The Christmas Helper Strikes Again November 30, 2011
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Happy Holidays everyone. With the passing of Thanksgiving I’ve decided to spend several times over the month sharing some of my favorite gaming related Christmas shopping memories. I want to share another quick story with all of you from a few years back.
I’ve got a pretty short story to tell this time. With all the major technological advancements that are made every year and then become standard within the next year, some people who are just jumping in can find themselves in deep water without a floatation device. Six years ago, did anyone even know what an HDMI cable was? By 2013 everyone will have to support it if they want to continue to watch Blu-Ray movies after that date.
I have two stories that happened at two different years right around Christmas that involve people from the analog generation being thrust into the digital one, and thankfully, I was there to help them out so they could give their families a merry Christmas.
The first story happened while I was Christmas shopping for various friends and family, and at the time I was just browsing looking for deals on hardware. I overheard a cell phone conversation with this older gentelman (looked to be in about his mid-40s) and it was clear he was talking to someone he had trouble understanding. While I couldn’t hear what was on the other end of the phone, his mannerisms and what he was saying made it pretty clear he was being told to buy something he had no understanding of, and was completely lost.
Just to show you how lost he was, he clearly said into the phone, “What’s HDMI?”
Oh boy, was he in trouble, and he needed help. I flipped around a DVD player I was looking at and saw it had an HDMI port. I said to him, “That’s HDMI,” and pointed at the port. He heard me and nodded and I walked away.
I know I probably should have minded my own business since that’s the popular judgement most people have for each other nowadays, but it was Christmas and this guy was obviously completely lost as to what he was expected to do. I figured some help was in order, and I’m sure his family appreciated that he got them the correct gifts for Christmas, instead of running the chance of having to find reciepts and return anything that he incorrectly purchased that wouldn’t work properly with whatever their existing setup was.
In short, this is just another example of what can happen when you have what should be private cell phone conversations in public. People around you can probably hear you better than the person that’s on the other end of the phone. In my case, I decided to be a nice guy and help him out. I mean, wouldn’t anyone help a lost man find his way out of a forest?
My Mother, The Crusader November 29, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Editorials.1 comment so far
Happy Holidays everyone. With the passing of Thanksgiving I’ve decided to spend several times over the month sharing some of my favorite gaming related Christmas shopping memories. I want to share another quick story with all of you from a few years back.
Like many people, I will usually have a few video games on my Christmas shopping list. My family knows next to nothing about technology so they usually just prefer that I write down specifically any gifts I may want so they can show it to a store clerk who may be able to make heads or tails of it. This doesn’t always work, however, as I’ve still had to return a few gifts that were incorrectly picked out by a clerk, but its fine for the general majority of things I’ve asked for. After Christmas ended a few years ago and I had some new games to play, my mother had a shopping story she just had to tell me.
The story, as my mother told it, was that the clerks at the register knew that what my mother was buying wasn’t for her. So they asked her very calmly if whoever she was buying the game for was old enough to play it. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Even though I am not under the age of eighteen, I do not agree with mandatory ID checks on people when buying movie tickets, video games or music. There’s no law against buying video games at any age like there is with alchohol or tobacco (in fact all attempts to make these laws have outright failed since they violate the first amendment) so its just store-enforced age discrimination, which to me is quite immoral. Sometimes if I do get carded when buying something I’ll just up and leave the store with the unpurchased item still on the clerk’s conveyor belt. I figure they should have a reality check on just how many lost sales those policies will give them.
When my mother was confronted with a clerk spouting this policy to her (a woman in her mid 50s) she told me she looked at the guy with an odd face and said, “Yes, and he’s old enough to buy the beer to go along with it.” and left. When she told me this story I broke out laughing. I guess these sentements run in the family.
Don’t Listen to Clerks, Listen to Me November 29, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Editorials.1 comment so far
Happy Holidays everyone. With the passing of Thanksgiving I’ve decided to spend several times over the month sharing some of my favorite gaming related Christmas shopping memories. I want to share a quick story with all of you from a few years back, it didn’t help me get a job, but it may help you out this shopping season.
I was in my local Best Buy during the holidays, buying some Christmas gifts for my friends and family. An older couple was behind me in line to ring up their items. They had purchased a Nintendo Wii and a bunch of shovelware games with it. A clerk was with them talking about the Wii and the games they had purchased. The clerk was completely clueless, and had no idea about the technicals of what he was selling. My evidence to this conclusion ranged from the gaming selection the couple had to the comments he made to them, like he had no idea what kind of internal memory capabilities the Wii had (it does, but not very much, just enough for saves and a few downloadable games) or if Wiimotes have rechargeable batteries (they don’t, they use two AA batteries, and you can only get a rechargeable batteries for it through third parties, not recommended).
As he walked away I turned around and commented on their Wii purchase. The line was pretty long and I figured I had about five minutes to kill, so it didn’t bother me. They were actually quite nervous about their purchase and had no idea if they had bought their son right thing. I’m platform agnostic, so I saw no issue with anyone receiving a Wii as a gift, as long as they got some good games along with it.
I asked how old their son was and they responded he was twenty-two. I looked at the stack of games they had, and not seeing the obvious game any twenty-two year old with a Wii would have I told them to leave the line immediately and buy him Super Smash Brothers Brawl, which as far as I was concerned was a must play for the Wii. When they asked what it was about, I said it was a cartoonish fighting game with Nintendo characters and it was very well made and quite fun (I had been playing it at the time). They left the line and came back with a copy, now satisfied of their purchase.
I guess my problem is I have a serious issue with minding my own business. But thank goodness for that, or else I’m sure their son would have been out $50 for the copy of Super Smash Bros he would have eventually bought for himself.
