Editor S Choice

This was not the case with GTA3, VC, and SA… the benefit of ending “on top of the world” in those games was that you then got to spend a great deal of time enjoying your mastery of the environment; effectively giving us a chance to fully appreciate the sand in the box. I know there are many people who immediately jump into the open world and enjoy it regardless, but those are usually the same people who have never bothered to finish the main plot of any GTA game in the first place. Fallout 3 suffered from this as well, only worse, because your inability to keep enjoying the sandbox world was actually enforced, and not simply based on your own despondent lack of interest. Of course you could always simply load your pre-end-game save in Fallout 3, but just as with GTA, without even the trappings of plot or immersion, the sandbox world loses its hold on me. – nezroy If you were to believe Escapist users, every game ever made is art of the highest order that will be immortalized in history, just like Mona Lisa. Gamers are so desperate to be seen as grownups engaged in Serious Business that they’ll call anything art. GTA IV is not particularly original and has nothing to say that hasn’t already been said to death by countless crime stories. Trying to tie the gameplay and story together is silly. They are divorced from each other completely. In the story Niko is a pretty sympathetic guy while in the game he is a monstrous psychopath. – bagodix

In response to “Playing the Hand You’re Dealt” from The Escapist Forum: I think this article hit the nail on the head when it said that the Yakuza games were more concerned with telling a story than actually simulating Japanese gang life. The main character Kazuma himself is a perfect example of the “Honor and Humanity” the article describes as well as the romanticized pre-RICO mafioso that “How Games Get the Mob Wrong” criticizes. The circumstances of Yakuza’s storyline however cannot be completely glossed over. At the beginning of the first game the main character Kazuma is fresh out of 10 years of prison and totally cut off from his organization because he took the rep for a murder committed by a guy he grew up with – his brother for all intents and purposes (That’s not a spoiler it happens within the first 30 minutes of the game). He’s no longer a full-time Yakuza. The girl he babysits is the child of the woman who might as well have been his fiancee. From what I remember, most of guys in that game shown stealing, extorting, and pimping are young kids who better exemplify the heartless modern mafia described in this week’s articles. Compared to them Kazuma looks like an oldschooler enthralled to the old ways, and that’s probably what Sega wants to make him out to be. By the end of the first game Kazuma seems to have every intention of leaving the gangster lifestyle behind. By the beginning of the third game he’s running an orphanage. The fourth game currently in development will actually star three playable characters in addition to Kazuma – one of them a loan shark, one a thoroughly corrupt cop, and one a mafia assassin. Oh, and real porn stars cameo in these games. – RedSwir1

There is no attempt at “realism” in genres, and we can see similar silliness in the “cowboy” genre, which never features actual ranching, and the “pirate” genre, which never features the slaughter or selling into slavery of captured crews. The “Mafia” genre is a fictionalised setting created for novels, films and video games which serves to glamorize an otherwise sordid and morally unjustifiable activity. Thuggery, extortion, drug selling and other forms of crime are hardly glamorous at all when you get down to it, and most of those involved in crime spend long times in jail or end up dead. The flipside of course is the “Cop” genre where justice is only obtained by a single man working alone to bring down a crime syndicate without any forensic evidence; or the “Procedural Crime Investigation” genre, where putting together the clues magically whisks the suspect out of the air rather than being used mainly to secure a conviction. It’s all silliness but it probably doesn’t bear detailed examination, and moreover, if you break the rules of a genre you have to do so knowingly, and with a full understanding of how to bring the player/viewer along for the ride. – domicius “So why doesn’t the gameplay ever reflect this intelligence?” For one of two reasons, probably: – The writer isn’t skilled enough to make your character actually come across as intelligent. – The average player isn’t intelligent enough to appreciate an intelligent script. I don’t think it’s at all impossible to create, say, a Mafia RPG that mixes action with planning, stealth and the like. I keep coming back to Bloodlines, but there really aren’t that many good examples of good action-RPGs. VtM:B’s plot was more or less built around various power-groups pulling your strings, deceiving you and ultimately trying to do you in. I don’t think it’d be impossible to make an even more in-depth RPG, but it’d require a masterful script writer first and foremost. – Dectilon

In response to “An Offer You Can’t Refuse” from The Escapist Forum: Hey Allen. You know I am a fan. Interesting to see you tackle this. I find Zynga fascinating. But what I find equally fascinating is the hardcore game community’s — devs and gamers — response to the games that they make. I would toss out for your consumption the argument that this (the Escapist, etc) is not the proper audience to judge Mafia Wars from a game standpoint, and so I appreciated the inclusion of your friend. But I think looking at these games from the standpoint of a hardcore audience, or even merely someone who is familiar with playing and analyzing hardcore games, is perhaps the least interesting thing to do with the subject. Even though they’re called games (because they are) and they look like games, it’s fundamentally apples and oranges — like saying that a kite has no value because it’s not a B-52. I’m not saying that’s what you did here, but I think that’s a challenging dimension of presenting Mafia Wars to an audience of hardcore gamers. I think that Mafia Wars itself says fascinating things about what bar of embodiment and challenge is that is sufficient to generate a fantasy experience. Zynga is showing us that, literally for millions of people, it is very very very low — or they’ve just found an exceedingly efficient way of generating that fantasy. Because people are finding it deeply satisfying with the sparsest game and symbolic triggers the business has ever seen, though you could get into an argument I suppose on whether SpaceWar! was simpler. The scamville stuff misses the mark too, though to be fair there’s a good part of the industry, I think because of the kite-to-B52 comparison, that is predisposed to find a reason to hate Zynga… but the scamville series of articles became progressively more accurate as it went on, and started out extremely inaccurate. It’s an extremely small proportion of people that wound up being scammed, and they (Zynga) did correct it when they became aware of it. The trouble is when you have 63 million people and are working with reputable partners (which SuperRewards actually is) those things can be difficult to track down. But the argument is complex — it is a bit less than a third of their revenue that comes from lead generation, yes — but it’s only a small percentage of that lead generation that is scam-bent. We used lead generation in GoPets, too, and our users were thrilled with it — because for a good number of them they could try out programs rather than paying money, and those programs (like Netflix) were perfectly legitimate. The scamville author tried to make a case that the legit offers will be pushed out by the scams, but that’s speculation at this point — it hasn’t actually happened. And to focus on that small percentage of >30% of Zynga’s revenue also conveniently bypasses the fact that 70+% of Zynga’s customers are paying them directly for these game experiences. Any rate, there is a lot of fascinating stuff about what’s going on in this space. A lot of game developers have very secure and profitable jobs because of this company. A lot of players are getting access to games who previously (and currently) couldn’t afford them. The story has many dimensions and is regularly misjudged by the hardcore game audience. – ErinHoffman Besides which, it all depends on what you count as a scam. Sure, maybe it was an extremely small proportion that were illegal scams, but far more of what it does is exploitative of its players. Anyone care to estimate the ARPU of Mafia Wars? Flash games with millions of players make tens of thousands of dollars. Mafia Wars has made hundreds of times that. I don’t know about you, but that sets off my alarms. – Dom Camus

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-03-10” author: “Evelia Mcconnell”

The fact that kids today get their knickers in such a twist over eThings in games is kinda sad. – Nerdfury

In response to “Videogame Myths Debunked” from the Escapist Forum: Game content can be quite violent indeed. The question is, does that content carry over into real life? People can always find something to blame for someone’s real life violence, from the film “Natural Born Killers” to “Law and Order” and “CSI”-style shows, but proving that the thing they blame actually caused the violence is a lot harder. But don’t forget that other things, like the parents spanking a child (Or conversely not spanking said child) is blamed as the cause of the violence. Last I checked, using a chainsaw to cut a creature in half or shooting up a base full of militants is violent. To put it shortly, many things are blamed for violence in youths and teens (and even adults). Proving what the direct and proximal causes of the violence are is much harder. Maybe the kid was born with poor impulse control. Looking for an easy out, and an easy cause to blame means that the people doing the blaming are not looking for the real causes of violence. They want something easy to blame so they can go back to not really thinking about it- because not thinking about it is easier and then they don’t have to address the real causes of violence (whatever they are- I’m not claiming to have all the answers, or even any answers. I suspect that it’s different in every case.). And the media loves it because it gives them something to stir up their readers with- and the media will tell you that everything in this world is scarier and more responsible for everything that’s wrong in your or other people’s lives than you think. And they’ll tell you what to be afraid of… just keep watching! – LadyRhian I’m certain I’m in the minority when I say this, but I highly disagree with the “games are art” argument, even more so when the author compares it to the laws of gravity of all things. Let me explain, and I’ll try to make this as coherent as possible. A movie is not art. Neither are books, music albums, or the topic here, video games. They are instead amalgams of several artist mediums. For movies, the most prevalent is acting and writing. Books, just writing. Albums, music (goes without saying or so I choose to believe). For video games, graphics (an extension of the concept usually used as reference or simply drawings), writing, even the soundtrack. All these come together to make a single glorious package, but you can’t really say that said package has the same artistic merits as the individual parts that compose it (one reason why I’m slowly starting to dislike Extra Credits). All of this is highly subjective of course, and I could be wrong on some or everything. To that end, I’m gonna go back to gaming. – SageRuffin

Agreed. It feels like the lesson is that, so long as you are on the right side (defined for this scenario as those who follow Pip), you can refer to others as “idiots with buckets on their heads, playing a game of grab-ass as they died again and again.” I know it seems different because the author is talking about someone in the past rather than talking to them in the present, but I don’t think we can dismiss it that easily. He’s still locked into immature and sexually-based descriptions of others and their behavior. How much more mature would it be if your opponent in Black Ops was totally silent to you during the match, but later wrote on his Facebook page how you handle a sniper rifle as sloppy as he handled your mom last night? Does pulling the discourse outside the game somehow redeem that kind of talk? I think we’re excusing it a little too readily just because we like the idea of Pip, and I don’t know that the idea of Pip would approve. – Ironmaus This kid sounds awesome. However, I think that if I would’ve encountered someone like Pip, I would not follow. I just don’t want to win that much, I don’t care about winning. Playing a game and enjoying it is what matters to me, and that’s often unrelated to whether I’m winning or not. Also, listening to “Holding out for a Hero” by Bonnie Tyler while reading this was hilarious. – Orthon

In response to “Hey, Listen, I like Navi” from the Escapist Forum: I adored Navi. I found her adorable, extremely helpful (I have distinct memories of her teaching me how to beat the water temple boss) and her little voices chimed in just frequently enough to be comfortingly reliable without being terribly annoying. Watch out! Tatl was less annoying because of her bell replacing the voice, but significantly more annoying just because she was, well, a bit of a stupid bitch. (To the extent that fairies can be.) While Navi felt like she was encouraging you to go in the right direction, Tatl felt like she was punishing you for going in the wrong one. I felt they hit the perfect balance with Midna in Twilight Princess, though, and it was also nice in that game to find out that this little imp thing was actually relevant to the greater plot. – Thorvan “Water Temple” gets my vote for the modern equivalent of FUBAR (not an impassible obstacle, merely one that will make you want to bang your head against a wall, if only to potentially divert the proscribed path from the horrors that await). If I recall correctly, that was the only temple in which Navi and Link were equally confused as to how to proceed. (It’s been a few years since my last playthrough of OoT, but didn’t the Water Temple require more forethought on the player’s part than any other area of the game?) It seems to me that the Water Temple functioned as the sole trial in which Navi and Link could be considered of equivalent rank, neither individual truly leading nor following, but both stumbling, almost blindly, through a completely foreign environment. I mean, what would a forest child and a skyfaring shapeshifter know of underwater exploration, except what they discover in tandem? Loved the article, BTW (and apologies if this bit of rambling belongs in a different thread. I’ve sporadically lurked before, and am attempting to figure out protocol/etiquette as I go). Hooray for the under-appreciated sidekicks! – Ben Byard

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-01-25” author: “Sarah Guerra”

