Korean Videogame Fashion Festival

AppleTV Should Be Getting Its Casual Games On Soon With A Strikingly Wii-like Remote

A little over a year and a half ago I suggested in Next-Gen that Jobs and company had a potential Trojan Apple up their sleeves with the iTV (now AppleTV). The idea was that the set-top device for streaming digital downloads to your home theater could just as easily become a platform for games. While Sony and Microsoft plotted digital convergence supremacy by using game consoles to capture that infinitely valuable territory above (or more properly now beside) your TV set, Apple seemed in a position to take the opposite route. Knowing he couldn't compete heads up with the console manufacturers, Jobs stayed closer to his iPod-driven home. As I wrote then:

Instead of using games to gain convergence, Jobs and company may just use music and video to wrap up games into a neat set-top bundle.

Although Macworld's Peter Cohen immediately brushed the off the idea in a piece titled Why iTV Won't Be For Gaming, former Xbox Live Arcade chief Greg Canessa let slip a few months later that Apple indeed had gaming plans for the device. Having recently become vice president for console gaming at PopCap Games, Canessa told Wired that

[Casual games] are going to continue to grow into non-core demographics. This is relevant as it pertains to devices that are not currently earmarked as gaming devices: mobile, set-top boxes, Apple TV, MP3 players and other devices in the home that will reach the non-gamer -- people who don’t think they want to play.

Getting people who don't think they want to play the chance to play anyway by putting games on devices they are more comfortable with is precisely the Trojan stratgey to which I'd been referring. A month later, files were discovered in iTunes 7.1 that made reference to gaming on the AppleTV--"Some of the games in your iTunes library were not copied to the Apple TV [...] because they cannot be played on this Apple TV." (GC: Vindicated!)

So where are these Trojan games? Apparently, waiting for just the right interface. According to AppleInsider, the interaction wizards at Cupertino filed a patent in November 2006 (the month I first pressed my absurd claim) for a 3D gaming device that, like the Wiimote, could be used for gesture control of videogames, as well as mimic some of the iPhone's multi-touch abilities:

[The] remote control system also can include optional console . Console can have controller that can perform some or all of the processing described for controller. Console also can have one or more connectors to which accessories can be coupled. Accessories can include cables and/or, game cartridges, portable memory devices (e.g., memory cards, external hard drives, etc.), adapters for interfacing with another electronic device (e.g., computers, camcorders, cameras, media players, etc.), or combinations thereof.

The patent adds that "the absolute x- and y-positions of [the] remote control can be used, for example, in video games to position a user's character or to otherwise track the movement of the remote control in a user's environment" and "zoom into and out of an image or a portion thereof based on the absolute position of the remote control in the third axis."

There's no little irony in the Wiimote-ness of Apple's filing. Nintendo took more than just a page from Apple's marketing book with the industrial design, packaging and marketing campaigns for the Wii. Now Apple is cribbing from Nintendo's grimoire of fun. Let's just hope this Apple isn't as sour as the Pippin.

[via AppleInsider]

Take-Two Chairman Maintains GTA IV Bug Free

In an interview with CNBC yesterday Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two’s chairman denied any technical problems have sprung up with the record-breaking GTA IV. Maybe he’s just high off of the half-billion bucks his title has brought in after the first week alone, but that’s a particularly rosy (more like inaccurate) way to look at the game.

When asked if there were any problems, Zelnick replied, “None whatsoever,” and offered a ludicrously lame anecdote. “I'd say the only issue is that someone came up to me yesterday in a restaurant and said ‘my thumbs are hurting from the weekend.’”

Come to think of it, my digits hurt too, but that’s partly due to flipping off my Xbox after it froze for the tenth time. In fairness, my basement has some heavy dust and my machine could use a clean. Nevertheless, it’s easy to forgive the faults of GTA IV, but it’s also clearly not perfect. Sure it’s the buzz of just about every media outlet on the planet, but the game has had several reports of problems with frozen intro screens in both the PS3 and Xbox360 versions.

My blood-thirsty friend Nico Belic doesn’t like being lied to. I don’t either.

