I got a little excited during my compulsory Kotaku read this evening, thinking there was some quality enterprise journalism coming from some of the press at this year’s E3.

The story, from Game Informer, is about how developers were uninformed that Nintendo was creating an attachment to the Wiimote that increases precision and reduces lag time. Bet someone working on a game with, say, swordplay, would’ve liked to know that beforehand.

Great story idea, but disappointing in execution. No named sources, nothing on the record, not even a specific number of developers that make the factual basis for the story. (How many is “several?” Three? Three Hundred?) I also take issue with this paragraph, which wades out of factual territory and into unfounded speculation:

It looks as though Nintendo’s making what could already be a tough sell even tougher. One of the Wii’s strengths is that it streamlines the process of getting into games. Imagine the confusion that gaming neophytes will face when they’re told they’ll have to buy an additional gizmo to make the controller function the way it says it does on the Wii’s box. Couple that with a limited selection of games—with little third-party support at first—and the waters get even murkier.

I don’t entirely blame the reporter for this. Games journalism has a tendency — which I’ve mentioned before — to adhere to lower journalistic standards than reporters covering other topics. You can almost see the journalist in this case having a few casual conversations and spinning it into an article. Without individual voices, and with statements like “the general feeling was one of annoyance and betrayal,” readers are led to believe that any and all developers are pissed about Nintendo’s secrecy. I mentioned Star Wars: The Force Unleashed in my opening paragraph, but I can’t say with certainty that the developers of that game would’ve liked to include the new peripheral.

Could this be something developers don’t want to go on the record about? Maybe, but if so, that needs to be articulated in the article. Fear of retribution for bashing the Big N? Now that’s a piece of news.

Wii, Media | No Comments »

Hooray for Google Analytics, reminding me that 3 months without any posts begets no visitors. If you don’t know me, you probably don’t know I am moving to San Diego in a couple of weeks. I already quit my newspaper job and will be heading across the country after a brief respite.

So, the arts department at the paper never got to publishing that GTAIV article I mentioned earlier, because I never got to writing more articles to prove that I was a consistently capable writer. (I guess they saw the blog. Sigh.) So here we are:
—

If I worked for a publication that exclusively covered video games, I’d probably be excited to review Grand Theft Auto IV. It’d be a chance to state an opinion that really matters, not just to gamers, but to all the concerned parents, casual players and culture junkies who might be reading.

So it’s not surprising that when reviews finally dropped for the latest installment in the series, which requires players to commit many felonies in the service of organized crime, out came the “games are art” argument and comparisons to Goodfellas and The Godfather. Perfect review scores abound on several gaming Web sites, and one critic for GameZone even called GTAIV “the masterpiece of this gaming generation.”

Look, I’m firmly in the “games aren’t second-class media” camp, but if you believe all the lavish praise, you’re missing half the equation.

Popping in the disc, I found the shimmer of the opening scene, the sweeping score, the dialogue, mesmerizing. When the plot advances, it seems GTA has matured, leaving behind the senseless violence and murder for which the series is known.

But when you’re left to wonder the city on your own, it’s the old GTA. I needed to travel, so I stole a car. I’m not a great driver, so I hit a few lampposts — and people — along the way. Just to see what would happen, I shot a homeless person. The main character, Niko Bellic, who seems so likable in cutscenes, can also resemble the nameless, faceless, morally empty character that starred in Grand Theft Auto III.

I thought about criticizing Rockstar, the series’ developer, for giving us two completely different games in the same package before I realized it had to be this way. Without the version where you can blow up cars, shoot innocent people and jump off buildings, you could never sell the one where the characters talk about their feelings and develop relationships.

You wouldn’t have the media hype either. I know this, because my non-gamer friends know nothing of the games that really do have artistic merit. In a way, it works out; the mainstream media frets over the violence, sex and drugs and how your kids will probably do all those things because they played a video game, and the gaming press responds by pulling the “games as art” card.

If I were one of those critics, I’d probably do the same.

Xbox 360, Games as Art, Player Choice, Violence, Late to the Party | No Comments »

Welp, I just turned in a tight little column (420 words) on the concept of “two GTAIV’s” to the assistant features editor at The Hour, where I’m a news reporter. This is some form of trial column, I understand, for video game musings, similar to the “Late to the Party” kinds of reviews I’ve had before. Hopefully it works out and I can get the good gaming word out to the common folk.

If they’re not pleased, of course, I’ll post it here, and if it’s published I’ll post a link.

