Artsygamer

Ha ha ha… Yahtzee is back in form as far as i’m concerned. Loved the review. Loved the things he underlined… linearity, a game that actually wants you to see your teammates as annoying/bad unlike all the others where you’re supposed to love them even though they seem to be the same…
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Great discovery: www.racketboy.com . They focus on retro gaming but it seems they have regular game art collections, now featuring MGS.
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A couple of days ago a friend reminded me of this game… quite a special game. I liked it because of it’s original artwork, great sense of humor (the Timmy scene cracked me up) and some quite innovative gameplay. I still remember the feel and intuition of the jetpack and some great gameplay situations. Where it did go wrong in my opinion though were the lack of saves combined with lack of a really easy difficulty, which lead me to never finishing it, despite considering it quite the masterpiece.

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‘fraid to say my fears are confirmed by the review. And it’s not as much what they’re saying as much as what they’re showing: generic artwork, unimpressive technology, and a story that I don’t expect to be particularly moving or spectacular (I think it’s hard to make both a strong story and leave space for 4 player co-op). I really had hoped more from Free Radical. I may play it someday with a friend for the fun of a shooter, but I was hoping for more original level design and possibly a heart moving story with moral grey and paths…
PS: obviously until i play it myself this is just confirmed intuition… but in my experience i’m seldom wrong about this stuff (in terms of my own enjoyment)

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Gamasutra has an interesting article
Are Game Publishers Becoming More Like Movie Publishers?

It does raise some very interesting points on such issue as relationship between ratings and profitability… it is a business after all, even though it may be a beloved passion for many of us. From the article:

It seems that publishers within the video game industry are taking the same route as movie publishers, not necessarily concerning themselves with quality so much as publishing profitable titles. Essentially, Activision is to the video game industry what Paramount is to the movie industry: Infinity Ward as Activision’s LucasFilm, Call of Duty 4 as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
[...]
The uncanny resemblance does not end there – as the movie publishers sometimes act as just a distributor for a film, having little control on the film’s production. Again, refer to Paramount, which acts just as a distributor for companies like DreamWorks and Marvel.

But unlike what many may think I am not actually crying for these things or complaining: I do understand it’s a business, and i think that’s a great thing. People have loud mouths but they really vote with their pockets (and the two messages often differ). I do see a silver lining though: the bigger the business becomes the more valid niche products become… because, let’s admit it, games which are about high art are a niche, not the norm and what everybody wants to see… but that’s okay Those of us here are used to being "different".
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Well, it seems i have forgotten my own principle when starting artsygamer, resulting in the ancient fear come true: for fear of lack fo time to write the "good" articles I would like to I end up writing nothing… not good. So, please remind me should i forget again: better short than nothing! Hurray for the glorification of short!

So, back on subject: this is an interesting link I’ve been meaning to post for a long time: 10 Must See Virtual Places To Visit Before You Die. Can’t say I agree with the elements on the list, but love the idea: I must say that some of my best memories of places I’ve visited are virtual rather than real world places (Unreal experience comes to mind). For some reason the real world is not as full of fascinating ruins coupled with soundtracks …  also this article gives me an excuse to post Samorost which though i didn’t play from what i’ve seen find has a very unique and praise worthy artistic mood/feel.

Big thumbs up to the whole world!!

PS: in case you’re curious (i am), what i’ve been up to recently and why haven’t posted recently: heavily learning drawing stuff. Big shout out for Andrew Loomis, the illustrator that blew my mind with his amazing books (who would have thunk that books from 1950 can be sooo amazingly relevant today)

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Just read a pretty interesting article: it starts from the recent MS Xbox 360 price drop and their statement that this brings it to the mass-market and discusses what the mass-market really means.

The mass-market isn’t "one thing for everybody", it’s "something for everybody". It’s not a Holy Grail, a monolithic audience just lying out there waiting for the Right Product – it’s a collection of niches, some larger than others, some very small indeed. Fill enough niches, and you can call your platform – and your medium – mass-market. Simply keep pumping your efforts into one or two niches, and you’ll always be on the sidelines.

I dissagree with the article in that I believe that price points are still a big deal in bringing everybody into games but the article does make some very interesting points. What do you think?

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Not too long ago I was reading an article, I believe on next-gen.biz, showing numbers on the decrease of M-rated games. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not nuts for violence or anything like that, I’m a very peaceful person, but I do like games treating more mature subjects. And these subjects just don’t get the same depth of treatment when they get censored down to a safe E rating. So in this context I’m very happy to announce that now they have a piece showing that though they are fewer they’re bringing in the best money, which gives me continued hope for the game industry as a deep medium. yeayyy!!!

By the Numbers: M-Rated Games Rake It In

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Recently I’ve been reading a lot of articles about the negative effects of piracy on PC gaming sales. It’s interesting to read one from another point of view from a developer of the now really hot PC strategy game Sins of a solar empire that sells great… with no copy protection, unlike others which have a ton of copy protection frustrating their buyers. The writing I think is brilliant as a whole and I can’t hope to cover it with a short quote but I’ll try to pick one anyway:

The number of high end graphics cards sold each year isn’t a trade secret (in some cases you may have to get an NDA but if you’re a partner you can find out). So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? In what other market do companies do that? In other software markets, getting 1% of the target market is considered good.  If you need to sell 500,000 of your game to break even and your game requires Pixel Shader 3 to not look like crap or play like crap, do you you really think that there are 50 MILLION PC users with Pixel Shader 3 capable machines who a) play games and b) will actually buy your game if a pirated version is available?

For a view of the other points he made the full article is a fascinating read IMHO. Nah… I can’t help myself, the article is just too good not to give another quote to tempt you for the full read:

The reason why we don’t put copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor – we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.

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I’m almost crying right now… because of this shocking little game called Passage. I wholeheartedly recomend you play it. I almost didn’t, partly because it wasn’t flash based and I hate running random .EXEs off the internet, and partly because it seemed to me it was just a junky nostalgia piece of the pixel art era, something with little content not worht my time. I warmly recomend it: it may seem super boring, but it ends in 5 minutes, try to figure out as much as possible by then, and maybe the revelation will hit you too as strongly as it hit me forcing me to play it several times until my heart accepted and dealt with the pain. Ironically the little content gets the message through much more powerfully and I may very well think it was a design decision. Imagine the same message, with compelx artwork, a gameplay of 40h … and the message is still the same as it is with our 70 year lives…

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