And so it goes

The first arcade review will be up within the week.

Meanwhile, let’s all doff our +2 Helms for Gary Gygax. He created a fantasy world that sustained many of us through the darkest years of our adolescence.

Rather than reading yet another eulogy, you should just revisit Paul La Farge’s excellent piece on Gygax and D&D in The Believer:

Here I am tempted to advance a wild argument. It goes like this: in a society that conditions people to compete, and rewards those who compete successfully, Dungeons & Dragons is countercultural; its project, when you think about it in these terms, is almost utopian. Show people how to have a good time, a mind-blowing, life-changing, all-night-long good time, by cooperating with each other! And perhaps D&D is socially unacceptable because it encourages its players to drop out of the world of competition, in which the popular people win, and to tune in to another world, where things work differently, and everyone wins (or dies) together.

The State of the Arcade

Maybe it’s the passing mention of a certain decrepit old arcade machine in my friend Tim’s recent rundown of the late greats of videogame boxing. Or maybe it’s just midwinter cabin-fever. But lately I’ve been thinking about arcades.

Not emulators, homebrew cabinets, or retro downloads from the Playstation Network. I mean real honest-to-goodness arcades: with bubble-gum on the floors, cotton-candy-colored flourescent lighting on the ceilings, sullen teenagers with mullets, scary old men dispensing tokens, and Def Leppard playing on the sound system.

The fading glory of the arcade is a hangup unique to those of us who were old enough to care about video games in the 80s and early 90s. This was the mythical golden-era of the arcade, before Nintendo made it obsolete.

But even as late as the end of the 90s, there were still technological marvels that home game machines simply couldn’t duplicate. So arcades struggled on, but they moved from bowling alleys and skating rinks into upscale niche entertainment complexes for adults, like Jillian’s or the now defunct Block Party.

The current crop of home game machines are superior to almost anything that an arcade can hope to provide. Not only are they more powerful, they are more convenient… and in the end it’s cheaper for a game player to own a machine than it is to keep buying tokens, tickets, or “play cards.” And you can provide your own microwave pizza.

But there are always intangibles to be lost in any trade. No child living today will experience anything like the day I ruled the Double Dragon cabinet at the StarDust Bowl, surrounded by a crowd of the defeated and the curious. Children today will rule online charts from their living room. And that’ll be it’s own reward, but it’ll be different.

The Quest

I’m not going to get into whether or not one experience is better or worse than the other. Suffice to say, it’s always sad when the good things of our lives go away. So I’m embarking on a quest to experience the best arcades my home state (Indiana) has to offer - while they still exist.

I’m going to visit five arcades, ranging from the mom-and-pop mall arcades of the past to the giant adult-centric entertainment complexes of the present. I’m going to give each a traditional review, but along the way I also want to answer a few questions…

• Is the era of the arcade at its end?
• Are classic arcade games actually more entertaining, or do more recent arcade games offer anything better?
• Do arcades still have the social component that I remember so fondly?
• Is it still possible for a kid to have fun in an arcade? And the corrollary question: can a kid still afford to visit an arcade?

And most importantly:

• Which arcade has the best snack bar?

The Contestants

After an entire hour of painstaking research, I’ve settled on these five as offering a good mix of classic and new-school arcade experiences:

MegaPlay: Mishawaka, IN

This one’s a bit far for me - about three hours away from Indianapolis. But from what I can see, it is currently Indiana’s reigning champion for golden-era arcade games. The number of classic cabinets this place sports is impressive: Joust (1 AND 2), Asteroids, Centipede, Karate Champ, Ms. Pac Man, Space Invaders, Galaga, Pole Position… and a lot more. I’m willing to make the drive, because I’m itching to play some of these games.

Great X Scape: Bloomington, IN

Slightly closer to home, this mall establishment in Bloomington seems closest to my idea of what an arcade used to be. It’s family owned and operated, they operate off tokens (awesome!), and if the pictures can be trusted they have really weird carpet. All good signs. They don’t have as many classic games as MegaPlay, but they do have a decent selection (including an Arkanoid cabinet).

X-Site Laser Tag & Games: Indianapolis, IN

Continuing the prominent use of the letter X, we have the first entry in my home town. They certainly have games, but details on exactly what games they have are sketchy, and the primary draw of this place appears to be Laser Tag. That’s ok, the best arcade of my memory was in a bowling alley. This is the wildcard of the bunch.

