Games! Games! Games!

There is an article on Gamasutra about usability in video games. A lot of the things mentioned are similar to the topics people have been talking about in the web design community for a while now, and I think it’s great that game developers are starting to put more emphasis on the user experience, by that I don’t just mean the game experience but the game as a whole. That’s not to say every developer ignores it’s users but with more and more formulaic games being released (*cough* colour matching games … *cough*) more effort should be put into the user experience. This is one area that indie developers can excel in since it all it costs is a bit of time and patience (and effort).

THQ have shipped Destroy All Humans! for the Sony PS2 and Microsoft Xbox game consoles. Destroy All Humans reverses the usual arcade game roles and allows gamers to play as the alien invader to unleash a wave of destruction on mankind using disintegrator rays, massive explosions all presented with a healthy dose of 1950s paranoia.

The next one is the worst. It is estimated that Sony will sell the PS3 for… $399. That’s £220.72. But let us not forget, we always pay thorugh the nose for consoles. Let’s add the obligatory £80 onto that and we’re looking at paying £300 for a console minus extra control pads and games. So let’s add those. Let us say on launch you buy 2 games and an extra control pad to play multiplayer. Oh and I almost forgot, you’ll want a hard drive to go with that.

Previously announced at last year’s E3, the action RPG Princess Crown, finally has a release date for the PlayStation Portable. Atlus had been planning the release of this game from the time the PSP had debuted.

Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer of Nintendo America, has been singing praises to the Revolution’s controller, and why shouldn’t he? He works for the damn company. However he also stated that key third party developers have seen the mysterious controller and that they were very very excited about it.

Nintendo has recently announced that it’s Next-Gen console, which has been code-named Nintendo Revolution, will not support high-definition. This decision has grouped Nintendo’s fans into two categories: for it, and against it.

In this episode, they test the wireless capabilities of the PSP and the Nintendo Gameboy DS. They actually skydive while playing a game on the Gameboy DS.

HD-DVD and Toshiba seem to have become increasingly desperate in recent weeks and it's become clear that Sony simply aren't interested in making a deal on a unification of the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats. This desperation is partly founded in the knowledge that Sony possesses a killer USP - the Playstation 3, whereas Toshiba has none. Now Toshiba are moving to redress the balance by forming a partnership with Microsoft that will see sharing of ideas and technologies, as well as the joint production of an HD-DVD player.

So I've got a friend who is the uncle with someone working at the offices of Bungie. He refused to tell me what department the guy's in, but apparently he was hired earlier this year and is working on their next project for the Xbox 360. This project is Halo 3.

I think I managed to get a slight sunburn today. We (my department) had our quarterly outing; we went to Magic Mountain. I proved my prowess on the miniature golf course (ha) and we then played arcade games for a couple of hours. I where I work, seriously. How often do you get to take field trips at work, much less field trips that include freedom to drink beer on the clock. I’ve heard that for our big company outing, which is approaching, we might be doing paintball. I’ve never played paintball so I’m kind of hoping that is the activity they choose. Other options include going to a baseball game, going to the Ohio State Fair, or to a theme park.

So, it’s been almost a week since my last post and nothing has really happened. I played video games. The games in question are Battlefield 2 (just the demo) which is fucking amazing, Warcraft III tourney in town, and other RTSes. in case you were wondering I placed 4th in the tournament and 1st in the StarCraft “mini-tournament”. But you don’t care, you want to hear about how the Texas Governor called a reporter a Mo-Fo. Well he did, so I’m gonna go play some more BF2, then some StarCraft, then some UT2K4m, the some C&C Generals, then some Armies of Exigo, then some Kohan II: Kings of War, then some Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, then finally watch Clerks and go to bed.

I think 99.9% of people are not affected by video games. From this news article, however, it appears like this kid did do exactly what one would do in the game. I don’t know of criminal statistics about these types of spree killings. Maybe this is natural. If it is not, then this lawyer has got a strong case, at least in an Alabama civil suit. Prepare for milder video games.

Game consoles just cannot avoid the fate of being hacked to run unlicensed or unauthorized programs on it. We have heard mod PS, PS2, Xbox, etc etc. Now Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) is experiencing the same fate.

