Gaming

Responding to the idea of a PSP-branded Sony Ericsson phone, the head of Nokia games said at a recent press event:

I’m not scared about anybody. The real question is how do they do it? Can they create a link between the PSP games and a phone? Can they do the multiplayer and online stuff? We’ve been doing this for two years and it hasn’t been easy.

So again, Nokia is showing us why this revival of N-Gage still doesn’t have us feeling more confident than their first go at it.

Nokia is having problems with N-Gage because they are a phone company first (cramming a gaming platform into a device that isn’t natively designed for it) and they have almost no gaming experience except for the original N-Gage devices which were considered failures by the gaming industry.

If they are not scared, it’s because they looking too closely at the engineering challenges, and are thinking that Sony Ericsson would try to do this by themselves.

But any PSP-branded phone would like be a PSP… with, you know, a phone. Sony Computer Entertainment wouldn’t want to fracture game development, and there’s definitely other reasons why they recently launched the ability to download titles from an online PSP Store. Just look to how download-only titles on Xbox Arcade or Playstation Network work on their respective consoles, and you can see how a small-screen PSP phone with no UMD disc could co-exist with a “big screen” handheld PSP console.

Just think of it this way: SCEJ can provide a PSP platform with hooks for telephony, which they may already have begun with the latest Skype support, and Sony Ericsson does the cellular engineering and design around it.

There’s no expectation that this phone be Symbian, Java, BREW, or anything of that ilk, and after seeing Apple’s success in starting fresh, why would Sony want to stick with the old, especially with this brand? After all, this is a company that has made not one, but two mylos!

Nokia, however, is entrenched in S60. They don’t have an SCE, or similar division with 12 years experience, to fall back to when it comes to video gaming. And they continue to think there is a serious audience interested in gamer points and online matches on cellphones when phones have yet to provide any hits bigger than Tetris or Bejeweled — the stuff they’re working so hard to perfect may not actually be what those players want.

Which is why they should be scared, or at least concerned.

A little bit of brillance from Alex on the Evil Primate forums:

I broke down and bought [Guitar Hero 2] yesterday and the guy behind the clerk kept teasing me cuz I chose it over Gears of War.

Here’s how this went down.

Me: Guitar Hero 2
EB Guy: You don’t want Gears of War?
Me: Not really my thing, no.
EB Guy: You’re nuts! Gears of War is like the best game released this year.

After a bit more of this guy’s heckling, I finally got a sentence in.

Me: Just curious. How many girls do you usually have over when you play Gears of War?
EB Guy: …
Me: Chicks dig guitars. Later.

Today’s announcement of the Fujifilm V10 camera at CES shows the progress we’ve made with electronics. It’s what I call the We-Will-Because-It’s-Easy factor — it’s where there’s some feature that’s so easy to implement, they can’t resist just throwing it in, even where it’s not really appropriate.

I’ve never really charted this out before but this is the rough draft of the flow:

Clock -> Alarm Clock -> Calculator -> Address Book -> MP3 Player -> Games

See, not only is Fuji’s new camera a compact 5 MP camera with a 3-inch LCD screen and a high-sensitivity CCD that can take photos up to ISO 1600, but it also has several built-in games which is, as Engadget puts it, “in case you want to burn your batteries up and miss important shots.”

Cell phones have become the de-facto platform for this kind of evolution when it comes to consumer electronics (and sure, we’ve reached Video/TV with those devices), but in terms of the kind of WWBIE that I’m talking about—like having an alarm clock in my rice cooker or an mp3 player in your sunglasses—I think the Fuji camera is a sign that perhaps we’ll see downloadable Java games for your toaster in the near future. ‘Cause nothing says progress like a little Bejeweled while you thaw a bagel.

And Pac-Mac is eating it. Well, not specifically Pac-Man, but the gaming industry in general.

Last weekend I went to see Revenge of the Sith. During the opening ads, at least 50% of the ads shown were for video games. Two of them were even presented movie-trailer style, like the spot for Forza Motorsports, the most polished of the bunch.

Now, I followed E3 on TV this year—thanks to Cablevision who seems to be the only carrier of G4 in the New York City area—and the main thing I took away from the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 demos was that Hollywood is in a lot of trouble. And I was reminded of this as I watched this Xbox Live experience on the big screen.

Yes, this isn’t a new statement. No, this isn’t something we haven’t already seen unfold in retail and the box office. But it’s a new shift in the trends framing that activity. Just take a look at the effects shown in the next-generation console demos and decide how long the big Hollywood blockbuster can last, especially when you consider some key points:

Something that really bugs me is the excessive promo-everywhere design style that permeates all gaming websites. Gamespot, IGN, Gamespy, they all seem to incorporate the same HTML elements: huge “skyscraper” Flash banners, three-to-four column layouts with text crammed into it, embedded images galore… all things that seem to drag my browser to a crawl. Granted, I don’t have the latest machine out there (it’s two years old) but I think this is part of the problem — see, I’m a console gamer, that’s also because I am a Mac user. I’ve separated my needs for a device to play great action titles from my needs for a user-friendly and well-designed computer to do work on. But I feel like these sites play to the PC gamers out there first and foremost, and PC gamers are notorious for keeping cutting edge machines, ones that could double as professional graphics-lab renderers and genome crackers, all over-clocked and freon-cooled. When you build to this audience, almost any page works, no matter how overloaded and burdened with multimedia it is.

What I want is the Google of gaming websites, something that tells me exactly what I want to know about a title, without a design that turns my poor Lappy into mush. Yahoo! Games is, sadly, too simple, and GameCritics, a fave of mine once highlighted in (the now defunct) Shift magazine, is a labor of love and as such reviews titles out of their own pocket, which is to say it’s not terribly comprehensive. Still they give me hope, since as gaming becomes the real mainstream, someone will eventually appear and provide a site for older gamers like myself.

Kotaku had a post about problems with ESRB game ratings. In it, the author is dumbfounded how one game where you shoot people from a distance can be rated more mature than one where you break necks in close combat. Part of it, the author assumes, is context.

But that brings up a very interesting point that the game industry will eventually hit. We’ve already seen it in titles where the game environment is so flexible that almost anything seems to happen (even though it is clearly optimized for death and destruction). In a game whose story context is limited but whose interaction is almost limitless, how can you rate it?

The thing that bugs the most that comes with every release of Grand Theft Auto is that the media immediately focuses on things that the game lets you do by virtue of the mechanics not being “on rails”—sure, if these news reports ever showed shots of what the game script asked or required you to do, I wouldn’t mind. After all, there is a reason why it’s rated M for Mature (tho’ there are plenty who think it should have been AO). But these reports always come with some video or screenshot of a player repeatedly bashing someone on the ground with a baseball bat for minutes on end. In terms of gameplay, it’s only something that’s possible, given the game mechanics.