Curmudgeon Gamer

9 Out of 10 Zombies Prefer the Wii

2008-07-17T14:09:00.003-04:00

As I noted last November, the Wii is the console of choice for zombie games. Now it will be getting yet another: Dead Rising.

After the ugly Lost Planet port and no Dead Rising for the PS3, I feel a bit burned by Capcom. On the other hand, I can now kill about a dozen zombie birds with one stone:

Resident Evil 4
Umbrella Chronicles
House of the Dead 2 & 3
Dead Rising
My older son's undying desire to play Mario Kart, Smash Bros., and/or Super Mario Galaxy.

I guess I'll just start saving my pennies now and plan for a Wii this fall sometime.

Ninja Gaiden II Can't Take Care of Itself

2008-06-17T23:30:00.001-04:00

If you ask me, gamers are a notoriously fickle bunch that hop around whatever niche fad is currently popular at any given time, flicking aimlessly around their singular objective like a moth to a flame - only this moth will threaten to kill you and make some sort of racist remark because you said whatever franchise he's currently cherishing isn't necessarily a divine blessing. This leads to some games being revered above and beyond the merit which caused their popularity in the first place. I would quite comfortably lump the original Ninja Gaiden into this category: a thumb-aching, testosterone-fuelled misogynistic charge that you'll enjoy playing but feel terribly embarrassed if a (hypothetically, as this is unlikely to happen to any of us) girl walked into the room when you were watching a cutscene.

The trouble is, Ninja Gaiden II has recently arrived and has reminded us that at the end of the day it's all just a game. People aren't happy with this.

There's lots of bandying around the word "cheap" to describe the whole affair. To some extent, this is true. Ninja Gaiden II is a victim of its own progress; in an attempt to appeal to the current trend of regenerating life bars and a greater sense of not dying every six seconds, your average encounter will end with your life bar filling up to a fair amount of its capacity. How, then, do Tecmo infuse their concoction with a sense of difficulty? By upping the amount of damage you'll be taking, and also turning the speed of the game all the way up to eleven. Things will fly at you in this game, and they'll take your life with it. But it's okay, you'll recover. Think Bruce Willis in Die Hard donning a skin-tight black ninja suit and you're in the right area. There's other things to consider, too. Money is now so easy to come by it's likely being fed intravenously into the game from the bank of Nintendo. There's also enough weaponry in the game that, come the denouement, you'll have enough stock to take on the in-game merchant at his own business.

All this adds up to create a different game from the Ninja Gaiden that came before. You can't blitz through a level without taking any damage and you can't cling onto your healing items like they're family heirlooms. You're going to be forced to use them. Maybe this takes some of the finesse away, but it creates a rougher, more brutal experience. Considering that limbs get lopped off in this game quicker I'll get killed in a game of Halo 3 online I can safety say that brutal is what the developers were aiming for. Every weapon and item in your arsenal is valuable and you're going to need to employ it all. There's also enough video evidence on the Ninja Cinema mode to prove that skill and tactics are still part of the game. The biggest flaw to Ninja Gaiden II is that, because of associations with its predecessor, it will be punished for trying out something new. That, and the Armadillo boss is a real sod.

Civ MMO, please no.

2008-06-13T18:59:00.008-04:00

From a Q&A on Gamedaily.com:

4. I've read about your interest in possibly working on an MMO. What is your next genre of game going to be? Are you going to be making a new kind of game in the future?

[Sid Meier's Answer:] I'm exploring lots of exciting ideas right now. A Civ MMO is a really intriguing idea and we're spending time thinking about how we could make it the fun addictive experience Civ players expect...

Please heavens no. I realize there are people who play Civ against each other, but it seems to me that "chess by mail" is the better metaphor for how Civ should be played than, well, Quake or an RTS game or, for the sake of picking a non-video game activity, basketball.

Perhaps there could be a Firaxis social network (though I hate the catchphrase) that encourages folks to find buddies that'll play Civ by email, but much more than that and you're creating a substantially different game. MMO does not lend itself to "the fun addictive experience Civ players expect".

And I'll not resist adding this tidbit, which anyone who wrote a post titled Civilization -- should be part of the curriculum five and a half years ago is nearly forced to share.