Gameworks Studio: Indianapolis, IN

This joint is on the top floor of our downtown mall. I’ve probably walked by it like 15 billion times. It was once called something else (don’t remember what) and it is prominent in my memory for having once had a virtual reality BattleTech simulator that was insanely detailed. I think that’s gone with the old name, and that the new place is more focused on regular games. It’s also a national chain, and appears to be one of those all-in-one adult-oriented “entertainment complexes” that started sprouting up in the late 90s. Its website boasts that it “…strives to meet a variety of moods and needs by offering finger foods at the snack bar, scrumptious meals at the sizzling grill, drinks with flair at the full-service bar, and a massive, high-intensity gaming floor categorized into separate zones…” None of which sounds particularly encouraging.

Jillian’s: Indianapolis, IN

Another all-in-one entertainment complex. I’ve been here before, but it’s the 800 pound Donkey Kong in the city, so I’m gonna try to give it a fresh look.

The Criteria

I’m a fan of keeping things simple, so there are five criteria. Each gets one of three ratings: Sucks, Cool, or Righteous. I think that’s a fairly self-explanatory system. Many of the ratings are bound to be arbitrary. Sorry.

Game Selection: I’m a gourmand, so places that offer a lot of different kinds of games will score well here. I like classic games, but I’m also interested in seeing some fresh stuff. I really like group racing games, and while I don’t like fighting games at home much, I really like them at the arcade.

Game Quality: Having a ton of games isn’t much good if they all suck. That’s possible: does anybody remember the experience of walking into a room full of games and somehow not finding anything to play?

Atmosphere: Is the place fun to be? I’m not looking for any specific feel, but I want to be comfortable enough with an arcade to want to spend some time there.

Value: It’s becoming fashionable to gouge people with expensive games and questionable “game card” deals that encourage you to spend more money than you normally would. My standard is simple: could an adolescent afford to play games here?

Snacks: This is the most subjective and simultaneously the most important criterion. Are the snacks good but simple snackbar fare? Or are they pretentiously dressed-up pub food? Something different? All snacks will be measured against the glory of the snackbar at the bowling alley that I grew up with. So the bar is admittedly pretty high, but I’m willing to be surprised. Cost is a factor too. I don’t want to spend all my game money on snacks.

The Schedule

Like the rest of this blog, it’s gonna be pretty irregular. Look for updates about once a week. Maybe more. Maybe less. I dunno. Each place will get an entire post, just to give everyone a fair shot. And, this may turn into an obsession, I’m not sure. If you know of a nearby arcade that I haven’t listed here, let me know in the comments. I may drop by. Especially if it has Ms. Pac Man.

In My Nerdiest Hour

Since we made the switch to Linux in our home, I’ve recently done some really swell things with our home entertainment system. Our home is currently a living advertisement to what can be accomplished with free (as in freedom) software like Ubuntu.

The Rundown

In the course of setting all this up, I’ve managed to fulfill a few lifelong dreams:

• The ability to access my entire music library from anywhere in my apartment and anywhere else with internet connectivity.
• The ability to play my favorite old school arcade, NES and SNES games from my couch with an arcade controller rather than hunched over a computer keyboard.
• The ability to stream any no-DRM video format (DivX, Quicktime, etc.) from my computer to my television.

While setting all this stuff up, I managed to accomplish a few other interesting things as side effects:

• I can remotely cue up BitTorrent downloads on the server without using my desktop machine.
• I can play some really great PC games (like Vega Strike) just as if I were using an arcade console.
• I get the satisfaction of doing it all with software that supports open standards, free speech, and involvement in a real community.

The Equipment

Our old desktop PC - Hiari - is beginning to show her age. Besides a full hard-drive, she doesn’t have much memory and her old CPU isn’t fast enough to do the kinds of things the old lady and I have been wanting to do. We determined that it was time for an entirely new PC, and that Hiari could be fitted with a server OS and moved to the basement to quietly serve up media files in her retirement.

I’m conservative about upgrades, and don’t like to buy new hardware (I average about 5-6 years between major system upgrades). Therefore, I always try to upgrade to a system with enough power to keep me happy for an equally long span.

I set myself a budget of $500, and found that it was pretty easy to stay inside it. In fact, thanks to this Slashdot article, I built a system that can match the performance of many high-end gaming rigs.

After installing Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop on the new system (now named Nakato), I wiped Hiari’s hard drive, installed Ubuntu 7.10 Server, and moved all of our old media, documents, etc. onto her storage drive. After getting the server OS configured, I removed her monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and moved her to place of honor in the basement where she will live out the remainder of her life serving up files and downloading torrents.

A tear or two may have been shed as I took her downstairs… but honestly I think she’ll enjoy having more privacy and a more relaxing environment.