I know that a lot of you parents are going to be stuck buying things on your child’s Christmas list that may look as if its written in some foreign language. You may be asking yourself things like, “What the Hell is an Xbox 360 Kinect 250GB?” Worry not, because that’s what I’m here for. If some random person who is not wearing a store tag tells you something knowledgable, take it with a grain of salt, but listen well, he may just know what he’s talking about.
Alan Wake Xbox Live Arcade Image Analyzed November 10, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Editorials, Game News.1 comment so far
Now, we have known Remedy has been in development of a new Alan Wake game for a while now, as Remedy teased us a few months ago. They had said they were working on a new Alan Wake game, and it wasn’t going to be a sequel or DLC. Armed with just that information, I spent a whole article with my own speculations on what it could possibly be. Well, now we know what it is. Earlier in the week, Remedy has announced that a brand new Alan Wake game is in development and it will be released exclusive to Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA).
Remedy has already promised that even though the game is going to be released through XBLA no sacrifices will be made to any of the core gameplay we know and love from the very first game. They have also stated that if you had removed the cutscenes, the physical space the game took up in the retail disc was around 2GB, which nowadays is small enough to fit maximum XBLA file size specifications. Anyone remember when maximum XBLA filesize was 50mb?
Well the first image of the new game has been released. For legal reasons I’m not going to embed it here, but feel free to check out where its being hosted. The cool thing is, a lot can be speculated on from just the single image! I looked at it myself and drew my own conclusions about it, but some other die hard Alan Wake fans I’ve talked to have noticed things in the image that I had missed!
First off, it looks like we aren’t in Washington anymore! Both the background enviroment and Alan’s attire speak volumes to that. Gone are the forests of the Pacific Northwest, replaced by a desert enviroment. Alan’s attire appears practical given the rugged enviroment. Alan could be somewhere in the midwest or even the south. The background and designs of the buildings around him do scream Montana or the Dakotas (which aren’t that far east of Bright Falls), but given Alan’s attire (and the steer on his belt buckle) he could be as far south as Texas.
Alan is still brandishing a flashlight but he has a new weapon in his hand. Upon initial inspection I thought it was some kind of power drill but other people have commented this is actually a nail gun. The player may be forced to using more improvised weapons in this new game. Not content with just one power tool, I’m sure a lot of people will be asking if a chainsaw will also be on the list. There is a light pole behind him (which were heal/savepoints in the first game), so it looks like all the light based gameplay of the first game is quite intact.
A die hard Alan Wake fan also noticed an improvement to the graphics engine has been made. Paticularly, the model for Alan Wake (played by the actor Ikka Villi) looks a lot more like the actual human actor in the new picture than he looked in the original game. I remember Remedy mentioned they had improved their technology a few months ago (before the new Alan Wake game had been teased) so this is probably the first official image of that new techonology as seen in a product.
Next off is the most obvious thing you can take from this and that is the Night Springs sign on the right side of the picture. Night Springs does not really exist in the Alan Wake world. Night Springs was a fictional series in the game which was probably influenced by shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Over the course of the game, some of the televisions in the game will show various episodes of the show. The major significance of them is that Alan’s agent, Barry Wheeler, had mentioned Alan had written a few episodes of that show, although I don’t think we saw any episodes he had written in the game. In the opening of the game, Alan did have a nightmare (which served as the game’s tutorial) that he was driving towards Night Springs, which was to make it clear to the player he was in fact dreaming. Sarah Breaker did mention in the first game that the older residents of the town were fairly certain that their town was the original inspration for Night Springs. I mean Night Springs is pretty much the opposite word of Bright Falls. Could Alan be traveling through fictional episodes of the series that he created?
Another tidbit no one has really talked about. I’ve kind of sat on this information for a few months now but the Poets of the Fall (who recorded the song “War” for the game’s soundtrack) did tweet that they heard The Old Gods of Asgard recording some new songs. I wonder what that was for…
The first full trailer for the new Alan Wake game will premere on the Spike Video Game Awards Show on December 10th, 2011. If you can’t wait till then a teaser for the trailer has just been released and you can watch it here.
The Cycle of Modern Game Companies November 4, 2011
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When the news hit that Sony had bought out Sucker Punch, I started thinking more and more about just what the companies who make video games have to go through during their life cycles. After looking at it for over ten years, I’ve been noticing a pattern over the past few development cycles starting to emerge. I don’t like it one bit, and I think the rest of the industry shouldn’t like it either.
During the early days of the gaming industry it was exactly as you probably imagine it was. A bunch of geniuses would get together in a dorm room or an apartment and use their programming and art skills to make a game for the early computers. Back then it didn’t take much to publish a game. You could make floppies with the game, seal them up in a ziplock bag, put a label on it, and sell them in quantities to computer stores, who would put them on the shelves alongside the games made by major publishers. There wasn’t a lot of overhead back in those days. The teams were very small, averaging around five people, who would be building these games in their spare time on computers they already had (or stole from work). They wouldn’t bother with stuff like offices or marketing, there was just no need. The market was so small anyway that everyone was treated with legitimacy and if you could make a game that was good, you’d do well for yourself.
id Software was one of the poster childs of this era. They had started as just a few employees of a larger company that were not being allowed to make they projects they wanted to make, so every weekend they’d steal their computers from work, and build video games in a lake house in Shreveport. After they completed the first Commander Keen trilogy for Apogee (later 3D Realms), they were taking in checks for $65,000 a month!
As technology improved, more and more people got into the business interested in getting in on this quickly booming business. Larger teams of developers would be needed to have projects completed quickly. With technology improving rapidly, new people were needed to bring different skills to keep up with the advances in technology. With all these people, creating a real business would be a necessity because people would need to be paid a salary and have a place to work. This didn’t bother the early startups. They had done really well the first time around, and had the money to expand their businesses, nor were the publishers bothered, because they were making most of the money from games sold anyway.
