David Jaffe: “I remember being on a panel with Harvey Smith a few years ago and he was talking about how he wanted to make a game about death. Harvey was talking about DEATH as a force, as the thing that rips lives apart, that turns the circle of life. You know, a deep, meaningful game.
And I loved it. Loved the promise of it.
But I asked him then: what is the actual GAMEPLAY!?!? What do you DO with the controller?!?!†That’s a really good question, and for a while I pondered it so much, I almost lost my faith in videogames. ↵
In the long-winding, quite insightful, but also a bit Nintendo-biased essay ‘Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy’ by Sean Malstrom there’s a phrase I really like: ‘non-fiction game’, for things like ‘Wii Fit’ and ‘Brain Training’, but also ‘Flight Simulator’ and ‘The Sims’. It’s so obvious that it should stick. ↵
According to LucasArts “the cart size of the DS makes it impossible to put out ports of any of our old graphic adventures.†Yeah, that’s because they’re only an inch in diameter, while your games used to come on these huge floppy disks, right? ↵
Justin Marks: “We don’t need Niko’s idiot cousin to tell us we’re about to be betrayed — in Portal, we actually act out the story as part of the gameplay.†Or as someone else wrote, but I forgot who: in games, we shouldn’t tell, we shouldn’t show, instead we should have the player do. ↵
“Why Japan didn’t create the iPod.†I’d guess because countries generally don’t create electronics appliances. According to this author, however, it all comes down to the language. Gives some insight into why consoles took off so incredibly in Japan. ↵
Maybe this is no news for you, but Todd Alcott has a refreshing perspective and puts it quite well: “‘Doom’ is a great game, but ‘Half-Life’ is a great narrative.†Even though Half-Life was released ten years ago, the sense that you’re really part of a story (and not just watching a story for a bit, then playing a game, then watching some story again) is still something few games evoke. Most recently, I felt it while playing Half-Life 2. ↵
This is something I’ve been wondering about: “Microsoft, somehow, is letting Sony keep fighting in the battle for second place even without exclusive killer apps. What happens when it has them?†The sales curve for Xbox 360 seems to have flattened for the last year or so, a sign that somehow it only appeals to a limited audience. Now that PlayStation 3 is picking up steam, that sales curve is going to be ripped to shreds. ↵
“We as outsiders to this whole gaming industry have the ability and the license to probe and ask questions to figure out what’s really going on and to get to the bottom of things and change the conversation from the marketing-driven factors of gaming.†Words of wisdom from MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, who’s doing some of the most interesting things in games journalism. ↵
As Diablo3.com was recently acquired by developer Blizzard, a new ‘Diablo’ game could very well be coming up. No surprise there. What did surprise me is that the previous owner “being a loyal fan of Blizzard’s series, […] handed it over to Blizzard completely gratisâ€. One piece of advice: never donate your domain to a company that makes a billion a year. ↵
Chris Dahlen: “I’m sensitive about time. When I have to be somewhere, I’m rarely late. I get anxious about missing things. So I have a giant pet peeve with games that can’t consistently handle a perception of time – when they act like the clock’s ticking, but it ain’t.†Like in GTA IV. ↵
“When [Activision CEO Bobby Kotick] says Guitar Hero isn’t just about guitars, that franchise is clearly stepping into a minefield of potential failure. […] A friend of mine once told me the design document of one of the modern adventure-style Sonic games started with the words ‘Sonic is not just about running really fast’. […] Once a company wants a franchise to be something it’s not, they have to be really lucky not to screw it up.†↵
Is ‘Spore’ for everyone? “I’m used to living in a world drunk on Spore anticipation […]. But among the newbies, there was a significant amount of uncertainty and performance anxiety. People weren’t sure they would be able to build something, even with encouragement and example. One even said, over my shoulder, ‘I’m not sure I’m creative in that way.’†The cartoony style (that crystallized along the way) answers some of my concerns, but I still doubt Spore will come close to the success of ‘The Sims’. ↵
The Flemmish experimental game ‘The Graveyard’ is really interesting. I’m already in touch with the developers to do an interview and will hopefully write a newspaper article about it soon. ↵
I’m waiting for a second generation iPhone (it would also be nice if it were officially released here in The Netherlands). Hopefully, by that time, some of the great games that should be possible will have emerged. So far there’s one iPhone game I’d love to play: Trism. ↵
“Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.†This reminds me of an idea I had ages ago: a game in which your actions result in the defragmentation of your hard drive. ↵