I’ve taken advantage of a previous apartment dweller’s strategically placed hole in one of our vents to get network cable into the basement. I hate wireless for its lack of stability and security. Good old fashioned Cat5 requires a physical connection to gain access and doesn’t flake out when the people upstairs turn on their microwave.

Network Services

File Server: With Hiari in place as our file server and Nakato in place as our main desktop, it was easy to get the two sharing files. Since we only run Linux at home, there was no need to mess with SAMBA or anything like that. The Unix standard file protocol, NFS, worked great.

After setting up a share on Hiari, I modified our fstab to mount the remote drive on our desktop transparently. Our document, video, and music folders act just as if they were on our local hard drive, courtesy of a few symlinks. It’s actually easy to forget that they are stored on Hiari downstairs.

SSH: Unlike Nakato, Hiari has no GUI desktop. Instead I can log in to a command shell via SSH. The connection is encrypted, so I can log in from pretty anywhere without worry.

UPnP: I also installed MediaTomb on Hiari, so she now serves music and video to UPnP devices (like my PS3 and my D-Link network mp3 player).

Internet Music Server: NFS lets me access my mp3s on the local network, and UPnP lets my devices access them. But what about when I’m away from home? GNUMP3d lets me stream my music over the internet from just about anywhere. It was easy to set up, and offers the ability to protect it’s interface with a password. Eventually I hope to upgrade to something that uses SSL to make things a little more secure.

DynamicDNS: We have DSL for internet, which means that our home IP address is constantly changing. I set up a free account on no-ip.com, and installed their (also free) client on Hiari. This gives me a free, easy to remember internet address that is always up to date.

TorrentFlux: TorrentFlux is a BitTorrent client that can be operated off of a remote server through a web interface. The old lady and I can just log onto Hiari’s TorrentFlux admin page and queue up torrents to our hearts content. We can close the browser and forget about them until we decide we want to see if anything new has downloaded.

You’re on TV!

Nakato has a dual-monitor capable graphics card and my television has a VGA port, making me only a few cables away from being able to use all these new multimedia capabilities right from the couch - which is the whole point of this exercise.

Most Linux installations end up using Xinerama for dual-monitors, but it’s not really what I wanted. Since my second monitor is a TV, I don’t actually want the second monitor to be treated as an extension of my desktop - which is Xinerama’s main feature.

With a large shared desktop, windows and dialogs might accidently get switched to a blank monitor when the TV is turned off. What I wanted was to have the monitor itself treated as a second desktop that I can switch to at will for playing games and watching movies. Support for this behavior is actually part of Xorg as-is. A few modifications to my xorg.conf settings and everything was running.

Finishing Hardware Touches

Along with a desktop, I need to get a couple other things over the TV to really make this complete: Audio and a good game controller.

Audio wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped: the VGA channel on my TV doesn’t have its own audio input. This bites, because it means I can’t use my TV speakers for output from Nakato. If I had a sound system hooked up to my TV, it wouldn’t have been a problem… but I don’t really have room for a fancy sound system.

I resolved this with an ultra-cheap (under $15) set of small computer speakers and an audio splitter with long cable. Not the most elegant solution, but it sounds good enough for us.

The game controller was also a challenge. I have a PS3 and several controllers, so I was hoping that they’d work for Linux gaming. No dice. They kinda work, but the button mapping is a mess.

Luckily, USB gamepads are cheap nowadays, and I got this baby for a song. What I really like about it is that the cable retracts into the controller’s housing… I have a real problem with leaving controllers and their cables all over the living room.

The new controller works with Linux out of the box, no messy drivers necessary. But it’s not very convenient to plug it into the desktop when I’m sitting on the couch. I solved this by throwing a long USB cable over to my TV cabinet and duct-taping a little 4-port USB hub to the housing of my cable box.

There are wireless gamepads out there too, but few of them seem to recharge via USB. That’s a deal-breaker for me. I’m not interested in constantly swapping out rechargeable AA batteries. Dear USB device makers: Why do you insist on manufacturing so many devices that require batteries without providing a facility to recharge them through the USB port?

Games

Arcade Games: For arcade machine games, I use sdlmame. Unfortunately, Ubuntu still hasn’t bundled an official build for my CPU (AMD64), but I found a preliminary version here that worked perfectly.

Nintendo and Super Nintendo: GFceu and zSNES work great for Nintendo and Super Nintendo games respectively.

(The old lady enjoys a stimulating game of spacial relationships.)

Nintendo 64: This was more of challenge… Mupen64 is the only actively developed Nintendo 64 emulator for Linux. The version in the Ubuntu repos was extremely buggy, so I had to make my own binary - which was a pain. Ubuntu’s focus on being friendly means that it doesn’t come with many dev packages pre-installed. Of course, they are all just an apt-get away… but sometimes figuring out exactly what you are missing can be a challenge.