8. What is the most interesting 'story' you have heard from a school that is using Civ to teach students about history?

[SM's Answer:] It is pretty amazing how many teachers around the world are using Civ in the classroom to teach everything from history to communications to economics. We were hearing from so many of them that we decided to create a section on Firaxis.com called the Educator's Exchange which provides a place for teachers to share stories and ideas about using Civ in the classroom...

Quick Update: After reading through Bob's latest silent Sterno on that older post I linked to, above (even though I believe I've now managed to convince him to stop commenting on my posts), let me just clarify that the most intriguing defense for putting Civ into the classroom is that it is the perfect means of introducing the topic of circularity in the development of social mores on the grand political scale. That is, the history of *this* world is reflected in Civ's design, which then seems to "accurately" recreate that which inspired the game. Capiche? Maybe zakk was on to something when he mentioned SMAC? Nah. ;^D

Tempus Fugit

2008-06-12T13:00:00.002-04:00

As I was picking up my Metal Gear Solid 4 today at GameStop, I hit the next-door Best Buy which has a great clearance bin that gets refilled with games about every two weeks. I found $5 copies of Hot Shots Tennis (PS2), Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror (PS2), and Sega Rally Revo (PSP) and headed up to the counter to pay. As I'm swiping my card, I notice that my hand is right next to a new, boxed, silver-finish GameCube.

On the front of the GameCube box is a hand-made price tag. It says:

$49.99
** VINTAGE **

Not even seven years old yet...

Stuntman: Fixed

2008-06-03T23:53:00.004-04:00

Stuntman on the PS2 was a clever but flawed game. It provided cinematic moments that you can't get in the racing genre, but lengthy loading times crushed the joy from the experience. Ruffin knew it would appeal to me, and it did, but I never finished it.

With Stuntman: Ignition, a sequel on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the load times are gone. Two seconds are required to restart a stunt run, and I can indulge the game's invitation to perfectionism. It is also a lot prettier.

The PSN demo that went up last year was uninviting. The full game gives a better introduction and I'm enjoying it.

On the other hand, if you haven't played the game before and it tries to download the latest update, the system registers and error and drops back to the PS3 system menu. Playing once and restarting fixes that issue.

Single Player is Dead. Long live Single Player!

2008-05-31T18:35:00.001-04:00

I'm not an impartial commentator on much, and I won't hide the fact that I loathe Phil Harrison's stupid bald head more than waking up in the morning and finding out that I'm out of milk. So when I'm just casually perusing the Internet and I find out that he's declaring that the single player way of life is over, I see red. Here's what he said to Eurogamer in some recent interview:

Alone in the Dark is a beautifully crafted single-player adventure game. I don't think the industry is going to make many more of those. I just don't think consumers want to be playing games that don't have some kind of network connectivity to them, or some kind of community embedded in them, or some kind of extension available through downloadable content.

Before we all start raiding the cutlery draw in an eager dash to perform DIY lobotomies by sticking forks through our ears (it's required to seamlessly integrate with the majority of Xbox Live players) it's probably worth mulling over what exactly Harrison is banging on about. No more beautifully crafted narrative adventures that unfold at a linear pace? I like a bit of Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 online as much as the next guy, but the idea of never seeing a "beautifully crafted single-player adventure" again absolutely terrifies me. He can't be right, can he?

I hate to say it, but on some level I think he is. With news that even Resident Evil 5 wants to tap into the co-op trend, I definitely get a feel that the days of sitting on your own and enjoying something in a similar way as you would sit and enjoy a book are over. Social gaming is reaching a new epoch, so it's only a natural extension that everything tries to get on board. But, then, I think about it a little more. Harrison is pretty much just doing what he usually does and making a grand sweeping statement that declares something that is far from the truth. I presume he's basically predicting that everything will come with stuff like online scoreboards and uploadable replays. I don't think slapping a few of those in everything heralds the end of the "beautifully crafted single-player adventure".

Lovable beady eyed Harrison is hardly a prophet here. When I predicted that eighty percent of all games in the next two years would use a cover system after playing Gears of War for the first time, I didn't think I was making a clever and astute piece of social commentary: after spending most of my life playing videogames I was fully aware what a horribly derivative and unimaginative world they usually are. The rise in online co-op is probably just another piece that your average - and let's face it, Atari are pretty much the epitome of average - developer has drained from the popularity of Gears of War and Halo 3. At least those expensive focus groups are good for something, I guess.