The problem is once you fail things are going to become very difficult for you. Heck, even if you’ve made a great game, you can’t pay your employees with review scores, it has to make money for your company.
Once the company has been exploited as far as it can be, if the publisher isn’t interested in any other projects they have to offer or have no other projects they want them to make, the company is either shut down or absorbed completely by the publisher. This happens FAR too often!
Microsoft is NOTORIOUS for doing this. After the completion of Shadowrun, Microsoft shut down FASA Studios, which had produced fantastic games under Microsoft’s publishing arm for years including the Mechwarrior series and the fan favorite series Crimson Skies. I heard musings that they would work on a Crimson Skies game after completion of Shadowrun, but with the company shut down it never came to fruition. Did anyone else notice the way Jordan Wiesman talked in the Ode To Bungie documentary when he told the story about how he was asked by Microsoft to tell Bungie that being owned by Microsoft wasn’t that bad just so they could strike a deal. I’m sure during that interview Weissman realized the irony of that statement now that Microsoft had shut his company down four years earlier.
There’s also the story of Digital Anvil, a company created by Chris and Erin Roberts, who were responsible for the Wing Commander and Privateer series while working at Origin. When they decided to strike out on their own to make a new universe of similar games, Microsoft stepped in initially just as a publisher for four games the company had under development. After the release of their first game, Starlancer, Microsoft started putting more money into the company, eventually getting ownership of it, and the Roberts brothers left. Two of the games the company was working on got canceled outright, although one of the games, Conquest: Frontier Wars, was so far along in development another publisher picked it up to finish and release it. Digital Anvil existed just long enough to release the long in development and much hyped Freelancer game, which even though it sold extremely well and got very high reviews, could not save itself from being fully absorbed by Microsoft.
Do I even need to talk about Ensemble Studios? I think everyone knows what happened to them after Halo Wars got released, and these were the guys who made the Age of Empires series, considered by many the best Western RTS guys in the world!
Is this what we’ve become? An industry where a promising startup forms under the banner of a visionary industry veteran. A lot gets invested in it by a publisher. The game ships and either doesn’t pay it’s bills or doesn’t make enough to fund another game, and the company dies. It’s happened so many times. Flagship Studios is a huge poster child for this. Here was a company formed by Blizzard veterans who promised to redefine the traditional PC RPG game with a whole new business model of tiered multiplayer. It would be a single player game with an MMORPG component as well, use the most recent DirectX graphics engine to take full advantage of new PC hardware. Sales would come in from retail sales and the optional MMO subscriptions. The problem was the publishers were the ones calling the shots with the game and not the developers, and they forced the game out before it was finished. Initial reviews of the game were lukewarm, and while the developers did improve the game tremendously through patches, the initial reviews weren’t going to be changed, and the costs of maintaining the company and the game’s MMO portion was higher than they were taking in sales and subscriptions, and the plug was pulled.
Even for the independent companies, no matter how successful they are, or how many good titles they’ve developed, to publishers with money, they’re only as good as their next project. Troika Games was responsible for releasing some very fun and yet very undercooked games for the PC, which were well designed but released extremely buggy. I will admit to everyone who will listen to me that I loved Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines with all my heart, and playing it every summer has been a tradition. The game’s atmosphere was second to none. They took a realistic environment like Downtown Los Angeles, California, added in the premise that everything that we assume bumps in the night was in fact real, and created a very atmospheric game with mature themes that worked perfectly for the environment and subject matter. Only it was released before it was ready and had tons of gameplay bugs and a really nasty memory leak. When the company was ready to pitch its fourth project, no one was interested in it, and the studio heads shut the company down, cutting off any chance for them to continue development on Bloodlines to fix the issues with it.
Some companies tried to buck this trend and do something creative to prevent something like this from happening to them. It was met with mixed success. Back in 2006, there was a huge resurgence of companies interested in episodic gaming. The three companies which were poster childs for this, Valve, Ritual Entertainment, and Telltale Games, planned to release games episodically at a lower price for each individual game. The intention was to use the same tools to continue game development through an entire series, with each episode funding the next one. The problem with this business model was that the money made from each individual episode was enough to cover costs of development of the episode, but not enough to cover development of the next episode. Valve survived this because they were Valve, but Ritual not able to weather this storm, and to survive they were bought out by Mumbo-Jumbo, which absorbed them. This stopped support for the SiN Episodes, even though many updates and patches to the game was promised and even ready for deployment. But you could tell Valve’s perspective on Episodic Gaming had been changed. When Half-Life 2 Episode 2 released, it was bundled with four other games, two of which were already released, to get them a full retail price point. How dead is Episodic Gaming? The fact there has not been a word spoken about Half-Life 2 Episode 3 in over three years speaks volumes about that.
However, Telltale Games thrived under these circumstances, since unlike the other two companies, they charged a price point for not just individual episodes, but offered a deal to sell all episodes in advance by paying a flat fee, and they would go out to the customer when finished. However, in the past year I have noticed Telltale has been quick to start taking preorders for the full downloadable games months before a first episode is even released. Of course, they still will give you the game when it releases and the option to pay just for shipping when all the episodes are released to DVD-ROM, but you could be paying upwards of $40US up front for that now.
Bungie is the only exception I can think of to this rule. After making millions upon millions of dollars in profits for Microsoft with the Halo series of games (in exchange for it’s 60 million purchase price), Microsoft let Bungie have their freedom back in exchange for two more Halo titles (which were Halo 3 ODST and Halo Reach). With their freedom, there was no way Bungie would share the fate of companies like FASA or Ensemble, but Microsoft would keep the rights to the Halo franchise.
