l-dopa

Well, it’s official: UMD sucks.

Sony, come on. How many times do you have to do this shit? You make good things. Elegant things! Why do you have to relearn this lesson every single time?

Yes, you invented the Walkman. Yes, it was a brilliant invention on which you’ve capitalized for decades now, often innovating beautifully.

Do you really think it would have flown if you’d made up your own cassette tape and headphone plug?

Here, try this:

Use Flashmedia or even frickin’ USB thumb drives. Use fucking S-video and RCA ports. You were all excited about FireWire, even calling it iLink to make sure no one realized it would work with FireWire devices. Why don’t you just, you know, do that, but more?

This is the age of networking. Things that talk to other things. Stop trying to make it so things can only talk in your language. That just makes you, I dunno, English.

Damn, the Nintendo Revolution is looking fancy! I’ll be first in line to nab one. More pictures here.

~jeff

An interesting game that stands without much explanation.

I wasn’t that into “The Sims”, but Will Wright’s new project “Spore” looks outrageously cool; the player starts the game as a single cell organism and end up invading other planets, and this all takes place in an environment collectively designed by players of the game. I was at Electronics Boutique the other day and even though there’s no release date whatsoever, people are already asking about this game. Anyway, check it out:

• video.
• summary.
• screenshots.

~jeff

Aha! Now I have proof for my growing suspicion that Katamari Damacy is actually a reference manual about Earth for aliens.

It has been long known that Katamari Damacy is a very strange, very excellent, video game which has unusual effects on human populations. In addition to making no sense whatsoever, it is highly entertaining and causes stunning gender switches.

I once polarized a party by innocently introducing the group to the game. The mostly non-video game people (let’s call them “ladies”) were instinctually drawn to its eerie glow while the normally video game-oriented (”guys”) escaped to buy snacks and retreated to talk about relationships and feelings in the kitchen while they waited for us to end our new puerile obsession with rolling up all the world’s objects into a giant ball.

Most pertinent to the formation of my burgeoning conspiracy theory, my suspicions were aroused by the incredible detail of the game: every (Japanese) object one could possibly imagine had been modeled within, from batteries, to talking welcome mats, to crabs, to ferris wheels, clouds, and aquaman. Furthermore, all of these objects have been assigned a fairly accurate mass and have been completely logged in relationship to each other, thereby enabling the user to pause at any moment and find out what multiple of mosquitoes, or mermaids, or rocket-swan-cars, or anything in the world, is equivalent to the size of the ball you’ve made.

But there’s more. I have just discovered an additional out-of-game feature that allows you to select any of the thousands (perhaps millions?) of kinds of objects you have ever rolled up in your games and there is an explanation of the object provided for each.

Proof positive.

Wow, I still remember riding my bike down to Kay-Bee Toy and Hobby and picking up a copy of Zelda. It was a little more expensive than the other NES cartridges, but it was gold and I read in Nintendo Power* you could save your game — no more writing down stupid long codes like in Metroid and Kid Icarus! It was accompanied by a TV ad with a guy in a black turtleneck screaming incomprehensibly about something.Hard to believe that was twenty years ago.

~jeff

* oh, and I wanted to be a Nintendo Game Counselor so bad, too. Imagine! You’d get paid to sit around in a tracksuit, play NES games all day, and then talk on the phone to children! But in the cold, hard light of twenty years later, there’s no way in hell I’d take a job where I’d have to work up tips n’ tricks for “Chubby Cherub” and “Blaster Master”, both of which I swear to God I beat.

Anyone who knows me knows that I like to stay on the bleeding edge of technology. That’s why after several of the most recent years of playing Super Mario Brothers 3 for NES, I opted to upgrade to Super Mario World for SNES this past Christmas season.

It was around this time that I discovered something on the Interweb that I’d not seen before: Tool-assisted video game speed runs. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s sum of someone with too much time on their hands, console emulator software, and someone with too much time on their hands. They’ll create a near-flawless video of a game being completed, “rewinding” thousands of mistakes to do so, finally, posting the video for us all to enjoy.

Alexis Neuhaus’ run of Super Mario World through Bowser in 10 minutes, 51 seconds can be found here. It’s worth a little watch, even if you’re not into the latest technology the way I am. Via the Internet Archive.

This here application will let you use your Nintendo DS to detect wireless networks, and may well fulfill every dream Jeff has ever had, except that it still won’t play dvds.

[Via Engadget and all kinds of other people.]

Oh, man. I had such high hopes for this game; when I heard Nintendo was making an abstract music touchscreen game, I got really excited and started thinking about the intersection of gaming and musical instruments, which honestly, I haven’t thought about in a while*.

However, as fascinatingly freeform as the game sounds, it also appears as if Nintendo has unfortunately not included the ability to save any musical creations, and has also neglected to include any wireless collaborative or multi-player aspect. And that’s a shame; good musicians will forgive almost any instrument limitation and turn just about any technical deficiency into an asset, but with software and hardware like this, there should really be a way to collaborate, or at least save your “work”. It’s kind of a missed opportunity, is all.

~jeff

*That’s my college thesis paper there, by the way. Talk about embarrassing.

This looks just like the video game you “designed” during homeroom in 5th grade; you know the one, that used the special awesome controller with the seven buttons and which featured the ship with the kickass laser that shot like five different directions? Yeah, that one, but the difference here is that these screenshots are of an actual game; this upcoming game from Ambrosia has a killer hand-drawn look, and with both cooperative and competitive multiplayer game modes built-in, I can’t wait to try this.