Watching Movies

This worked out of the box. I had to install some codecs to view things like DivX and Xvid, but Totem prompted me to do this automatically. Here’s a picture of the old lady enjoying some original Star Trek on the big screen, courtesy of our fancy new media setup:

Still To Do

Anybody who is into home networking will tell you that there is always something left to do. And anybody who is into home media will tell you the same thing. Bringing the two together is bad magic for the gadget obsessed.

Remote Control: Currently, I have to use the mouse and keyboard on Nakato to control movies and launch games. I already have a gazillion remotes, including 1 bluetooth remote for my PS3, 1 IR remote for the cable, and 1 IR remote for the TV. I’d love a programmable universal remote that does both bluetooth and IR, but I’m afraid that even if such a thing exists, it costs like $500. It takes a special kind of man to spend $500 on a remote control, and I’m not him.

Game Launcher: I want some kind of front end for launching games and other software that can be controlled by a joystick. There are a few things out there … Wah!Cade looks great, but I’m having trouble compiling it for my AMD64 processor.

Thin Clients: The old lady and I are house hunting, and my grand plan is to install thin clients with tiny LCD screens in various rooms to access things like music and Wikipedia (to resolve debates). Obviously, this isn’t really necessary in our tiny apartment. But I’ve been thinking about the various different flavors of client computing available, and what sorts of hardware I’d like to run them on.

Wine: I’m thinking about playing with Wine to get some games from the Windows world working on Nakato. We’ll see, I have so many entertainment options that I’m not sure if I’m going to need to go there for quite some time.

I’ll take Ganesha, You take Muhammad

I just wanted to share Faith Fighter with everyone. It’s Mortal Kombat between the world’s most popular imaginary friends.

A Series of Interesting Items

No time, no excuses - here’s some interesting stuff I’m seeing today.

Online game rivalry ends with real murder

All this shit does is convince me that my all stereotypes of online gamers are correct. Just kidding.

The press slobbers all over this in the same way they slobbered all over Satanic D&D Brainwashing back in the 80s. Fact is, there are some psychos out there who can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I’m willing to bet this’ll be true with any other new entertainment medium our children invent.

Still, it is a troubling story. Online gamers… will this make you think twice about who you choose to interact with in the game? Does the existence of (a statistically insignificant number of) people who will murder you when you beat them give you any second thoughts?

None of this is why I don’t play World of Warcraft. I just think MMOs suck.

Free Game! Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden!

I don’t even know where to begin. It’s like a Final Fantasy game only it stars Charles Barkley in a post-cyberpocalyptic New York where basketball has been banned. Just… watch… the trailer.

My Living Room

A man who keeps his computers for an average of 6 years between major upgrades is walking a fine line when it comes to Geek Cred. You are either a luddite who hates technology or an equally frightening sort of uber-geek who corners people at parties to tell jokes about vi, bash, or the latest revision of the GPL.

While I’m probably more of the latter than I care to admit… I plead that mostly I’m just cheap. I hate upgrades and I hate spending money on something I already have. So I tend to run computers until they accumulate so much cruft that the hard drive quietly asks me to take it out behind the shed and just shoot it for pity’s sake.

So my old computer has been moved down to the basement to quietly serve files, stream music, and download torrents. In its place is a shiny new computer with a lot of new and interesting capabilities. I’m nt going to list stats here, because I don’t want to be one of those guys. But let’s just say I can render with the best of ‘em.

My current favorite new capability? The ability to use my computer to play Mario Kart 64 on my TV while Shae uses her own time more productively.

That’s right, I’m using my computer to play Mario Kart 64 and that’s my favorite part of this upgrade.

Next post: Remind me to tell you this great vi joke I heard the other day…

The Orange Box is Great

It’s been a long holiday for me, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Besides the standard holiday stuff, I managed to slug my way through a bout of what can only be described as SARS wrapped in a ball of Bird-Flu served with a side of antibiotic resistant Cooties.

But I’m all better now, thanks.

One other thing I did over the break was play every single bit of The Orange Box. In a nutshell, the three of you who read this and haven’t bought it yet should just go right out and get it. The compilation is incredibly entertaining.

Of course, everybody has been touting its value. But those people are right! 5 full-sized games in one package. That’s a lot of content. Even at the outrageous prices they charge for console games these days ($56?!) it still comes out to a bit more than $11 per game.

I’m not going to break down the entire package. That has been done extensively elsewhere. I just want to give you some of my favorite points.