How can a whole industry survive, let alone thrive, if all the new talent isn’t being given the chance to throw their hat into the ring and make games? It just doesn’t make business sense for a company to form, release a game, then be shut down after the game completes, forcing its employees to form a new company and start the cycle all over again.
We can’t be an industry that is built on the backs of the same companies that started this whole thing in the first place, because even some of them are falling on hard times with poor products coming from very long development cycles. Duke Nukem Forever is what killed 3D Realms. They spent more years than they probably should have developing the same game over and over again thinking each time that the new product they were creating was better than the old one, when in fact people would have been fine with if they simply released the game they showed back in 2001! The cost of development over the extreme number of years bled the once highly profitable company’s profits and overnight it shut down. The game would be saved, but the lesson remained nevertheless.
However, it seems that with the release of smartphones like the iPhone or Android, the industry may have hit a reset button. Almost overnight a new breed of game developers saw these new devices and the new marketplace they ushered in and decided that was where they wanted to stake their claim. Once again overheads are low and because of that profits could be high as the sky. With the device’s low cost, great features, and decent hardware, an enormous install base has come from it. Games selling at .99 cents a download have made some developers overnight millionaires and in the always connected internet age, word of mouth travels fast for what is good and what isn’t. They’re not forced to pony up large amounts of cash up front or be heavily in debt from the outset like startups are nowadays. Failure, even on a monetary basis, might not be fatal to the company. Without the worry of having to sell, creativity has the chance to thrive in this new environment.
We could be seeing the start of a whole new generation of games coming from a completely different mindset that is not based around the PC or Console at all. I mean, everybody’s gotta have a phone these days don’t they?
Science Check: Portal 2 October 27, 2011
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Sometimes, you’re forced to make some severe leaps of logic as to just how plausible a video game’s grounded reality can be. Some things we’re willing to take for granted, like enemies will simply just carry health and ammunition supplies with them at all times, and you will be immediately able to make use of them.
But then sometimes there will be moments in gaming which skirt the bounds of reality and you are forced to ask yourself…COULD THAT REALLY HAPPEN? Fortunately for me, I happen to have a bunch of friends on speed dial with science backgrounds and when I ask them questions, they have no problem filling me in on just what reality would do in these situations.
So this is Science Check, where I take a look at the leaps and bounds of scientific logic that games have made over the years and check if it would indeed work, or if you tried doing it in the real world, you’d be totally screwed.
Today, we’re going to be talking about the game that has been the most requested for this series. Portal 2. Don’t know anything about Portal? Take a look.
First off, I want to tell everyone right now that this is going to be a very different Science Check than what I have done before. Science Check has prided itself with grounding all components of scientific leaps in video games to what already exists, I am at a loss for what to write about here. Portal prides itself with taking theories and putting their own theories on top of those for the sake of the fun of gameplay, and as a game it works fantastically. In reality however, I honestly don’t know if it would work or not, and I don’t think any modern scientist could either.
In the game, the player has control of a Portal Gun created by the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. The company was founded by Cave Johnson who believed in “throwing science to the wall and seeing what sticks.” A noble endeavor, his company didn’t waste its time with theories on top of theories (like I’m going to have to with this article), his philosophy was to learn by doing. If it works, make it better. If it doesn’t work, throw it in an incinerator and board up access to all the lower floors it was developed on. The gun allows the player to create two holes in space (on top of any compatible surface material, moon dust working the best) which automatically bridge between the two points, no matter how far away they were. They could only be disrupted if the gun passed through a special field which if passed through, reset the gun and removed all existing open portals in the area. Any momentum earned while passing through a portal (even in regards to orientation and gravity) would sustain itself on the other side, either to the benefit or despair for its user.
Now the closest thing that has been theorized to exist as a way to link two points that are great distances apart in space has been dubbed an Einstien-Rosen Bridge, or simply a Wormhole. You’ve probably seen them or things like them in various science-fiction movies or shows. Sometimes they are depicted in these fictional stories as existing naturally in space, and in others they can be created artificially by intelligent beings as a way to travel great distances. In reality, an Einstien-Rosen Bridge is something that has not even been SEEN existing normally in the universe, nor has mankind been successful in creating one, and that is the basis of the problem I’m in right now writing about this.
I have no idea if a human would simply be able to pass through a naturally existing Einstien-Rosen Bridge let alone an artificial one without being killed in thousands of ways that are possible and even a few ways that may be impossible! Since we haven’t found any, there are no studies I can look up. It would be useful to know if probes survived going through them, if they could transmit from the other side. Portal depicted going through one as instantaneous (and you would be able to see through to the other side). For all we know, traveling through one could take thousands of years. In Portal, momentum (either by human power or external forces like gravity) could be sustained for a time after going through. There’s no way to know if momentum would continue to exist while passing through a portal, it’s just as likely momentum could be stopped completely at the moment the test subject entered!
Other interesting things to ponder would be about the device that created portals itself. What could power something that powerful and yet be so small? Older signs in the lower floors of the Enrichment Center depicted a portal gun much larger and bulkier than the sleek, handheld recent design you get to make use of, so like with everything techie, it can be made smaller over time.
The device would need to have some kind of internal memory for the spacial coordinants of where the portals are, because the portals will erase themselves when you pass through the force fields at the end of each testing area, showing that it is indeed the gun which is controlling them. If the fields in question were electromagnetic in question, this might cause any internal power source to blink out for a second, erasing the internal memory in the gun and with it the control over the placed portals. This is given credibility to the fact that the portals will only erase when going through the field, simply going around them will do nothing, and if you don’t pass through it, you would be able to place portals on either side of it without the danger of them getting erased. It could also be blocking the wavelenths that the portal beams fire at (similar to how a pair of sunglasses block certain wavelenths of light), which is why you can’t fire a portal through them, but that’s just my theory (Looks like I got into theorizing myself now! -ed).