Lately I’ve been messing around with MAME, an emulator for arcade games. Sometimes it’s actually more fun to play a series of games and watch it evolve from beginning to end. Like Space Invaders > Galaxian > Galaga Series. And the best part is that you have an infinite amount of quarters.

Gamepolitic has called for a boycott of the Xbox 360 over Microsoft’s compliance with Chinese government censorship and oppression. More details here. Of course, with the Xbox 360 hitting stores months from now, I wouldn’t be surprised if short-term memory proves a major stumbling block over this boycott.

Microsoft has apparently signed a license with NVIDIA allowing the company to use NVIDIA technology within the Xbox 360 console. This is a major piece to the puzzle of whether the Xbox 360 would actually be compatible with older Xbox games. During E3, Microsoft announced that it would offer support for best selling titles on the Xbox 360 but it wasn’t clear how this was going to happen. Now it appears that Microsoft will use NVIDIA libraries to emulate the NVIDIA graphics chipset onthe 360 since the new console uses an ATI chipset. Microsoft will also probably need to run an emulation layer for the Intel processor since the 360 uses triple core Power PC processors. There are rumors that Microsoft will also ship some patched executables for major titles on the Xbox 360 which will allow the older games to run. Over time, many expect Microsoft to offer more patches via Xbox Live.

fully half of the book is an apologetic for video games. i must admit i checked out of the video game world just as it got good, according to him. i really dug the linear-ness of super mario and super ultra mario or whatever came next. although i was the reigning queen of mario-cart in my day (more 3D than the others), my expertise (and interest) stopped when you had to start wandering around in a 360 world with no clear-cut goal, relying on trial and error and the benevolence of strangers to give you tips. it’s now those incredibly complicated, simulated worlds that challenge greater realms of problem solving and cognitive abilities. i certainly believe it. it won’t make me go out and buy a sony playstation (old-dog syndrome), but i’ll concede that the overall effect is a net positive.

A Tokyo adult video maker has put Sony Computer Entertainment in a difficult position by announcing it plans to produce adult-video discs that can be played on Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) game console.

Earlier this week a program was released to allow homebrewed applications to run on the 1.5 version of the PSP. This works really great except for that fact that you have to have two memory sticks to do a swap. Hopefully sometime in the near future (next week, maybe?) someone will come up with a way to use it with just one card. Having all of my content seperated on two cards gets somewhat confusing and annoying.

I went out at lunch today and bought a Nintendo DS, along with Kirby Canvas Curse and Warioware Touched. They’re both amazing games, which I took full advantage of while waiting for my oil to be changed. A little kid sat next to me with his Gameboy Advance SP and stared in awe at me creating rainbow bridges and achieving “burning” status (the phrase coined by Clayton was, “I got burning!"). Actually, there’s a great Penny Arcade comic that accurately depicts the joy received from playing Kirby. You just don’t know until you play… it’s like flat crack, as Jody would say.

MGS4 doesn’t seem to be limited exclusively to the PS3, though. While Kojima states that the game is, at this point, only set for the PS3, he wouldn’t mind porting it to other hardware. However, this would require a large staff and lots of development funds. He also adds that if he were making a game for the Revolution or Xbox 360, he’d want to make something completely different from the Metal Gear Solid series — an original title that fits in with the market for those systems.

I am sure I have expressed many times that I don’t understand gamers. The whole allure of Xbox, PS, etc. just completely fazes me. But I do have a huge interest in A/V-computer convergence, and for this reason I am very excited about XBox 360 and PS3 — something cheap and easy to use, that can (a) do video scaling; (b) serve up media.

Beyond3D has an 11-page behind the scenes look at Xenos, the graphics technology ATI has created for the Xbox 360. The article is fascinating and complicated. If you want a crash course on graphics architecture, read it.

