FUCK YES MOTHERFUCKERS
http://kotaku.com/5020476/blizzard-splashwatch-final
The Blizzard splash page I’ve been too busy slavishly following to update about is finally finished. It looks a little bit different than the ice-based teaser pic with the Death Knight/Protoss eyes that was up before. Here’s the pic so I can show you the differences:
The differences are subtle, but many. For example, the ice motif is gone, replaced with a red and orange, fire-based theme. Text is now present on the image. Also, IT FUCKING ANNOUNCES DIABLO FUCKING THREE. I may get sick of having to pretend I give a shit about WoW anytime I’m around gamers that I don’t already know personally, but if it allows them to finance projects I actually care about, I want a law passed making a WoW account mandatory for all US citizens, punishable by torture, because when Blizzard’s good, they’re really good. Now I’m just waiting for a splash page announcement for Lost Vikings III.
Overdone
Am I the only one who stops reading a video game preview/review/whatever when I see “trading card elements” and it’s not proceeded by “contains absolutely no”? I probably am.
Analyst Says Casual Gaming May Be A Fad; Millions Stunned
Industry analyst Hiroshi Kamide believes DS hardware demand has peaked globally, and that the massive, gleaming ivory tower casual gaming has built is soon to topple, killing all who dwell inside.
Casual gaming growth has been the primary driver for the industry over the last three years, the key player being the Nintendo DS. We believe DS hardware demand has now peaked globally. A downturn in software demand is likely to follow, as casual gamers are “happy with their lot” and do not need to consume more. We feel that the same predicament awaits the Wii console with its similar market expansion angle.
Well, ok, yeah. I mean, that has been pretty obvious. You may not have noticed, but your 13 year old sister isn’t really interested in much outside of Wii Sports and possibly a game about puppies or something. However, I do take issue with the last part of his statement:
Titles such as Brain Training and Wii Fit do not act as ‘gateway drugs’ to turn non-traditional gamers to core repeat users. We feel this is a structural industry issue that cannot be easily changed.
This is simply not true. Well, maybe not simply. It’s actually a pretty complex issue. Many people will pick up a Brain Age or a Guitar Hero, get hooked, lose track of their lives, and wake up in a pile of Unreal Tournaments and Front Missions. Many people won’t. It could really go either way, and there are enough examples of each to claim there’s a ‘majority’ on either side. If you look at the DS, yeah, Big Brain Academy may be flying off the shelves, but so are Professor Layton and Ace Phoenix. And that’s where the biggest problem lies.
What exactly constitutes a “casual” game?
It’s generally accepted that shitty poker games and “700,000 Slight Variations on Mahjongg!” collections are casual games, and likewise that games like Gears of War and Quake constitute “hardcore” games. But what do you do when you get into grey areas? Look at Professor Layton and the Curious Village. A good amount of gamers consider that a “safe” game, meaning that their friends won’t hold them down and take turns punching them in the stomach for playing it. But what difference is there between Layton and Big Brain Academy? A narrative and not much else.
Does that make Azada a hardcore game then? Hell, that game was written by John Cutter, famous for Betrayal at Krondor, which is about as good as a fantasy-based storyline can get (it was based on the Riftwar series of books, and was so good that the original author of the series eventually novelized it and considers it canon). Azada’s gameplay is in fact very similar to Myst (cold, humanless environments and arbitrary logic puzzles), which most people would generally consider a hardcore game that happened to appeal to many casual gamers.
Myst also presents a unique problem. What happens when a game is claimed to be part of both camps? Myst was the best-selling PC game of all time for almost 10 years (in 2002 it was overtaken by The Sims, both in sales and as the only game your 43 year old uncle will talk about other than Tetris and Super Mario Bros. when he tries to converse with you about video games), and drew a lot of fans who couldn’t give a shit less about games, but who WERE able to follow technological fads. After Myst hit, many companies tried to court adults who hadn’t grown up with video games. As many people now know, adults simply do not enjoy things that are fun, preferring things that are trendy and fashionable, hence the rise of “multimedia games”.
Only the 3DO could take a game based on Jurassic Park and make the game’s focus puzzles and not dinosaurs.
Multimedia games were a blight on gaming history from the mid-90s, spurred on by the growth of CD-ROM drives for PCs and the Sega-CD and 3DO consoles. Myst served as a “killer app” for CD-ROM media, as well as opening the gates for gameplay-less slideshows with brief panty shots to sell in some cases as many as 100 copies. Games such as The Daedalus Encounter and Entombed presented players with movie-quality plots (“The aliens are attacking! Hurry! Our only chance to survive is to arrange these tiles to form a picture of a goose with its head stuck in a bucket!”) intertwined with deep, intricate gameplay (“There must be millions of different types of puzzles mankind has created, why does it keep giving me slightly more complex versions of the same three puzzles I’ve already completed?”) in a way that was completely unprecedented. Well, actually, it presented players with shitty, poorly acted, poorly directed movies that occasionally give them the option to go left or right, by which I mean, choose to watch either movie A or movie B.