Invisiclues were awesome

2008-05-27T21:10:00.003-04:00

Why don't today's games have in-game hint systems? Hard to believe it's beyond the capabilities of the programmers.

And, not to give away the evil ideas, but why not sell an in-game guide as DLC over Xbox Live Marketplace or the PlayStation Store? For a modest (and I mean modest) price, it might be worth it not to have to get up from my comfy chair, truck two feet to the computer, and fire up GameFAQs.

The appearance of impartiality

2008-05-27T12:38:00.004-04:00

That's what vanishes when people sign on to do things like this:

Nintendo's recent ploy, in the UK at least, is to require reviewers to visit the 'Nintendo Flat' in London, a place where one can book slots to review titles for a period of time (depending on what slots are left over from the prioritised lifestyle mags and newspapers) from the comfort of one of the company's armchairs.

Of course it's not just Nintendo -- the commentary in question is really about Rockstar and GTA4 -- but this really does bring the point home. I've come to rely more and more on blogs and NeoGAF poster comments before buying a game.

There was a time when I loaded up sites like GameSpot and IGN to check the latest reviews. I can't recall the last time I did that. Instead, I rely on word of mouth. Sometimes a demo suffices (Uncharted) or reputation (my MGS4 preorder).

Super Stardust HD Redux

2008-05-25T22:47:00.002-04:00

Super Stardust HD on the PS3 has an upgrade available for $5. It adds a mode called Endless, which is pretty much what it sounds like: endless waves of random enemies and asteroids.

Think of it as Robotron: 2084 played on a sphere with continuous waves of random enemies and difficulty that ramps steeply the longer you survive. The AI is completely ruthless, and willing to drop roughly eleventy billion rocks and lightning fast enemies on you at one time if that's what it takes to kill you. Oh, you will die cheap, humiliating deaths but the game is just fair enough to leave you thinking it's your own fault for dying.

Which is to say, I love it.

I thought SSHD was pretty much distilled arcade action, but I was wrong. This is better -- a lot better. I'm not sure I'll ever play the other modes ever again, much as I can't play Twisted Metal 2 ever again without homing napalm.

If you own a PS3 and love fast arcade action games in the vein of Robotron, you owe it to yourself to buy Super Stardust HD. Buy it with the Solo Pack upgrade and get one of the very best experiences the PS3 has to offer.

Wii-nner, Wii-nner, Chicken Dii-nner!

2008-05-23T21:16:00.004-04:00

Doing some trawling through GameRankings, I ran across this advertisement.Now the phrase "wii-nner, wii-nner, chicken dii-nner" won't stop repeating in my head. Argh.

I think I'll be able to do without the Wii for a while longer now...

Incidentally, links to this page.

Coincidence of the day

2008-05-22T15:33:00.003-04:00

Just as my commentary proposing artificial scarcity is published, Joe Keiser at Next-Gen.biz publishes an interview in which the general manager of Xbox Live, Marc Whitten, says they will begin delisting "underperforming XBLA games".

I guess we may get some information on that scarcity issue after all...

Oh yeah! Bioshock PS3.

2008-05-22T10:59:00.003-04:00

About flippin' time. Of all the exclusives on the Xbox 360, this one was the most frustrating to me. Now it looks like I'll get my chance to play later this year.

The other exclusives that bug me are Pac-Man: Championship Edition (which apparently has zero chance of ever making it to another platform) and Ace Combat 6. The latter I suspect will make the jump to the PS3 later this year too, perhaps as Ace Combat 7 (a la Ridge Racer 6 and 7).

Artificial Scarcity in Online Distribution

2008-05-22T10:21:00.004-04:00

As a consumer, I hate the idea, but I thought it made for a fun gedanken experiment. Happily Gamasutra liked the idea enough to publish it. (Finally a piece that doesn't have a single graph!)