Moon dust in itself is quite reflective in nature. We know this because we can see the moon at night so long as the light of the sun shines on it (the Earth will sometimes partially or fully block that sunshine). We’ve even seen its effects in pictures taken by the men who visited the moon (that’s the reason there’s no dark shadow on the man on the ladder). This could be the basis of why it is such a good portal conductor, but by that reasoning metallic glitter could be the absolute best, and I don’t think you could place a portal on a metallic surface. You could however, place a portal on the moon itself (in SPACE!), which is what happens in the game’s finale. However, if you look closely at that final puzzle moment, you’ll notice that Valve intentionally altered the perception of time at the moment the gun fires, you know, because of that whole speed of light thing. Nice little touch.
I know it’s not as factual a Science Check as I usually do, but this is a game where the mechanics are based upon theories, which while may be scientifically valid, may be just as realiistically invalid. Its still a fantastic game and a lot of fun, and I recommend it to anyone interested in picking it up!
Can Somebody PLEASE Identify This Disney Channel Movie? October 24, 2011
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Back in the early ’90s, The Disney Channel was actually a paid premium service on par with HBO or Showtime, and when I was a young kid, my parents had access to it. They still had their own unique selection of classic television shows for kids, as well as Disney Channel movies. The movies they broadcast could have been Disney movies that were in theaters, but Disney Channel also broadcast their own unique movies which were produced exclusive for the channel.
Some time in the very early 90s (probably 1990 or 1991, 1992 at the absolute latest) the Disney Channel played a very interesting movie I have since been unable to identify which was one of the first movies I ever saw which tackled gaming as a subject matter. Astonishlingly enough it wasn’t a horror movie! Now I know this wasn’t the first gaming movie (Wargames probably beat them to the punch ten years prior) but seeing gaming recognised in an established medium for the first time was an awesome experience for my eight year old self.
The movie revolved around a bunch of teenagers (they may have been adults playing teenagers) who had an arcade in their basement. This was no small operation, they had a lot of full sized arcade games down there. Heck, I specifically remember they even had a full sized SEGA motorcycle game (Hang On)!
The cool thing was that all the games were actually linked together (somehow), and it allowed them to play a continuous game on all of them. They controlled a character (I will call him an avatar) through various problems, and made decisions for each situtation he’d find himself in out of a multiple choice list. When he would move from task to task, it would be represented as a different arcade game. Each of the gamers had their own specialty. When the avatar got on his motorcycle for example, one of the players would hop on the SEGA motorcycle game and guide him to his destination.
Because it was an earlier movie, the avatar was represented as a live-action human being. Even though he was played by a human, he was still a game character, so anyone trying to draw parellels to the movie Gamer can just stop there. The avatar, played by a different live action actor, was monitored by the players on a seperate TV screen. When he reached a decision point, the players would decide amongst themselves what the avatar should do and select the decision out of a list. That would lead the game to its next setpiece, and one of the players would have to complete one of the arcade games (which game was played was dependant on what the avatar had to do in the game).
At the end of the movie, as the players reached the conclusion of the game’s story, a game character came back that they weren’t expecting, and it ruined the outcome for the avatar. The game ruined, all the players start packing up. When they all start to go home a teenager’s father (who looked like a businessman) comes by to pick him up and tells him that he is willing to give him a good paying job, and with the money he could earn from it, he can afford to buy new equipment to upgrade the arcade.
A very lengthy wikipedia search of every Disney Channel produced movie since the channel was founded has turned up nothing. No movie synopsis for any of the movies the channel produced in the last twenty years came close. I also tried to match it up with any television shows produced exclusive to the channel and turned up nothing close, but that was kind of futile since Disney Channel rebroadcast shows made by other production companies at that time, and those would not have been listed.
Can ANYONE identify this? I’d love to find a copy of it somewhere so I could review it for the site, but I don’t even know the name!
You Will Be Missed (Part 3) October 21, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Editorials, You Will Be Missed.add a comment
I’ve been following gaming news for over ten years and I’ve been involved in the industry for over eight years as a staff writer on various sites. I understand that not all companies last forever, but there comes a time when you are so caught up in the activities of an organization that when it shuts down, a part of you goes with it. It’s happened to me more times than I can remember, but here’s a list of companies from my experiences that are no longer with us. They’ve either been shut down, gone bankrupt, or were taken over so badly that they are no longer the same company I loved. It is a sad story to see such great potential end abruptly, but like life we have to move on, but we will never forget.
Rare: This one was requested by one of my commenters on an earlier You Will be Missed. Rare was one of the best Nintendo exclusive developers in the US for the SNES and N64 generations producing hits that were not only critically acclaimed but fan favorites of their respective platforms. They produced such hits as Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Killer Instinct, Perfect Dark, and of course GoldenEye 64, considered by many the greatest N64 game of all time.
Then Microsoft bought them for $100 million ($40 million more than they paid for Bungie) and made them an Xbox exclusive developer. They started off by releasing updated games for the Xbox 1 platform like Conker: Live and Reloaded, but when the Xbox 360 came out of the gate they launched two major exclusives, Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo, one of which was a critical disappointment and the other was not a major seller. After that, Rare released Viva Pinata, which was a very good seller. The problem was, Viva Pinata was very different from the action games that Rare’s fans wanted them to continue making. Since then, Rare has been working on very different kinds of games for the 360 platform. While games like Perfect Dark and Banjo Kazooie have been ported to Xbox Live Marketplace, Rare’s recent resume has been working on games like Kinect Sports. While the company is still very much alive and kicking, it has been clear many fans would like for them to go back and continue releasing the unique action games that made them successful.