– Nivag

In response to “Leveling the Playing Field” from The Escapist Forum: At some point the tax break is, like the silver bullet reference, just a symbol for people. Even if the ultimate benefits are negligible it helps people feel like they’re doing a good job and that the country they’re in does care and support them. More substantive than a gift basket, less useful than a scholarship program for the computer sciences. Every bit counts I guess. – L.B. Jeffries In general tax breaks are bad under these circumstances, as the article pointed out along with tax breaks come a demand that the goverment[sic] be given an increasing say in what is produced. This leads to more censorship when we’re already having trouble getting violence, and sexual content through the process unmolested. Not to mention the fact that attention-whoring nitwits are trying to bring racial issues into games and nearly EVERY game from Drakensang to Resident Evil 5 to Street Fighter IV has has at least a mild accusation of racism thrown at it in the last few years. Tax breaks of course means that the same overblown standards of political correctness that apply to other media (and oftentimes ruin it as many have criticized) will be applied to games. Drakensang for example got the question about “where are all the black folks” in a game loosely based on ancient Germany… and this despite the prescence[sic] of an Arabic race of Spellcasters (playable). This leading to a discussion on at least one forum about “how dark someone needs to be to be black” and whether deep urban slang and an attitude is needed for it to not be a racist depiction. Detracting of course from any discussion about the game itself. The goverment gets involved, and next thing you know we’ve got Fifty Cent stomping around the ancient world, firing his crossbow sideways “Gangsta style” despite the obvious implausible technique that would imply… Laugh if you want, and even think that the stereotype above is in it’s own way racist. HOWEVER that is exactly where things are going to go with video game “affirmitive[sic] action” which is going to come about with goverment involvement at least in the US (and I can assume the same would apply in Europe if they adapted to the same standards). As far as the industry succeeding, well it comes down to the fact that the corperate[sic] process has never been good at producing original works. That takes the “bedroom coders” so to speak. As more money is involved corperations are less likely to take risks, but the longer they keep spewing out the same stuff the more they need those risks to be taken. The problem is compounded when YESTERDAY’s “bedroom coder”, long since out of viable ideas, has an office and is defending his job against the young turks, and uses his reputation to turn out mediocre product after mediocre product with the company figuring “ahh well, he’s breaking even, maybe genius will strike again”. Letting the current game companies fall is ultimatly[sic] good for the game industry. The demand will still be there, it will simply mean new companies will rise to replace them, with their own generation of “Bedroom programmers” providing the inspiration. Propping up the game industry just means more people buying the GRAQ/Unreal/Havoc engines, reskinning them, and turning out more and more derivitive[sic] crud. – Therumancer What an incredibly biased article! Della Rocca is American, and most American’s think any tax breaks is the dastardly road to a socialist state (cf: Therumancer’s inaccurate and ill informed raving above) There are no facts, figures or direct quotes in the article at all, just a vague reference to some survey. And where’s the counterpoint? Where’s mention of the positive things tax breaks supply to an industry? Where’s the argument of the cultural dominance of the USA and how tax breaks can support varied cultures and smaller studios? – FunkyJ Editor’s note: Jason Della Rocca is a Canadian, born in Montreal.

Funnily enough, when trying to come up with games offering a comparable experience to that of Elite, the only ones that come to mind are Captive and its sequel Liberation, by Antony Crowther, ie. another British programmer. Coincidence? – Falien Bedroom programmers definitely helped out the games industry we know today. Heck, some of those games got turned into amazing franchises today. Take Prince of Persia for example. A marvel of a game, which was so ludicrously hard to complete, but some did, and it was hailed a technical dream thanks to an amazing game play premise, realistic gameplay, and smooth graphics. Also some of the text based games of the time helped improve vast imaginations of the time, which not only helped people think of better stories when playing “dungeons and dragons”, but also would have broadened the imaginations of the game developers we know and love today, and who do we thank for all this? The brave souls who worked in their bedroom making games with the change in their pocket. – Catkid906

In response to “Yak to the Future” from The Escapist Forum: I have to say I’m not convinced. I’m not convinced that zany, off-the-wall games really resonate with the public at large. As much as arcade game designs are returning and gaming is coming full circle I don’t think that people will suddently [sic] start being interested in something they’ve been ignoring in the old arcade days already. Then again I’m one of those people who had Tempest 2000 for the PC and even at 5DM considered it a waste of money (gave it away as a gift later on). – KDR_11k Alright dammit, I’ve got to step in and defend this guy. First off, the light synthesizer is one of the most influential programs in consumer computing I can think of. His was the first, and now it’s been replicated on PS1-3, XBox 1 and 360, Winamp in various incarnations, even Windows Media Player and Apple iTunes. And I applaud the man for taking our concept of gaming into the more abstract areas of perception, whether by using his light synthesis code to create a dreamy atmosphere or by replacing characters with livestock, it all manages to take the piss out of games that lately have been too interested in realism and remind us that anything is possible with a computer. I for one would much rather play Halo reskinned as Hayfield: the Llama Farmer’s Legacy. Second, watching the Google conference video linked in the article, Minter goes into a little more detail about The Zone and I think from the standpoint of interactivity this is a crucial point. There are a lot of games people have told me to play that I’ve tried and set down after just a couple levels because the INPUT barrier between the game and myself was too difficult. Sometimes it’s more than that even, the game might handle just fine but the design elements (for example TOO MANY CUTSCENES or lots of QUICKTIME EVENTS) just don’t make it interesting to play. Games like Counter-strike kept me hooked for so long (TOO long) because it puts you in the zone: the graphics feed the sound feed the player feed the game, it all works in a loop and the response between the player and the game is so fluid and rewarding that even when the game is whooping your ass you don’t want to stop playing it. This feedback loop is a point that Minter makes that I don’t think should be missed, and I have a feeling his updates of arcade games are more than just reskins, but also more finely tuned experiences. – 300lb. Samoan

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-03-06” author: “Howard Fields”

I notice that it’s the more… indie isn’t the right word, but almost boutique developers, Valve, Paradox, and StarDock, companies that pride themselves on their relation to their consumer, that seem to be creating the most successful DD platforms: Steam, GamersGate, and Impulse, respectively. And while none of these platforms are quite as perfect as we want them to be, I think it’s rather a good thing that these distribution schemes are handled by companies that believe in treating the consumer as the party who should be rewarded in a business transaction. –HobbesMkii I think that many people are a little disadvantaged by games being more available online, but that can be the result of their situation. Being unable to afford, or not having available, a sufficiently high download cap to make this kind of purchase worthwhile hamstrings many consumers. I, for example have a 7GB monthly limit in a family of four which means that there is no circumstance in which it’s practical. Obviously as the industry moves forward there’ll be a shift in both the home download capacity (I hope) and the way we work with games. It’s slowly getting there. –Labyrinth

In response to “The Downside of Direct Downloads” from The Escapist forum: I have to say that if/when the day finally does come when digital downloads completely take over, it will be a sad one for me. To me, gaming is more than just getting a game and playing it. I mean, what of the social side of buying a game in the first place? One of my fondest memories of 2007 was getting up at 7am on August 24th, picking two of my friends up at 7:30 and heading to the local Asda store ready for the 8:00 opening. Stood out there in the cold, we waited for those doors to open so we could finally pick up BioShock, a game we’d waited months for. And while finally being able to play the game was certainly amazing, the best part was the fact that the three of us went together to buy it. That social experience is something that sitting in front of a computer watching a download percentage could never hope to replicate. Then of course there’s the game box itself. Firstly there’s the artwork. Truly great artwork on a game box can catch my eye in a shop and cause me to stop what I’m doing and at least check out the back of the case. And of course there are the debates among my friends and I. Which artwork is better, Dead Space or Valkyria Chronicles? Should the default Commander Shepard be on the cover of Mass Effect considering my in game character looks completely different? Secondly, there’s the excitement. It’s hard to deny the excitement I felt when, after queueing half an hour for my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, I took it home and slowly unwrapped the cellophane, savouring that new game smell, looking at the map of the new Liberty City and reading the manual. As I said already, gaming is more than simply acquiring and playing a game. Get rid of physical games, and you’re getting rid of half the experience. –scnj From the beginning of the current console generation, consumers paid the “next-gen tax” of a $10 price hike on most HD games because the industry could use the excuse of increased development costs. Not shipping. Not printing. Not warehouses. Development costs. With the industry spiraling out of control into ever increasing budgets and development costs, you would be a fool to imagine that digital distribution will be used to give consumers a “break” by the Big Publishers. Digital distribution is the future in terms of technology and ease of access but in a rapaciously and ruthlessly corporatist society, it’s also a powerful tool for corporations to reduce customers even further to anthropomorphic wallets that suck at the corporation’s teet while dolling out money. Don’t be fooled – if corporations can swing it, they’ll make it so that nobody anywhere (aside from them) truly owns anything that can possibly be worth a dollar. If they could rent your clothing to you, they would. –squeakthedragon

–DaxStrife Now, I do not own a 360, but I do have my PS3. So, I can only comment on PSN. I think that PSN does have a chance to come out on top, but it will be an uphill battle against the LIVE name. I can, from PSN, get some TV shows and movies, along with games to play. I also like the fact that many of them are not just rehashes of classic games (but it does have those), but they have some fresh ideas. As for digital distribution, I don’t see the PS3 utilizing it for most PS3 games in the future. Mainly because of the huge size of some of the games. If games start filling up the Blu-Ray discs, My 30gig HDD will not be able to hold many. The PS3 can interface with any PC, accessing the PC’s media. But you have to have a different media server software than WMP. I use WinAmp and I can access my entire music and video collection from my PS3. But I think that Sony could stir up interest for PSN if they released a kit that allows users to create their own games, like MS’s XNA. –j0z

In response to “Destroy All Consoles” from The Escapist forum: Well, I look forward to playing my games with all the clarity and responsiveness of YouTube videos. Because that’s the best video streaming technology has to offer at current. And I don’t see anyone producing the kind of infrastructure necessary to provide streamed HD video with less than 100ms of lag over TCP/IP anytime soon. Anything other than that is a huge step backwards in terms of gaming experience, and gamers won’t go for it. So why on earth do these companies keep getting attention? It seems absurd to me that we’re reading four page articles on these con artists. There is no way for them to deliver the experience they keep waxing lyrical about, yet no-one seems willing to call them on it. –Fex Worldwide It surprises me that so many focus on the technical challenges and suggest that streaming video games are impossible. The technical challenges are being solved right now by the likes of OnLive, Gaikai, Otoy, and others. And the faster-internet-to-the-home issue will also see progress in the near future. The combination of more bandwidth to more homes, (relatively) inexpensive server farms, outstanding compression, and improvements in input controllers are forming and will continue to form the environment to make this possible. The question is, as Ray points out in the article, the business model. Who is going to make this work in a way that is commercially viable? There are several more players that could be involved (see The Emerging Competition over Streamed Video Games for several options). The likes of OnLive and Gaikai could both be very successful with different approaches – I have a feeling there is plenty of room in this emerging space for more than one solution. –MishaE

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-01-25” author: “Lacey Soltis”

VIII, like AITD is riddled with bad design decisions, yet each one redeems itself on reflection by being a good, swift kick to the face of convention. The worst issues that plague JRPGs are all swept away by a new and radically different ‘Junction’ system. Gone is the ability to simply grind your way to victory, mashing attack and intermittently casting some Cure spell (a la VII) – enemies don’t just level alongside you, but ahead of you, gaining significantly better stat boosts. Fighting need not be about gaining experience, but there’s now a more varied, more interesting incentive to go out and fight, which is to draw spells and obtain a collection of items. GFs shook up a stale and predictable battle system that had stayed virtually unchanged since the days of the very first FF. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from still being bad decisions. Giving any player equipped with more brain power than a cephalopod to junction himself to 9999 HP and max stats in the first few hours of the game was never going to turn out well. Nor was building a junction system that punished magic casting use with stat decay: in essence, players had little incentive to do anything other than junction to Str and spam attack, or, failing that, junction to Mag and spam the GF command command instead, the latter being only marginally more relentlessly uninteresting than the first. Hunting down rare enemies to obtain some obscure item vital to a weapon upgrade became tiring quickly, and the card game was either a pointless distraction or an express route to 99 hero drinks, that then made the game virtually un-losable. At least the spirit was there, though, and perhaps with better execution and a little more thought, FF as a series could have taken a radically different direction. As happened, though, the cool reaction from fandom prompted the self-consciously conservative IX and may well have seeded the stagnation JRPGs have suffered from (and for) over the last decade. – Bosola If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. If a game is worth playing, what makes it worth playing? You’d want to play it right, since your idea of right will be my variant of left. Perfection is quite a fickle thing. We can never quite get to that point where we say ”This is perfect, it cannot be improved any more than it has been.” due to the fact that someone may not like it thus making the whole thing, well, imperfect. When someone has brilliant ideas but is unable to shovel them in to a product correctly they’re usually shunned, but it doesn’t make the idea any less of a good idea if you believe it to be so. Even if Alone in the Dark was a monolithic goose-chase in several areas, it has still made an advance of some kind and I believe that’s what matters. Also an off topic: Many great ideas were spawned in sheds. – TheSeventhLoneWolf

