I’m on the phone to the education store to preorder my copy as I type this.
Monthly Archives: April 2005
Coppola Whacks EA
EA can never be accused of putting too much emphasis on the artistic side of gaming (or anything for that matter), so it’s good to see a real artist letting their frustration with them known. Making their own GTA clone that could sell itself would have been too much work, so lifting one of the great works of modern (ish) cinema must have been the obvious solution. Paramount aren’t much better for actually selling the rights to them, but Paramount deserve credit for putting out The Godfather in the first place.
I’ll be surprised if it’s any more than Driv3r or The Getaway – a pale imitation of Rockstar’s games.
Know Any Horseriding Jokes?
Today is both Charles and Camilla’s wedding day and the Grand National. I’m sure there’s an obvious joke in there somewhere…
In all seriousness, good luck to them in their marriage and good luck to me on the National. I should also be getting God of War for the PS2 soon which is by all accounts a stunning game. I’ll post impressions whenever I get it.
PSP: Homebrew Paradise?
It may have died a premature death, but the Dreamcast was kept alive for a long time due to its vibrant homebrew development scene, thanks to its ability to boot unofficial code from CD-R (ironic that the ability that played a major role in its downfall was what kept it going for so long after). Now the x86 PC architecture of the Xbox has proven incredibly hackable due to its familiarity to developers and the console is being used far beyond what it was intended for; from Linux servers to media centers. Modchips are finding uses beyond the traditional import and piracy scenes.
What is perhaps the most unusual candidate for a burgeoning homebrew scene is Sony’s PSP. A closed hardware specification with a closed storage format is about as unlikely as it gets, but barely a week since the release in the US we’ve seen enterprising meddlers coming out with web browsers, IRC chat, and various pieces of software to do things from synching it with your iTunes library to using it as an Xbox memory card. It was even possible to tunnel them online within days of the Japanese release.
Obviously their abilities to make it do cool things are limited when they have no way to run code on it, even if the Memory Stick seems to make the finding of an exploit to run code a matter of time, but Sony have a good history of supporting homebrew development with the PS1’s Net Yaroze and the PS2’s official Linux kit. If they release an official homebrew development kit for the PSP we could have an avalanche of software that makes the system essential – how about some PDA applications? A media player that supports more than just MP4 video? Emulators? Ports of open source software? IM clients? The inevitable PSP Linux?
I can’t really see homebrew software being a mainstream selling point in the way that genuine, UMD-based software and built-in abilities will be, but if Sony can see this community and make moves to court it, they could have a huge underground success on their hands. If people see others on the train to work checking email and surfing the web on a PSP they’re going to see it not only as gaming’s answer to the iPod but also as a PDA and an essential component of a busy lifestyle. Sony could certainly come out with this stuff themselves without having to open up development, but having this software appear with no development costs to them is an astute business move. People like free stuff and not only would Sony get software to sell their console on appearing for no investment, but the ability to drop a program onto your Memory Stick and run it for no cost is very appealing to a potential buyer.
RSS
In the last few days RSS has really started to change the way I use the Internet. I’m still not into reading everything on the whole blogging scene (don’t worry, the irony hasn’t escaped me) but previously I was limited to having a Firefox Live Bookmark for Slashdot in my bookmarks toolbar, which I used to check up on their latest stories and watch the open source zealots chatter amongst themselves. I tried out Firefox’s Sage extension when I wanted to get some more feeds, mainly so that I could subscribe to Apple ones so that I’d know immediately when Mac OS X 10.4 was ready for release.
Now I’m sitting here with NetNewsWire Lite (the free version of NetNewsWire) pumping 35 feeds to me all the time I’m on the computer. I’ve taken the obvious step of finding feeds for all my favourite news sites so that logging on in the morning no longer necessitates hitting GameSpot, Penny Arcade, BBC News, DVD Answers, MacNN, Slashdot, Wired, News Askew, etc, but this new RSS addiction has also allowed me to find a lot of little gems that I’d otherwise have missed. Sites like BoingBoing, Daily Mail Watch, Daily Sucker, Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Blog (the guy behind Rez and Lumines, amongst others), and Mediawatchwatch. It’s the idiosyncratic, occasionally self-righteous kind of stuff that made the Internet appealing in the first place, and that it’s easy to lose track of in the maelstrom of commercialisation that the Internet is fast becoming.
I suppose that getting the news delivered straight to you in this way cuts out the effort of having to go to the sites for your fix, and just lets you cherry pick the stories that you want to read. Even if laziness is the catalyst for the boom in feed-reading (and hence the growth of the blog), it can’t be a bad thing.
Filed Under: ‘Marketing Bullshit’
I just saw this about the in-game advertising in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, where an Ubisoft representative says that the advertising is implemented “in a thoughtful and selective way to enhance the realism of the game.”
Call me cynical, but I haven’t seen security operatives ‘working’ at computers with a parade of Nokia phones scrolling past. I also highly doubt that super spies like Sam Fisher make an effort to hold their packets of Airwaves chewing gum full-frontal so that everyone can see what brand they chew, and although it might technically be true that in the event of a blackout of New York City the only remaining light would come from the Airwaves blimp above the Yankee Stadium, doesn’t that image sound like the perfect opportunity for an advertiser to show their product logo on an otherwise blank screen?
Now I’m all for advertising in games if it keeps the development costs under control – with piracy being rife, competition being fierce, and costs spiralling ever upwards it’s unreasonable to expect games to guarantee their own profit margins – and when it’s done properly it can enhance the realism. You walk down the street and see signs for McDonalds and Coca-Cola after all; not ‘Fast Food’ and ‘Coola’. The Japanese version of Shenmue had Coca-Cola machines along the streets which sold Coca-Cola and Fanta, and it was more realistic than the English versions and their generic soft drink machines. Similarly, the fact that Sam Fisher’s PDA in Pandora Tomorrow had Sony-Ericsson at the top didn’t bother me because they didn’t bash you over the head with it.
It’s not just games that do it – movies and TV shows where the characters drink beverages with generic white labels take will draw your attention more than one where they drink Pepsi and drive a Ford. Castaway was criticised for being one long Fed-Ex commercial, but I contend that it would have been criticised by the same people if he’d worked for a non-existent delivery company that just happened to have offices in most countries and its own fleet of aircraft. That’s product placement done right, but I, Robot is the perfect example of it done wrong.
If you’re a developer sat there trying to work out how to draw a few extra bucks from your new game, don’t be afraid of advertising. It isn’t annoying by default and certainly can enhance the realism for the player. Just don’t cram it down our throat because then it does ruin our experience. If that means you get a few dollars less from the advertisers, who cares? If your fans had a better time with the game they’ll be that much more likely to give you another $50 next time around.