Newman, Media, Violence, Late to the Party | No Comments »

Moll and I were just watching a Fox 5 local newscast (don’t ask) that included a story on the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Ultraviolent, not suitable for kids, yada yada yada — I’ll spare you the rant on television news’ treatment of video games. The industry might as well just accept bad press as the standard and work from there, like Big Tobacco.

But the cross-section of gamers that Fox found on the street today didn’t help. We in our little Internet gamer circle love talking about high-minded theoretical stuff, and it makes me feel better about the medium sometimes, but dude, the Man On The Street is killing us. Check the video, not from the newscast we saw, but they used the same interview reel. Here’s what Noah Eisenberg has to say:

“You can do everything you ever wanted to do in New York City. If you’re driving and you get pissed off, you can take care of them, so to speak, and it’s just what everyone has wanted to do in real life.”

Goddammit. I guess it was too much to expect a pithy quote on the merits of player choice and how it applies to your ability to kill hookers and take their money. Instead I have to look at this kid’s goony face while he paints us all as psychopaths with road rage. For the record, I’ve never felt the impulse to: a) steal a car, b) kill people, c) punch hookers. Why do I play GTA? I dunno, just to see what the fuss is about. Plus, I do like building empires in virtual worlds, albeit criminal ones. What do I really want to do in New York City? Live in a bigger apartment and pay less for rent. Let’s see a video game do that.

—

That’s a perfectly good place to end my little outburst, but I do want to give a shout out to “big kid” Owen Long, as Fox calls him, who caps the story with what the reporter bills as a “philosophical approach to the game,” obviously taken out of context considering how little airtime he got.

“Just like real life, you either choose to do it or not. You don’t have to do it,” Long says.

Presumably, he was talking about player choice and hookers. Hookers. Just wanted to make sure I wrote “hookers” five times in this post, ’cause they’re controversial. Good night.

Media, Rants, Player Choice, Violence | 1 Comment »

I suppose this isn’t anything new to gamers with a broader cultural palette, but there’s this new Dockers commercial that uses the song “California Soul” by Marlena Shaw, and when I heard the opening horn riff I thought they were sampling Rez.

That’s because DJ Adam Freeland sampled that riff prominently for the remix of his own song, “F.E.A.R.,” as the music for Rez’s fifth level. It’s my favorite track in the game, and Freeland makes pretty good work of looping and beefing up the horn groove (see 2:22 in that video). Who knew?

Music | No Comments »

After stuffing ourselves last night with various skewered meat offerings at Oh! Taisho in the East VIllage, some friends and I went to Chinatown Fair, a NYC arcade that is apparently world famous according to the deep annals of Internet video game forums.

YouTube’s got a pretty good walkthrough of the place, conveying just how hardc0rez it is. Most of the games are head to head tournament fighters, many of them obscure even to mainstream gamers. There are endless variations of Street Fighter, Tekken and the “Marvel Vs…” and “Capcom Vs…” series. For good measure, Chinatown Fair includes some old classics like Pac-Man and Galaga and some new ones like Dance Dance Revolution, but the focus, especially by the clientele, is on fast-paced, combo-driven combat.

We went at about 1 a.m., and there were probably a couple dozen people there. Despite the ferocity of the competition, Chinatown Fair doesn’t feel too intimidating to outsiders. There were plenty of machines to jump on, with the exception of a few favorites, where joining in as a newbie would constitute a waste of a token. Two guys had set up folding chairs in front of Tekken 4: Dark Resurrection and were playing with Playstation controllers that they brought and plugged into the machine. I mostly jumped around, trying out the fun but expensive Time Crisis 4 ($1.50 per game), some of the fighters, a scrolling shooter called Giga Wing that I liked and of course a few rounds of Metal Slug.

I only had two interactions with the regular crowd, and both occasions resulted in my ass being surgically removed, cooked and placed before me in short order. I was trying a game called The Rumble Fish 2 and faring pretty well against the computer when a guy entered the arcade, popped a quarter into the machine and nonchalantly beat the snot out of me while talking to his friends (to be fair, he basically gave me round 2 after I told him I’d never played the game before). The second time, I imposed on a game of Super Street Fighter II Turbo and got sliced up by Vega. It wasn’t close, but it felt like a more legitimate loss, because unlike most fighting games, there’s no emphasis on memorizing 12-button combos.

It was a good time, but I’ll probably return to Barcade before I go back to CTF for another whooping.

