore....

Anyway, on the heels of my last but one post, which was on the heels of Rob's post, about video games and their effects, yet another researcher has come out saying that violent video games may be good for some kids.

I made a post over at Tech Talk, comparing Sony and Apple, and how Sony falters in delivering cool gadgets, while Apple tends to not do so. It's mostly techy and not gamey, but has liberal mentions of the PS3 and PSP, so there's some gaming info there, if you want to check it out.

I may as well describe what I would have hoped for from the new PSP, and why I would think it would be better than what Sony has delivered.

CBS will, at noon today, be broadcasting the 2007 World Series of Video Games. Featured games will include Guitar Hero II and Fight Night Round 3, games that can be simply watched as if they were musical performances or traditional boxing matches respectively. I would go so far as to say that some folks would reasonably be able to tune in to see FNR3 and not immediately know it was a video game, the graphics being as good as they are.

But what does this mean for games? Or CBS? Anything?

Ten months after release, Sony has sold its millionth Playstation 3, something that I don't think anyone – anyone not a PS3 developer, that is – would have predicted twelve months ago. But the release of Hot Shots Golf 5 spiked sales, and the PS3 has only taken one month longer to one million sales than the Zune took.

I am one of the few people I know to have bought a PS3, and I have to admit that I'm enough of a geek that one of the turning points was that it's mega-fast at processing Folding@home data. Having a game machine able to devote spare cycles to helping find cures for Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease, that's something real. That, and Virtua Fighter 5.

Author's Note: yes, I know the 360 version of VF5 will have full online play. But that's a value of "better" that doesn't include "playable right now".

Someone told me that Halo 3 has hit the stores. I've been too busy playing Team Fortress 2 to notice...

Halo 3 has such hype, and such an economic swirl around it, that one would be forgiven if one thought that it represents the apex of action gaming. But I'm one of those folks that can't get past the fact that handheld-controller FPS gamers are dilettantes compared to mouse-and-keyboard FPS gamers. Maybe I'm an uninformed fogey, but from the brouhaha I heard about the ethical ramifications of the XCM XFPS adapter on the XBox online FPS community, I'm guessing that the FPS community at large thinks the same thing.

TF2 is my new game for the next little while.

An old coworker (or, the shibboleth of an old newsgroup of mine, cow orker), Jason Booth, has blogged about his low opinion of the PS3, and was inundated with a lot of Sony defenders saying all kinds of, well, web-forumish things.

Trouble is, he's right, guys. Face up to it.

Because I finally bought Heavenly Sword, and it's beautiful. I don't care about whether or not it's short, because with a new baby in the house, I don't really have time to play a super long game. I am very impressed with the art direction and animation, and I have enjoyed every minute of the game so far.

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.

From Gamasutra.com: for the second month in a row, the PS3 has outsold the XBox360 in North America. The interesting thing is that I'm guessing this has a lot more to do with the fact that it's pretty much the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there, or at least the cheapest that anyone knows about, because as you can see on the software chart at Gamasutra, there's only one PS3 game in the top ten, compared to six XBox titles. And the PS3 title, Devil May Cry 4, is behind the XBox version.

This says folks aren't seriously gaming on the PS3s they're buying, they're finally buying hi-def DVDs players, now that the format war is over.

[via 1up] Microsoft may be looking to unload its crushing hardware cost burden onto other folks, and license other companies to produce XBox consoles. As an exercise in expanding the brand, it's a brilliant move: XBox consoles are expensive, and Microsoft has already established a serious presence with the console and with XBox Live. Now they can continue to make the pie bigger by inviting hardware competition in increasing the platform's spread, driving costs down, and hopefully resulting in better quality (not to mention quieter, sheesh) consoles. Let's hope it happens.

So my hand is sort of cramped up from playing Guitar Hero: On Tour for the DS, and it just got me thinking about the world of input devices, and how this is really a new golden age of interesting ways of interacting with games.