In response to “Crying Out For More” from The Escapist Forum: I applaud games like this. But to spurn certain gameplay conventions is doom for the medium. There are certain things that the game industry take for granted but are not (i.e. ‘everyone loves burly space marines! who needs a storyline? let’s stick some guns in there.’) But there are some things that are the result of true and tired trial and error, and you should not ignore it. Look at Portal. Okay, it’s no Citizen Kane, but it has a nice difficulty progression, it makes you feel all fuzzy inside when you complete a puzzle, and you almost never wonder where to go (unlike, say, Half-Life 2). The same way some experimental moviemakers will try to do away with basic moviemaking elements, or literature deconstructed itself with postmodernism, some people will push these boundaries. But since games require the gamer’s effort to proceed, you are failing in your quest unless you expected the game to be so hard to solve the player had to resort to a walkthrough. (Now that would be an interesting commentary.) There’s little point in building an amazing wonder of sensation and misdirection if those experimenting it need to alt-tab back to our drab old world to proceed through it. Then again, after watching the characters in Dead Space explain exactly they were feeling as if the designers assumed I might be an autistic robot raised by wolves who would be unable to comprehend that strange thing humans call fee-lings, I welcome any game that assumes I am able to understand things that are not explicitly said. – The Random One

Some levels (like the ghost house) are very well designed, others are just ugly (down-town). The White Wolf canon in the background could have become an orgiastic nerdgasm (imo WW players are notorious nerdgasm-junkies) but manages to stay out of the way without feeling overlooked. Great, memorable characters. Maybe that’s enough. The only other flawed but brilliant game in the same league I can think of is the first Mass Effect; although a sort of reversed version where I love the gameplay but don’t really care about the bland rubber-faced-alien “epic” in the background. I did however care about three of the characters. Perhaps that’s the secret sauce? – raankh Excellent article, although you took the time to mostly focus on the game’s shortcomings. In response to that, I’m not joking when I say that Bloodlines holds the top spot in my list of favourite games, and here’s why. Obviously for me to say this I have to rely on fan made patches to make the game 99% playable and reliable; that comes as a necessary thing with a game featuring so many game breaking bugs. And sure, as pointed out, the game is indeed rushed – as you progress through the four main level hubs the amount of available side quests drastically diminishes each time, the lengthy sewer section midway seems mainly like a cut and paste job, and the last quarter of the game is heavily combat oriented and inferior to the game’s beginning. But all of this is mostly irrelevant in my eyes, as what this game offers that so few others do is a vivid and compelling atmosphere. Bloodlines not only allows you to play as a Vampire, you become one while playing the game. The soundtrack, the storyline, the characters, the setting and the art direction all come together to form an in-game world that is not overwhelmingly huge to the point of Morrowind-esque sandbox, but large enough to invoke awe while still remaining strongly focused to the plot. While the game has many obvious flaws, it gets everything that matters completely and utterly correct – there has not been another game that has drawn me into its game world as effectively and enjoyably as Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. If only the team had have been able to polish this diamond further, perhaps more people would have been aware of it and game may have been even better. Thankyou for the article, I hope that somebody reads it and is compelled to find and play the game as a result. – JC175

In response to “Stumbling Through Mirror’s Edge” from The Escapist Forum: I definitely had an issue with the combat. I tried going through my first playthrough for the “no shot fired” achievement, which (aside from being an achievement junkie and needing my fix) seemed to me like the way the game should be played. I didn’t want this game to be a shooter. Before the game came out, I played the demo into the ground; I was totally hooked on the style of “run, jump, flow” through the city, with “combat” limited to “kick, disarm, drop the gun, and run”. That was the game I wanted to play. Some of those levels were head-poundingly frustrating, though, having the self-imposed limitation of not shooting. The old saying “never bring a knife to a gunfight” is even more true when you have a half dozen guys shooting at you from different directions and you substitute “knife” with “bare hands”. That, and I found the controls extremely unforgiving. Way too often, I felt like I was fighting the controller as much as anything else. I’d know that I’d want to make a certain jump or turn, but if I didn’t hit the right bumper button at the right microsecond, I’d find myself flat on my back on a platform thirty feet below with the wind knocked out of me, if I was lucky. (And using the bumpers anyway felt really awkward; my hands always seemed to feel more cramped after a night of Mirror’s Edge than any other game.) It’s even more aggravating when you’re working on a time trial and that one microsecond miss results in complete failure. – CyberKnight Absolutely adored the full Mirror’s Edge experience despite the guns and clearly intentional slowdowns in the game. When you look at ME you have to understand that the size and scope of the levels you are playing whiz by at a pace unheard of by any FPS games. There is such a depth of design that other development companies just never have to deal with while DICE themselves have been pushing the boundaries of for years (full 360 degrees of map). They had to find a way to slow the player down and keep them from speeding through each level in minutes. I think what needs to be done in a Mirror’s sequel is essentially find more creative, in engine ways to pace players through the game and enhance the story or gameplay at the same time. My first suggestion there is to make a few more boss set pieces like what occurred on the rooftop with Ropeburn. Throw in some scripted moments that require a some specific maneuvers to break up the free run and advance the story and you could have a really strong series. Guns need to be disarm and drop all the time. – Wandrecanada

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-02-27” author: “Manuel Mims”

It may be a bit absurd to have exploding barrels and item crates in nearly every FPS, but I honestly don’t think that removing them would help the genre. – IvoryTowerGamer It’s hard to know when and how to innovate… and it’s even harder to know if a change is “innovation,” or just “bucking the norm to be a dick.” It’s really a fine line to walk. I think the mistakes that most folks make, in any medium, when they’re trying to “shake things up” are pretty common. You see it in reboots of franchises, retellings of classic stories, and in games that try to set a new standard by challenging the old. Those mistakes, in no particular order:

1. Trying to change too many things. If you’re going to make changes, you make them one at a time. There’s no law that says you’ve got to build everything from the ground up. Your audience needs to have a few familiar landmarks, and a few “anchors” that keep them from feeling lost. And the bigger the change you’re going to make, the fewer other things you should tweak for now. Save some for the sequel. Maybe a game in which players use the environment to construct creative “skill kills” isn’t the best time to change up cosmetic features like barrel color…
2. Trying to change too small a thing. Overreaction to fear of being guilty of #1, usually. Rather than make one change that matters, you make several small changes to things that are largely inconsequential. Change a color here, a name there, just tiny stuff. And either your audience doesn’t really notice (in which case you really haven’t made any changes)… or they go “Why on earth would they bother to change this and leave everything else the same?” Is there a reason to change the color, other than saying “We don’t have red barrels like those sell-outs,” or something? If not, consider leaving it alone and innovating elsewhere…
3. Changing something without letting the audience know it. You’re not just changing one thing. You’re also challenging a ton of prior knowledge, experience, and instruction that have gotten your audience used to a certain expectation. You’ve got to prepare for that transition if you want your change to work well. If you want exploding barrels to be green, include some content that demonstrates this for your player… – Dastardly

In response to “The Hands’ Job” from The Escapist forums: I’m more worried about feet, particularly. Namely, how FPS heroes apparently don’t have them and like to float in midair. It always makes me happy to look down and see my shoes (although in games like The Darkness the downside is that the player’s maximum speed is ‘overweight man jogging’). – The Random One I tend to hate hands because they smash immersion. Completely and utterly. They remind you that our field of vision is wholly and fundamentally different from the field of vision presented in a game and that you aren’t looking into a world, but looking into a screen into a world. I’m sure you’ve seen the live-action FPS youtube video. Why is it funny? Because no-ones moves with their hands like that in real life. In real life, the sense of where you’re hands are, is a mixture of peripheral vision and your brain processing the sense of attachment and control. Neither of which you have in an FPS. Your vision isn’t really square and if your hands are in the central, focussed part of your vision and directly part of how you are looking at things, you’re doing it wrong. Most FPS’ roughly do “hands holding guns” right. That is how it works, because the hand that is supporting the gun is a focus of your vision and you are using it to engage with the environment (And basically aim). But the minute they hold a knife, it quickly becomes a case of who does that? What the ef is wrong with their arms? Try it now, raise your hands to roughly the height of your chin and maybe 20cms from your face. Isn’t that exactly what a game shows you? When you focus on a screen you tend to ignore peripheral vision entirely. And it’s not comfortable holding your hands like that. – BrotherRool

Healing is just another of those concepts like hunger, exhaustion, carrying capacity (in terms of weight, not number of objects) that is glossed over and abstracted by most games in the name of expediency. And usually for the better. Do you really want to go to the washroom in a game, The Sims notwithstanding? – Falseprophet See you just explained why Fallout: New Vegas confused me. I am encouraged to get high as a kite on all kinds of varying medication and the only drawback is a chance of addiction. However there is actually a quest in the game where one option is to kill the NPC by spiking his supply of Jet with some Psycho. This causes him to die immediately on taking some. You character previously even says to the quest giver (if your medicine skill is high enough) that a little bit of psycho added to the guy’s jet stash is fatal. I stood over his corpse and tried the exact same thing to see what would happen (possibly not too bright here I know) and I didn’t even get addicted to the stuff. – Scorched_Cascade

In response to “The Princess Problem” from The Escapist forums: The irony of using Sheik as an example of ‘Strong Princess’ is that, the MOMENT Sheik gets revealed as Zelda, the MOMENT she takes off her guise as a strong dispenser of teleportation songs…. …she gets kidnapped and you have to go rescue her. The very moment the ‘man clothes’ come off… she’s now an object to be rescued as a SIDE-EFFECT of the main quest which is already established by that point. Let’s be absolutely clear about Ocarina of Time. Your quest is to lock Ganandorf into the Golden Land so that he stops being mean to Hyrule. You have the stakes for the adventure set clearly for you; the world is dying because Ganundorf is a jerk. You can see the ruination and decay in the land, because you’re not just looking at pictures of it or being told… you are SHOWN the results of Ganondorf’s evil. This is an example of how to set the stage right. How does Shiek add to this by being the princess, and getting kidnapped? It serves no purpose other than to say ‘It’s legend of zelda, and zelda’s gotta get in some peril cause that’s how we do things in Hyrule!’ Sheik ain’t the subversion of this trope! She’s a card carrying exemplar of it, who exists solely to lure you into a false sense of ‘it’s not rescue the princess time’ until… oh yeah, it is. Contrast that with Twilight Princess. Forget Midna. Take Zelda herself in that. She’s sitting there, in her sword and armor, fighting to the last until evil has assailed her castle, and she makes a sacrifice to preserve her kingdom’s future. She’s not some MacGuffin who sits there waiting to be rescued… she’s a fighter who, defeated, makes the complex choice to subject her people to the Twilight so that they can survive in limbo, in the hopes that someone can rescue them, rather than succumb her people ti extinction. THAT is not a ‘princess peach.’ That’s a queen making a desperate sacrifice, and shows a strength of character and leadership. ————— That said, Princess Ashe from ff12 is a great example of a princess who is far from helpless. – DracoSuave

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-02-05” author: “Mary Carter”

I didn’t really see the point to all that at all. Obviously it feels more wrong to shoot a cop than a demon, aside from the “you’re killing a human not a monster character” we associate the police force as something inherently good or positive in the real world, whilst monsters are not. You’re also treading light ground with Halo. You seem to forget that it’s less about killing demons and more about a religious war. It’s more akin to the catholic crusade against the muslims and saracens(?). The Covenant believe humanity for whatever reason is evil and must be purged as dictated by their prophets. They believe they are the holy and righteous ones. We are the demons to them. In fact, in Halo 1 and 2, i believe the grunts and elites even refer to you, the Master Chief, as a ‘Demon’. Aside from Bowser, the Doom games and a few other key ‘lookit this game focuses on the big bad being Satan and you are a 100% good character with no character development!’ there is no real representation of ‘God, angel, mortal, Satan’ because we’ve moved past that now. We have character development, plot exposition and the ability to make a choice between right or wrong. Are the Krogans ‘demons’? If you disagree and support the removal of the genophage, are you a demon for siding with what can be inherently perceived as ‘demons’, or are you more an ‘angel’ for your tolerance and kindness towards an otherwise stereotyped and possibly misunderstood race of aggressors? – Gralian Eh, it’s the other way ’round. It’s much easier to create a game in which you say, look these are the bad guys, these are the good guys. Let’s have them fight. So any setting in which these differences are obvious is going to work. Angels and devils work? Sure. So do Nazis and non-Nazis. Of course it’s possible to use theology as a strong groundwork for a true story – someone up there mentioned Shin Megami Tensei, and second hand accounts lead me to include Disgaea as an example – but I’d say most of the time this duality is just used as an easy way to create a duality. Of course, since people nowadays confuse ‘pressing moral issues’ with ‘you are the bad guy’ it works just as well the other way ’round. No John, you are the demons. By the way, good vs. evil is actually very rare if you take a look at all religions, especially pagan ones. If you look at Greek, Norse, Celtic mitology, the good guys are pretty much assholes and the bad guys are murderous assholes. Hell, Loki is the closest thing Norse myths have to a devil and he’s on the good guys’ side half the time. – The Random One