Joystiq finds the Composite Curmudgeon

2008-05-22T09:00:00.001-04:00

Nega-review: Grand Theft Auto IV - Joystiq:

'GTA IV has its flaws as a game.' (1) 'The flow of the game basically goes like this: you watch a cutscene, someone in the cutscene says that someone has done them wrong, you're told they need to be taught a lesson, and then you get in a car and go teach them the lesson. At that point another cinema is triggered and the process repeats. ... it can definitely become a little repetitive.' (2)

And thus begins my first experience with a Nega-review, where Kyle Orland puts together a composite of all of the negative-esque points and quotes from reviews for a game at major gaming sites for you to read in a single sitting. It's an incredibly enjoyable and informative piece even though, as he says later, "it was actually relatively hard to pull negative quotes from most of the reviews of GTA IV."

If you haven't stumbled over it before I did, head over and take a quick read.

Wrongheaded Microsoft

2008-05-21T21:29:00.004-04:00

Yes, Microsoft has the right to choose what GamerTags are allowed and which are not. I don't dispute that. It's their system, after all.

But you don't have to choose to cater to the very lowest common denominator, the poorly informed (at best, stupid at worst). If a man's name happens to be Richard Gaywood and he uses that for his nickname online, then for crying out loud honor his request. And if someone complains, then do your due diligence, determine if it's the guy's real name, and then explain to complainant that "it's the dude's name, now you know the story behind it, please go back to playing games".

Honestly, Microsoft missed the opportunity to set a great example here and they blew it. If this keeps happening (the most recent case before this one was a ban of theGAYERGamer), all the backpedaling in the world won't fix it. After all, Microsoft took a $1 billion charge toward supporting all those red-ring-of-death systems out there (and largely calmed the storm) but that still won't stop people from wondering out loud whether Microsoft's next system after the Xbox 360 will have the same quality issues.

Also, someone with connections needs to ask what happens to PSN IDs like this. (Does Mr. Gaywood have a PS3? If they'd allow his name, Sony should send him one and offer him the PSN ID of his choice.)

I'm really kind of in favor of allowing theGAYERGamer too, but I can at least understand their complaint. The problem is that Microsoft contends it contains "sexual innuendo" since the term gay has sexual connotations for a lot of people. I stopped thinking of it that way some time ago.

A Year Passes

2008-05-19T01:04:00.003-04:00

Last year I started writing about the data released about the videogame industry every month by the NPD Group. The first article was about the May 2007 data, released in mid-June. I just finished the April 2008 data, which means I've done a full year in this line of work. If you care to look back at a year's worth of this kind of stuff, here you go:

May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007 - Hardware and Software
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December and Overview of 2007 - Hardware and Software
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008

Doesn't get much more exciting than that.

Review: Defender of the Crown (GBA)

2008-05-15T11:27:00.003-04:00

For $3, I couldn't pass up a used copy of Defender of the Crown for the GBA. The classic game I'd loved as a youngster, now in handheld form? Brilliant.

I'm happy to say that the nostalgia comes through nearly unspoiled. The graphics remind me of the Amiga version whose screenshots I'd envied back when I played the Commodore 64 version until the disk drive wore slam out. The music is more modern, and I think I actually prefer the SID version.

As for gameplay, it's exactly the same. You play a little RISK-like strategery, claiming land and building an army. Occasionally you raid castles, try to rescue a damsel, or joust at a tournament. (Ok, there is something new in the tournament. I don't recall ever bashing my opponent in a one-on-one mace battle.) Ultimately, you want to take over the entire country and claim the crown.

The random setbacks (losing a territory, money, or sabotaged catapults) feel a little too frequent for my tastes. And the swordfighting I found to be frustratingly hard. In the original there were only two opponents, now there are ... four? Forget it, I'll stay a bachelor until I'm king. Also, how the heck does jousting work? It seems completely random to me.

I've seen some reviews complain that this game could have used some extras. Ok, sure, paying full price I can understand the disappointment. On the other hand, it makes a perfect cheap game that is way easier to pull out and play than my Commodore 128 system.

(Or, you could just play the official versions online. For essentially free.)