~jeff

I can’t confirm this but: rumor has it that tomorrow (December 22nd) Toys R’ Us will be having a huge video game sale: lots of current video games will be on sale for $10. If you’re still Holiday Time Gift Shopping — or if, like me, you are a cheap bastard and are gluttonous for toys — it might be worth a visit.

~jeff

P.S. I am the one true Super Monkey Boxing Champion of the world

Work continues on Shock: Social Science Fiction, and has progressed to this version, playtest 0.2.0. Download! Enjoy! Report!

Shock: is a Fiction Game (or Story Now Game, as some are calling things like this, or, as some others call them “role-playing games”) for generating science fiction in the Asimov/Bradbury/Dick/LeGuin/Heinlein model. In much of those authors’ works, protagonists are metaphor for the collision of a social issue and a big change between the reader’s society and that of the fiction. Those changes might be technologies, philosophies, or social upheavals of one sort or another. I call them Shocks.

Changed since v. 0.1.0: Conflict Resolution, which was deeply broken before, is much improved. Protagonists can initiate Conflict now and the use of dice rather than coins adds uncertainty to actions that didn’t exist before. There are set phases to a Conflict now that gives more texture and Minutiæ are given a particular mechanic.

These changes crept back all the way into Protagonist generation, though not as far as World Generation.

Dear ldopa,
my wife wants me to get a video game console from the
Annual Gift Man. Problem is that the Gift Man doesn’t know which
system to get and, even worse, I do not know either. Should I
go for the 360? Or should I wait for the new offerings from
Sony and Nintendo? Or how about one of the portable systems?

…your wife wants you to buy her a videogame console for Christmas? Every man should have your problem:

• The Xbox 360 ($400) has mighty pretty graphics, but currently zero (0) games that your wife will want to play. Also, unless you make “good friends” with a blue-polo-sportin’ Best Buy employee right now, there’s virtually no chance of you finding a unit for purchase before Annual Gift Man Day. This isn’t because they are so popular, this is because Microsoft apparently made about twenty of them for the entire continental United States. Also, the consensus on the Xbox 360 is that while it looks incredible on an HDTV, on a regular TV resolution, there’s nothing so jaw-droppingly amazing about it. Bottom line: unless she’s a nut for online gaming, which is pretty polished on the Xbox 360, I’d hold off for right now. The older model Xbox is a scary, noisy, obsolete doorstop which only exists to reject my fresh and newly bought games as “dirty or damaged” — stay away from the older Xbox entirely.
• The Playstation 2 can be picked up for a song ($150) and has many inexpensive and used games, but at this point the graphics are a little behind the curve. The new Playstation 3 will be very technologically advanced, but expensive Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, keeps making ominous public statements as to how expensive the Playstation 3 will be — statements such as “Ninety-two weeks of salary is not too much to ask for a technological marvel such as the Playstation 3″ and “I hope you haven’t become too attached to your youngest child, because soon you will gladly trade them for a Playstation 3″ and “Hey — I couldn’t help noticing your child looks succulent and delicious” and “I really look forward to eating your child”. What PR purpose Kutaragi hopes to accomplish with these statements is unclear, but what is clear is that the Playstation 3 will probably be expensive and won’t be out until around March of next year. It’s probably worth waiting for the new model rather than picking up an older one, but start saving your pennies, and children, now.
• As you may know, I have an unhealthy and forbidden love for all things Nintendo. I have the world’s largest collection of GameCube ($100) games, in fact, I just yesterday moved the entire collection to the other bedroom, and while I was moving it, I put the collection in order from “girlfriend-friendly” to “not-so-girlfriend-friendly”. I was impressed by the number of “girlfriend-friendly” GameCube games I own; I define “girlfriend-friendly” game as a game I would offer to play with my girlfriend, like “Super Monkey Ball”, and not a game I would hide away like underage-snuff-porn, like “Resident Evil 4″. Recently, Josh, Carrie and I have been having a lot of fun playing Monkey Boxing and WarioWare. Also, I love the wireless controllers Nintendo offers, they are cheap and comfortable and run forever on two AA batteries. And additionally I point out: it’s the cheapest of all your options at $100. However, the same caveat applies to buying a GameCube that would apply to buying a Playstation 2; next year there will be something much, much more advanced, so at this point it might be better to adopt a wait-’n-see attitude.
• Finally: I am an fool, soon parted from my money and so I own both a Sony PSP ($250) and the Nintendo DS ($130). I would wholeheartedly recommend the Nintendo DS; I’ve found lots of games I have enjoyed playing on the DS, while almost a year after purchase, the Sony PSP sits gameless. If your lovely wife would have any inclination for gaming-on-the-go (or gaming while lying around languidly in bed, another big plus for portable gaming) then I say pick one up. The downside is that two-person gaming becomes an expensive and extravagant affair — you’d have to pick up two — but two Nintendo DS’s cost about the same as one Sony PSP, and is still cheaper than one Xbox 360.

Hope this long, rambling polemic helped!

~jeff

There’s a really great article on MTV.com (and that’s the first time that phrase has ever been written!) on the game writer behind some of Nintendo’s latest games, and my current favorite: Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time. Yeah, I know, how dorky. But it’s fun, I swear!

By the way, MTV.com is completely un-navigatable. Whoever over-designed that site should be fired. Or killed. Or killed then fired. Then eaten.

~jeff

Remember the Scorpion 8? That system was awesome. We used to play Mel Gibson’s Safari on it all the time.*

* All statements may be lies.