Portal

This is now one of my top games of all time. It’s one of those high-water mark moments that you come back to as an example of a great game 10 years after it was released. It’s so rare nowadays to open up a game and feel like you are really doing something completely different.

And Portal just so happens to answer every one of my recent complaints about gender, violence, character, and story.

Games struggle with having a good “payoff” at the end of a game. Something that really gives you a sense of having accomplished something significant. The payoff at the end of Portal is… well I don’t wanna spoil it. But it’s great. As the credits rolled, even the old lady came over and sat down on the couch next to me to watch. My only complaint is that I want more, now.

By the way: The cake is a lie.

Half Life 2

(and the two Episodes).

It’s hard to say what I find so compelling about Half Life. It’s a “first person” shooter like countless others. Its plot resembles many of its peers: Inter-dimensional demons invade the world, hero finds shotgun. Havoc ensues. The gameplay is a linear progression from one scenario to the next. Lots of combat, spruced up here and there with some low-key physics puzzles.

There’s just always been something undefinability ballsy about Half Life. The way the story is told without any cut-scenes - entirely in-game. Plot elements are introduced via scripted events… things happen in your environment when you reach certain locations, or when you accomplish certain tasks. So while the story isn’t terribly original — the telling of it is. You feel immersed in events. The world feels dangerous and somehow more real.

While NPCs might not have terribly well-written dialogue (it’s fairly standard genre-shlock), the fact that your interactions with them happen only in-game, without the cut-scene crutch, makes them seem somehow more human.

Half Life is a great example of the idea of a Zeroeth Person narrative. Our hero - Gordon Freeman - never speaks and we never see his face. Other characters speak to him, and he interacts with the world mostly through his gun. But he really is a zero. There has been no development of his character beyond the basic outline.

Contrast this with Alyx Vance, an NPC who is your companion through much of these games. Her character is fairly round (as much as can be in this genre). She has relatives, friends, a history. She talks to Gordon (us) about her life and expresses fear and worry.

If this was done via cut-scene - I think it would become cloying and boring (and Alyx still does in fact suffer from occasional bouts of mawkishness, especially in later episodes).

But because her character development happens during the action of the game and directly through our camera lens as the player… it lends the whole thing a documentary feel. As if we, the player, are in part a roving camera eye experiencing the game world through the faces of its inhabitants. We get to connect with them on our own terms.

In the world of drama, there is a phrase: “Show, don’t tell.” Meaning, don’t tell the audience that something is sad, beautiful, or terrifying. Show them the action of the scene, show them what the characters do in response… and if you do it right the audience will get it.

I think eliminating cut-scenes brings the narrative of Half-Life (all of them) a little closer to that ideal. We can choose what details in a scene to focus on and who to pay attention to. And if the scene moves us, it feels more as if that reaction is arising spontaneously (even if it is still rather artificial).

Side Note for PS3 Owners

Much has been made of the fact that load times for levels on the PS3 are much longer in Half Life 2. Well, I’m here to say that most of that has been geek hysteria. The load times are a little on the long side. But I’ve seen longer, and they aren’t game-killers by any stretch. If your complaint with this game is that you have to wait 5 more seconds than your Xbox 360 or PC-using friends… well I can only pity you.

I too miss my beloved companion cube. But I had to kill it. I had to!

Free as in Freedom

In a previous post, I went off on PC gaming and how much it completely, totally sucks. And I stand by that position with one notable exeption: free games.

Consoles are still frightfully proprietary and will remain so for the near future. As a home Linux user and part-time Open Source evangelist, this annoys the hell out of me. Not just anybody can fire up a compiler and start producing games for the Wii, XBox 360, or the PS3. This gives the game machine manufacturers a really unprecedented level of control over the content available on their systems.

Imagine if everyone had to get the blessing of the manufacturer in order to make a CD that plays in your car stereo, or a DVD that plays in your home theater system. CDs and DVDs would be a lot more expensive, and you might occasionally have trouble finding an album that plays in your brand of CD player.

Because of this situation, there is no serious indie market for games on consoles. As long as the Big Three (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo) make it expensive to produce games for their machines, there never will be. These companies don’t actually want a thriving indie game market - they believe that it’s in their best interests to make it just a little bit expensive to publish a game for their console.

Since games sell consoles, the Big Three would rather focus marketing efforts on big blockbuster titles. Games with TV commercials that make you feel as if you really have to play that game. They are banking on these marquee titles (think Halo) to help them sell consoles and don’t want to muddy the marketplace with thousands of no-names that won’t necessarily inspire people to buy a console..