In response to “Games Are Modern Morality Plays” from The Escapist Forum: Unfortunately, while a nice enough idea, this does not work. You are not all knowing or all powerful (otherwise there would be no difficult puzzles, and you’d never need a re-try to beat a boss), and while you control your character or party, you have to play it the game’s way. Very rarely can you change the game to accomodate what you want to do, you have to follow the predetermined path or story laid out by the game designer. To follow the metaphor, the game designer IS the god – the creator of the world, who has mapped out the player’s destiny (while sandbox games may give the impression of free will, to actually finish the game will require following the pre-planned story to the end, changing only minor details) and has decided what will happen and when. If the player fails, the designer is the one who has programmed the helping hand that lets us get back on our feet and resume play. Likewise, if we play through the game and earn redemption for our character, it is only by the grace of the game’s makers, who could just have easily made the ending a bleak twist wherein the protagonist ultimately fails and is cast down. In this metaphor, we are just the facilitators of a greater design. I suppose we would be the equivalent of a guardian angel, guiding our characters through the story that has already been laid down for us. – SonicWaffle It’s true that us godless fellows have picked up a concept of Heaven and Hell through osmosis, but do they mean the same things to us as they would to a pious man? Usually, they don’t. You’d have a hard time finding consensus on what Paradise and Perdition mean, even among those of a single faith – primal psychological crap is like that. – lleihsad

In response to “How to Shoot Real Demons” from The Escapist Forum: This was a nicely-handled article on a potentially touchy subject. I appreciated the alternative explanations of symbolism provided, as there are followers who aren’t always trying to find something to beat down through a literal interpretation spiced with their own unfounded feelings. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” — Ephesians 6:12 (And no, I don’t think Paul is talking about Obama, either.) – TLatshaw

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-03-08” author: “Eunice Dewey”

It’s been a long time since I picked up my dice as well. And I miss it. I tried doing an online tabletop game via Skype and some “tabletop simulators” and it was hard to get the feel right. All you hear is the voice, and all you roll is a text command. No sense of comraderie, and no real sense of purpose. At least, when you are all there at a table at someone’s house, or a game store, you are there to game. Online, there are so many distractions just from not being in the same room; girlfriends, pets, the uncertainty of how long someone will be AFK… Nothing will replace gaming with good friends at someone’s kitchen table or living room. No technology can replace that. – Nightfalke

In response to “Weekend Warrior” from The Escapist Forum: I think the lure of activities like LARP, re-enactment and paintball and sports like rugby are all based on the same experience. They all attempt to create the atmosphere of a battleground. Because we react to this type of situations according to primitive, tribal instincts, the surge of adrenaline and the feeling of being an integral part of a group, can be an almost euphoric experience. Although LARP never interested me, since it always seemed too safe and too far removed from the real thing, I used to play paintball with some friends when we were younger. I never liked to do it as a sport. Instead, we tried to maximise the feeling of dread by wearing only light clothing and playing in cramped, complex interiors, like in an abandoned woodmill. Sometimes we used assault tactics and sometimes stealth. Crawling in sawdust, in the dim, claustrophopic ruin of a building, even your own breathing sounds too loud, every shadow is a threat and every creak makes the hair on the back of your neck rise. When a paintball hit, it was almost always painful and often broke the skin, but it was also a relief, because the tension finally broke. – Finnish(ed)

In response to “Aggro Management” from The Escapist Forum: Hey, when people get into shouting matches and fistfights over which sports team they support, it’s hardly surprising that people with some actual time and effort invested into a game faction might feel that way, or worse. However, hating someone for being a different game faction is as ridiculous as hating someone for liking your favorite team’s rival, and it belies some pretty serious insecurity. I have to wonder what sort of fragile ego a married professional has to have for him to throw his job and spouse around to make him feel better over a 20 year old college dropout that insults his game guild. That’s not ‘ganking someone in real life’, that’s being a defensive, insecure jerk. That pretty much goes for most of your examples. To dismiss someone out of hand because of what amounts to a recreational preference is rude and bizarre. – mattaui I’ve played WoW since day one (and EQ and DAOC before that) and have many friends and family members ranging in age from 14 to 55 who play. No one I know would behave like the people in that article. It’s ridiculous that people would snub someone in real life because they play the other faction. In my experience, people are pleased to meet another WoW player because it’s fun to share experiences. Maybe some people have trouble separating cartoonish, completely fantastic games from real life, but no one I know does! It’s a game with orcs and gnomes and magic spells: if you can’t separate that from real life, you’re kind of delusional. I think the article gave a very biased and unrealistic view of most MMORPG players. – Alifeyl

In response to “Cosplay and Effect” from The Escapist Forum: Considering the traditions of Halloween and the dressing-up that goes on there, the idea of cosplay doesn’t seem that strange to me. What does confuse me, though, is the decided lack of representations of Western science-fiction characters. OK, you’ll probably get a certain number of Master Chiefs, et cetera, but what I’m really looking for is a suit of vintage-2076 T-51b Powered Infantry Armour. I mean, if some people are spending 100 hours and lots of money on emulating characters from anime or Eastern RPG settings, I don’t see the stretch to making a suit of armour. OK, it would be impractical to carry around 50 pounds of metal and plastic all day long, but it can’t be any more impractical than some of the weaponry found in the typical cosplayer’s simulated arsenal. I wouldn’t mind lugging a decent T-51b replica around all day! – RAKtheUndead

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-03-04” author: “John Adams”

So, while some games are inherently “loner” games, I think that social, relatively casual games like Wii Sports, Warioware, etc, may give people a brand new perspective on gaming. It’ll be really interesting to see if current early teens have anything like this problem as adults. – oneplus999 The article is extremely sad. It describes a person who feels excluded from social interactions if he acknowledges his hobby, yet it seems as if he himself is the one who does the excluding. A roommate who asks about the videogame he plays clearly does not feel that videogames is the sole dominion of future Virginia Tech mimic psychos and extreme otaku-level fat, unwashed fans. Yet the person feels the need to excuse himself. Unwilling to even admit to OWNING A WII AND PLAYING GAMES ASIDE PARTY GAMES, he forces himself (is NOT forced by anyone else, mind you) to hide it behind the TV, like a casual drinker who hides beer in the bathroom because if someone sees it in the fridge, he thinks they’ll think he is an alcoholic. Self-delusion. It runs deep, and it saddens me to an extreme. Do none of his friends have a hobby that he doesn’t actually like, but it’s okay because frankly he could care less what they do during the days? Most people are like this. “Oh, you like games. How nice.” and that’s it. There’s no need to hide your gaming habit. You decided that your hobby is a heavy cross chained to your back. Nobody put it there but you. So just take it off, you idiot. Nobody walks around with actual, physical, heavy crosses on their backs when they don’t have to. So why have you DECIDED that your hobby is one, thus forcing yourself to wear it? If you ever drink a beer with your friends, you can play games aside Guitar Hero and Wii sports, and let others know about it if they ask. In short, the point I try to hammer home real heavy here: No, gaming is not a deeply shameful act, unless you make it into one yourself. Like the previously mentioned beer-drinker, you’re hiding your gaming. Which means that it seems like a problem, while it isn’t. Think about it, if you find that someone hid beers in their bathroom, they look like they have a problem. A six-pack in the fridge? Not so. If you only play when others aren’t looking, pretend that you’re not interested in games, hide the games and consoles physically from others…you LOOK like a god-damned freak. You might not be, but that’s sure what it sounds like. Think about it. – propertyofcobra Solidarity, brother. You are not alone. For someone who is articulate and insightful, you seem overly concerned about social acceptance. Who cares? Social acceptance is reliant upon society. We all know that society is dumb and slow, raised on fast food and tranquilized by major league sports. Revel in your games, and let your detractors be damned! If your girlfriend loves you, she will be grateful for the things that make you happy. If she doesn’t, you are better off alone. Personally, I would be more concerned with E! network playing on my television than Halo 3. Gamers are no longer a hidden class. We are a vast population who will no longer take a back seat to the sleepwalking fanbases that fantasize about football players. Gamers are at the controls of our own entertainment. We don’t sit and expect to be spoon-fed recycles plot points by a Bruckheimer flick. Gamers unlock the adventure for themselves. Which part of that embarrasses you? – XerxdeeJ This is what happens when a bunch of antisocial men who aren’t used to competing with other people get together and try to compete with other people on the internet. It has a very clear ring of truth for me with relation to the Unreal Tournament 1v1 community. Even the nicest guys have to verbally abuse themselves or the other players once in awhile; it’s just part of the whole experience. In fact the main predominant emotion in UT 1v1s most of the time is anger/frustration (I know that’s certainly the case with me, and if other player text is any indication, them too). What keeps us playing it, anyways? – p1ne In response to “Games are for Kids” from The Escapist Forum: I get this from my wife a lot but she’s coming around a bit more. Mostly I play my DS because “I can play it anywhere in short bursts”. Also I can use my son as an excuse to game now. The semi problem is though with my son I get to play more Lego Star Wars and less Grand Theft Auto or Team Fortress. I guess we take what we can get. Anyway, the only game she plays is PC solitaire on the laptop. I almost got her into SSX but it seems to have vanished completely. Also what bugs me is she gets irritated if I’m not “spending time with her” and want to go use the computer or play a game but half the time we’re together she’s a TV zombie. At least I’m interacting with my entertainment. – RamenJunkie

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-03-02” author: “Darryl Mundt”

Overall, humor from glitches is sort of becoming a lost art. I’d love to see a game that is intended to be a sort of self-aware parody in the manner of SpaceBalls or other Mel Brooks films. I know there are some out there, but they are typically sophomoric in style and appeal to an unsophisticated “I’m in College and drink BEER!” mentality. They’re basically video game versions of all these “Not another shit movie” coming out. I want a game where the big bad evil emperor is actually living in his mom’s castle, and the heroes escape the dungeon by exploiting the glitch that drops them through the level and respawns them back at their base. The closest to that I can recall playing is Gex: Enter the Gecko, a platformer I’d love to see revived properly. Overall it was more a big joke on television than video games (but tell me you wouldn’t love to see a game spoofing Left 4 Dead, Super Mario, Halo and God of War all in one level). – ccesarano In response to “Katamari Absurdity” from the Escapist Forum: First of all, you’ve written the best in-depth analysis of Katamari Damacy I’ve ever read, so well done, and for the love of all that is good and insane, keep writing for The Escapist. What I really liked about this article is that it reveals the surprising amount of depth the Katamari games have kept hidden from us for so long. While most gamers dismiss it as another of “Japan’s Trippy Games,” I never realized that this game had so many sides (no pun intended.) – HardRockSamurai In response to “Where the Funny Things Are” from the Escapist Forum: Yeah, I think it was a poor choice. The Adult Swim’s games section is very high quality, and it does a good job at playing with gamer’s expectations and gaming clichés – like how HRmageddon is your basic RTS, except the fantastical magical creatures or the tough hardened soldiers are replaced by office drones, and gameplay remains the same, or how the highly awesome (most of the time) Amateur Surgeon can take a famous game, replace the names in the buttons you press, and turn it into something identical yet completely opposite. But most of the games just try to hard to be darker and edgier for no reason other than being darker and edgier. Like Bible Fight. It obviously didn’t emerge from a discussion about what would be a nice place to get characters for a fighting game, it emerged from a discussion about how to make a game be very offensive without being objectively offensive. That said, I agree in jist with the article, since the poster above me as I posted mentioned Ben There Dan That, in which the main character accidentally goes on a murder rampage through several alternate dimensions, and how to pick up urinal cakes without touching other men’s pee poses a serious problem. Yeah, games that try to push the envelope will not be found in the realm of AAA games with their massive investiments and boards of directors, but in a couple of guys writing Actionscript in their basement. But didn’t we already know that?… – The Random One After playing a number of the games linked in the article (namely HRmageddon and Meowcenaries) I can safely say that the level of quality in these free-to-play-on-demand games is nothing short of inspiring. You can easily see that some TLC has been taken by someone somewhere to make an idea a reality – and to make that reality work correctly as well. The freedom of being able to put nigh on anything in these games is refreshing too. Some of the humour (HRmageddon’s “sexual harrasment” attack comes to mind) is crude, garish and often entirely inappropriate, but if the humour offends the audience then simply switching the game off is always an option. Censorship is somewhat tiring in this day and age and to have a source which is free and able to present whatever it may choose is a welcome addition to the Tubes. Granted, there will always be the downright pathetic attempts at “videogames” which took a bored 30 year old two days and a folder of porn pictures to create, but Adult Swim goes to prove that the quality is out there, and is worth playing. Who knows, maybe the developers of some of the best games will be recognised and be hired. You never know. – Aurora219

