Dismal Delerious Dreams

The Shame of it All

2004-06-14T12:28:00.000-07:00

Online gaming presents to the world a place where people can gather with race, gender, creed or politics. Most games provide for some form of electronic commerce, with that has come a real world economical system. These real world systems are powered by auction sites such as E-Bay and Yahoo Auctions. What could prompt someone to buy these electronic weapons, items and armor when they could just spend some time playing the game (that's what games are for you know)? Perhaps it is similar to the idea of the system of trade that the world is based upon these days. Not everyone wants to subsistence farm, not everyone wants to be a computer programmer. We have a free trade market for products that people want and we deliver them at a price. Is it ethical to deal in purely imaginary stock though? Can it be justified to pay someone for their time gaming??? Similar to the idea of selling books, I believe this to be an ethical practice, however, I find it deplorable that someone would be so entwined into an electronic "metaverse" that they would pay real money for someone's time and imaginary items. I agree with Sony's stance with EverQuest: that selling of items for real money should be illegal.

2004-06-04T11:49:00.000-07:00

The giants in today's computing industry are definitely Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. The interesting thing to note is that Sony is only in the industry because of Nintendo's fatal mistake: leaving Sony hanging with a cooperatively developed piece of hardware about 10 years ago.
Around the heyday of Nintendo's 16 bit powerhouse system, the Super Nintendo, Nintendo thought that in order to compete with Sega's CD attachment to the Genesis, thy would have to make a similar attachment. They turned to Sony in order to make such a system. The Super Nintendo's CD system was scrapped mid development due to Nintendo's desire to focus on cartridge based games for a while longer (this was due mainly to the low latency of read operations on cartridges compared to the relatively large latency of a Compact Disc Reader, which were designed for 10 megabytes a min. rather than the 100s of megabytes per min. that could be delivered by a cartidge with a hardware ROM chip). Sony, not willing to lose the money it spent on the develpoement, began developing the attachment into a stand alone gaming system. The result: the Playstation. The playstation had superior storage and graphics to Nintendo's 64 bit platform as well as a superior software library.

There you have it, Nintendo inadvertantly spawned the largest gaming harware giant in the modern era (although Micro-suck is fast catching up).

-all your base are belong to us

Text based games

2004-05-28T11:46:00.000-07:00

For those who have not had the joy of playing a text based game, perhaps it is time you find one. These amazing creations are similar to a dungeons and dragons game without the annoying nerd for a dungeon master (who thinks that one should have a more interesting character and thus kills yours...). I recommend the port of Douglas Adams' masterpiece "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" as it is not only humorous, but available as a java applet here!

Games such as zork and the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy are the pinnacle of puzzle solving. They are simply an text-display that will tell you anything you'd like to know about your environment, you provide the action (although the game provides the impetus).

The impact of these kind of games can be seen because of their inclusion in pop culture like in Tom Hanks movie, "Big." A graphical interface is put upon the game, however it is unnecessary as all interaction is through text. If you are currently a text-based game virgin, you should play Hitchhikers... just read the instructions, you'll be glad you did.

-Justin

Transmedia entertainment

2004-05-21T13:25:00.001-07:00

The vommit inducing attempts at transliterating games into movies did not improve terribly much over time. The laughable attempt at putting the Super Mario Bros. and Double Dragon on the screen resulted in many audiences walking out of the theater. Street Fighter was not much of an improvement. Mortal kombat made headway as it was baically a remix of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. Tomb Raider enjoyed moderate success (enough to merit a sequel) while Resident Evil took the genre in the wrong direction. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within had amazing artwork and beautifly rendered characters, but fell into some translation problems. Hinorobu Sakaguci (sp?) is a japanese mystic, thus all of his creations have some sort of mysticism involved. His spiritual vision did not translate well onto the silver screen and the writers did not help very much. Perhaps they should have just produced FF7: Advent Children from the start?
The problem that most of these translations had was that they focused too much on the games and not on the story. Here lies the ultimate problem for translation across the media: popular games usually have great gameplay, but poor story, the ones with great story have poor gameplay )or they are RPGs which require much more than a measly 100 mins to convey their stories).

Damn Programmers Don't know what they're thinking about

2004-05-21T13:25:00.000-07:00

Todd Frye complained about having pacman on the screen and flickering ghosts... he must never have written an embedded application. I calculated the amount of memory to keep track of the ghosts, pacman, and pellets (including power pellets) as well as have enough of the program in memory to run, and it comes out to be just enough memory to double buffer the screen (i.e. stop the flickering) and still have sound, scores and AI... the only problem here is that I don't have the hardware to prove it on... My slowest machine runs about 100,000,000 times faster than the Atari, has a more comprehensive (and less compact in terms of memory usage) instruction set and doesn't natively support a joystick... so I can't really blame the guy.
The real point about my previous rant is that those engineers had such a painstaking job that even for a million dollars, I probably would not agree to have worked at Atari if I were around at that time. The Passion and insanity that would be required to write such anal retentive and efficient code would drive me wild!

Magic Pills?

2004-05-18T13:29:00.000-07:00

The culture of video games players has been very peculiar. As the President of Nintendo once said "Video Games don't affect kids. If Pacman affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms munching on magic pills." Well... This is pretty much the case. Aside from the parties held around a Game Cube with Smash Bros. or Mario Kart, gaming is a very solitary experience In a darkened room (it takes the glare off the screen) munching on various forms of stimulants (be they drugs or sugar or caffeinated drinks). Take, for example, the average Counter Strike player; The 16 year old kid is probably in his parent's basement yelling "I pownzored you!" into a microphone while slamming a 2-liter of mountain dew and using auto-aiming software to cheat. What is it about gaming that puts us in such isolated situations? Is it the inherent annoyances of people breathing while one is trying to beat the stage boss??? Is it the fact that anyone interested in hanging around a gamer would rather be gaming themselves? For me, it is both reasons... I can't stand people watching me while I play Megaman and my friends would all rather be playing some MMORPG anyway. Thus I am banished to a darkened dorm room with an infinite supply of caffeine and sugar. What kind of environment would gamers have if games were all cooperative with the other players needing to be there in person? Would gamers have better communication skills? Would we shower more often? Maybe there would be no change at all... hell, we could just be playing Dungeons and Dragons by candle light.

-megaman

Slug Russ

2004-05-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

In a way, I owe Slug Russell quite a bit of thanks. Because of this man, I sit in front of my computer or television everyday and allow myself to be mezmorized by arrangements of pixels floating around (or in the case of the television, the pixels are scan converted...). The man invented Spacewar, yes, but he also did it for the rucssh of doing it, not money. While corporate development cycles brings us some really cool games these days, garage born games still have the best production values (that is, the game should be fun, not a work of art). Video games have gone from simple, fun driven concepts to involving, engrosing environments that concentrate more on their looks and sound that feel and fun have been pushed to the background. I think it's time that the gamers speak up against the corperations and demand good games that not onnly look and sound good, but are fun to play! We want the replay value of pong, pac-man, spacewar and mario again. We want the Meagamans, the final fantasy I's and the snoods of the world to be the standard by which games are made. I want to be able and willing to pick up any game and play it for the 100th time! Is that too much to ask? Well, at least I can still play spacewar on my linux box.

-Justin R Eylander

Video Game Violence

2004-05-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

I am an avid player of the mortal kombat series, and as such support the use of violence in video games. I just don't understand the concern about violence in video games. If 18 year olds are allowed to enlist in the army, take an m16 and go abuse Iraqi prisoners over seas, then 12 should be able to take a plastic analog input device, watch pretty colors on a screen and pretend to kick the crap out of Satan incarnate. If you're so worried about violence affecting your children, don't let them play games.
As for the nutjobs on capitol hill, when did it become your damned business to tell us what kind of morals and ethics we should uphold? Go ahead an make the guy at Walmart card me when I buy Doom 3, but don't regulate what configurations of pixels can be displayed on the TV screen or my computer moniter!
My final beef here is with countries that ban entire games from being relased in a country. WHy on earth could you not trust your citizens to be intelligent? Do you actually think that a video game is going to insite your country's citizens to steal cars en masse and shoot law enforcement officers? The only ones that would be succeptable to that probably already do it anyway!

-Dismally yours
Justin R Eylander

Mission Successful

2004-05-11T10:33:00.000-07:00

Primary Mission Objective Completed: Blog has been created.