Reading these days is far more difficult to fit in then it was five years ago, due not to my enthusiasm for television or video games (those are minor distractions), but due to the internets. I read far more material starting with an http:// than anything else. This isn’t a bad thing: I read a ton of quality material on the web, and feel I’m better for it. But it’s a different type of reading. There aren’t long, complex, overlapping narratives on the web that compel me to stay on the same web page for two hours. Rather, I read a paragraph or two about a specific subject and then move on. Bloglines and del.icio.us/popular are my home bases, and I read 30 or 40 web articles in the time it takes me to get through 2 chapters in a novel. Reading on the web is episodic, due both to internet conventions (short articles about a singular subject) and content (technical articles, news blurbs, or jokes). It’s less sophisticated than reading good fiction, but more informative in a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of way.

Dude, every kid’s dream day has just arrived: the Redlands, Calif., school district is in the process of designing an “exertainment center” to combat growing levels of obesity by using workout games like Dance Dance Revolution and EyeToy: Play as part of the physical education curriculum. They’re working with local health care facilities to design the center and raise money to install Sony PlayStation units in at least one of the district’s elementary schools, incorporating five to seven different stations to handle classes of 35 students as they game their way into better fitness. We can’t even tell you how gypped we feel right now about all those youthful hours we endured playing capture the flag.

So about a month has passed since E3, and things are looking even more interesting with these new consoles. It turns out that Nintendo isn’t completely behind in the race, as Sony is intending to release the PS3 in Spring ‘06 as well. This is a crucial chance for Nintendo to actually release a console ahead of Sony for once. The rumored specs for the Nintendo machine would put it on par with the XBOX 360; but then again it’s not as if Nintendo has ever let their machines be defined solely by their technical specifications. The N64 and Gamecube both had their deficiencies, but Nintendo was still able to perform some amazing feats with the limited hardware. As an admitted Nintendo fanboy, I hope they take this chance to reclaim some of their former glory.

Today, the Video Game Ombudsman highlighted a great news story about Steve Ballmer’s comments about XBox 2. The article speaks for itself, but I was amazed at how un-hyped he was while hyping his baby. What follows is my interpretation of the events. Please note that some of the quotes are fake.

So today was the day i actually decided to change certain aspects of my lifestyle. Currently I have been browsing the internet for most of the day and playing video games. This is purely due to boredem as i never watch telly. Well Due to this i aint lost weight, like i originally planned, or revised or got any fitter.

Well it looks like the days of running Homebrew on your 1.5 version PSP are finally here. The folks over at ps2dev have released the Swaploit! which allows this. All you need is the exploit file that you can download from the above linked site, and 2 memory cards and you can run homebrew on your 1.5 PSP. Oh, and of course a homebrew app that you would like to run on your PSP!

More and more little computers come on the market in the guise of video games, address books, and video players. With each device comes people that take it upon themselves to push them to the limit of how then can be used. In many cases it takes a little hardware to make it all come together. This is one such case.

The Xport plugs into a Gameboy Advanced and gives you the following:

E3 last week wasn’t as great as I thought it was going to be. All of the new systems were announced (although Microsoft had everyone beat with their Xbox 360 MTV "soft launch" the week earlier) but nothing really concrete was available to play with. From what I understand Microsoft is farthest along in the "time to market" area, with both Sony and Nintendo following a distant second and third place respectively. Sony’s Playstation 3 sounds cool, especially because it’s backwards compatible all the way to PlayStation 1 and interfaces quite nicely with the PSP. Nintendo’s Revolution sounds interesting because of its ability to be pseudo backwards compatible all the way to the orignal NES. I say pseudo because you can play the original GameCube games in the new system by just putting the discs in the Revolution console, but anything older you will have to download to the machine from the internet. I think it’s fantastic, but I’m still of the opinion it’s pseudo backwards compatability because you don’t use your original cartridges to load the games. I realize it’s semantics but I’m a geek/nerd and that’s what I do best, argue semantics.

The creator of Final Fantasy and now, Mistwalker head-honcho, Sakaguchi talks about his two upcoming RPGs on the Xbox 360, Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey.

I have been playing Halo 2 alot and now that I have I moved from level 2 to level 13 on rumble pit. In one day I’ve moved as high as I was before they reset the stats. I think I can add my live stats to the bottom of this blog one of these days. When Xbox 360 comes out you can webcam me while I’m in the game, or at least that’s what they say. If only you could watch a halo 2 game online, live. You could follow people or just fly around the map. I love you Xbox 360 and I don’t even know you.

