Tag: games

MADE: Creating a space for Video games

That’s the video pitch for the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in San Fransisco. MADE is raising money right now on Kickstarter to rent out a space where they can set up the Museum (as of this writing they had 50 more days and only $8,000 more to go.) I’ve already given money to the program. I’m writing this though to tell you why you should to.

Unlike books, movies, music, paintings, sculptures, and every other artistic work. Video games don’t have museums, galleries, libraries, or archives to preserve them. They don’t even have the recognition of being works of art in many circles. Videogames, as seen by the mainstream, are just more disposable entertainment. Sadly, this view is too often held even by game designers and publishers who have been only too happy to condemn design documents, artwork, and code to the trash heap.

This problem is compounded by videogames digital nature. Digital storage mediums degrade at a rate that would give archivists heart-attacks. The hard- and soft-ware necessary to run much of this code does not only degrade with time, but some of it is irreplaceable and no one knows how to repair or maintain it. Code can be preserved but art has to be delivered in a context and much of it is being consigned into landfills or recycled at e-waste centers.

That’s where MADE comes in! They want to not only preserve videogames as artistic works but to present them in their original context. Old Sierra On-line games running in DOS, Atari 2400s hooked up to old CRT televisions, etc.

To read more about the preservation crisis that the video games industry is facing please see John Anderson’s articles on the subject [1, 2]

I know that the space MADE sets up is going to be small. But, I can envision a day when MADE is just as large and important  as the MoMA, or Smithsonian  and where people will come to see and experience the work of past designers who were able to meld story, art, and interaction into what we so commonly call “games.”

I know you’ve got five dollars lying around you aren’t using, so why haven’t you clicked over to Kickstarter and helped preserved our heritage?

Ultramarines: HQ Units

This was more of that “needs more metal miniatures” I was talking about last weekend… So here are some pictures of the various HQ units for my Ultramarines Army in Warhammer 40k. I think I painted these seven or eight years ago before I came up to college. I bought into 40k during third edition. Instead of saving the money I made at my job for college I spent large amounts of it on little toy soldiers and their accessories.

Since moving up to Davis I haven’t done a lot of painting or playing WH40k which is a shame because I really do enjoy the game and the hobby. (Worse I have friends up here who want to play it with me!) Maybe if you see these and tell me how great they look, how you want to see more, and wonderful things like that I might find the energy/time to finish assembling, painting, and playing with all the models I have lying around.

I don’t know how Games Workshop or Privateer Press takes pictures of their models… However they do it, I wish they’d share. I swear while these might not be professional grade models they don’t look as bad as these pictures make them appear. If the pointer hovers over the image you’ll get some inside commentary on painting these little guys!

Tiny space marines fight across enemy held desk
The Old Marneus Calgar
Captain with power sword and storm bolter
Chief Librarian Tigerius
Chaplain
Techmarine
Veteran Sargeant

There is an apothecary in that group photo but every picture I tried to take of him was a blurry, white mess. That’s it for the HQ. If I continue doing this I’ll put up pictures of my Elites next.

I want to see more games like TWEWY

Silly name, good game

I finished The World Ends With You (TWEWY) last Friday. The game was an enjoyable romp. The story didn’t make a lot of sense and the character (and costume) design was atrocious but the gameplay was solid and more important scalable. Why is scalable bolded like that? Because it is the single greatest thing it has going for it and the single greatest thing I wish started showing up in more games!

TWEWY doesn’t punish a player for not learning the minutiae of its various game play mechanics. It doesn’t penalize you for not being able to sink in the hours and hours to master controlling characters on two screens simultaneously, or learning the intricacies of its mini games (like tin pin slammer and fashions.) TWEWY is only as difficult as you want it to be. You can set the difficulty level at any time, you can set how your secondary characters works at any time and you can safely ignore all the mini-games, sub-plots, and interesting game design elements if you want, and still see the ending of the game.

More difficult than it looks.

Why is this so important? Well, I’m not six or sixteen anymore. I have a fucking life now and I no longer have the luxury of six or seven spare hours in a day to immerse myself in my favorite pastime. If I did I’m sure I could master all the nuances of tin pin slammer, or figure out just what types of experience go into making my pins evolve. Seven-year-old-me loved that shit and ate it up. Seven-year-old-me had the free time to memorize enemy stats and talk endlessly about the differences in the magic systems in various JRPG gaming franchises and how that compared with said systems in western game franchises (oh, the misspent hours of my youth…) I do not.

I don’t want to hear anyone down in the comments say something like “Maybe you just suck at gaming,” or “If you can’t commit to a game don’t play it.” The answer to my lack of time isn’t to give up my most cherished pastime. And you should slam your head against a wall for thinking I, or anyone else, should. The average age of a gamer today is 34. In general 34 year-olds have full-time jobs, family commitments, social commitments, community commitments, etc. What they don’t have is a lot of free time to sink into games that demand they ‘master’ them in order to enjoy them.

God, these kids look stupid.

I just wish more designers did things like this. The difficulty in video games has been declining for years, but as implemented in TWEWY it allows the player to decide, on the fly, how difficult they want things to be. So, when the player is looking for something more challenging or has the time to sink into it they are rewarded for it. At the same time I can play and enjoy the game as well.

Here is a case where gamers can have their cake and eat it too. So why aren’t designers catching on?

Things I found at my parents house: Sega Dreamcast!

 

It's still thinking?

 

 

Ninja Turtles, computer game manuals, and books aren’t the only things I found boxed up in the spare room at my parent’s house. I also found video games! My original PSX which I decided not to keep (PS2s do a fine job at that) and my trusty ol’ used Sega Dreamcast.

I only have one controller but, I have this nifty adaptor that lets me use PS2 controllers on the console!  I also have one of those generic mega saved game cards, which still has my saves on it after eight or nine odd years! Everyone knows the tragic story of the Dreamcast and how its failure ended Sega’s console making days. The system is sturdy and the games for it are a blast. This almost went up for sale a few weeks back but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I haven’t played it yet since bringing it up but I need to because I have some pretty good games for it:

 

Web browser, PSO, Powerstone, Rayman 2, Soul Caliber, Skies of Arcadia, Starlancer, and Virtua Tennis

I could have sworn I had crazy taxi or the Simpson’s variant. I can’t find it anywhere though so I guess not.  I wonder if I can get it cheap? Out of all of those games I enjoy Powerstone and Virtua Tennis the most.  Powerstone is simply mindless fun and Virtua Tennis is the best sequel to Pong I’ve ever seen!

 

%d bloggers like this: