I don’t play MMOs; the majority of my gaming time is consumed by single player titles. Though many such games involve you taking the role of a character, and sometimes you can even design them, without the social aspect it never really feels like the character you control is an avatar, a direct representation of you. Single player character-driven games, especially the more narrative focused ones, are nothing more than puppeteering. You can do what you want with the strings you’re given, but nothing more.
Avatars are about ownership and one does not own John Marston in Red Dead Redemption. You control him in between story segments, but he is exclusively his own person within the narrative. The set-ups, the order of events, the motivations of the characters exist strictly within Rockstar Games’ realm, but the how is what’s up to the player. If between moments of severe tension in the Mexican Revolution you decide to go back to the United States to go look for some treasure and pick some flowers, that experience remains yours. If you capture a bounty alive and during the trip back to the local jail you get randomly attacked by a cougar because you decided to take a short cut through a field and you curse at it for killing your horse and your bounty, you have a unique tale to tell.
John Marston’s story, however, belongs to Rockstar. Everyone that plays it, save those that quit part way through, will have the same narrative and the same outcome. Top down story-telling tends to separate a game’s character from the player. You control Marston at times, but you are not him. It’s a small but important difference because when it comes to solitary game experiences, an avatar, as a representation of the user, is solely the result of a player’s actions. You could switch out John Marston for any other character and it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s what you did to get there that counts.
We boarded the plane at high noon. By three in the afternoon I was on the ground again, nearly ten hours passed. A direct flight from Paris to Toronto is eight hours long, but this one had a stop-over in Quebec to let off all the Quebecois. The final one hour stretch from Quebec City to Toronto Pearson airport was wonderful; the majority of passengers had disembarked, leaving a mostly empty and spacious plane for the more English speaking passengers. I kept trying my French with the stewardess, partly out of habit and partly because this might be my last time I can do so for a while. I am now in anglophone land.
The in-flight entertainment was a Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker movie followed by a Twilight movie. Once this was announced and we hit cruising speed I quickly got up and pulled out my little netbook and the thumb drive which I had preloaded with music and some better entertainment. Minutes after booting, I switched off VLC, stopped my movie, and did something rash: I opened Flash CS3.
With my legs stretched out and crossed–oh how wonderful it was to have seat 1A–and the EEEPC balanced on my knees, I started making things to kill the time. I set up basic DisplayObject structure, created an mp3 loader and player, played around with audio visualization, created some blurring effects and filters, used the visualization data to generate “enemies”, brought in user input and player bullets, and, as a whole, got into a serious groove. In less time than it took to show to horrible movies I had the basis for a playable music game.
It probably won’t amount to much in the end but it stands as a testament to the creative possibilities that arise when you are trapped in an uncomfortable place with nothing to do and no means of escape. If this is true, then my being in Mississauga should herald a new creative era.
I realize that such a comparison between the Apple iPad and the Sony PSP is inherently fallacious. Comparing the sales performance of the iPad to the PSP is like comparing the performance of a boat to a plane; they’re completely different. For one, the low end iPad costs almost twice as much as the PSP at launch. On the other hand, the iPad has far greater utility and a lot more software and media available at launch. The iPad also has a browser and mp3 player that isn’t painful to use. So in some ways it evens out.
The one thing that distinguishes both launches is the amount of hype. While the PSP had a bit, most of it was contained within the already excitable gamer demographic. The mainstream press, while making mention of it, casually passed it by. There certainly were no marquee features in the likes of Time magazine, written by Stephen Fry, or anything of the sort. There was no hyperbole about the PSP saving media/journalism/print/whatever. It was just another game device.
Today it was revealed that the iPad sold 300,000 units on launch. People are claiming it’s a success. It sold more than the iPhone originally did, and look how that turned out! Big numbers!
You wouldn’t know it if you went by the buzz alone, but when the PSP launched in North America it sold, in two days[1], 500,000 units. It was considered a flop.