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-01-30” author: “Kurt Sorrels”

– TheWizard

In response to “Inside Job: How Much Work and How Much Play?” from The Escapist Forum: I am completely against restricting internet access at the workplace. Myself, I’m working in a role where internet access is a must and I’m expected to stay up to date with what’s going on in the web. But even apart from that, I just can’t stay productive if I can’t have my dosage of socializing. I agree that it can get out of hand, but my productivity is not harmed if I keep my Gmail open, reading maybe half a dozen personal emails a day and replying to one or two. I check Facebook when I need an actual break. I usually turn up to work ahead of schedule to have time to go through my RSS feeds. I’m not trying to hide these activities; it’s just how I work. As long as I get my work done, I can’t see what’s the problem. – jlaakso It’s a tricky issue to be sure. Breaks are an absolute necessity, but when your employees start taking their break a few minutes early, ending the same break a good ten minutes late, and then going online immediately afterwards and updating their blog with some hot gossip they heard from Ben while they took their break…. It’s an issue of trust, and abuse of said trust, that gets management to start thinking of restricting the group, rather than the individual, so that work gets done when work should be getting done, mostly likely because it’s easier and quicker to apply law to the group than it is to the individual, lest some other individual is doing the exact thing same thing they’re stopping someone else from doing, but they don’t notice since they’re too busy with the one individual, and now I’ve used individual one, no, two too many times. Point is, when someone breaks the bond of trust, it’s considered easier and more effective to enforce the law with the group as a whole so the experience won’t be repeated. – SatansBestBuddy

In response to “Alpha Centauri” from The Escapist Forum: Alpha Centauri is one of the games I still play and love, more than six years after I first installed it. And I believe it is better, in a number of ways, than all Civ titles, amybe save the last Civ IV with all its expansions and complements. But why, I wondered… And the answer is emotional involvment. The story, the quotes, the backwriting, the Voice, the setting are made to draw you in and make you lay just one more turn… – moromete – danimal1384

In response to “Burning in the Halo Pre-Order Hell” from The Escapist Forum: So, stop. Stop preordering. You’ve indicated that you live in a large enough area to not worry about a game ever selling out, much less for more than a week. There is, then, literally no downside to feeding these pre-order trolls. If you check that $1 box, you’re helping candidates run for office without private interests corrupting things. If you give that extra money to the pizza guy, a real person has directly benefited from your generosity. On the other hand, GameStop puts that money in a corporate bank account, and garners interest. I totally empathize with your complaint, but I have to say I’m really disturbed by your closing paragraphs, where you basically shrug off your self-disgust with a “meh” instead of resolving to actually change your ways. If you give in to the economics of the stupid, even once…well, you’re stupid! – Khakionion If you have an internet connection then you never have to worry about a game being sold out. I buy almost all my games online now they are just cheaper online then at retail stores. I do pre-order games but only when pre-ordering let’s me buy the game for less. For example I pre-ordered BioShock and paid a total of $45 dollars for it, I got the same deal on Mass Effect. After I pre-ordered Halo 2 and got it a midnight release I said to myself I would never pre-order at retail again and try to get the game as soon as the store opens when I could easily get my sleep wake up the next day and get the game without being in the store for more than 10 minutes. Now I have a Halo 3 pre-order one that I was more given than wanted and I probably won’t concern myself with it until after 2pm on 25th and this will mark my last planned brick and mortar retail pre-order for a very long time. – Lex Darko i probably would have pre-ordered if i had a 360. it’s fun to be excited about something. i like to think i don’t go overboard though. – jt2002tj

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-01-19” author: “Anthony Rodriguez”

Next, why even point out that Mattel is pushing their brand so hard or that they have a preconceived notion of what girls like that you feel isn’t correct? Of course they are pushing their brand. It’s a barbie site. As to how they push the pink and ‘girly’ out there.. It’s working, isn’t it? If parents don’t like what it represents, they should keep their kids from it. If they are afraid that the kids are talking about stuff they shouldn’t or seeing others talk about it, then they should stop them from visiting the site. There are a whole lot of sites out there that I don’t want my kid to visit. I just don’t let her. Also, I try to watch as she goes to a site to see what is involved, what’s going on, and what she is doing. Parents that don’t get what’s coming when they have to later explain what a dirty sanchez is to their 8 year old. – monodiabloloco Wow. 1984, anyone? There are so many things wrong with BarbieGirls – the way it promotes materialistic values, the way it forces this perception of what girls should like and do, the censorship – it’s crazy that so many girls are being subjected to it. The crazier thing is that most of them are probably playing it by choice, which means that Mattel’s message has sunk in and become accepted, which is the last thing anyone wants. Well, except companies like Mattel. – zoozilla

I really enjoyed reading this article, as it’s not often you hear about the adventures of a pregnant gamer lol, and playing the DS during contractions has to be a first, maybe Nintendo could use it as their next advert to casual gamers. – ThePlasmatizer Oh wow.. the joy of birth, and the joy of video game at the same time? That would be sensory overload for most people. I’m a pessimist, so I have to ask this – wouldn’t starting your children on video games so young sort of cut them back on other exercise? I know being a gaming parent yourself, you most likely know the importance of balance between gaming and life. I think it’s a life skill that kids these days need to learn. (Especially if they live in the US.) All in all, congratulations, and hang in there. – olicon

In response to “Indorktrination” from The Escapist Forum: I think the take-away message here isn’t necessarily that you didn’t get your wife into your lifestyle, but that she now has a better understanding – and hopefully, appreciation – of your interests. Part of the disconnect, evident in the opening of the article, is that a lot of non-gamers don’t even WANT to know about gaming of any sort. They view it as infantile and as a waste of time. Although I’d like to have heard that your wife felt more inclined to join you in your hobbies, I’ll settle for her better understanding of the lifestyle in general. It’s more then we get out of most non-gamers these days. – Scopique

In response to “The Perspectives of Tracy J. Butler” from The Escapist Forum: Too much testosterone in the video game industry and you get what I call the “Lord of the Flies Syndrome.” Men who spend the majority of their lives in the company of other men all working on video games to please other men/boys and voila, you get video games like Manhunt. I’d say the biggest barrier to women as gamers and game producers is that they have to invariable deal with hordes of these obnoxious knuckle draggers. – MorkFromOrk

In response to “The Frag Fraternity?” from The Escapist Forum: It’s amazing how many of the problems of network play disappear in LANs, at least at the ones I’ve attended (and the one tiny one I held). Admittedly, these were LANs held in private and were invitation-only so much of the “riff-raff” were weeded out from the start… but that too is part of the Joy of LANs. Indeed, at the Halo LANs I’ve attended the number of female participants has increased each time though women are still in the minority. So there’s hope yet that the gender barrier will be broken in LANs. – Anton P. Nym

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-03-07” author: “Matthew Polk”

– Jeff

In response to “Buy, Sell or Trade” from The Escapist Forum: that was pretty interesting stuff, see I’m one of those comes in the store raving about a game recommend kind guys who used to constantly buy useds and trade in old games at my local independent [till it got bought out] so ii gotta a little place in my heart for independents, plus i hate the saturation of the market ideology of the modern gaming industry, more money less ethics eh? but i guess as EA tell us you gotta “challenge everything” and keep your store ticking, good luck surviving the minefield of staying in the green dude. – rhizic

In response to “Life After Shelf Death” from The Escapist Forum: I can understand that developers don’t earn anything from titles rejected to life beyond the shelf, but what about the user, the one who actually plays the games? This irritates me somewhat as I have been like so many others penniless and in dire need of a new gaming fix, which is where the bargain bins or second user sections come in, I remember an argument that was coming about where developers were miffed that second user sales were doing quite well and they weren’t getting their greedy mitts on the dough (cough EA cough) but hang on, they got their revenue from selling the game once, why the hell do they need another cut of the sale? – bobmanuk

In response to “Innovation by Carrot” from The Escapist Forum: Great article. Although, having worked on a licensed game, I don’t think it’s just a matter of creative freedom that makes those “chore” projects so tedious and painful. Part of the issue is that with a license, many people outside of the studio have a very significant say in the game. If you’re making a game based on a movie based on a comic book license, you’re at the mercy of the movie people and the comic book people (at least that’s how our license worked – you pay to use their brand, subject to their review). And because those outsiders aren’t usually around the studio, it leads to bad communication and very slow and rare review/revise cycles. This leads to horrific feature creep and design by committee, which leads to a horrible game, and the studio ends up looking bad for it. There are many things the studio could potentially do. Such as, make sure those things don’t happen by negotiating a more reasonable contract (maybe negotiate design “lockdowns” to avoid feature creep). So while I agree with your central thesis, I just wanted to point out that a studio’s first “chore” project should not be taken lightly – it’s not just taking out the garbage. There is very much a right way and a wrong way to do it. – stevesan – thequixoticman Why do people feel nostalgic about Mario showing up in sports games, games that have NOTHING to do with his turtle-smashing roots? Aside from the Mario series characters, the sports games have no connection to the old games and ruin any semblance of nostalgia. Just because Mario is in the game doesn’t mean its automatically nostalgic- sure, if he was playing soccer while stomping on turtles and jumping over platforms, all while the screen scrolled right, I might be a bit nostalgic. Even that, though, might be a stretch. Too many of Mario’s games have nothing to do with the actions performed in old Mario games. I get it, 2bit side scroller’s don’t look and play as good as they used to but a side scrolling platformer is the essence of what Mario truly is. Its not his mustache or his jean overalls that make him unique, its the fact that his hard work jumping on turtles and collecting stars made games what they are today. I just can’t be nostalgic every time I see a character, he has to be doing what I remember him doing. I have yet to play any Mario game aside from the originals, and super Mario 64. I hate sports games, just because Mario’s apart of something I hate doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to play it. – Ranzel Mario is not a character, he’s a brand. As far as game companies go, Nintendo is fairly unique. They create their games different than anyone else. While most is kept under wraps, some things you can deduct. Other companies usually create a game like this: “Lets make a game on a space dungeon! (insert your own cool environment here), the main character will be an emotionally constipated male with control issues (or whatever), all right! lets make that into an FPS”. See the sequence? setting, character, gameplay. Nintendo does not do this. They test scores of gameplay ideas first. They have this fantastic inhouse engine they have been refining since Super Mario 64. Plenty of ideas are discarded, the ones that turn out good (I’ve read of Nintendo employees referring to this as “sifting for gold”) are strung into levels, which eventually get combined into a whole game and branded -its either Mario or Zelda. Ever wonder how come Mario/Zelda games have so many things to do without getting repetitive? This is why Mario does not need a background story: He is the real “Nintendo Seal of Excellence”. To us gamers, the name “Mario” emblazoned on a game means that the game has been built to Nintendo standards. I don’t think anyone plays the Mario games for the story, do you? Nintendo has taken very good care of Mario, Like all brands, it takes time and effort to build brand awareness. Could you do that today? Build a new brand like that? Yes you could. But keep in mind how long is going to take, and how consistently good you need to be. It will take vast amounts of resources. And you have a lot to learn along the way. Nintendo has mastered the process over many years. They have become damn good at it. – imagremlin

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-03-09” author: “Steven Peter”