Multimedia games were largely unsuccessful. The most successful multimedia game (probably, there’s virtually no info on sales for these games, and I don’t care enough anyway) was Digital Pictures’ Night Trap. Originally for the Sega CD andlater released for the ill-fated 32X and multimedia toilet the 3DO, Night Trap was the story of the Sega Control Attack Team using security cameras and their undercover agent, Dana Plato , to uncover the secrets of what jailbait girls do at slumber parties. They soon find out that when a group of teenaged girls gather together in nighties, they’re attacked by vampires, ghosts, mummies, or various other supernatural phenomena. Of course, the only way for a specially trained, heavily armed police task force called the Control Attack Team to protect the girls whose privacy rights they’re so flagrantly violating is to setup a series of Scooby-Doo traps.
Night Trap wasn’t really “successful” in the traditional sense, rather, it was successful in popularizing the idea of “adult” games. Night Trap (along with Mortal Kombat) was responsable for the first ever congressional hearing on the content of games. After this uproar, many people looked at the controversy and screamed “me too!” Thus was born the “adult” “multimedia” “game”. I put each individual word in quotes because not a single part of that is true. The games would have maybe 1 or 2 “damns” and “hells”, or maybe an underwear shot, so they weren’t really adult. They also weren’t truly multimedia, and they certainly weren’t games. However, they did bring in a few old men who attempted to be dirty, but met with no success.
Shortly after multimedia games failed to be the big draw for non gamers to become addicted to, PC developers finally realized one of the few areas that had been successful with casual gamers: the puzzle game. The advent of Shockwave and especially Flash made it much easier to get someone to try a game, even if they aren’t regular gamers. With no cost and little download time, people were willing to try new things. The first game to really explode with 48-year-old toothless shut-in women who sit in front of the computer all day was a little rip off of Tetris Attack (or, technically, the Puzzle League series) called Diamond Mine. You may know it as Bejeweled.
Bejewled took the casual market by storm in 2000. Suddenly, fewer spreadsheets were finished on time, more computer-side ashtrays were filled up with cigarette butts and fun-sized Snickers bar wrappers, fewer forwarded emails about Procter & Gamble being satanic were mailed out. Bejeweled introduced a massive amount of people to the fact that good games were still coming out. Now, we’re left with a glut of casual games, most of which are very, very bad. (I’ve also noticed that many seem to have silly nonsense names, like Zubaz or Bongle or Borga.) Nonetheless, some of them are somehow still getting people more interested in games.
I myself have witnessed many of these people. And while a lot of them never leave that same casual category, a few have. And those few are some of the hardest-core gamers I know. So I refute the notion that casual games cannot function as a “gateway game”. Even now, thousands of people are firing up Peggle, unaware of the fact that someday soon, they could know what the term “pwned” means. Yes, the casual game monster will soon fall, crushing many, many developers under its gigantic, unsupported frame. But I think the effect the genre has on games will make a change for the better.
Or who knows. Maybe 5 years from now we’ll all being playing “Puppy Match 12: Sing for the Stars!”.
MMO News Stories Made Easy!
Qore is Now Available for the PS3
Sony’s new subcription-based advertisement service, Qore, is now available. Qore (which is oh-so-delightfully close to being called “queer”) is only $25 for 13 1-to-2 hour advertising segments a year.
Hopefully this will summon images of the “qore”, or empress dowager, of Kush, thus improving Sony’s performance in the vital Sudanese market.Order now and receive a free download of David Jaffe’s Calling All Cars!
David Jaffe on Calling All Cars reviews:
“Fuck you, guys. Go fuck yourselves. What other developer makes a fucking change to a game when a review (IGN’s in this case) has a good, valid point and is willing to open the fucking code up at the risk of more bugs to make the game better? Amazing.But hey, you guys are great, you guys rock. I hope Kotaku fucking puts your ass out of business, wanna be fucktards. And if you were actual journalists you would have read the motherfucking quote I posted on NEOGAF where I said because of the two bugs we needed to fix (not because I was afraid of the bargin bin) we had a window of opp. to fix the magnet problem. Assholes…total fucking assholes. ”
davidjaffe.biz
Ok, this one I’m going at completely, totally balls-out. This game is completely untranslated. That’s right: I’m a pioneer.
That said, I seriously doubt that any dialog could possibly make this game the least bit comprehensible.
Zig Zag Cat: Ostrich Club mo Oosawagi Da (1994, DenZ)
The Game:
“Zigu! Zagu! CATTO!” Greatest intro to a game ever.
Zig Zag Cat is the story of a mentally disabled ward of the state in pajamas carrying a trampoline to bounce his cat into ostriches in order to make them explode.
I know, I know. I thought the same thing. “Greatest plotline ever. Somebody call Hollywood; we’ve got the next Casablanca on our hands.”
The game’s actually pretty good. Unlinke most Breakout clones you just look for a specific block and try to break it to win the level. In between levels you can stay at an inn (I think. It may be some kind of fucked up church. It has a nun with enormous bouncing tits.) and play little bonus levels, and make money, not that I’ve been able to figure out where, how, or on what to spend the money. You don’t make much, so I guess he uses it to pay for psychiatric bills.
Why was it never released in America?
I have no idea. The only thing I can figure is that the powers that be knew that between Super Metroid, Earthbound, Final Fantasy 3, and Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City, we had too many completely epic games to handle a story of Zig Zag Cat’s magnitude.