Cabinet, Teh Hardcorez | No Comments »

Instead of going to bed on time, I just finished playing through Karoshi 2.0, the title derived from the Japanese for “death by overwork.”

Each level of this game contains one way to commit suicide, and the player must find it to advance. At its simplest, you jump on some spikes, explode, and respawn elsewhere. After a few stages, though, Karoshi takes a diabolical turn and repeatedly tries new ways to mess with you. There aren’t many examples I can divulge without spoiling everything, but at one point the game feigns exiting to Windows before popping back on and reminding you it was just kidding.

Indies, Free games, Violence | No Comments »

I got to this blog, Magical Wasteland, via GameSetWatch. For a guy who works for an indie game developer, the author writes regularly on game journalism, and a fair number of game journalism heavyweights comment accordingly.

Up there currently: The trouble with New Games Journalism, press burnout, common game magazine cliches and some fun with typos on Gamespot.

Indies, Media | No Comments »

More from the series that grows as I critique games way later than everyone else.

My girlfriend, falling asleep as I played the opening stages of Bully: Scholarship Edition for the Wii, somewhat facetiously asked me, “What is the constructive value of this game?”

A natural response, I thought, one that falls lockstep with other criticisms by people who haven’t actually played the game. You read the title, you see some punching and coarse language, you find out it’s by the same people who brought you Grand Theft Auto and you figure it can’t be anything redeeming.

Others have defended the game against these assumptions, so I won’t. But I will say that Bully attempts to be constructive by offering a view of teenage life through the lens of a GTA-style dog-eat-dog world, and while I applaud that concept, there’s so much lacking in execution that it’s hard to defend the game outright.

Bully’s lead character is Jimmy Hopkins, a disgruntled teen who gets dumped at a boarding school by his aloof mother and sniveling stepdad. Despite his troubled past, Jimmy seems to have a better head on his shoulders than the rest of Bullworth Academy, which is full of stereotypical jocks, preps, geeks and greasers. The faculty isn’t any better.

The opportunity is ripe to create a bustling system of alliances and betrayals, where each action causes a ripple effect of consequences throughout the system. Bully takes you partway there, offering a “respect” system similar to GTA: San Andreas (help a nerd and the jocks will be more likely to attack you on sight), but it doesn’t get any deeper than superficial aggression.

This failure is further compounded by the game’s physical world. There’s a school, and beyond its borders is a town, but rather than treat life outside Bullworth like a forbidden hideaway, you’re basically thrown out there to find new adventures the minute you get situated (Chapter 2, to be exact. And to be fair I’ve played no further.).

All of this comes at the expense of fleshing out the academy itself. The pool is empty, the football field is lifeless and the only accessible rooms in the Boys Dorm are your own and a small, underpopulated lounge. There’s no organized recess and no lunchtime to fool around in. You have a schedule — two classes a day and bedtime before 1 a.m. — but there are no long-term consequences for refusing to follow it. You can court females, but unlike real life, the rest of the student body doesn’t seem to take interest. Instead of keeping the game concentrated on the microcosms of the schoolyard, the developers spread it out, or in other words, watered it down.

The result is a game that plays more like Grand Theft Auto, for worse. In GTA, the world is static; your actions have limited weight on the world at large, but that’s OK, because like any big city, most people don’t matter. School is different. Everything happens under a microscope.

Because Bully seems so fixated on mapping itself onto GTA’s existing construct, I can’t help but think the developers phoned this one in. I don’t purport to know much about programming engines and the technicalities of development, but it does appear that Rockstar took whatever they built with the GTA series and tried to apply it as best they could to a high school drama. It should have been the other way around.

I thought of lecturing my girlfriend on the unique way that video games model and look at the world. Bully, I would say, has the potential to be constructive by detailing the social underbelly of student life in Anytown, USA. Instead, I just let her fall asleep.

Wii, Reviews | No Comments »

The Internet (or at least the quadrants I run in) is abuzz with news that Target, the major retailer, is carrying a line of T-shirts with logos from experimental video games. What’s more, each shirt comes with a copy of the game.

Kevin Allen Jr. (who I linked up there) points out that the shirts are made by EGPApparel, which seems related to the Experimental Gameplay Project. I was vaguely aware of titles like “Tower of Goo” and “Gravity Head” before, but this should prove the catalyst for me to check them out while supporting the cause. To Target!

UPDATE 4/26/08: I went to Target on 225th Street in the Bronx the day I posted this. There were no shirts and the few employees I spoke to had no idea what I was talking about. Figures.

Indies, Games as Art, Free games | No Comments »