Excellent comic by Virtual Shackles.

In other Oil Disaster related news, this map will overlay the size of the disaster on your hometown, based on your IP address.

It’s really depressing to think how utterly screwed that area is. Hopefully today’s efforts to stop the leak doesn’t make it worse.

This is amazing; it makes me want to get my Lego from my parents’ house and build something that will never come close to how awesome this is.

Actually, nevermind… *sigh*

Via Eric

So you may have noticed that I have a store now. At the moment, I’m selling a girl’s and guy’s t-shirt with a high resolution version of the above lolz. I come up with ideas for gaming shirts from time to time, but I’ve never gone to the trouble of creating any of them.

THIS CHANGED YESTERDAY.

The store is still in it’s infant stages; you should expect more products soonish. If you have any comments, definitely send me a message by any of the channels on the right.

So, in an attempt to get you in the shopping mood, I suggest you listen to this:

My last game save on Wind Waker was in 2006, but I played the bulk of it the Spring & Summer of it’s release in 2003. Between the time that I was fully immersed in that archipelagic world, and when I went to the disc channel on my Wii to play it this weekend, I’ve:

• Completed 4 years of University
• Moved out of my parents’ house and in with my fiancée
• Abandoned organized religion
• Created the entirety of my portfolio
• Got engaged
• Moved to Ashley and my 2nd apartment
• Watched my cats give birth (The first birth I’ve ever seen)
• Went to the states for the first time that I can remember
• Started shaving and slowly became perma-scruffy
• And made some amazing friends

It’s surreal to think about the progression of time and how much things change.

Jumping back into the Wind Waker and Metroid Prime conjured up so many memories. The feel of my parent’s basement rug, the effort I had to put into convincing my brother we could play Wind Waker co-op with me using my GBA, the long night gaming sessions that had me backtracking through Tallon IV and checking my map at every room, and the experience of each game themselves.

It’s not that I wish for a return to these times, but it’s an amazing experience to lose yourself in what is essentially a disc-based time capsule. For a gamer like myself, my years were defined by the games I consumed, and so my memories become more efficiently locked to these articles more than they could to any photograph or home video. It’s a first person memory; when you replay a game and memories come flooding back, you’re actively reliving a piece of your personal history.

I’m rambling but I really encourage anyone out there to pick up a game that meant a lot to them when they were younger.

The question we, as gamers, must ask ourselves is thus: who cares?

Who cares what labels are placed on a medium? Who decides what is art? Certainly not a critic grounded in only one medium and certainly not a games-obsessed youngster either.

What does the label of art imply? Prestige? Government funding? Respect? Saying something is “Art” does nothing to the content. It’s simply a superfluous packaging on top of a product that already affects our emotions one way or another.

Take the photo above. This hard drive is wrapped up, placed in a cardboard box, and then sealed  once again with a load of plastic and cardboard. Due to the awkward shape of the new packaging, the top and bottom need to be supported by a cardboard brace for shipping. Once the product is put on display in the store, the top layer is discarded. Once the product is taken to the cash register, the bottom layer is left at the display. Once the product is taken home, the owner remarks at the foolishness of the packaging, takes it apart and only keeps the original cardboard box as it is all that is necessary to store the product.

This is a visual metaphor for the labeling of things as “art” and things as “not art”. Adding more and more layers of packaging to this hard drive will never increase it’s worth. It will always do the exact same thing, and we would experience the hard drive in the exact same way if it were handed to us without packaging. Once we label something as “art” we need to put up these braces to prove it is art, but in the end the one who experiences the work will not care about these supports, or the labels of “art” or “high culture”.

Whatever it is called, I still felt the emotional burden throughout Heavy Rain, I saw the error of my ways in Shadow of the Colossus, I felt a sense of wonder and the rush of exploration in Ocarina of Time, I felt the weight of my decisions in Mass Effect, I felt the deep sense of isolation in Portal, and through playing Braid, I experienced the world through the eyes of Tim as he realizes that his princess was in his castle the entire time.

To avoid the pretentious bull manure, I’m going to go with different nomenclature. From now on, any work that plays with our emotions or makes us think, be it a movie, play, game, painting or whatever is to be called a Makemefeelstüff (Maak-ee-mee-fil-stoof). Do you like it? It’s Swedish.

Example:
“That is the greatest work of Makemefeelstüff I’ve ever seen!”
“The Makemefeelstüff exhibition brought out some new talent.”

Can we all please get over it now?

And by quirks, I mean big flaws.

Don’t get me wrong; the App Store has been the absolute best thing to happen to digital distribution in a long time. It was the first mobile platform to get application distribution right. It certainly helped that the single platform meant your application could be in the hands of any present day and future iPhone/iPod touch user, rather than creating a different version of your application for every crappy monochromatic Nokia phone available now and in the future.

This is a 2007 phone. Compare this to the 2007 iPhone.

The app store also provided a central distribution channel where all your revenue could come from. It was tied in to the user’s iTunes account, so the initial fear of connecting the user’s credit card to the phone was drastically decreased. iPhone marketing relied heavily on the app store, which blasted developers apps to stardom. The iPhone was a developer gold rush from the nerd God Himself, Our Lord and Saviour Steve Jobs. However, gold rushes end, and with the competing mobile platforms reaching near-feature parity with the iPhone, it doesn’t seem like the best option for developers anymore.