It’s pretty safe to say that the PSP under-performed over its lifetime and didn’t make the in-roads that Sony hoped it would, but it’s also pretty far from a failure despite public perception. There are over 50 million of them. I don’t care what you’re selling, if you sell 50 million of it that’s pretty damned good. You wouldn’t know it by the hype, and this is where that media perception comes in, but that means there are 20 million more PSPs sold than iPhones and iPod Touchs combined.OK, yeah, that’s an old number. There are more of those than PSPss now. But still fewer than DSs. See comments
I find this interesting from a media perspective. When I see the actual numbers being so disproportionate from the actual buzz around the devices, I come to two conclusions: 1) Apple’s marketing is that much better than Sony’s; 2) Videogames, despite their obvious ubiquity, still get no respect in the media and the PSP, being a games-first machine, was duly dismissed. Let’s not even mention that the Nintendo DS is approaching 150 million sold.
The revolution with simple, accessible computing in magical devices happened long ago. They’re already all around us.
I realize I’m comparing one day sales to two day sales, but with launches like this the vast majority of sales are on day one. There’s no way that the iPad sold more on day two than day one, so I believe the PSP still has the edge.
You might remember James Barnett’s “fauxvist” series of videogame landscapes, which I posted on Offworld last summer. He was also one of the very first Kickstarter projects and, because of certain internet community affiliations, I was an early supporter. Thanks in part to all of these things I had the option to have a specially commissioned painting from James. As I very much enjoyed the fauxvist landscapes, I went for more of that.
I thought about what videogame vistas I liked and wanted to see recreated in this fashion (leaned towards Metroid Prime, to be honest) but it soon became apparent that I was going abroad and a painting wasn’t the most practical thing to bring with me, so it morphed into a thank you gift to my friend JP. The setting became obvious: Bioshock’s Arcadia. I must have a thing for big, artificial environments being consumed by nature (see Metroid Prime) because that was my unbiased favourite area in Bioshock. I figured he’d appreciate it more anyway on account of, you know, his design work on that specific map. The painting arrived yesterday so I can finally post it:
I’m glad that this Wired list of the 15 Most Influential Games of the Decade exists since it proves yet again why Chris Kohler is one of my favourite people writing about video games and because it reinforces one of my opinions. A few other end of the decade video game lists left me rather disappointed but Guardian’s top 50 left me completely baffled. Four Grand Theft Auto games and not a single Sims game? Really? More disappointing still was their expanded Top 100 list which, after all those games, doesn’t even acknowledge one of the best and most influential games of the decade. A game that Chris Kohler rightfully recalls.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved
It was a rather simple game with simple vector based graphics that unapologetically played like something straight out of an early 80s arcade. It’s easy to overlook a game like that, but there’s no denying that its influence was massive. It was a herald for a new kind of console game.
It was an XBox 360 launch game and, more importantly, it was a launch game for XBox’s Live Arcade digital distribution service. By virtue of being there at the beginning it was one of the first, and the most successful, games that you could buy and play from the console itself. We almost take it for granted now but five years ago this was a big deal.
Do you know how many credits the game has for design and programming? One. And even though it was a mini-game within the much larger Project Gotham Racing 3 and had that larger studio backing, it proved, right from the start of the XBox Arcade service, that small one-or-two man teams can create games for the platform and succeed. All the consoles now have quite a few small-team produced, independent games available on them. This too was mostly unthinkable five years ago.
It’s not the first modern retro-styled game but it was a popular and successful (and cheaply made) one and because of it you can draw a line from Geometry Wars to Space Invaders Extreme and Pac-Man: Championship Edition and Galaga Legions and many others. Its aesthetic impact on this style of new-retro games is obvious.
One of the best games of the decade wouldn’t exist if not for Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and that game is: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2.
It showed the power of having an instantly accessible quick-play game installed on your system’s hard drive. Downloading something? Start up Geometry Wars, see where your friends are on the leaderboards (perfectly integrated, showing others how to do it from the start), and play for a few minutes.
Hundreds of blatant clones.
Other reasons.
It’s making me wish I had my XBox 360: my leaderboard scores need a boost.
I’ve previously mentioned my official and certified title of regional Super Mario World champion. I still have the proof, in writing, from Nintendo itself.
As it says there, my skills and talents won me a sweatshirt. During my cleaning and packing prior to coming to Paris, I found it. I photographed it. I reminisced about winning it.