What they want is a cardboard cutout of Master Chief standing on a pile of Xbox 360’s in every GameSpot. Ideally, they are shooting for a handful of new major games like that every couple of months to really put their marketing money behind.

Not so in the PC world. There are so many indie games that it’s hard to keep track of them all. And many of them are free. So in the interest of extending the olive branch to the PC world… I give you the One Good Thing about PC gaming: Free, indie games.

Below is a rundown of some greats. They are all “Open Source.” That means that they are free for anybody to use, modify, sell, or give away, so long as they also provide the source code for any changes that they make. You may have heard about the Linux operating system or the Firefox web browser - those are both examples of Open Source software.

Egoboo is a 3d arcade-action dungeon exploration game with a cute visual style reminiscent of Mario. It’s been out for a while, and has garnered an active community. The official site is mostly dead and is rarely updated, but a new community has sprung up that is producing new releases of the game.

FlightGear is a slick, professionally produced and fully open flight simulator. As a young geek, I was addicted to Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer. Obviously, this fully modern flight sim puts that experience to shame (although it lacks a poorly rendered likeness of Chuck Yeager mocking me whenever I crash). The pure joy of flying a virtual airplane is now sadly lost to me, but FlightGear itself really does it well if that’s your thing.

Armagetron Advanced. Remember how I tried to have Tron killed on the game grid? Remember how poorly that lightcycle game turned out for me? Well despite my resulting aversion to the very idea, I have to admit that Armagetron is a great game. It’s a 3D racing game where you pilot lightcycles just like the ones Tron rode to infamy on, and you can play it with friends over a network. How about that?

Frozen Bubble is a free remake of Bust’a'Move. I’ve tried to steer clear of blatant remakes in this list, but Frozen Bubble is just so damned well done. You can download and install it directly on your computer, but you can also just play the java version online right now!

Nethack is an ancient geek standby, and also extremely engaging dungeon exploration game. NetHack dates back to the days when computers didn’t have any means of displaying complex graphics - so the player, the terrain, the monsters… everything had to be represented with alphanumeric characters. Today it is quite possible to play NetHack with graphics (even in 3D!) but real geeks are only happy if their character is represented by an “@” symbol.

Neverball is a 3D arcade game that is reminiscent of that old wooden Labyrinth game… you know, the one where you guide a ball through a maze by tilting the board itself? Use the mouse to tilt the world around your Neverball as you guide it through various obstacle courses.AlephOne is an Open Source release of Marathon that is supported by its original designers: Bungie (of Halo fame). Mac users from back in the day might remember playing Marathon while their PC buddies were knee deep in Doom. Bungie has added all kinds of interesting updates (including optional updated 3d models, new scenarios, physics, network games, etc.).

Scorched 3D brings the so-called Mother of All Games into the world of 3D. Does anybody else remember the original Scorched Earth? That incredibly simple game where you had to enter velocity and angle numbers in order to get your cannon’s projectile to destroy the other player’s cannon? Anybody? Scorched 3D is exactly like that, only the action takes place on a three dimensional island with terrain. Also, your “tank” (which is really just an immovable base) can be upgraded with shields, different kinds of weapons (including nuclear bombs), etc. The game also incorporates local and network multiplayer, and is a great way to waste an afternoon.

Vega Strike is a space trading, exploration, and combat “simulator.” It’s similar in many respects to the old commercial game Privateer, but has a much larger universe to explore. You can choose from and customize many different kinds of space ships to pilot, and you can make money by trading or by accepting missions (randomly generated). I have to admit that I haven’t spent much time with Vega Stike, but it’s suprisingly deep, and very strikingly pretty.

Oh Chuck, still you mock me in my dreams…

Happy Spendmass!

Atheist unbeliever that I am, I happen to love Christmas. I love getting cards. I love carols. I love lights. I love sweets. I love It’s a Wonderful Life.

But there is one Christmas tradition that fills my heart with cold, seething, murderous rage: Christmas advertising. I am also aware that this is the least original complaint ever. Lucy Van Pelt was right all along. Christmas is a big commercial racket. It is all organized by big eastern syndicates.

But do we have to be so transparent about it? This year, I’ve noticed a subtle increase in the number of ads that carry a specific underlying message: Screw your loved ones, Christmas is a great time to buy shit for yourself. We’re no longer even pretending to believe any of the generosity malarkey that once justified our annual consumptionfest.

Like the toy companies, the video game industry does its level best to provide us with a yearly “must-have” item that will suffer inevitable and well orchestrated “supply shortages.” Christmas is an incredible marketing two-fer for a few lucky video game companies (Nintendo).