Lechmere: This one may be a bit of an obscure one, as with the research I’ve done told me that this place spread only as far as the Northeastern US. Lechmere was an electronics store on par with what we would consider a Best Buy or PC Richards nowadays, but only it did it years before Best Buy even came to my state. The difference between this store and more recent electronics stores is that this place knew what it was selling but still operated in a mass market mindset. The stores were huge, twice as big as what a Circuit City was, and there was nothing electronic they wouldn’t sell. You could even stock a brand new kitchen with appliances, or demo a video game over at the Nintendo 64 alcove. My first exposure to most of the major devices in the 90s was in Lechemere, including the Virtual Boy, Playstation, Nintendo 64, CD-i and 3DO. This is where I would go to see those early PC FMV games demoed as well. I remember being wowed off my rocker to see movies being released on CD-ROM there for the first time (boy those never took off!)
So if it did everything right, why is it the company’s been dead since back when I was in middle school? Well, you can blame big business for that. The story I was told at the time was there was a major conglomerate (I don’t know which one, and they’re bankrupt now so who cares?) who wanted the Maytag name but couldn’t get it. Because Lechmere had it, they chose to buy the company to acquire Maytag in the process. When the conglomerate filed for bankrupcy, they took Lechmere with them, and even though the stores had plenty of customers and sales, they were shut down. My own research did confirm part of this story, but I cannot verify the reason why they were purchased was because of Maytag, so for all I know that story could be bullshit. Regardless, the company shut down in 1997 and has not been seen since.
In my opinion, no electronics store since has been organized as well as Lechmere did. Their mindset was big and it worked well for them. Prices were affordable for items, like music or movies, they actually had a large amount of cash registers open at any given time (you know, because there were people buying things). This was a lot different then when I had to start dealing with stores like Circuit City, which never had registers open under any circumstances. They would instead force customers to go to Customer Service to buy their items, and have to wait forever behind people returning a printer they never should have bought in the first place. I miss you Lechmere, come back, we need you in this world!
FASA Studios: Formed by Jordan Weisman in the 80s, this company was responsible for the Mechwarrior, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies games, all of which are considered some of the best games ever published by Microsoft. The company was bought by Microsoft and for a while they were given a lot of liberty with what they could do. In 2006, after completing Shadowrun, Microsoft had no further projects for them (even though they wanted to make another Crimson Skies game) and chose to shut the company down.
You can find a FANTASTIC video about the life and death of this company on YouTube, done by someone who calls himself Research Indicates. It was done very similar to documentaries directed by Ken Burns and provided a lot of great information and factoids.
A lot of the people who were a part of the Crimson Skies team became a part of Bungie Studios and contributed to the space dogfight segment of Halo Reach. Weisman has since formed a new studio and recently released Crimson Steam Pirates for the iPad (with the backing of the now independant Bungie).
I’d also like to make a small update to some of the earlier You Will be Missed articles I have written in the past.
The Little Miss Gamer blog from PBC-Productions has gotten some life back into it. Lindsey Briggs has posted a tidbit or two on it as of recently after over a year of lapse. Unfortunately, PBC has not made any Little Miss Gamer or Captain S videos in quite a while, but I hope to hear more from it!
Barry Smith’s InkTank site is back online, and some of the archives of the older Angst Tech are back up as well. Barry even put up a new strip shortly after bringing the site back up. Unfortunately that is all that was added to the site in several months, as the majority of the Angst Tech archive has not been restored, and no further new strips have been posted.
Science Check: Heavy Rain October 19, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Editorials, Science Check.1 comment so far
Sometimes, you’re forced to make some severe leaps of logic as to just how plausible a video game’s grounded reality can be. Some things we’re willing to take for granted, like enemies will simply just carry health and ammunition supplies with them at all times, and you will be immediately able to make use of them.
But then sometimes there will be moments in gaming which skirt the bounds of reality and you are forced to ask yourself…COULD THAT REALLY HAPPEN? Fortunately for me, I happen to have a bunch of friends on speed dial with science backgrounds and when I ask them questions, they have no problem filling me in on just what reality would do in these situations.
So this is Science Check, where I take a look at the leaps and bounds of scientific logic that games have made over the years and check if it would indeed work, or if you tried doing it in the real world, you’d be totally screwed.
I was going through my shelves eyeballing various games I have in my collection this time around, looking for something that grounded itself in reality enough for me to talk about it for this article, and low and behold I came across Heavy Rain by Quantic Dream. I picked up this game on day one based upon my enormous love of the previous game Quantic Dream had made, Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit for you Europeans and American Director’s Cut owners). A Playstation 3 exclusive, the game has you control four different characters as you try to determine the identity of a serial killer to stop him before he kills his next victim. The game had a gripping story and intuitive controls, either on the Dual Shock 3 or Playstation Move.
One of the characters you play as in the game is Detective Norman Jayden, with the FBI. He’s assigned to the NYPD as a Profiler in order to help them out with this case. Jayden’s unique ability is his use of the ARI system, which was given to him by the FBI to use for the case. What is ARI? Take a look at this and fast forward to about three and a half minutes in.
The ARI system that Norman uses in the game comprises of a pair of VR Goggles (made up to look like stylish sunglasses) and an interface glove. They provide the player with Night Vision, as well as a full uplink to an identification and analysis database, probably the FBI crime lab. In short, they’re a forensic scientist’s dream, able to immediately identify clues in a crime scene with a few waves of Norman’s gloved hand. He can examine trace evidence from a multitude of clues including blood, tire tracks, and identify objects. It stores all this information so it can be investigated further at the user’s convenience. Finally, ARI even comes with a few minigames the user can select from when killing time off duty. That sure is a great device! Can we get a pair of our own someday? Well, I’m going to tell you. Since ARI has multiple functions in one device, I’m going to have to break down the device into its basic functions and determine if it is indeed a plausible device as shown in the game, and if it is, tell you how they could be made in reality.