Super Mario World
The first thing you might notice about the above form letter is that I was the high scorer of Super Mario World. This in itself is weird because scoring has never been a goal of any Mario game. Sure, the early games tallied points but it was always acknowledged as a legacy of videogames’ arcade roots and not something inherent to the game design. No one paid attention to it as the goal always was to beat the game. Indeed, all the obsessive challenges around these Super Mario revolve around beating it as fast as possible. There are many speedruns[1], but playing Mario for score isn’t an expected thing.
By the time the competition arrived in Mississauga, I was already well versed in Super Mario World. I was twelve and I had already beaten it multiple times, found all 96 levels, including the star road, and beaten those, and discovered a few weird exploits. This, of course, was in the days before the likes of gamefaqs.com so all of it was earned the hard way: by sheer will of persistence. Never underestimate a twelve year old’s ability to make the most out of a single game. Of course, in all that time I never played the game for score so this competition required some adjustments.
I had previously, however, maxed the score out at 9,999,990 using one of those found exploits. As anyone that has played an old Mario game knows, continually jumping on enemies (or chaining them with a hit shell) without hitting the ground basically doubles the amount of points you are rewarded. Jumping on one goomba gives you 100 points, hitting a second, without landing, gives you 200, then 400, 800, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000, and then a 1UP. At this point you stop getting points, but you start accumulating lives.
In the forest area of Super Mario World, about half-way through the game, there are caterpillar enemies, called Wigglers, that have unique characteristics in the game. Jumping on a Wiggler would net you points as normal, but it wouldn’t kill them. It’d just make them angry. Pissed off Wigglers would turn red and mean and start frantically moving around their area becoming more of a nuisance. You could keep jumping on them in this state, but it’d do nothing and it’d net you no points.
What I noticed was that if you went a screen away from an angry wiggler and then back again they’d respawn in their calm states. This meant that if you were adept enough with the cape and flying through the air, and if there were enough wigglers in a level, you could float back and forth continually, crash landing on them, and accumulate as many 1UPs as you wanted. I figured this would be a good way to collect lives for some of the harder star road levels, so I found a good, open space in one of the levels and went to work. What I didn’t account for was the game glitching out completely after you earned your third or fourth 1UP.
A pointer in the memory must have gone astray because the “1up” pronouncements soon became scrambled graphics and the lives gained became arbitrary additions and the score started to increase by seemingly random values. Scores increase almost exponentially and in less time than it takes to complete a level you can accumulate the maximum 9,999,990 points. Something about those damn Wigglers must have caused an overflow and all the counters went crazy. An example of this can be seen in this video here, although this player did it in a more clever way, and easier location, than I remember doing it. This glitch might be relatively common knowledge now, within the right circles, but back then it was privileged information. I was on top of it, I knew the game back to front, and I was ready for any Super Mario World competition.
The Competition
The Nintendo Power Play Tour’s Mississauga stop was stationed in the Woolco parking lot at the Square One shopping mall, the depressing “heart” of the city. Cordoned off in the area were a few sponsor stalls and one giant trailer, inside of which was a single aisle with encased televisions and Super Nintendos on either side. The right side had the latest games to try and the left were all the competition Super Mario Worlds. People would line up outside until a group was let in. They’d flow in to the trailer and lay claim to a machine and a controller and once everyone was ready the machines would be reset. After five minutes the controllers would be deactivated and the rear doors opened. The staff would take a survey of the Super Mario World machines to see if anyone beat the current high score and, if they did, record their name and contact information. Then the machines would be reset and the next batch of people let in.
As long as you lined up after each go, you could play as many times as you wanted. I thought of the wigglers out there in the Forest of Illusion, but they were too far in the game to reach. For a moment I considered rushing the game, saving as often as I could, and then resuming from that point each round but the problem with that approach was that I wasn’t guaranteed the same machine each time. Not to mention the risk that someone would overwrite the save. There wasn’t even any guarantee that I could reach that point via five minute increments. I had to make due with World 1 and figure out strategies to maximize my score within that.
I played through the first few levels of the game a number of times, taking mental notes of what yields how many points, how long it takes, what’s a waste of time, and how much of a time bonus I could get at the end of a level. I was making good progress, and always looking over my shoulder at how others approached it, but it was slow and it wasn’t getting me a really great competitive score. There had to be a better way.
Then it dawned on me.
Intro
The first level of Super Mario World (technically the first level on the right as SMW is the only Mario game that I can think of without a defined first level.) acts as the typical Nintendo-styled introduction to the game. Everything in the level, and everything Mario can do, is organically revealed. There are no tutorials and no tips, just a plain game mechanic driven carrot on a stick.
To the right of the start is a shell lying on the ground with a platform above on which a bunch of koopas are walking. The setup is obvious, but in that instant it shows you a few things that can be done in Super Mario World. You can either kick shells or pick them up. If you pick them up, you can jump with them. Then you can throw them to dispatch enemies. And, most relevant to my needs, if you kill multiple enemies you will cause a chain and eventually get a 1UP.
That means if you play it right, and it’s hard not to, in the very first few seconds of the first stage you can net yourself 16,400 points. After that, all the time you spend collecting pittances, be it from Yoshi coins or other enemies, seems wasteful by comparison. That’s when I remembered one little trick in the game: if you play through a previously completed level, you can press start and select to cancel out of it. Then you can play it again. And cancel out. And, yes, I did that.
I would rush through the first level, just so I had it completed, then for the rest of the five minutes I’d spend going back to that same level for five second intervals. I’d kill those initial koopas and get the points then pause, hit select, drop back out to the map, and repeat over and over and over again. It might not be in the spirit of the competition, but it was damn effective. I honed my technique and did this about, at the very minimum, ten times. I must have spent over an hour playing Super Mario World in this way. Eventually I had a score I couldn’t beat anymore, 656,500, and I was comfortable enough with it to know that I could finally go home. I was right.
The Prize
A couple weeks later I got the above form letter and this sweatshirt:
The front features a large Super Nintendo logo adorned with extraneous brightly coloured triangles and circles, as was the style of the time. It’s very much of its era, stuck in that post-80s geometric pre-mainstream-grunge Parker Lewis look. With the fashion trends of the last couple of years, it’s almost fashionable again. Or ironic.
The sleeves have the prerequisite junk food sponsor logos. I remember the Power Tour had, as was popular at that time, a Pepsi Taste Test booth near to the Nintendo trailer. As with every Pepsi Taste Test I’ve had, and I’ve had a few, I chose the competitor’s product. Every time.
The back of it has Mario riding Yoshi with more superfluous dots and neon pointing triangles and a green rectangle. Before I left I did try the shirt on and, to my surprise, it fit. It was a little snug, but then it wasn’t designed for someone of my age. That’s probably a testament to the weight I’ve lost these last few years.
Despite my victory, I still wonder what could have been. A few weeks later I received confirmation that I wasn’t the Ontario champion. I can’t remember the exact score, but I think I was bested by a 100,000 to 200,000 points. I think they were from Sudbury or the Sault. I’ve always wondered how they managed that, or what the theoretical best score in five minutes is. I never bothered to try. By then, I was already sick of Super Mario World and I had moved on to the latest and greatest (probably Super Mario Kart.)
I still wonder, in this day of speed-run videos, emulators, and tool-assisted play-throughs, what kind of score can be accomplished in five minutes. More so, I’m curious how close to an optimal strategy I came. As a late twenty-something, I don’t feel as though I have that level of patience and deftness anymore. I look back now and at often times I wonder if I really was more clever as a twelve year old than I am now. That sweatshirt, gaudy as it is, reminds me of that.
Yes, there are some low score runs, like this one for Super Mario Bros., but their inherent goal is the same: just beat the game. The low scoring is just an added obstacle. High score runs are unusual, partly because the score always maxes out.
I was up on Friday morning and rode out to Gare du Nord to catch an early Eurostar train to London. The trip from Paris to London is about two hours total which, for someone that grew up with the vast distances of Ontario, is mind-boggling. It’s a comfortable, easy ride and really the more civilized way to go. Sure, it’s more expensive than flying and takes twice as long in transit, but the overall experience is quicker since both train stations are located centrally, so you don’t need to go through the extra hassle of going out to the boonies to get to an airport, and you don’t have to deal with all that airport bullshit. The entire check-in process, including passport control and security, took less than five minutes.