Mirror's Edge Teardown

2008-05-15T10:49:00.004-04:00

Mirror's Edge, a new title from Electronic Arts, looks really amazing to me. I think its new take on the parkour action genre has the potential to make Ubisoft's upcoming Prince of Persia game look stale. (Caveat: We've not seen the new PoP, so we can come back and compare once Ubisoft's game is shown.) When I look at the games I've really enjoyed in the past couple of years, they're mostly third-person action games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and the God of War series. I hope Mirror's Edge will be a fresh title to add to that list.

Anyway, the official trailer is a lot of fun to watch, and even more fun is this teardown of the trailer by GameTrailers.

Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

The words I wish I got to define

2008-05-15T03:37:00.003-04:00

So, a little while ago I posted a query on Curmudgeon Gamer, namely What is Ludology? This was an honest question, but asked with ulterior motives (more on that later). And the answers I got were perfectly reasonable.

But then I had to get all fancy-pants and search the Web. As always, big mistake. Not accidental porn big, but big.

At this point, I will digress by explaining those ulterior motives.

When I was young and naive, I came across a brilliantly excitingly named branch of mathematics called "Game Theory". Naturally I said to myself, "holy crap! Pretty darn smart of me to become a mathematician -- now I'll get to play games for a living!"

In case you aren't aware, "Game Theory" is a bait-and-switch ruse right up there with "Greenland". Somehow they managed to take the field of strategic game-playing and restrict it only to games no one would ever want to play. (Apparently there was some analysis of actual games in there at the beginning, but that was swiftly excised, lest anyone actually enjoy themselves.) Even worse, it turns out Game Theory is actually useful in economics, so there are hundreds of books on super-boring "Game Theory" that are actually not about games at all, just taunting me.

Now, as time went on, my interest in games has actually increased, and I desperately want to make a living from analyzing and studying (and playing) games. Real games, that are fun. But I had learned that "Game Theory" was not that.

So while explicitly I was asking "What is ludology?", implicitly I was pleading "Ludology is the immensely fun and cool analysis and study (and play) of games, right? And someone will pay me to be a ludologist?" I mean, how could it not be? "Ludo" is from the Latin for game (ludus), and "-ology" means "study of", so ludology must mean study of games, which is what I desperately want an official legitimate-type word for, right? (Put your hands down, eager beavers -- we'll get to it!)

Now let's return to that horrible "search the Web" idea.

It turns out "ludology" is in fact a pretty widely used term in the field of "game studies", which is a catchall term which presumably includes analysis of the play of games, but also refers to things like game sociology, game criticism & history, game computer science, and pretty much anything that some academic wants to publish that refers to a game. (How game studies should relate to the design of actual games is a topic of some debate.)

But of course ludology doesn't mean what I want it to mean. Oh no. Ludology is both a field and an ideological position, in opposition to the field/ideological position of narratology. Narratology is meant to encompass the study of essentially anything with a story, abstracted from its medium (so movies and books and soap operas and arguably videogames all use narratives, and can all be understood under the narratology umbrella). Ludology pushes back, saying that games are fundamentally _not_ just narratives. Just like narratives occur in different media, so do games (board games, card games, tv game shows, videogames, etc.) and instead of just lumping them in with the narratives, the ludologists say, the play and rule elements of games set them apart and they should have their own umbrella field that discusses the nature of games (abstracted from the medium) the same way narratology treats narratives. And that field is ludology. (The perspectives with horrible -ology names doesn't necessarily stop there: here's an article promoting a "paradigmological" approach.)

While the five word definition of "ludology" is still "analysis and study of games", the meaning behind that is very different from what _I_ was talking about. It asserts a political standpoint (games aren't narratives), and because of that standpoint it is necessarily chiefly concerned with the ontology of games, which is a fancy way to say trying to answer the question "what is a game?" Furthermore, the conflict between ludology and narratology as disciplines pulls them both further away from usefully relating to actual games, which of course require both gameplay and story.)

I understand that any "-ology" needs to make some effort addressing what they're all about, but that's Chapter One of the Intro to -ology book. (Remember reading the "What is Life?" section of your biology book?) The rest is the interesting stuff. You don't take archaeology and spend the whole time learning about "what is old stuff? what makes this the old stuff we study and that the old stuff we don't study?"

Oh, and am I the only one who's annoyed by taking a random word and putting "-ology" at the end of it? "Narratology" is obviously made up, and the natural counterpart "gameology" is equally stupid (no offense intended). But who thought digging up a Latin word to put before the (Greek) -ology would make it more acceptable?