1. Loads of money from poor saps who are essentially required by guilt to buy a pile of useless shit for their (kid/lifemate/whatever).
2. The added PR boast of being perceived as the hot toy of the season, since nobody can find your sold-out game anywhere. Now you have another guaranteed wave of guilt-fueled post holiday game purchasing by poor saps who failed to buy the love of their (kid/lifemate/whatever) on the first go.

My advice to game buyers this year? Stop putting up with this shit! Of all the industries to shamefully manipulate holiday release dates to maximize profit, the game industry is second only to Hollywood. If it’s not artificial shortages, it’s timing releases to either stack up on the holiday or to just miss it (so that marquee games can soak up the most consumer love).

It’s important to remember that they don’t actually have you over a barrel. There are lots of other ways to spend your money. Or better yet, consider finding some ways to make Christmas a little less about money in the first place.

So many game players are adult men with no kids. We can buy games whenever we want them. Maybe for adults, Christmas should be a time for us to reflect on some intangibles.

The old lady and I don’t buy presents for each other anymore. We bake, watch Christmas movies, listen to Christmas music - the whole shebang. And we each make a little something special in secret to wrap and put under the tree. The only rule is that it can’t be store-bought.

We find that we have a lot more holiday energy. We don’t get sick of carols the way we used to. We don’t feel as cynical about the holidays.

I’m not sure if it’s the lack of shopping, or just the amount of pride I take in assembling something special out of cloth, paper, or sugar. Or maybe it’s all the extra time we get to spend with each other, accomplishing something real and assembling all the other silly little presents that we make for our friends and family.

It’s not that we’re cheap. We’re doing fine. But we’d rather spend our extra money on a vacation, or something that we do together. And if we want a game, book, movie, or even a toy… we just go buy it.

Besides, the games will be cheaper when they go on sale in January.

The inevitable sexism rant.

I’ve been holding back this post for some time, because I didn’t want to start things off with a big feminist harangue. I guess the time has come.

Women Like to Play Games, Too

A lot of hay is made about the so-called difficulties of courting women gamers. And I think that’s mostly bullshit. It isn’t hard to get women interested in games, it’s just that the big game publishers are addicted to the kinds of games that appeal to their traditional market: men in their 20s and 30s.

They’ve been targeting that demographic since the first Playstation came out, and they really know how to do it. Making a serious effort to include more potential players is a risk they aren’t willing to take, even if it means sacrificing some potential theoretical profit.

I think that’s a mistake, because there isn’t any trick to getting women interested in so-called hardcore video gaming. Women want to play games as much as men do, but gaming has been so trenchantly sexist for so long that it’s hard for some people to imagine a world in which it isn’t. The Wii has proven that lots of people outside the traditional demographic are interested in playing games. But far more needs to be done.

Side note to game designers: Reaching out to women does not mean putting pink butterflies on the package.

I’m not even an expert on my own tastes, let alone anyone else’s. But I have some ideas, not that anybody is interested.

We Have Several Different Kinds of Sexy Bitch In Our Games

Women in games today are depicted as:

• Almond-eyed Fucktoys with Attitude.
• Ugly Bitches.
• Sexy Bitches.
• Brainless Sexy Bitches.
• Brainless Ugly Bitches.

Regardless, they are all in the game to be had, either metaphorically or literally. Yes, yes, I know that there are exceptions and that you can go through your game library and glean a measly few semi-evenhanded treatments of women. But it’s hard to deny that this is an enormous trend.

When a designer decides to make a female protagonist sexier… they aren’t doing it for women. They aren’t doing it because women are interested in being Almond-Eyed Fucktoys with Attitude. They are doing it because men want them to be.

The Myth of the Powerful Lady

Occasionally gamers will trot this one out. They’ll offer up one of the various Almond-Eyed Fucktoys with Attitude as an example of a “Powerful Woman” who somehow breaks gender barriers with her sheer bitchy ass-kicking boobalishousness. But, ladies and gentleman, Lara Croft isn’t really breaking any gender barriers and we all know it. She’s there for the boys, and she represents a gender-role fantasy that has been carefully calculated to appeal to us.

Editorial Addition: In fact, this particular phenomenon is even worse for the potential female gamer. The message these so called “Powerful Women” send is: “No matter how bad ass you are, no matter many guns you have, no matter how strong, intelligent, or independent you are — you will still be measured by the size of your tits and ass. So you better bring the Double-D cup and the booty if you want to participate in our make-believe world.”

Men Are Sexy Too

“But, games usually depict the male protagonist as having an ideal physique.” So goes another common argument. And you know, I’m not so sure that’s true. I can toss out counterexamples all day (and it’s telling that most of the games with ugly protagonists still feature sexed-up ladies), but there’s more to it than that:

When you are a man, being leered at is never a threat.