My first order of business in London was to make my way to the Pixel-Lab’s Playful event. It was two tube stops from the station, but I decided to stretch my legs and walk it, without a map, and with the faintest of directions. It had been almost exactly a year since I’ve last been in London, when I spent three months there, but it easily could have been two weeks. Everything was instantly recognizable and navigable and despite the unfamiliar destination I managed to find my way without getting lost. Screw Google Maps, Human Brain™ is the real impressive application.
I arrived at Playful during the first break and stayed for all subsequent presentations. It was hit or miss. Some people were clearly not too comfortable in front of a crowd, others were just reading out their script, and others were engaging and entertaining. Russell Davies‘, James Bridle’s, and Rex Box’s, somewhat clunky but amusing overhead projector and transparencies powered, presentations were the standouts.
Russel Davies presents
During the lunch break, after a bit of Twitter-tag, I met up with Alex aka. rotational in what would be a precursor to many internet people first meetings. As they say on that side of the Channel, he was a good chap. We talked about the conference, writing for games, the magazine gaming business, and the internet like all true nerds would.
After the conference I headed towards my London City hotel, again by foot. The streets of London are far more stressful than the streets here in Paris. It was the evening rush-hour, already dark, and the hustle and bustle of the place felt very North American to me. I could feel my blood pressure rising just by being surrounded by it. Maybe I’m projecting, as I’m living a very casual, laissez-faire life over here.
I eventually found my hotel, just around the corner from the Eurogamer expo, and to my pleasant surprise I found that I had been upgraded to a deluxe suite. It was wonderful. A room more than five times larger than my current apartment. A large screen TV, two desks, a sofa, a speaker above the toilet so you could listen to the TV while you took a shit, and a cavernous shower larger than the entirety of my current washroom. I knew I wouldn’t want to leave.
So I didn’t and I skipped the Eurogamer Expo for that day while I relaxed and, later in the evening, headed out to The Crosse Keys pub nearby for the Indie Arcade Show & Yell arcade where I would meet up with more internet people, mostly consisting of those weird and crazy people of the Idle Thumbs forums including one of the organizers of the event, David aka. Nachimir. It could have been a disaster of an event — the plasma screen in the venue, specifically chosen because it had a plasma screen, didn’t work, putting a kibosh on any potential showing — but David’s tireless efforts to salvage it with a crowd of drunken indie devs and a megaphone turned it into a fun, if a bit disorganized, yelling match.
Joe Danger shown at the Indie Show & Yell, held up as some sort of monument to indiedom.
After a wonderful sleep and breakfast in the hotel I met up with Aubrey and we headed for the Eurogamer Expo and, not surprisingly, straight for the Indie Arcade. This tiny room with a bunch of PCs had more creativity and heart than the rest of the expo. There I played Joe Danger, easily one of the best games of the show, and chatted with the nice Hello Games people. Terry Cavanagh and Alex May, other swell chaps with whom I’d play 4 player Super Mario Bros co-op later in the day, were there to show VVVVVV and Euphloria, respectively. There was Time Fcuk and Squid Yes! Not So Octopus! and Super Yum Yum and Shooting Starcade. Leaving this little room and entering the vast spaces where the “mainstream” games were held was shocking in its contrast.
Indie Arcade
The problem with shows like this, where a lot of different games are placed within view of each other, is that they reveal just how same-y most of them actually are. No where was this more evident than in the 18+ basement where God of War 3 sat next to Dante’s Inferno. As I watched Aubrey fight some enemies by aimlessly swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus menaced in the background, I looked behind me to see, in a completely different game, someone fight a bunch of enemies by swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus was pissed off in the background. Then I played Bayonetta and I fought a bunch… stone colossus. It was all very depressing.