Thankfully, their failing is my last shot. Someone stole Game Theory, Ludology seemed like a good idea but someone stole that too. However, "pediology" would be more consistently Greek -- although people might think it has to do with studying children and/or feet ("paidia", I am told, means "a childish game or amusement"). Equally confusing would be "scholeology", but perhaps even more appropriate: according to footnote 7 on page 5 of this paper (PDF link), the Latin ludus might have been used as a conscious parallel to the Greek schole, which referred both to leisure time and to school.

So, I coined it, I get to define it: I'm a scholeologist, which means that I analyze and study forms of games and game rule systems, both in terms of objective strategies and results and in terms of entertainment value and human-game interaction. I don't study the role of games in society or the society of gamers (what I would call game anthropology), although we might have useful things to say to each other; and I don't study games solely as vehicles for learning and cognition, although that's exactly what I'll tell the funding bodies when I apply for grants, if they'll buy it.

There might be ludologists who would say what I do is ludology (certainly it's not narratology -- I plan to never use the word "Aristotelian" again, and they seem to like it), and maybe I'll come around, but for the moment it sounds too political and "the nature of game-ness" for me. If the hypothesis "the positive effects of rubber-banding such as in Mario Kart for casual players can be achieved with less negative impressions from competitive players if more information is hidden from the players" isn't ludology, then I'm happy to make it scholeology. (I don't know if it's a true hypothesis or not -- possible future paper? :) )

Just in case there aren't enough links in this post, and/or you got here because of a conjunction of search terms, you might want a summary bibliography of books from various sides of game studies. For that, check out this excerpt from yet another book.

NYT Crosswords vs CrossworDS

2008-05-14T06:31:00.005-04:00

It's possible to take it for granted these days that, if it's a casual kind of game made for the DS and it's not published by Nintendo, then it's a sucky piece of trashware produced solely to cash in on the system's huge user base. And conversely, that Nintendo has produced a similar game that is much better.

That had been the case with Nintendogs (as opposed to Catz, Dogz, Horsez, and the horrifying "Babyz"), with the severely underrated Clubhouse Games, with the two Brain Age games... heck, the Sudoku applet in Brain Age is so clearly better than every other version of the puzzle on the DS that it brings one to a kind of despair. Why is Nintendo's Sudoku minigame so well-made when others' full Sudoku applications are so crappy? Putting these things together is not brain surgery. It's enough to make one wonder if Nintendo doesn't have a patent on non-stupid number grid entry on portable gaming computers (USPTO # 951827364).*

It would be easy to assume that Nintendo's version would be better than Majesco's. It is not, by a long shot.

From looking at the games, initial impressions would seem to indicate the usual first-party upstaging. Crossword DS has a brilliant interface nearly as good as Brain Age Sudoku, and with better character recognition despite having 16 more glyphs to distinguish. It's not obvious at first that Majesco's game HAS character recognition. Furthermore, that game's color schemes range an odious gamut from ugly to unreadable, while Nintendo notices that a crossword game that's not black boxes on white squares is a slight against the memory of Arthur Wynne.

Majesco's game commits a few other grave offenses, although they're only obvious compared to Nintendo's interface. NYT Crosswords shows only Across or Down clues at a time; Crosswords DS shows them both at once. NYT uses a thin-stemmed, seedy newsprint typeface for clues and what looks like hateful Comic Sans for entered letters; Crosswords DS uses sharp, thick-lined sans-serif characters for both. NYT uses annoying button assignments that make it far too easy to accidentally receive an irrevocable hint, and only offers one type of hint at that; Crosswords DS uses the book orientation popularized by Brain Age, ignores button presses in favor of a visual interface, and will give stuck players the option of seeing a single letter, a whole word, or even providing alternate, easier clues, ala GAMES Magazine's World's Most Ornery Crosswords. And while both programs offer more than a thousand puzzles, Crosswords DS also provides Word Search puzzles and Anagrams.

