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Lifehacker
It's the New Year, and that means it's time for resolutions. You know, drop some weight, quit smoking, get organized - just like you resolve to do every year, right?
The thing about goals, they must be measurable, and they must be achievable. That's how I justify going after some low hanging fruit -- beating Steve Wiebe's score on an Atari 2600 classic.
G-Unit's Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo, like group mate 50 Cent, aren't your traditional celebrity turned video game character. They actually play the games they're in. And they know who Sephiroth is.
It's been crammed down our throats for years now. Current-generation games development is expensive. So expensive that it stops the little guy from getting the resources together to compete against the big guy.
While some console manufacturers may have claimed that 2008 was going to be their year, the past twelve months may be remembered for the year the casual gamer won the market. And like it or not, it may have been the best thing to happen to the video game industry.
In 1982 the president of Arista records, Clive Davis, wrote an editorial in Billboard magazine entitled "You can't hum a video game." His point was that, although the then newly-popular pastime of gaming was giving record companies the heebie-jeebies by threatening to eat into the spending power of the youth market, music would always have the upper hand compared to this newfangled bleepy nonsense.
By now it's sadly common experience, hearing racist, homophobic, even anti-Semitic slurs during online games. Often it's for no apparent reason other than as a term of abuse used against competitors, that packs more of a punch than your standard four-letter word. But a couple months back, I had a different experience, and I'm sure it's no more uncommon for others, too. In a game of Castle Crashers -- cooperative multiplayer -- this guy I was playing with completely proffered some rather ugly opinions of African-Americans, and needlessly heaped racial slurs on the foes we were battling.
For almost a year now, over 300 Australians, two noted Japanese gaming personalities and Sony Japan's record label have been hard at work on a project with Blizzard Entertainment. This project encompasses World of Warcraft. And Starcraft. And Diablo. It has absolutely nothing to do with the development of a game, and absolutely everything to with developing one of the most indulgent pieces of fan-service we've seen in a while.
A few months ago, Chris Plante had a thought provoking suggestion for the gaming industry: what we need is more global games. I thought it was an interesting position, and one that I more or less agree with -- but the problem isn't simply lack of 'global' games. On the whole, mainstream gaming press is seriously cut off from anything outside the typical mainstream purview. It would probably do all of us some good if we started looking seriously at game development and industry news coming from elsewhere.
It's a tech demo that doesn't look like a tech demo. The clip was just a woman talking. Pedestrian stuff. That is, until the woman's face changed colours. Literally. Months back a facial animation clip called "Emily" popped up online, showing off the strides that its software maker Image Metrics has made. "Our recent Emily project is something we're all proud of," says Image Metrics co-founder Kevin Walker. Damn well they should be.