Conspiracy theories are not new, neither are crazy people who you have to deal with to get on with your life. Graphics depictions of such people’s minds is not really new either. But the freedom to run, jump, live and die in such a mind is what makes the experience unforgettable. – lietkynes In response to “The Milkman Cometh” from The Escapist Forum: I can only comment on my experience with Colossus, but what I hear you guys describing of Pyschonauts could be indicative of the large palette of games as art. Wandering and manipulating any sphere of play is to wander inside the vision of the development team. Wander’s awkward lunges, exhausted panting and half-determined, half-frightened gait highlight his mortality in his environment. That’s noteworthy because most heroes of his ilk are rendered immortal, or worse, swaggering. I love that Crigger notes [Shadow of the Colossus] as a study on death. It’s an overwhelming, almost heartbreaking experience. And I think one of the reasons it is so effective is the physics that flesh out the avatar interacting with the environment. Do you think that’s why so many GTA clones fall short of being satisfying experiences? The lack of a truly visionary manipulation of worlds? – nbarbour In response to “I Didn’t Leave Games …” from The Escapist Forum: I was initially excited to learn that the creator of EWJ was also responsible for one of my favorite new cartoons, Catscratch. Upon further reading though, I began to see yet another disgruntled, ranting and self-absorbed lapsed developer. Doug, I think the biggest disservice “DP” did you was to inflate your ego and salary so fast that you have no perspective any more. If your love of making games was bigger than your head, you’d get out there and do something like Telltale or Garage Games are doing instead of demanding to be treated like royalty for making some interesting characters almost 10 years ago. I yell because I care. – meathelix In response to “I Didn’t Leave Games, the Games Left Me” from The Escapist Forum: Disagree completely – I love The Netherhood and am really excited that Doug worked on that and Earthworm Jim – two of my all time classic favs! There’s a real uniqueness to The Netherhood and a an acceptance that it’s not going to be a number one smash like the big shoot ’em ups – Doom 3, Quake, Halo etc. Instead it’s a really cool, special little game – one which makes gaming less stifled and more interesting. I cant help but feel Earthworm Jim could have gone further down that road if Doug had been allowed more control over it. It’s pretty disgusting that now he’s not even allowed to see what they’re doing with his character. I’m not saying that capitalism is always bad and that the people with the money don’t know what they’re doing – just in this case I think they should have left well alone. Here be beauty, there be pie charts … that kind of thing. Leave the creative people to do what they do best and we might have a few more games like The Netherhood. – pixie_lady In response to “I Didn’t Leave Games, the Games Left Me” from The Escapist Forum: While I can’t really shed a tear for someone who says, “I’m so damn good, you should come and get me,” I also feel like TenNapel sounds like a lot of artists who make their money off of people looking to make a lot of money, for better or worse. Of course “the suits” are gonna screw you out of your creations, that’s why young & naive creative types need legal council (or at least more than a handshake). – EvN

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-02-25” author: “Billy Hollan”

1. It’s effective. Whether you use it to gain money, tactical advantages, political friends or to wage war (or even to, I dunno, let me pick an example at random, win the game), religion is incredibly useful. Even if it’s not part of your strategy overall, you should still have some form of religion, and it’s even better if you can found one.
2. They’re balanced. Sure, Hinduism and Buddhism are the first religions you get, so they get that little advantage, but later religions come associated with more advanced techs, and the really late-game religions like Islam get free Missionaries. That keeps it from feeling like Christianity Pwns Joo. – Clashero This article touches on a lot of touchy questions about religions in video games. The first question is, why? Short of making a game particularly about religion, when and why should you include religion? Several games (such as Assassin’s Creed) include it as part of the story line, which is common to much of literature, but turning it into a game mechanic is something entirely different. For a game like Civilization, it makes sense to use religion as a tool, because religion has been instrumental in managing entire empires. A hard question is how to make religion into a mechanic. Religions are more than simply a practise; there is a deep philosophical underpinning to them that permeates into all facets of life. How much of that can you use without ruining the mechanic? How little can you use without trivializing the religion? How do you do either without bias and without implying statements about the purpose and effectiveness of various religions? Lastly, how do you make a game with religion, without making the game about religion? Can religion co-exist with other material without being trivialized? Even just the suggestion that there is more to life than religion could offend some people. It’s not surprising that few games really touch on religion, even though it’s ripe for the exploration that gaming allows. Kudos to the Civilization for trying to tackle it and making it fun. – ReverseEngineered

In response to “Pastor Blaster” from The Escapist Forum: Interesting article, although for some reason I’m mildly disturbed by the idea of a pastor directly participating in a murder simulator (despite the conflict with a percieved, or in the case of Doom, obvious evil, violence is the main point of the game). Perhaps, as a lapsed Catholic, I have entirely unrealistic expectations of the clergy that doesn’t even translate appropriately to the topic of the article. But would the simulation of violence be analogous to sexual fantasies on the part of a Catholic priest? Sinful in regards to the fact that they stimulate feelings that go against their respective doctrines? An unbidden fantasy may be regarded as a spiritual attack, certainly something the priest attempts to overcome, but in the case of violent video-games, the person in question has actively sought out the sensation and could be analogous to a Catholic priest browsing through a copy of a gentleman’s magazine. By no means do I support the view I just explained, as I dislike the repression in more puritan religions. I’m just curious as to how playing violent video-games can be justified on faith grounds, as it has some effect on the purity of thought or something. Probably. I could easily be confusing doctrinal issues between different religions, or imagining a problem that does not exist, but if anyone better informed has an answer (or more wild speculation to add to my own) then it would be very welcome. – pigeon_of_doom Great Article. I know a few pastors like this myself, and it’s always encouraging to me. I also know a few pastors who don’t play, but don’t condemn either. In fact they’ll use games on a ‘youth night’ at the church, playing Halo or Call of Duty on the big screen projector in the sanctuary! I just have to wonder why people are surprised by this, though. The dogmatic of the church used to stand against Rock and Roll and Hip-Hop music, and now we’ve got Christian rock bands and Christian Hip-Hop artists! As the youth of the church grow to become it’s leaders, they grow with an understanding of what is and is not important to stand for or against. The leaders of today know that Rock and Roll is just music, and any music can be used for bad, or for good. Likewise, the Church leaders of tomorrow will say the same about video games, and it’ll happen sooner then later. Again, great article. – Baby Tea

This reminds me of an article on video game morality I read long, long ago, on a different site. It mentioned that the main fault on trying to make moral choices matter in a game is that players will just ‘game’ the choice – i.e., choose the one they think or know will have the best outcome. Do you let the starving man that stole food go or reveal his crime to the eatery owner? Well, which rewards do each side give you? Oh, none of them do? Then it’s a pointless sidequest, skip it. Oh, and I think that view on GTA’s policemen as a response to the player’s evil deeds is quite equivocated. I’ll use N64’s Goldeneye as an example because it jumped into my mind for some reason, but it could be any game, really. In Goldeneye’s first level, you are a secret agent who is infiltrating a dam controlled by Russian soldiers. The Russian soldiers will shoot at you. Is this telling you a morality teaching that going to places you are not allowed in is bad? No; it’s game design. The game gives you a goal (break into the dam), an obstacle that tries to keep you from reaching that goal (armed Russian soldiers) and the tools to remove those obstacles (a gun, and the ability to use the enemy’s guns). The same thing applies to GTA, except that, since it’s a sandbox game, you can create your own goal. So you decide your goal is to shoot random innocent people, and then the game creates an obstacle to stop you from reaching that goal and the tools to conquer those obstacles. If your goal was to reach the top of a bridge instead, the obstacle would be the game physics and the tools the flying vehicles. Oh, and since we’re on this subject, I saw an Atheist man posting that he found the Fallout 3 morality system too dogmatic, since you lose karma even if no one witnesses you doing an evil deed, which would imply a god-like entity keeping track. I just mention it to show that things are always more complicated than they first seem. – The Random One The possibility of more religious gaming is in some ways worrying. I think that if people treat games as a vehicle for preaching there will be a bias towards one religion, Christianity. It dominates the countries which own most of the gaming industry. I’ve personally seen enough culture bias and monotony of this nature in games to be very bored with it. Thankfully, there is a good chance people will simply not buy games that continue along the line of similarity. This is very much an innovation industry like that, and this may keep things interesting. From a design standpoint, I must ask: if there must be religious/moral systems in gaming, then why not make them as diverse as the ones we are presented with in the real world? How about, instead of simply having “good” and “evil”, having “orderly” and “chaotic”, a Y/X axis scale that literature and fandoms have already begun to use? Or better still, have a reading that shows what secular philosophy/religion your set of actions so far conveys (a kind of changable reading from gameplay history). For example, your character might visit one church and go save some people, this would make them read as that religion, but if they pray at different churches, that makes them a universalist. If they kill everyone in sight, they might be a nihilist. If they rebel against more than one government with different views, they become an anarchist. If they kill one man when they see his about to do something evil, they might be seen as a utilitarian. If they act selfishly, objectivist. Continue this around the many flavoured scale of world philosophies, and you have a powerful, diverse system that would keep players engaged for years. It’s not a simple thing to code or understand. However, it is something that gaming sorely needs. Such a reading could create complex factional consequences in a world-scale game, whereby people with similar “beliefs” (actions) will ally themselves to you, and others will slowly become enemies, neutral, or unsure (apathetic) as you establish yourself. This realism would actually teach people something about true consequences, rather than being, as many complain of moral systems in games so far, “preachy”. In literature, almost every philosophy has been given a narrative in some form. The same goes for film, though it hasn’t existed for as long and hasn’t covered as much yet. Gaming, meanwhile, is new to morality and ethics. I think that there must be a push for diversity, not simply Christian morality, in games. Unfortunately, thanks to the extremity of possible decisions in most games with morality systems, they seem to have a fairly obvious, simple, Christian basis. This isn’t always true; there are games like Masq, which show more than that and throw unexpected consequences in to make being “good” or “evil” less easy and certain. But in terms of the mainstream, there is very little in the way of risks being taken to do something interesting with this. If we’re going to have a lot more religious games, then they will depart much more completely from the simple idea of being fun or not fun. This is both a good and a bad thing for obvious reasons. I really hope that the good side of this consequence is emphasised and strengthened by pushing for diversity and not black and white decisions in games. The potential for the demonisation of any faith and prejudice is very strong – this could also be avoided if each game character still acts separately from their factions in one way or another as individuals. Games like PeaceMaker seem to do things right. A few more games about reaching peace (through diplomatic means) rather than waging war would be a fantastic thing which balances the situation. And not just because they’re good morally, but because such games improve the image of gaming itself. – Silva

Personally, I no more believe the verse that states that Christianity is the only way to Heaven/Nirvana/Paradise then I believe that lichen is self-aware. However, I do believe that it is a way. Even more than I believe that, I believe that you don’t need to profess a religion to get to HNP, you simply have to behave in a moral fashion. Of course, “morals” are vagrant, ethereal things. A “moral” is any belief that is held with total conviction, such as “eating meat is wrong” or “killing another is wrong.” A person cannot be “amoral” because “amoral” refers to something that “morals” should not have a bearing on (an example that would apply to most people is what breakfast cereal you are going to have). “Amoral” has, unfortunately, taken on the meaning of “immoral” (a shorthand for contradictory to morals). A situation can be amoral (not having to do with morals), but an act can be immoral (contradictory to morals). Basically, what I’m trying (and kind of failing) to get at here is that everyone is different, and thus everyone should be allowed to define their own moral code. Religion is not everyone’s bag, but it can be a very good place to start defining what you feel is right and wrong. This attempt to educate people who want to know more about Christianity is a good step in the right direction for our culture in my opinion. – RagnorakTres