And yet, of the two, despite Nintendo's typical meticulous attention to usability, their product is far inferior where it counts. Ultimately, in a collection of crosswords, the quality of the puzzles is
paramount. The New York Times is just about the most respected source of puzzles out there, and Majesco's inclusion of several years of their output shows that, while they may not be the best at putting together an interface, they care about the puzzles themselves. And once gotten used to, the interface isn't really so bad.

The handwriting recognition particularly turns out to be pretty good when used, even if the drawing area is restricted to a small input box. The ugliness of the interface can be remedied by entering a code. This essential code is "up up down down B B Y Y," and instead of being hidden away on GameFAQs, it should be printed in large, boldface type on the front of the very box, just beneath the title. Thankfully, once entered it's saved to the game file, allowing players to forget the low-contrast sins of the original color scheme.

While NYT Crosswords features years of top-notch puzzles, ranging in difficulty from a relaxing pastime to uncommonly challenging, Crosswords DS's puzzles... well, to be honest, I don't really know how hard they become. You see, in the same way that Brain Age Sudoku starts out with only a selection of low and medium-difficulty puzzles available and a bunch more that must be unlocked, Crosswords DS also forces players to begin with easier puzzles before letting him tackle harder ones.

This wouldn't be so bad, except that the easy puzzles are grievously simple! We're talking 4x4 grids here, progressing up to 11x11 for the harder ones available at first. You should know that these puzzles are included in the game's puzzle count, so when the back of the box says over 1,000 puzzles, a good percentage of them is this slight fare. Even the New York Times Monday puzzles, the easiest of the lot in Majesco's title, are full-sized grids.

Furthermore, while the NYT clues are filled with the wit and cunning for which the Times crosswords are famous, Nintendo's clues honestly read like something better suited for elementary school students. Fill-in-the-blank clues are over-common, as well as slipshod "partial word" clues along the lines of "the farmer in the d _ _ _". While it's possible, should the player persevere through the featherweight stuff to get to the harder puzzles, that the package redeems itself, it is unlikely to match the New York Times' Will Shortz-edited output.

Yet even one of the subgames in Nintendo's package fall prey to this kind of shoddyness. The very first Anagrams puzzle accepts, and in fact requires, "lase," which is a real if obscure word defined by Answers.com in regards to lasers, yet rejects "ale." The Word Searches seem to be okay, although they are hampered by the fact that they're word searches, the decaffeinated coffee of word puzzles.

Were this a perfect world, or at least one less encumbered by exclusive licensing, we would have a game that combined Nintendo's wonderful interface with Majesco's formidable puzzle assortment. It's possible that the problems with Nintendo's game has to do with them trying to play to both kid and adult audiences, which would explain the near-beer clues and word search inclusion. I usually dispute claims that Nintendo's efforts to keep most of their games friendly to children ruins them for adults. For insecure adults, maybe. But in this case it certainly has.

* Don't look that number up; it's a joke.

Videogames -- still not evil

2008-05-13T09:51:00.003-04:00

Just a little link to direct your panicked parent friends to: in what must be a surprise to everyone, a big 'spensive study found no evidence that violent video games make kids violent. Who'da thunk it?

Chains of Olympus for PS2 for Xmas '08

2008-05-08T09:24:00.003-04:00

This isn't an announcement, but a prediction. Provided the porting of Daxter from the PSP to the PS2 is true (see here, originally seen here), then Sony has to be seriously considering porting God of War: Chains of Olympus to the PS2 as well. Keep in mind that both Daxter and God of War on the PSP share some engine code, so a port of the former would accelerate a port of the latter.

According to NPD's figures, Chains of Olympus sold well over 300,000 copies in its first month on the market. A PS2 version would easily sell a million and would complement a $99 PS2 model quite well.

Given that I completed the PSP game twice (something I almost never do for long-form action games), I'd probably end up picking up the PS2 port. So make that a million copies, plus one.

In an ideal world, Sony would also get someone to port the game to the PS3 and sell it for $15 on PSN. But this is Sony we're talking about, so it will never happen.

Giving It Away (or: Why the State of North Carolina now owns a lot more videogames)

2008-05-05T20:27:00.004-04:00

My alma mater, NCSU, has a videogame collection. What they have covers newer systems and mostly popular games. So when they sent out requests for more games recently, I responded.