[Via Next-Gen]

Pefecting Games

MTV's Multiplayer takes an interesting look this week at the swelling ranks of perfectly reviewed games. The seemingly endless stream of critical paeans to GTA IV is just the latest in a trend that has seen four of the 12 highest aggregate review scores ever on Gamerankings.com go to games released in the last 10 months. Bioshock, Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, The Orange Box (featuring Portal) and what seems a golden age of independent games prompt Stephen Totilo to speculate:

I’ve been considering that a new plateau in game design expertise been achieved by a broad array of developers. It’s possible that the fundamental things that genre fans have been asking for have been achieved. The controls of “GTA” have been iterated on to the point that few people are cursing them anymore. The “Mario” universe has been rendered and re-rendered in all the dimensions in ways that seem to hit the spot perfectly for fans of that sort of thing. The war first-person-shooter has been nailed — repeatedly. Many known frontiers appear to have been conquered, goals have been met.

Surely gaming will get better. Games are an iterative medium. By and large, the new stuff is better-made than the old stuff. And, by and large, each year brings instant classics and instant lemons.

But I do wonder if something different is happening now, if a new status quo is being widely achieved.

It's an intriguing idea, and one I think is largely correct. The fundamental tools of game design as we've known it seem to have been mastered. Genre mechanics, character design, animation, music, the overall kinesthetic flow of games have reached a point of, if not perfection, then core excellence. The ragged seams that for so long prevented games from giving us complete and truly unified experiences are disappearing. The sense that we are playing some version of what game makers actually envisioned, rather than some adulterated sketch, has increased exponentially.

It's an exciting time to be sure. The medium is enjoying a perfect storm of financial, technical and cultural success. The quality and perfection of production techniques is no small factor in this success. The Wii has made the often parochial world of big-budget console gaming accessible to absolutely everyone. The explosion of downloadable console games has brought high production-value and the wonder of the classics to the masses in easily digestible chunks. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are routinely enabling designers to deliver fully realized and polished experiences that increasingly can stand against any other form of entertainment. Videogames have well and truly arrived.

But this is far from saying that game design has been perfected. The stage has been set, the wealth of the possibility space has been exposed to all and sundry, but in the midst of this moment, glorious for some, a new challenge has emerged. Soul. If games are to exceed their status as beautiful playthings, designers must now take the control they've achieved over the complex systems that constitute games and use it to more powerfully express the passions, fears and dreams of their creators. The proof of concept has been delivered with Bioshock, GTA, Super Mario Galaxy and the like. Now the challenge for games is to do more than simply succeed on their own terms. We need them to become ever more impassioned personal expressions with a finesse of viewpoint, character and purpose. It's not that games should aim beyond fun, but rather, that the fun they generate should be driven by intent. Games need to become fun for a reason.

Without that, all this perfection will soon become boring. And where's the fun in that?

Explaining Games to Those Who Never Play

Lately my non-gaming friends are full of questions about GTA IV. The game is this year's biggest pop cultural event, so of course they're interested. The problem is my answers never live up to how I much I enjoy the game. So much depends on knowing the series, or knowing generic game stories and how much GTA IV destroys those cliches.

The problem is even more basic than that though. How can you explain GTA, or any game, to someone who doesn't even understand the notion of HUD, or a health bar or the way a mission starts? These are things I've lived with so long I can't remember the moments I learned how to use and understand them. It would be like trying to explain to the deaf and blind why I love Star Wars.

Of course, the internet, like it always does, read my mind. Today N'Gai Croal reviewed game reviews – mainstream reviews that is. Really, Croal is looking for more criticism in mainstream discussion of games, the problem is the audience those outlets are speaking to often knows nothing or little about videogames. He wants a review that “will allow us to examine the mechanics, visuals, sounds and narrative elements of videogames not in isolation, but in concert.” The problem I'm having with this is that combining all those elements in any meaningful way, and in a way a non-gamer understands, seems nearly impossible when non-gamers don't even know what many of those things mean or that games even include them. How do you explain game narrative to someone who doesn't know what 'cutscene' means and what effect it has on a game's flow? Or even what flow means for a game? It's not impossible, but where do you start?

Then the internet read my mind again and gave me the blog HowDoIPlayGame. The answers to my questions aren't here, but this is a start. It's a blog devoted to one man's play-through of Half-Life. What makes it special is this man isn't a gamer, and Half-Life is, frankly, quite a game to step into when you know next to nothing about the medium.

Most of the blog is devoted to a first-person account of his latest gaming sessions, but even in that there is something to learn about how a non-gamer plays. He seems most interested in progress and achievement, though a linear game like Half-Life probably lends itself to those feelings. It'd be interesting to see his take on GTA or any open-world game.