First off I want to talk about the Night Vision, or if you prefer, Light Amplification, feature. Night Vision as we know it can amplify light with usually a green and black or black and white color spectrum. There are other options for seeing in the dark as well, such as infrared which reads only heat, usually responding well to body heat or starlight vision, which can also be used to film at night. ARI’s Night Vision appears to be light amplification, which is very common and is also used by the military for night missions. Heck, you could probably buy yourself your own pair of goggles that can do light amplification for around $100. However, I would be negligent if I didn’t mention night vision goggles are usually big and bulky and trade light enhancement at the cost of depth perception, at least for civilian models, but I must remind anyone reading this that ARI’s tech is not civilian, it is government, which is usually a few years ahead of whatever civilians can get a hold on, and remind you that we never actually see what ARI’s interface looks like from behind Jayden’s eyes, only in third person, so it is possible that Norman could have depth perception problems while wearing them that the player isn’t aware of. This gets a pass.
While investigating, Jayden can just take his gloved hand and do a down motion with it, which ARI recognises as a command to sweep the immediate area for clues. Once the area has been swept, any clues will be highlighted, allowing for Jayden to investigate them further. This interface is almost exactly like what the Microsoft Kinect can do. The way the Kinect works is by shining an infrared light over a whole area. The light is invisible to the naked eye but the effect would read VERY similar to how the player sees it when investigating. The Kinect then reads the infrared spectrum with a 3D camera which can only read in infrared. The 360’s software compares the motions read by the camera and compares them to the motions it is programmed to recognize, and if it recognizes the move from the user, it registers it on the TV. If there was some kind of IR transmitter inside of the ARI goggles, and a sensor that picked up the infrared light, it would be able to take real-time 3D images of a crime scene almost instantly. It could also be programmed to only recognise the interface glove, and specifically take commands only while the user is giving them with it on.
It looked like the ARI had a direct uplink to some sort of FBI crime database since Jayden could instantly pull information, rap sheets, and other data in real-time that only the FBI or other local Police would have access to. There must be some sort of wireless antenna inside the ARI that allows for the fast transfer of data. Since ARI operates in areas that do not have WiFi hotspots the immediate assumption is that ARI must have some sort of cellular modem which can transmit data directly to the FBI and receive responses back. Of course, the downside would be what would happen if ARI operated in a cellular dead zone (which are quite common where I’m from, even though tons of people live here)?
The thing that the game fudges with is that ARI would not be able to take samples of what it sees like it does in the game. It may be able to identify two-dimensional images and identify what they were if the crime database already had it on file, such as fingerprints of ex-convicts or even tire-tracks of previously cataloged tires. It would NOT be able to identify DNA evidence and attribute who it belonged to just by closely examining it. Norman would need to collect a sample of the evidence, by putting it into some kind of sample container for processing. It is not enough for Norman to simply touch a DNA sample, even with the ARI’s interface glove, because in order for DNA to be processed, it must be done in a sterile environment free of ALL contaminants. Doing a DNA test in a live outdoor crime scene would be a bad idea.
ARI also has the ability to identify trace objects, even if they are invisible to the naked eye, like plant pollen. In reality, ARI would need an EXTREMELY high-resolution camera in order to identify objects that small, since even the smallest blur around the edge of a microscopic object could alter its identification. Since there are a nearly infinite amount of variations of objects, ARI or the crime database would need to have an extremely lengthy three-dimensional database of all kinds of objects for ARI to have to compare to. They would all need to be pre-scanned into the ARI database in 3D or else the ARI system will not be able to recognise what the object was. I would hate to be the FBI intern who would have to spend every day digitally scanning new coffee mugs with the hopes that some FBI field agent would run into one while on assignment.
But once ARI has all that information recorded, what do you do with it? In one of my favorite scenes from the game, Norman appropriates a decrepit abandoned office he’s given by the NYPD to make it compatible with ARI’s specifications. He moves his desk up against the wall and pushes all the clutter on top of it to the floor so he can use the desk’s surface to help him interface with ARI. When he puts his glasses back on, he’s almost magically transported to a virtual world of his choosing, rendered by the ARI glasses. He could be underwater, on top of a cliff side, or on the surface of Mars, all to go through his clues. Imagining that the lenses of his glasses would be able to display a 3D VR environment to him, as well as use the same interface system in the crime scene to respond to his commands, ARI would need a high-end central processing unit and graphics card to render that kind of environment in real time, and they would need to be small enough to fit in a pair of sunglasses, making them have to be smaller than even they would be inside the tiniest of cell phones. It would also need to have all these environments in memory as well, or else ARI would not be able to work at all in areas with no wireless coverage, and I honestly don’t think that’s a limitation the FBI would be willing to have in such an important device they would be giving to field agents.
But the ARI is more than just for work, just like your iPhone or Android, ARI includes minigames that Norman likes to play around with. While we don’t actually get to play with more than one minigame, the interface showed it had a few games in its memory. Devices like the Playstation Vita and iPhone already have the capability to augment reality. With the use of the device’s cameras, an image can be displayed over them in 3D which the user can manipulate using the device’s controls. Gyroscopes and GPS systems allow the rendered image to stay in place even if the camera is moved or the user’s perspective changes. The Kinect also was designed to play games, and using the assumption it would have similar hardware to the Kinect, that interface could be used for gaming. ARI’s games were pretty simple, like throwing a virtual baseball against a virtual brick wall, and that should be doable even with low processing power.