Leading storage solution provider Seagate would be supplying the disks to the Microsoft for shipping with the upcoming next generation gaming console Xbox 360. Seagate just recently unveiled the LD25 2.5″ discs, which they said, were specially designed for use in such systems as removable storage solutions.

I have long been anti MS. But the truth is that the strategy behind using the XBox 360 as the delivery mechnism and the media pc as the hub is a strong one. MS products for better or worse have been easy to hookup and link together, and ease is what dominates at the end of the day.

Finally released for xbox, its still fun considering it came out late last year for PS2. Major differance between this one and the PS2 one, graphics are slightly better, and ofcourse the load time is much better. Keep in mind I run all my game off my hard drive, this alone would greatly increase the load time of any game. Xbox games usually load faster then PS2 game because Xbox is a more powerful machine, faster processor, etc. I love to play this game use the cheat code to get all the weapons and just fuck people up. Thats what this game is ment for, and remeber its a game.

After watching Shane play 752 hours of NCAA football,�I started to get jealous. I've decided that I will be calling the powers at sony playstation and asking for a video game about nursing. Yes! Just imagine... You are an ED nurse, and a woman comes in (list of symptoms here). What do you do? SHE CODES!! (picture of death). You run the code. You score points for doing procedures correctly and saving lives. While playing, you also encounter drunks, rude family members, and crazies who want to kill you... but you calm those situations. You lose when...

The Sony Playstation 3 took home the coveted Best Hardware/Peripheral award at last night's Spike TV Game Critics Awards: The Best of E3 2005. Also, Killzone deservingly took home the Special Commendation for Graphics award.

Since we’re just starting to put together the details, we have some questions we’d like to ask of those libraries that are already doing gaming tournaments. Of course, we plan to corner Erin and Eli when they’re here in two weeks, but for others, we’d really appreciate your feedback. Our inclination is to get [what will then be] new XBOX 360s for the coolness and current factors, which means we’re dependent on the games initially available for the system. We’re debating if we need to also get a second, more established...

For popular multi-layered games, Microsoft will install a number of patches on the preloaded hard drive. These patches will allow Xbox 360 gamers to play multi-layered games right from the start. They have also promised to release more patches depending on the level of demand.

On the day that Hollywood voice actors (who are used to help add realism to games) are voting on whether to strike over royalty issues, there is an interesting piece on GamerDad.com about, in this opinion, the decreased importance of graphics (which add realism) in video games.

I use a lot of video games in my teaching. They are sources of powerful simulations that cannot be approached the same using any other methods. They are powerful motivators for students as they see them as entertaining and as a connection to what they do at home.

This is so funny. I hope the PS3 really does come with grilling capabilities. I mean Sony wants the PS3 to do everything else anyway. If it could grill that would really give it an edge over the other systems.

MAME is strictly a non-profit project. Its main purpose is to be a reference to the inner workings of the emulated arcade machines. This is done for educational purposes and to prevent many historical games from sinking into oblivion once the hardware they run on stops working. Of course to preserve the games, you must also be able to actually play them; you can consider that a nice side effect.

Microsoft is issuing warnings that there will most likely be XBox 360 shortages when it launches. Microsoft added that these shortages will be caused not from the lack of supply but from consumer demand. In other words Microsoft is trying to create a fake shortage like Sony tried and failed to do with the PSP.

This is a clever move by Nintendo: regardless of the final power of Revolution and the frequency of new titles, Nintendo knows that its loyal fans will cry tears of joy over a free service that lets them download previous Nintendo classics straight out of the box.

KB: Don’t you understand, you fool? We didn’t leave the gaming industry, the gaming industry came to us. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all now realize the error of their ways and follow the Infinium path to success: smoke and mirrors. Promises of content delivery over the Internet with fees to get you coming and going. A pretty shell of a console that we don’t let anyone touch because there’s nothing inside. Promises they won’t ever be able to keep. Pure Bacchus!

What if the Xbox 360 would play Blu-Ray and/or HD-DVD content over your home network? That would sure be cool, but could it work? It sure could, and it just might be Microsoft’s other key to win your living room.