There was a Street Fighter IV machine — actually, a Playstation 3 inside a Taito arcade cabinet (?) — that was drawing crowds and, in the basement, a the Wii fighter Capcom vs Tatsunoko. Some dude was hogging the game, taking on all comers. I grabbed the second player Wii arcade stick (didn’t know there were any) and picked my characters and then that dude proceeded to unleash multiple ten billion point of damage, literally, combos on me before I could even figure out how to do anything. I managed to get about two punches in the match and quickly left in disgust. This one moron did more to dissuade me from ever looking at this game than anything in the actual game itself. Way to go!
Street Fighter IV: moment of defeat.
Heavy Rain was in the basement, which was too good for it. It should have been under the basement, dismantled, buried in concrete to be forgotten for a thousand years.
The game of the show, as far as I’m concerned, was the one that didn’t involve shooting, stabbing, or racing: New Super Mario Bros. Wii. If you were to judge all games at the expo by the amount of laughter and camaraderie from its players, as opposed to the typical, solitary dead stares most had, Super Mario Bros was the clear winner (Left 4 Dead 2 was second.) The simultaneous four-player co-op was a fun, competitive and cooperative, tour de joy. Much like the indie stuff, it stood out amongst the crowd as a sole beacon of colour. I just wish they didn’t use two Toads for players three and four.
3D videogames: making you look like even more of a nerd.
Afterwards, there was another pub session. The joys (and hats) of Hook Champ were often cited.
Sunday afternoon was lazy and rainy, spent mostly on a sofa with Street Fighter IV, Geometry Wars 2, and Channel4’s Peep Show. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the Lady of Shalott while I was in London, but I was tired and this was the most suitable end to the weekend before the evening train ride home.
Unfortunately, the entire trip made me miss my game consoles even more. Once a gamer…
Excuse the journaly nature of this entry.
Heavy Rain really was complete shit. I’ll probably elaborate on this later.
I stayed at the Apex London, which I recommend for obvious reasons. But I’d probably still recommend it if I wasn’t upgraded to a larger suite since the staff there was friendly and helpful.
That might seem like a loaded statement when you consider that the entirety of the piece has no dialog, two lines of text, and features a protagonist that is three pixels tall. It’s mechanically simplistic too, only allowing you to move left and right and awkwardly jump. But that’s enough. Through your own explorations it slowly reveals the world and leaves it to the player to infer what happened and what is happening, building on all of that towards an effective ending. A simple story, but one well told within the confines of the system. And one that is told by the players’ own actions.
When I talk about narrative via gameplay, amongst the likes of Super Metroid and Left 4 Dead and others, this is exactly what I mean. It’s an extreme example, stripped down to the barest of elements, but a persuasive one.
EA’s Fifa Earth is neat. A Flash based real-time visualizer of stats and trends from games played in Fifa 10. I’m down with stuff like this. It’s ambient information that fits somewhere between the stat heavy specifics of something like Halo 3 and, well, nothing. Indirect stats like this always give a little extra life to an interactive product, making it seem more vibrant and organic.
Fifa Earth tracks things like what countries do well, statistically, in online matches, what clubs are most frequently chosen, how many games have been played, and the latest buzz from Twitter. Oh god why? And it’s unfiltered. And there’s a search tool? So with some selective search queries I was getting a stream of somewhat negative Twitter posts, some of which were directly complaining about EA, right on EA’s site. Nice.
It’s jarring. In this midst of this broad, unspecific ambient information is an overly direct tweet from what’s-his-bucket complaining about all the assholes that play FIFA 10 online. The whole thing then loses its charm. You realize that for all the hundreds of thousands of numbers and data points being shown, many of them are dicks.
Going through some backlog material I noticed that the above video hadn’t been posted, here or elsewhere. It really should be because of its videogame theme (I do like those) and, more so, because it’s so weird and borderline creepy. A paper-made animated tribute to an imaginary deity that watches over the high-score tables of classic arcade games, Matt Reynold’s student film “The God of High Score Legacies“.
Coming from Nick Stumpo, whose abnormal behavior child (abc) I fondly remember as one of the early paragons of the emerging flash/web/motion design scene back when Flash 5 was still fresh, is Fatty Bum Bum. An installation slash game Flash piece by Hanazuki for the Cinekid festival.