The problem is that basically ARI would be a device with high-definition cameras, night vision, a high end CPU and GPU, a cellular modem, an infrared transmitter, and all have to function on a battery no larger than one that could fit in a pair of sunglasses. I don’t think batteries that small with that much power (even rechargeable ones) exist quite yet. The other thing is that these things were implied to be cheap, almost throwaway technology. In one possible ending of the game, Jayden quits the FBI. When he offers to turn in his ARI along with his badge and gun, his superior tells him not to worry, that they were expecting the shipment of an updated model and were planning on throwing away the current models anyway. Even if you could build one of these devices yourself, it would not be as cheap as the game implies, at least not with technology made today. Maybe someday some of the advances in technology we would need to make ARI a possibility will come, like the smaller high-capacity battery, but for now the goggles, it seems, do nothing.
Science Check: Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater October 11, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Editorials, Science Check.2 comments
Sometimes, you’re forced to make some severe leaps of logic as to just how plausible a video game’s grounded reality can be. Some things we’re willing to take for granted, like enemies will simply just carry health and ammunition supplies with them at all times, and you will be immediately able to make use of them.
But then sometimes there will be moments in gaming which skirt the bounds of reality and you are forced to ask yourself…COULD THAT REALLY HAPPEN? Fortunately for me, I happen to have a bunch of friends on speed dial with science backgrounds and when I ask them questions, they have no problem filling me in on just what reality would do in these situations.
So this is Science Check, where I take a look at the leaps and bounds of scientific logic that games have made over the years and check if it would indeed work, or if you tried doing it in the real world, you’d be totally screwed.
This time, I’m talking about Metal Gear Solid 3, and if you’ve played the game you know if I’m talking about Metal Gear Solid 3, I’m probably going to be asking about the Shagohod. You are correct.
For those of you who haven’t played Metal Gear Solid 3 and don’t know what the Shagohod is, please enjoy this scene from the game which goes into explicit detail about what it is, what it does, and how it works.
That’s right ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to be talking about a Rocket Tank.
Inter-Contentental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) are enormous rockets which carry a nuclear payload. They are so massive that they have to be housed in missile silos, where they are buried deep underground on military owned unmarked land. The locations of these silos are pretty well-known by the opposition, and they are supposedly monitored by spy satellites constantly. During the Cold War, if one side was to launch their nuclear payloads, the deterrence was that the other side would know pretty quickly and launch their own missiles in retaliation, simultaneously destroying each other (and probably taking the rest of the planet with it).
Neither side liked this stalemate very much and each tried to do the best they could to gain an advantage over the other. The most famous of which was when the Russians tried to install WMDs into Cuba, causing the Cuban Missile Crisis. Other attempts to gain an advantage included when each side built nuclear equipped submarines, which were equipped with nuclear missiles of their own, capable of firing against their opponent, but these subs could be detected by sonar systems or the opposing country’s own submarines and turned away.
The Shagohod represents the extreme case of these conditions. Obviously during nuclear war, you want to be able to launch anything against your enemy in secret . To gain an advantage over the Americans, in Metal Gear Solid 3, the decision was made to build a nuclear equipped tank capable of firing from any point in Russia to hit anywhere in the mainland United States. Since any ICBM capable of traveling that distance would require two stages (it needed to be big enough to contain all the fuel it would need for making that distance) a standard ICBM would be too big to fit on any tank.
The brilliance of the design of the Shagohod is that in order to make up for the lack of a second stage on the projectile it was equipped with two rocket engines that could bring it up to speeds of 300 MPH, which fired a payload while at top speed with the intention that by firing the rocket while at speed, the total possible distance of the launched missile would increase by three times, eliminating the need for a second stage on the missile thus allowing it to be small enough to fit on the tank.
The idea of firing a weapon in motion is an interesting concept that goes back as early as weapons themselves. In fact, earlier cultures would train to use a bow and arrow while on horseback. The idea was that firing the bow while the horse was galloping at full speed would transfer some of that speed to the arrow while it was fired, giving the arrow the chance to penetrate the target further and increase the chance of a lethal hit. Penetration, when it comes to a nuclear weapon, is completely useless. A nuclear weapon does not explode on impact, it detonates in the atmosphere because its more effective that way. The game specifically says this method was designed to increase the total distance of the missile and that is what we’re going to judge it by.
Unfortunately, in reality it doesn’t look like something like the Shagohod would ever be able to get off the ground. The physics experts I’ve talked to have informed me that you can only transfer motion in that way if whatever is launching it has a much larger motion than the projectile its firing. In this case you have a very large tank going at 300 miles per hour firing a projectile which has a much smaller mass but travels at a much faster velocity. The problem is that the mass of whatever’s firing the projectile is meaningless, only the mass of the projectile and its velocity are what matters.
As you can see in the theoretical video, the Shagohod is firing its nuclear missile at an angle, which means it is not launching at the same exact direction that the tank is at. After any projectile leaves its launcher, it will immediately start decreasing horizontal velocity and things like gravity will start to kick in and work against it. Any initial speed it would have gotten from the launch boost would be lost in a matter of seconds.
The final nail in this coffin is the fact that rockets are designed to be fired from a standstill. You don’t want high acceleration in a rocket as it would make things harder to change. A high mass object going at high acceleration is difficult to control, and an uncontrollable weapon is not useful to a major government power.
It makes sense that something like the Shagohod was never actually made, because in reality it wouldn’t work. On paper the concept is terrifying (and makes for a great video game threat) but in reality, the physics in place would not work as the game said it would. I appreciate that the game did give specific numbers in order to make the threat the Shagohod possessed seem more immediate, but the laws of inertia are not on the Shagohod’s side.
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