In response to “Robbing Gods” from The Escapist Forum: They did do a pretty good job, and that’s a huge part of why I like the story in them. It definitely reminds me of the pagan vs. Christian church rivalry of old (I’m sure very much by design.) The Pagans are influenced by nature but not in the sanitized Disney perspective; they’re feral and capricious, not cute and fluffy. The Tenets of the Master Builder harken towards a darker idea of religion than is common now: One of undeniable brutality beneath the control of unyielding rules. The feel is far more medieval than the majority of analogous organizations in other games, which is still pretty damn unique 10 years or so after release. And I’m surprised that the article didn’t mention the religious schism with the Mechanists in the second game. It seemed to be pretty significant to the tone. I still need to play the third game, though. The engine change and the host of other alterations make it feel less like proper Thief (TM), but it is still worth it from everything else I’ve heard. Anyone else care to weep over the demise of Looking Glass Studios with me? – Kilo24 This is an article I wish I’d written myself. The interplay of the three different main factions in the City (Hammerite, Pagan, Keeper) set an excellent backdrop for Garrett’s antics, since- despite his bitter protests to not give a whit for the Keepers’ balance-favoring priorities- it was in his own best interests as well not to let either the Hammerites nor the Pagans get the upper hand over the other, as that would disrupt his comfortable status quo. The Hammerite/Mechanist schism in Metal Age brought all sorts of problems to our favorite taffer, and signalled the end of his self-interested bystander role with his partnership with Viktoria. And then there was Karras…. Deadly Shadows pretty much put the Keepers in the spotlight and relegated the Hammerite/Pagan feud to a plot point. In fact, in that game it was entirely possible to become buddy-buddy with both factions, and lemme tell you, hearing a Hammerite utter the words “Builder bless thee, Garrett” was like a sledgehammer to the forehead in terms of shock. Also, because it is one of the most awesome quotes in the game, prefacing one of the most awesome missions in the game (“The Sword”): “Builds your roofs of dead wood. Builds your walls of dead stone. Builds your dreams of dead thoughts. Comes crying laughing singing back to life, takes what you steal, and pulls the skins from your dead bones shrieking.” -Clay tablet in an abandoned Trickster temple – The Rogue Wolf A riveting read and an excellent use of that opening quote. I’d love to read that book someday. The Thief series is one of the few where you can sensibly deconstruct it and analyse themes like Religion. Each game analysis the three factions’ motivations and structures in turn while using the others to compare them again. As has been said, particularly with the Keepers, you can really see the attraction in their philosophy. A promise of a warm bed and predictable lighting, the surety that comes from creating formidable structures and sturdy weapons… in a world like the City its an enticing option, especially for those not lucky enough to be born into wealth. – kastanok

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-02-23” author: “John Newman”

– BehattedWanderer Did anyone else actually send a “cyclops list” to the e-mail listed on the article or was I the only one actually moved to do something somewhat silly by the article? Anyhow, much agreed. This whole idea of love is… well, it’s simple but we make it complex don’t we? This definitely reminds me of a passage in a book entitled Possession in which the characters begin to talk about something very close to love and then start to talk about it in terms of how intellectualized it is and they say something like “we know everything about love, but we just don’t know love at all.” Sometimes intellectualization just gets in between yourself and the passion that ought to be spent on a project. Anyhow, sorry, that’s terribly off topic. – AquaAscension

In response to “Gordon Freeman, Private Eye” from The Escapist Forum: I never said they were “deep”. And “deep” is a horrible term to use, it has no real meaning of its own. If you specifically mean narrative depth, of course they are lacking – my point is that these were the first immersive game experiences for most people. What most people overlook about Half-Life (and Portal) is the fact that any game could have told that story, but it’s the sense of immersion that enables it to be conveyed on the level that it is. A word tells you what’s there, a cut scene shows it, but interaction allows you to gather the meaning intuitively. Compared to playing Pac-Man, SMB was a very “deep” experience and compared to SMB, Doom was phenomenally “deep” – for the first time you could walk around a room and explore it for yourself, discovering keys and secret passages. Once Half-Life came out and the exploration of that space was being used to convey a compelling story, Doom and everything before it naturally became obsolete. – 300lb. Samoan Story telling is an incredibly difficult art; in an interactive medium that job becomes a thousand times harder. Many designers believe you should “funnel” the player to plot-specific moments (i.e. the Metal Gear series; many many FPS that try to emulate Half-life). But because you are creating a living breathing world; you should allow people to discover it for themselves, this is something valve does wonderfully. Take the Left 4 Dead games. At each saferoom, you see the scribbles of the survivors before you. You see their anger, confusion, and fear of the apocalypse. You walk around to a supposed safe zone in a mall only to find a pile of corpses that touch the ceiling. You move to a motel room and find ammo laying next to the carcass of someone. It’s not an infected, but you can tell she took her own life before being torn by the horde or face being turned into one of them. This style has also been used by games like Fallout 3 (checking out the ransacked and obliterated wasteland), the Grand Theft Auto games (with the many easter eggs to be found), and the first F.E.A.R (Alma’s appearances and copying the computer drives). This is the style of storytelling that should be adopted by designers. Let the player slowly unravel their world. Don’t just give us a heap of cutscenes that are either written poorly or drag on forever. – qbanknight

Think about what Heavy Rain promises, a game that explores how far you are willing to go to save those you love. I fully agree with Mr. Cage when he says that computer games should grow up. Games as a medium is a potentially powerful tool for directed storytelling. However, most games today end up on the same level of meaning as your average Wesley Snipes movie. You get some cool action and one-liners, but beyond the tesosterone and adrenaline there isn’t much to collect there. There’s no message, no moral dilemmas to explore or discourses on human psychology. Does anyone remember Mafia? That game showed us, in part, how games can tell a story with a message and make the player involved. Is there anyone who played that game that didn’t feel a sting of sorrow as Tommy’s crimes eventually catches up with him? Was there anyone who missed the message that “Crime doesn’t pay”? The two examples above are games that tries to push the storytelling in games. There are many who doesn’t, just as there are hundreds of TV-series’ out there that only aim at delivering quick entertainment. Games are a powerful medium, and I think it would be silly to dismiss their potential to one day be just as good narrative devices as books or movies just because they haven’t gotten there yet or that they have more uses than that. – Gethsemani I think the writer misses a really important point here: that Citizen Kane is not the greatest film ever made because it has the greatest story, but because it practically invented modern cinema as we know it. As the previous poster says, the story is told through the language of its own medium – a language which modern cinema takes for granted, but which didn’t really exist before Citizen Kane. I would argue that gaming has had plenty of ‘Citizen Kane moments’, where single games have broken new ground in the language of video game storytelling. Half Life and Half Life 2 are brilliant examples of how videogames can tell stories without using words; the history of the places you visit in both games are revealed simply by exploration, and the fact that the main character never speaks throughout the whole series is telling. Grand Theft Auto 3 showed us how you can tell a compelling story in a sandbox without losing focus. Play any Bioware RPG and tell me they haven’t figured out how to create emotionally compelling characters in our stories. Not forgetting The Sims, any Civilisation or Total War game or even Animal Crossing, all of which give the player a framework to create their own stories (even if most of the stories turn out to be very very similar). The ‘language’ of videogames isn’t even confined to storytelling, and there have been plenty of Citizen Kane moments in other areas. Halo replaced health packs with regenerating shields and turned that into the default behaviour for first-person shooters. The toolbar at the bottom of the screen with spells corresponding to the numbered keys on a keyboard is part of the language of CRPGs now, but someone had to invent it. The idea that interactive objects in an RPG would glow in some way was, arguably, an accidental invention, but has nonetheless become part of the language. There have been lots and lots of games that have advanced the art of videogames in a similar way to how Citizen Kane advanced film-making. There will never be a single Citizen Kane because games are too diverse, and what works in one genre would make no sense in another. Oh, and game developers have no control over the pace or ‘flow’ of their games? Have you played Left 4 Dead? I think you do a disservice to the many talented developers out there by suggesting that a game can’t manipulate a player’s emotions in the way a film can. Play a Silent Hill game, or Alien vs Predator without being utterly terrified at some point, or Left 4 Dead without feeling any sense of urgency. Anyway you get point. Hopefully. – carelesshx

THIS is exactly why the stories in FPS are so mind-blowingly disjointed, yet some still manage to show glimpses of absolute brilliance. Seriously, they need to bear the writer’s opinion first, by all means! – Tonimata

In response to “The Escapist On: Storytelling” from The Escapist Forum: I don’t like storytelling in games… at their heart, videogames are still games which really makes a mess of my suspension of disbelief. For example, I walk Nathan Drake along the edge of some crumbling wall to grab a shiny artifact I can see a short distance away. In a butter-fingers moment, he goes flying off the edge and dies. Half an hour later, he’s in a dialogue scene where a villain’s got a gun pointed at his head. Now what’s crumbling is my suspension of disbelief. Nate can take a dozen gunshots before dying, and even if he dies he gets to try again and again until he wins… so what’s the deal with letting this situation set him back? It’s inconsistent. My Nathan Drake would just turn around and unload the usual truckload of whoop-ass, sweep the girl off her feet, toss all the ancient treasures in a sack and fly away into the sunset right then and there; but NOOOO in “the story” he’s got to act like this generic goon with a crappy handgun is some kind of threat. It’s the same for the enemies: what the hell is up with taking Nathan hostage? He’s deadlier than ebola! That’s why I like abstract games (shmups e.g.) and simulations. That sort of game doesn’t give a damn if you win or lose… there’s no narrative that’s pre-determined on your progress and success, so failure isn’t a total disruption of your immersion in the game. – NamesAreHardToPick Is Logan a new face at The Escapist, or just on video? Hope to see more of him about, and not just to add a few more non-American accents to the mix. Mad props for admitting you look forward to the day that a game makes you cry – I’m in the same boat. The end of Half-Life II: Episode II made my tear up a little, but I look forward to crying like a bitch when someone makes a story that good. Strange that Russ is all “Story? Pshaw, unnecessary!” Being an editor, I’d assumed he’d appreciate the story. I remember, back in my day, cutscenes were a reward, so again I’m on the same page as Logan. You’d work hard to get to a certain point and you’d get rewarded with an awesome cutscene. And you know what you’d do right after? Call your friends or go into school the next day and tell them all about it. “And then the bad guy like waved his arms like THIS and BWOOSH he totally summoned lightning from nowhere and threw it but the good guy was like GODS PROTECT ME and made this little move with his fingers and the lightning TOTALLY FLEW BACK AT THE BAD GUY IT WAS AWESOME.” – Nerdfury

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-02-24” author: “Eugene Lasater”

Likewise, “cinematic” gaming has only produced a handful of gems (with probably the best one being Metal Gear Solid, the first one, more than a decade ago! And Kojima took all the wrong lessons from his success in that game), and the rest being primarily mediocre imitations of film (the vastly-overrated Heavy Rain). I’m not saying games shouldn’t borrow ideas or techniques from other industries, what I’m saying is developers shouldn’t be looking to copy wholesale in an effort to make their games ‘Art’ with a capital A, because that’s not what artists do (that’s the realm of hacks). Instead, developers, just like anyone in any creative field, should ask themselves “What lessons can we learn from other works, even in other fields?”, “How can and can’t we apply them here?” and, most importantly, “What can I add to the mix by making this?” If developers ask themselves those questions, and some already have, then the industry can and will “grow up,” so to speak. – SamElliot’sMustache Comparing Heavy Rain to Citizen Kane is really pushing it, I’m afraid. And saying that Heavy Rain was a milestone in gaming? Uh, no! Don’t get me wrong, I liked the game, but there was as much wrong with it as there was right. This might be beating a dead horse, but if you want innovation in games look at Shadow of The Colossus: Riding your horse actually felt like riding a horse instead of, say, driving a car as it does in other games with horse riding gameplay. Interacting with skyscraper-tall beings that were beautifully animated, but most of all, it told a story through gameplay instead of cutscenes. Sure, there were cutscenes, but only at the beginning and the end of the game and their only purpose was to set up the game and to conclude the game. The actual emotion of bonding with your horse and coming to the grim realization of your actions, was achieved through gameplay. And that is something I have yet to see in another game, except maybe Ico. I really liked the big blockbuster games of the last few years like Gears of War 2, Uncharted 2 and Mass Effect 2, but they seem to feel more like movie experiences rather then videogames. In the end, I want the bulk of my games to feel like videogames and not like movies. – Casual Shinji