There are nearly 200000 available applications on the App Store. As a comparison, Steam has 1170 games available to download from their service. Considering individual apps don’t get very much marketing, any business 101 student would be able to tell you that sending your work to die on the app store would be a bad idea. Due to the infinite shelf life of virtual goods, each one of those 200k applications are still competing, and will always compete with your work.

This is how you look in the App Store.

The app store is ruled by Apple, and they’ve been known to apply their draconian terms of service only where they see fit. You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but the jist of it is that the rules tend to bend and change based on the company submitting the application. Additionally, App Store’s Terms of Service are gearing up for a change with the release of iPhone OS 4. Many developers are afraid that a clause in the new terms of service would halt developers from creating their apps in non-apple production environments such as Flash, Unity, or Titanium Appcelerator. This is an obvious move by Apple to block developers from compiling their code to other platforms such as Android or Blackberry as many of these blocked tools allow exporting to multiple platforms.

Finally, the app store’s price race to the bottom is hurting developers and applications, plain and simple. The $0.99 price point is effectively turning the App Store into Dollarama. Cheap imitations of superior products, content-shallow applications, and other garbage clutter the shelves, forcing serious developers to adopt the $0.99 price point, or risk never making a sale.

I don’t think that it’s a wise decision to ignore the iPlatforms entirely as they have a massive install base, but I would never choose it as my flagship platform for any content. Jason Lamb, John Clements and I are making a game this Summer, and while we haven’t decided the platform, we all agree that any iPlatform won’t be the first. A better business decision is to start on something like Steam or Android, and begin to create buzz about the game from there. Once we have enough people talking about the game, that’s when we’ll make the move to the iPlatforms with a good amount of launch hutzpah a fair price point.

CP_Blastoff is a Team Fortress 2 map made by Jason Lamb and I for our senior thesis project in the Multimedia program at McMaster University. We’ve already handed it in, but we’ve still a presentation to do on it this coming week. We plan to add more lights and fix some textures up before we make the final .bsp release to the public, but you can check out what it looks like right now in the photos posted above.

We’ve spent roughly 100 hours on it between us learning the SDK and Hammer (properly!) and doing multiple “orange” revisions before settling on a design that both we and the beta testers agreed was fun and fair for all classes.

Recently, I’ve begun to think about how the actions of the player impacts the game world, the plot, and the overall experience in a game. This came about through finishing Heavy Rain a few days ago with my fiancee and then moving on immediately to Prince of Persia on PS3.

In Heavy Rain, your actions have a huge effect of the game world. When Ethan cuts off his finger during his third trial, you don’t get that finger back. There is no screen re-saturation you need to endure before your finger magically re-appears; it’s just gone. When I was playing as Jayden when the crazy religious guy pulled a gun on the Bad Cop, I freaked out and shot him. There was no deliberation or conversation, just blam-o and a corpse on my hands. I felt terrible about it afterwards! What if I had done things differently? What if I were able to talk him through it, and avoid the unnecessary loss of life? These actions meant something; your decisions had weight to them.

After Heavy Rain, Prince of Persia feels like a children’s roller coaster at one of those mall parking lot carnivals. Nothing you do has any consequences: any misjump you make Elika will return you to the most recent platform, every time you are bested by an enemy, Elika just barely is able to keep the Corrupted off you. Every time. The Prince does most of the actions automatically; the player is only required to do the occasional button press when observing him perform his acrobatics. When in combat, the occasional QTEs have a generous window to accept input and even if you mess up, the only thing you lose is time as the enemy regenerates a portion of health and the battles continues.

With failure not being an option, it makes me think: what’s the point? Finishing Prince of Persia is not a matter of skill but a measure of hours put into it. It’s like grinding starting zone mobs in World of Warcraft, but you never gain levels. Failure is necessary for games. Players need to be able to make mistakes to feel great about their accomplishments.

How many times did you fall in acid while playing Portal? How did you feel after finally nailing the sequence of portals needed to beat the test chamber?

Even the evasion of assumed danger is important. Left 4 Dead kept players constantly on the verge of failure, and succeeding at it is what made the game fun.

In summation: Prince of Persia is just not that fun because you’re stuck in a splash pad longing for the wave pool.

So far, Ashley and I are about 5 or 6 hours in and we nearly didn’t put the game down for the night despite having work the next day. If you let it, this game will grip you and whip you around. I’ve never lost sleep over any media consumed the night before, but both Ashley and I woke up feeling terrible because of game-induced nightmares. This game doesn’t play on the same monster-in-the-closet fear that many thriller games subscribe to, but rather deals with emotional fears of losing loved ones.

Your decisions in the game carry through; once a character you control dies, that’s the end of it. The tension during life-or-death quick time events is such that once you’re in the clear you remember you’re supposed to be breathing.

Really quick negatives:

• The voice acting is terrible at the beginning, but you get used to it.
• The writing isn’t amazing.
• This game needed more time in QA. Heavy Rain will crash on an average of once every two hours, and only a hard reset for the PS3 will fix it. Fortunately, the game saves very often.
• Like Indigo Prophecy, this game cannot properly set up relationships that aren’t pre-existing. Characters seem to care too much about random strangers for no apparent reason.
• No one on the development team has asthma or know anyone who does: Convenience stores do not stock prescription medication and asthma attacks don’t sneak up and strangle people doing everyday activities.

A full review will be coming soon, but will be posted first at A Couple of Gamers.

If you’re interested, you can show support for this project on Kickstarter and keep up with the one-man dev team at Shen Games. Cadet 227 is due to be released this Summer.

As a side note, this is exactly the kind of stuff I was thinking of doing as my main area of study for grad school.