Sunday, June 1, 2008
On Parody, the Marx Bros., and Penny Arcade
7:30AM Maggie Greene | While Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer doesn’t have any new news on his history of RPGs class, he has penned an interesting little meditation on comedy, satire, the Marx Bros., and Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. It suffers from an overabundance of quotations, but has some interesting points: More »
Ubi Forum Moderator: Wii Games “are not amazing new AAA games”
7:00AM Owen Good | That’s a little nugget couched in a defence against charges Ubisoft has a crappy lineup for Wii and doesn’t care. Oh but they do care! The lineup is crappy for a reason! Read on. On Ubi’s forums, a commenter complains, “we get no new Core-titles and when we get some like Shaun White Snowboarding it looks worse than SSX on the Cube. Doesnt really look like Ubisoft is trying to put some effort in it.” More »Valve on the ‘Perception Problem’ of PCs
6:30AM Maggie Greene | Gamasutra has a nice wrap up of an event held at Valve’s Washington offices; the topic was (surprise!) PC gaming. On the question of whether PCs are really lagging behind: “Is there a crisis in [PC] gaming?” asked [Gabe] Newell, who led the first segment of the talk. “You know, ‘Piracy killed my game,’ ‘Console numbers are huge,’ ‘People don’t want to play their PCs in the living room’ – all these stories get written over and over again, and our view is that it’s exactly the opposite. PC is where all the action is, and there’s a perception problem.” Also on the agenda was a discussion of piracy (and indicator of “unserved customers”), the worldwide PC market, and how Steam and Valve fit into this whole PC new order. PC Has ‘Perception Problem,’ Piracy Reflects ‘Unserved Customers’ [Gamasutra] More »Pre-release MGS4 Reviewers Got “Pretty Long” List of Forbidden Topics
6:00AM Owen Good | We had this up as a rumour yesterday, and I’d say IGN UK’s review of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots pretty much confirms it. “In return for letting us play Metal Gear Solid 4 before its release, Konami issued us with a list of things that we’re not allowed to discuss. This list of prohibited topics is pretty long, and even extends as far as several facts that the company itself has already made public.” Might that be the length of the cutscenes (upwards of 90 -gasp- minutes)? More »‘Playing With History’: the State of Historical Games
5:30AM Maggie Greene | We historians are a little protective of our respective domains — but a constant (and well-deserved) criticism we lob at each other in general is that through various means, we deliberately make ourselves inaccessible to the average, interest layperson. Over at Terra Nova, Nate Combs takes up the question of historical video games, referencing a great 2006 New York article by Niall Ferguson (Harvard professor and historian) on the ’state of play.’ The answer? Pretty damn bad, at least when looking on from the Ivory Tower: More »
