Reddit’s heart mug →
Leave it to someone on Reddit to post shots of awesome 8-bit gaming mug. Clever.
Leave it to someone on Reddit to post shots of awesome 8-bit gaming mug. Clever.
There’s a lot of discussion on tech and gaming circles regarding Microsoft’s subsidized XBox 360, and I liked Ars Technica’s breakdown the most. I’m disappointed and puzzled by Microsoft’s shift; if you want really want to move console economics, you’ve got to do better than this.
Gamers With Jobs‘ Cory Banks dives through analysis on GameStop’s used game market. It’s clearly huge; Gamestop sold $2.6 billion of used inventory during fiscal year 2011.
Having seen many indie game stores close in the past few years, I found Banks’ conclusion sobering:
No matter what, used games aren’t going away anytime soon. Gamers will continue to trade in old titles, while publishers will continue to develop more reasons to buy new. You’ll think of GameStop as the place next to the Orange Julius in the mall. EA will think of them as the big brother with the baseball bat and a bad attitude.
And either way, GameStop wins.
Giles Richards for The Guardian:
At eight, Jann [Mardenborough] thought he might have a chance of making it as a racing driver. Steve, an ex-professional footballer, had taken him to a kart circuit, and before long the owner took notice and told Steve his son was a natural. But finance proved the stumbling block. The local track closed down and the nearest alternative was in Bristol. “I stopped when I was 11,” says Jann, “because it got too expensive.”..
In the middle of 2011, Mardenborough had entered an online competition on Gran Turismo 5 that offered one final shot at the real thing. Out of 90,000 other virtual racers, he made it into the top eight in Europe and won the chance to test himself against other gamers in a real car at Brands Hatch. That he had kept it to himself for so long was entirely in character for a boy who did not like to make a fuss. “At that point we had no idea what it was,” admits Steve.
Seven months later, in January this year, Mardenborough, who’d never set foot in a racing car, was at the wheel of a serious piece of kit in the Dubai 24 Hour race – and at the beginning of what appears to be a very exciting career.
Wow.
This Atlantic piece on famed Braid creator Jonathan Blow has been passed around heavily online, but I finally got around to reading it this weekend. I’d recommend it, if nothing more for seeing author Taylor Clark – someone who’s clearly not a gamer – try to assess the “hard core” gaming scene from a fresh journalistic angle.
That said, Jonathan Blow comes off as pretty unpleasant. The guy clearly has a near messianic view of his own importance in gaming; he knocked out an “objectively better game than Pac-Man” on his Commodore 64 as a teenager? Total illusions of grandeur.
Also Clark makes too many generalizations of the industry. He’ll start out with something semi-reasonable:
Even the industry’s staunchest defenders acknowledge the chronic dumbness of contemporary video games, usually with a helpless shrug—because, hey, the most ridiculous games can also be the most fun. (After all, the fact that the Super Mario games are about a pudgy plumber with a thick Italian accent who jumps on sinister bipedal mushrooms doesn’t make them less enjoyable to play.)
But then he goes onto a whopper:
But this situation puts video-game advocates in a bind. It’s tough to demand respect for a creative medium when you have to struggle to name anything it has produced in the past 30 years that could be called artistic or intellectually sophisticated.
I’d be as fast to chime in about the general intellectual laziness about the current gaming industry as Clark. But 30 years of lack of artistry or intellectual sophistication? Completely false.
Smartly written piece by Killscreen Daily writer Theon Weber reminiscing on radio stations in the Grand Theft Auto and Fallout series. I loved this line:
Mario’s never needed period pop to bind together his adventures, or situate them historically: Princess Peach is to the right of where he is, and left is where he came from.
Vlad Savov for The Verge:
Apple sold more iPhones in the last quarter, 35 million, than Nintendo has been able to sell handhelds in any single year. The total of 109 million iPhones sold over the past four quarters eclipses the 98.5 million Nintendo portables sold over the past four years.
The market of a dedicated portable gaming device is clearly drawing to a close. Sans major handheld sales, where will Nintendo move next?
On Friday a Kotaku forum member leaked what looks like a legit orientation manual for new employees at Valve, the gaming company behind Half Life, Portal and the Steam network.
Anyone who works at a technical firm should check this out. There’s a lot of philosophies here that are really smart. For instance, keeping a flat corporate hierarchy:
Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily. But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish.
Or on working sensible hours:
While people occasionally choose to push themselves to
work some extra hours at times when something big is
going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at Valve, it’s a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected. If you’re looking around wondering why people aren’t in “crunch mode,” the answer’s pretty simple. The thing we work hardest at is hiring good people, so we want them to stick around and have a good balance between work and family and the rest of the important stuff in life.
Kill Screen writers Jamin Warren and Michael Thomsen debate the game review process and the importance of finishing games. I found both sides of their argument strong, especially this point by Mike on why finishing games prior to writing a review is so important:
I compare it to taking an assignment to climb Mount Everest. Nobody wants to read about me getting to the base camp. There’s Into Thin Air; there’s a long history of people writing very well about failure. But if you take the game as Everest, the review should be an account of getting to the top of Everest. What did it cost you; was it an easy hike not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of your own creative endurance? How quickly were you bored with it; how quickly did it become rote and repetitive; how much of a surprise was there in the ending; how much meaning came out of the boredom?
I’m not a huge iOS gamer, but when I do I gravitate toward word games. One of the best in the genre is David Gage’s SpellTower. It’s fun, simple, and has four game variations to keep things interesting. Works well on both iPhone and iPad, and there’s Bluetooth connectivity included for competitive multiplayer.
It’s on sale right now for a buck only for the next 24 hours, so go get it (Cool web site as well.)