From a game design perspective, Fatty Bum Bum is rather poor. The controls are a little unresponsive, not mapping properly to your mouse position or click actions. It’s hard to read — it wasn’t until my second playthrough before I realized what the hell was going on — and it’s impossible to tell if you are being penalized or rewarded for your actions. And, of course, the random item popping up collect-a-thon mechanics are, well, boring.
But as a piece of interactive design and animation, it really is something else. There’s so much variety in the animations, and they’re all weird and goofy and entertaining, that you are compelled to play through it a couple of times. It might be mechanically poor, but the whimsy of the whole thing is enough to support it for, at least, two or three passes. For something designed to be an installation, where attention is fleeting, it is perfectly suited. Location is everything.
I bought CodeWeaver’s Crossover yesterday in an impulsive moment of “I miss some of my PC games” boredom. Based on open source project WINE, Crossover theoretically lets you play numerous PC games on your Mac without having to boot into a separate Windows installation and all the crap and space that entails (including the requirement for a Windows license, which I have but still.)
First impressions, before I could even get the software, were not positive. The checkout process on the web store required that I create an account (annoying) and kept failing when I would try to create one. I figured it was something NoScript related, even though I was allowing scripting for the site (maybe some cross-domain stuff is going on?) I switched to Safari and it was fine. Bought it, downloaded it.
My first impression of the actual software also wasn’t positive. It looks like this:
Dear Codeweavers, hire a designer.
But I clicked on the “Game Software Installer”, clicked Steam, chose my “bottle” (hire a copy writer too) and it instantly began downloading and installing the necessary components (fonts, flash, directx, the client itself). After a few minutes Steam was running on my Mac. It was surprisingly smooth. There are a few minor quirks with the in-client browser (Steam, for whatever dumb reason, always used Internet Explorer) but it was working well enough to allow me to login to my account and start a download of Left 4 Dead.
No more than thirty minutes later, thank you French broadband, I was up and playing. And playing at a much higher resolution and with more fidelity than on my PC desktop back home. Apart from issues getting the Steam Community functionality working in-game, it worked flawlessly. I managed to get through, and survive, the new “Crash Course” campaign and, last night, get through two whole Versus matches. It’s an enjoyable addition, the perfect length for quick play without the time commitment that the original campaigns require. Why something of this scale wasn’t included from the start, I don’t know., but I’d like to think that Valve has taken user feedback into account for Left 4 Dead 2 and that it will have more of this kind of variety.
Now that I’m out of the console and PC-less gaming ghetto, to a minor degree, I now have one major holiday season release to look forward to: Left 4 Dead 2. It might not be guaranteed to work with Crossover, but considering it’s using the same Source engine I can’t imagine compatibility to break. I’m finally excited about an upcoming game release.
Then I noticed that the Steam Store was detecting my now France-based IP, despite my Canadian credit card, and it was offering me the idiotic European pricing for Left 4 Dead 2. 50% more expensive because my IP happens to be French? My enthusiasm has tapered.
Fans of the Toronto independent videogame scene should immediately be directed to the Playstation store. Capybara’s Critter Crunch is now available for download and purchase. I can’t vouch for the game itself, being Playstation-less over here, but I can vouch for the company so give them your hard earned money.
The following post was originally meant for Offworld, but, well, you know. It’s sad to see it end as a its own entity — it’s subsumed into the cluttered new Boing Boing design — and I’m not saying that as someone who occasionally contributed. I was a fan long before my first post there. That said, do follow Brandon’s weblog for any possible new, post-Offworld developments.
Cubie
sadmb’s Cubie (embedded above) is a java powered music creation application that, by the author’s own admission, takes a great deal of influence from puzzle games. The above video, a demo of a recent touch-screen implementation, certainly shows this: blocks fall from above as if from Lumines; pieces, and the entire stage, are rotated off to the side as in a Rubik’s cube.
The aesthetic is also very game-like, so much so that I wish that it was an actual game that I could play and not an open-ended digital musical instrument. Designed with live performance in mind, it is, as the site claims, also of interest to those who like unidentifiable but curious thing. I certainly do.
Cubie [sadmb.com, freely downloadable version available]
About
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
Robbie Cooper “Alter Ego”