When you are male, the situations where being slobbered over might represent a threat are statistically irrelevant. You’re a man! You’ve got the power, baby! The obvious corollary here is:

When you are a woman, being leered at is often a threat.

Look, fellow males. How many times have you walked into a darkened bar, caught the eyes of several people wandering over your chest and ass, and thought to yourself… “Maybe I should have a drink someplace more well-lit.” How many times have you thought that it might be a good idea to call up a friend to escort you to your car from a late night class?

When you are an adult male, the possibility of rape in the everyday world is basically nonexistent. When you are a woman, it’s a fact of life. Statistics vary widely, but most estimates put the number of women who have been victims of a sexual assault at around 15-20%. Some put it as high as 30%.

Chew on that statistic for a second, and think about how much gaming culture must look exactly like a creepy bar where the lights are just a little too dark. I think a lot of women take one look inside and choose to entertain themselves elsewhere.

I Like The Sexy Ladies, Really!

Let it not be said that I’m against sex in games. I’m not. I’m not even against pornography in games. I’m okay with a gaming world in which there are both seedy bars and places that are clean and well-lit.

But right now, the gaming world looks like one giant red-light district. And I’m tired of listening to people in the game industry act as if there is some mysterious trick to writing games that women will like — all while painting the nipple cups onto the latest Sexy Bitch With Attitude.

The Ethics of Journalism in Games

It’s with a interesting mix of pleasure and disgust that I contemplate the fate of poor Jeff Gerstmann. Pleasure, because online game magazines are notoriously dependent on developer advertising for revenue, and maybe some of them will begin think a little harder about ethics. Disgust, because the story seems to confirm many of my opinions about game reviews.

The background, for those of you who don’t follow this sort of thing (and good for you!). Dramatis personae:

Gamespot.com is an online magazine of sorts. It features reviews, previews, interviews, and various other sorts of views about all kinds of things related to video gaming. Like many of its counterparts, the writing there is a little too gushing and breathless for my taste. To be fair to them, they do have a reputation of being ever so slightly harder on the games they review than the other big rags. It’s owned by C|NET, so that should give it a little cred, at least as far as technology-related journalism goes.

Jeff Gerstmann wrote a lot of stuff for Gamespot until very recently. He was an editor for 10 years, and seems to have been one of their best. Favorite quote from a review: “Hour of Victory is broken in several spectacular ways; and no one, under any circumstances, should play this game.” Recently, Jeff wrote a review for a new (awful looking) game called Kane and Lynch. And Jeff’s GameSpot review panned it. Hard.

Eidos Interactive is the video game company that produced Kane and Lynch. At the time Jeff’s review came out, they had teamed up with Gamespot on a giant advertising campaign to push the new game. Users could “skin” the entire Gamespot website with a Kane and Lynch theme (why?), and there was some kinda flash video editor that let you make your own Totally Rad(tm) Kane and Lynch trailer. Presumably this kind of marketing is targeted squarely at the same kind of people who watch compilations of TV advertisements for amusement.

So, the interesting thing is this: Soon after posting his ill-famed review, Jeff was fired! Fired!

Soon after that, Eidos threw a shit-fit and withdrew their advertising from Gamespot. The rumur mill began grinding. The blogs began buzzing. Rumor has it that Gamespot lost hundred of thousands of dollars of future advertising revenue over that one bad review. Rumor has it that Jeff was sacrificed to the almighty dollar. Nobody knows how much of it is true, but the whole thing even made the front page of Slashdot. That’s about as big as a limited interest story like this gets.

Now, to be fair, nobody knows for sure that Jeff was fired for his review. I mean, it could be a coincidence that a respected, high profile, long-tenured writer was put out to pasture immediately after writing a bad review of a game that was responsible for tons of advertising revenue for his website. Maybe they were planning on firing him all along and were just victims of almost impossibly bad timing.

But, regardless of who is really right, all games have winners and losers. So let’s divvy ‘em up.

Gamespot: Lost one of their best writers. Lost tons of credibility with their readership. Is going to have to figure out how to convince us that they aren’t in the business of selling positive reviews. Score: -2.

Eidos: Looks like the big cry corporate crybaby that couldn’t take a bad review. Still stuck having to sell what by many accounts is a fairly mediocre game. Score: -2.

Jeff: Instant celebrity, official status as the “straight-shooting journalist who can’t be bought and sold.” Practically guaranteed another high-profile writing job, perhaps for an organization that understands that reviews are only as good as the perceived integrity of the reviewer. Score: Who cares? Jeff is clearly the winner of this round.