The Sandbox

On the heels of Rob's post about the possibility of a DSM classification for "video game addiction", Destructoid recently found an article on the research of Oregon psychiatrist Jerald Block which concluded that the denial of violent games to teen killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold was a catalyst for what became the Columbine massacre.

As someone who has worked on several FPS games, I completely understand this conclusion. FPS games are widely misunderstood in the popular media.

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.

Someone named Tuncer has a blog on Inside Mac Games, and he has entered an opinion in the recent, very minor dustup between Valve and the Mac gaming community over HL2. Gabe made some comment to the effect of, "Apple is hard to work with," to which Tuncer says that Valve made an "outrageous" demand of $1m upfront for taking the project on, that the only thing here is greed greed greed.

Um, yeah. Tuncer, the clue phone is ringing, and I think it's for you.

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.

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.

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.

Found on Kotaku, Disbarment with Extreme Prejudice, that's the recommendation by the Florida Bar, for Jack Thompson. OK, "enhanced disbarment" is the term, but whatever, I'm a violent game designer, and I am trying to immolate your very soul with my overtly destructive vocabulary. Rawr!

So it goes to the Florida Supreme Court, for review on September 2nd: mark your calendars, I'm sure it will be a colorful countdown come late August. It doesn't look good for Thompson, who declared that the reviewing judge did not have the authority to rule over him and walked out on the hearing. "Do too," she said, unecclesiastically.