Last week I gave nearly every Atari 2600 and Atari 7800 game that I own to them. In total 120 games, many with boxes and manuals, which I've listed below for the curious.

There are some items there that are probably worth a few dollars. I don't keep up with the scene any more, so I don't know how much a Limited Edition Okie Dokie cartridge goes for nowadays. (Mine looked like this, but with #49 on it.) Nor how much a special edition of Qb (#93) fetches on eBay, complete in wood box with source listing and the original broken version circuit boards. When I was collecting, it was a big deal to get games like Track & Field, KLAX (2600, boxed), and Road Runner. I suspect demand is lower today, but at least NCSU has them without the fuss.

I only regret that I sold my two Swordquest Waterworld cartridges (both found in the wild, one with instructions and comic) and Motorodeo and way back when. I even had a Shuttle Oribter -- I wish I could have given that to NCSU too, but it was long ago liquidated.

In the coming years, I plan to donate the rest of my collection -- NES, Genesis, SNES, Jaguar, Lynx, PlayStation, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2. Those later systems will be more difficult, surprisingly. Whereas I spent a lot of time collecting Atari games with which I had little emotional connection, it's quite another thing to think of donating my original copy of Tomb Raider for the PS1 or my copy of Metal Gear Solid 3 for the PlayStation 2. [Note: Originally the word "selling" was used above. I meant "donating", as the text now reflects. The items I've given to NCSU were donated, and I declined offers of money to "defray costs" of transporting the items to Raleigh in person.]

I'm not sure on a timeframe, but my dwindling free time makes having this library in my home less desirable. And, I can visit it any time I want. There is even talk of some public events, to which I would be an invited guest. Neat.

Oh, and I did keep one Atari 2600 cartridge. Which one? The Stellalist Beta Cartridge. It's special twice over: my dear friend, Ruffin, gave it to me and it has code on it that I wrote. As far as I know it's not available anymore.

If you're interested in what I just gave away, just click here to see the inventory sheet.

Video game canons and flesh colored band-aids

2008-05-01T11:46:00.001-04:00

I was obviously asleep when the announcement was made that this stab at a video game canon was announced last year:

Mr. Lowood and the four members of his committee — the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist — announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time:

Okay, I can pick at the list. Anybody can pick out a list. Did they screw up? Sure. Where's KABOOM!? (kidding on that one -- for now)

What concerns me is that these guys are, well, just that. All white guys. Sure, it's a pretty good crosssection of dark haired white guys. There's a short one. One that's not ashamed of his poor vision. Two -- no, on second glance, three -- major facial hair decisions. Still, as humans go, it's a pretty diversity challenged group on its face, har har.

What else unites the Superfriends of Ludological Canonization? That they all decided not to make their rationalizations for picking these ten easily Googleable [by me].

In any event, even if white guys too largely made the games and white guys too largely play/ed the games, is that really a good reason that white guys should pick the games? I imagine these guys would likely find my dimestore critique here uncontroverstial, but then why not branch out before announcing your list at the Game Developers' Conference and posing for the NY Freakin' Register of the US Times?

Insert smilie.

GTA4 lockups: what did reviewers play?

2008-04-29T21:21:00.002-04:00

I let my 60Gb PS3 install GTA4 tonight while I fixed dinner. When I checked on it later, it had run through the intro and locked up after giving control over to the player. (I wasn't there, so I didn't see it happen.) Apparently lockups are happening with some regularity to a lot of players and not just on PS3.

The whole situation reminds me of how Champions of Norrath on the PS2 locked up for a fair number of consumers, but no reviewers mentioned it. Seemed odd to me at the time and I did some asking around to find out why.

Turns out reviewers didn't review the same kind of disc sold in stores. One reviewer told me he reviewed Champs o' Norrath on two single-layer DVDs as opposed to the dual-layer DVDs sold to us commoners.

Makes me wonder if the same thing happened here. The reviews are pretty much all pegging the 10 on the review-o-meter, but I haven't heard about the reviews talking about lockups like folks are seeing on normal systems. If I had the time, I'd start asking around -- someone should.

Meanwhile, I hard reset my PS3 and played about 15 minutes up to the first save point. So far so good. Now if I only had time to play more, but real life has me elsewhere. Ah well.