In response to “Our Turn to Decide” from The Escapist Forum: I don’t particularly think gaming will ever mature past the level it is now. Good. Gaming, at it’s most basic, allows us to live out our fantasies. And, unless you’re the most boring person on the planet/never had a childhood, you can bet that most peoples fantasies will either involve sex, violence, improbable feats or some combination of the three. Gaming can be very mature when it wants to be, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but is there really any problem with killing lots of people in the most violent way possible? Assuming you’re old enough to play it. No, there isn’t. It’s fun, and that’s all there is to it. Sure, people will say it’s immature and morally reprehensible, but who really cares? The games still get made, and they’re still fun. You’re making a bunch of pixels fall over. And it’s fun. Movies, although touted as more ‘mature’, are almost the same. I challenge you, look through your DVD collection for films that involve no sex, blood, violence of any kind or swearing. There will be a few, but I bet they’ll be massively overwhelmed by the amount of titles that involve one or all of the above. Hell, back in the ‘good old days’, films, books and theatre were just as violent. The only thing stopping them from being really violent were the same kind of puritans that today hark back to them as some sort of golden age. Gaming is for entertainment. It doesn’t need to be any more mature, especially if we go by the definition of mature that non-gamers want it to be, that is, boring! That doesn’t mean games can’t be art, but as far as I see it, games are fine as they are. Nice article. – Furburt And that, I think, is the problem. People don’t want the medium to mature more. Good. But if we ever want videogames to become, I don’t want to use the term ‘accepted’, but less looked down upon, then the gamers need to step up and make it so. We need to become more than just the CoD dickholes screaming obscenities into XBox Live. We need to become more than just socially inept man-children in our basements playing WoW for 30 hours a week (or more) while ignoring the outside world. Until society takes gamers seriously, they will not take gaming seriously. And gaming will always be viewed as a child’s toy, and will never be an adult. I like how the article puts it, though. Once gaming stops being looked down upon as a child’s thing, gaming can then decide what it wants to be. I’m not saying that gaming needs to stop being violent, or sexy, or whatever. I am saying that gaming (and gamers) needs to improve its image so that it can be violent or sexy or whatever without causing an uproar. I mean, if there was a movie with the same plot and action as GTA IV, it probably would have done very well at the box office and noone would have cared. But since it was a videogame…well, you know the rest. – Nightfalke

Likewise, it is human nature to categorize, file, label, and marginalize. That most people will one day play games will not stop them from categorizing those they view as less savory amongst their number into groups apart from them. Remember, the term “gamer” actually comes from the tabletop RPG and wargaming community, pre-dating its use for video game players by many, many years. And though those sorts of games have gained much acceptance through references from high profile celebrities and mentions in movies and TV shows, it is still a niche and somewhat marginalized hobby, and to some people always will be. Just as with video games, you will always have a disparity between those who make games their lives, those who do so but whom the others don’t like for whatever reason, and those who think all of it is idiotic. The technology behind video games is important – again, a no-brainer – but that technology’s proliferation into every aspect of our lives need not be in the form of games, and certainly it would be a bad idea if it became so (see the first sentence of my post). Games, by definition, are for fun, not for serious business, and as stupid and unwise a species as we are, I have a strong suspicion we are not so stupid as to let idleness and silliness into our attempts at passing the bar exam. Acceptance is the key issue here. What makes somebody feel like an outcast? Often it is the bad timing of a single word. In this case “gamer.” But a new word will be found and marginalization will take place somehow, and a gamer by any other name… well. Video games are one aspect of a gigantic technological revolution. They are handy in many ways. But again, they are only one aspect of that revolution. They are not humanity’s answer to the Big Questions. And heaven forbid they should become so. If they are allowed to, we deserve whatever mess is ahead of us. – bruunwald Hey, this article tricked me! It looked like it was going to be about video game design, but it’s about plain game design! LIAR LIAR. Well, of course everyone loves games, although not everyone may admit that with those exact words, but I’m not sure if gaming becoming somehow ubiquitous is a good or desirable outcome. I acquire some minimal enjoyment out of unlocking an achievement on my 360, (mostly because the achievement is usually a lame pun and I love lame puns), but I might become bothered if my social network gave me a “Just Friends” achievement if none of my female friends assigned me as a crush or whatever is the most generic equivalent. Re: gamer as a label, I read somewhere a long time ago what is essentially a paraphrase of the first paragraph, that ‘gamers’ are bound to disappear just as TV fans aren’t ‘watchers’ or music fans aren’t ‘listeners’. To that I say: bullshit. Look at me in the eyes and tell me ‘punk’ isn’t a relevant subculture. Now tell me that, regardless of everything in behavior and appearance it implies, ‘punk’ isn’t primarily about music. See? Music fans don’t call themselves ‘noteheads’, but people who enjoy a certain kind of music create a subculture about it. Just as there are cons for fans of sci-fi TV shows and how fans of indie music gather to smoke clover cigarettes and wear berets. ‘Gamer’ may become an obsolete, incorrect label as more people play games, so it may end up referring only to those who identify with gaming at a higher level, as it kind of already does, but will not, in the foreseeable future, disappear. – The Random One

In response to “Jane McGonigal Lives the Game” from The Escapist Forum: I saw her talk at TED a while ago. While I liked what she had to say, most often, when her talk has come up, on the occasions on which it has come up, most of what I hear from others is pretty derisive. Or she is simply outright mocked. I’m not bashing your article, but Jane Mcgonigal does herself a disservice when presenting her ideas. Her nerdy presentation has alienated the people (at least the group I’ve met so far) she wants to “employ”. Of course it was TED, so probably the idea of some sort of translator went out the window. But she needs some help getting her ideas across in a way that seems hip to the people that create those huge number of man hours she wants to use. I had a similar idea about the use of the time spent playing video games by a lot of people, and when I saw her talk, I thought it sounded really interesting, I went to Superstruct.org and never actually signed up, the description was enough to turn me away. What she doesn’t do (or seemed like she didn’t do there) is provide a visceral experience for the “player” (more of a participant really). Games are predicated on fun, what she seems to create is contrived version of fun to me. A shallow metaphor that’s not a good enough deceit to get the kind of effort she wants for these projects. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m all for utilizing the man-hours put into gaming for a good cause, that concept is one that has real merit. But the more I see of her, the more I see her as not particularly able to create something that’s genuinely engaging to the largest number of players. And this is not based solely on my impression, this is based on a fair number of people’s impressions of her game. They had no real interest, I suspect that is partially because of her very nerdy presentation of her ideas, but also, for a very real and large part, because it doesn’t offer escape! There’s no metaphor masking the reality behind it, or close to none. I’m glad people are funding her efforts however, it doesn’t matter to me who is doing it, just that it doesn’t become an effort to endorse something else. – the_carrot I don’t know, I just can’t get behind games as saving the world. Sure, they might influence some people. They might inspire others to do good. But at their heart, they’re escapist. You don’t usually play a game to realize the harshness of the world, but to get away from whatever boring or unfair situation that exists in your own life. While a video game might keep people from doing bad things, it wont replace the need to actually do good things for others. And that’s why they shouldn’t get a Nobel Peace prize. – notthatbright

I agree that chasing tech-inspired awe is starting to get old. Graphics are so good that it’s hard to get any better. What’s more real than photorealism? True 3D? We are starting to hit the limits of what we, as humans, can perceive (which is awesome!). At the same time, each leap is getting smaller: never again will we have a leap like moving from the 2.5D graphics of the SNES to the 3D graphics of the N64. With the “wow” factor of tech innovations tapering off, customers are more interested in other things. The Wii wasn’t a hit because of its graphics, but because it had an entirely new way to interact with the system. Maybe it became a gimmick, or maybe it didn’t reach its real potential, but I was interested in it as a customer because it was something that hadn’t been done before: it was the next big thing. New game ideas are also a big thing. I jumped all over Braid when it first came out and I loved it. Guitar Hero took off when the franchise first started and Harmonix continued to gain customers when they introduced Rock Band. Customers aren’t necessarily looking for new, fancier graphics, they are just looking for something new. They want the biggest, the best, and the newest. They want something different than they had yesterday. If you can do that with better graphics, great, but you can also do it with new ideas of all kinds: stories, characters, gameplay, mechanics, you name it. Along the same lines, I think the interest in old games has arisen because new games are starting to lose their innovative edge. Every now and then we get a fun new adventure, like Rock Band, Braid, or Fallout 3, but most of the time we get rehashes of the same game again and again: how many more Halo-like shooters do we need? How many soccer, golf, and hockey games? As each company attempts to perfect their IP and their recipe for success, the “wow” factor disappears because each game becomes that much more like the other. But why does this make old games interesting? Because what’s old is new again. Modern games are nothing like the old classics, and in comparison, the old ones seem new, interesting, and different. When you look at the complex graphics, video, and special effects that go into a modern game, it’s hard to imagine that an old 8-bit game with sprites and square waves could be as engaging and gratifying as it was, but they are, proving that a game is more than just the technology that goes into it. The minimalist, often absurdist style that went into those old games stands in stark contrast to the realism of modern games, and this makes them appealing. It can be hard to see past the bias of nostalgia, but it can also be hard to remember that these classic games are classics because they really were good games. They had interesting stories, characters, and gameplay, and these are elements that don’t degrade over time. In fact, their primitive stylings make them attractive because they have become a reflection of a bygone era, the same way that watching an old black-and-white movie brings back some romanticism for a simpler time. In all of this, I think we have lost something from that era. When technology was limited, developers had to make their games compelling in other ways. The stories, characters, and mechanics all had to be innovative in order to stand out from the rest. Sure, there were lots of games that were yet-another-platformer, but there were also a lot of games that were completely unlike anything before: Dig Dug, Lolo, Bomberman, Donkey Kong, Tetris, Qix, Pipe Dreams, Fire and Ice — the list is long and the games are varied. In their refinement, modern games have started to converge on specific formulas that work, such as first-person shooters, real-time strategies, and role-playing games, and no longer branch out into entirely different genres (rhythm games being one of the major exceptions). Perhaps we have just discovered all of the genres and mechanics that are possible, but I think we have just stopped trying to find new ones because the current ones have been so successful from a business perspective. After all, the indie guys continue to come up with entirely new ideas. Overall, there is nothing particularly wrong with new games: they are converging towards perfection in the genres and technologies that they have target for the last decade or more. But at the same time, this perfection has lead to a lack of differentiation between product lines, leaving customers wanting something new and different. And in comparison, old games sure look different, making what was old new again. – ReverseEngineered

title: “Editor S Choice” ShowToc: true date: “2025-02-05” author: “Emma Croghan”

I’ve pirated games, and I find when you have a pirated game, you so much more likely not to play it, or to play it very little, than you would had you bought it. When you spend your cash on a game, you almost feel like you need to play it, to make the loss of those funds worthwhile – you’re more willing to swallow a bad game, persevere with a tough one, and play it till the end no matter what. When you pirate, you have so many games you barely play any, but you keep getting them ‘just in case’ you feel like it, even though you know you won’t. It definitely becomes just a collecting factor. – insectoid

In response to “¡VIVA LA R3V0LUC10N!” from The Escapist Forum: I, too, believe that eating babies is the best way to solve the DRM problems. – Trevel “By far the most funny thing to come out of all of this is the people who aren’t quite getting the joke.” I agree. But the article itself wasn’t very funny. This is a serious issue, and the article pokes fun at the wrong side of it. It would have been much more effective if the writer had poked fun at the DRM supporters, who DO actually tend to be over-the-top. The problem with the article, as satire, is that most anti-DRM folks are actually NOT irrational, so in order to cloak itself in some level of believability, the satire can’t be all that effective. – Beery

In response to “A Nation of Pirates” from The Escapist Forum: First of all, it isn’t more than likely someone’s committing a crime playing videogames in Brazil. It’s just likely. That is exactly what the word means. Use a dictionary next time. And you mention you pirate in Finland and… nobody cares one bit. Finland’s full of high tech, plenty of content providers, game studios etcetera. The culture isn’t against piracy either, and plenty of people buy a lot of legal games. Even more pirate some games and buy others. But pirates selling their ill-earned goods is seen tantamount to sacrilege – pirate all you want for your own use, but if you try to turn a profit on the work of others, you’ve committed a crime against the society’s morals. Or, in short, how American of you. Be you American or not, you certainly think like one. – insanelich The same situation exist in a lot of countries, especially in Asia. The alarming thing is that the police rarely do anything to stop them, mostly public “cover-up” raids in some small shops to make it appear as though they are fighting it. Just goes to show that in the right circumstances the piracy industry (if it’s as blatant as being sold in malls, which i’ve seen quite often)is a tourist attracting and good revenue source for the country. – Brotherofwill

– avidabey

In response to “Rob from the Rich, Steal from the Poor” from The Escapist Forum: Great read. I’m not a fan of DRM and I don’t bother to yell at people for pirating games. But when they start arguing that they aren’t really hurting the people who make games or that it isn’t stealing it crosses the line into delusional. Do whatever you’re going to do, no one is arguing that, but don’t lie to yourself about the consequences of your actions. Articles like this remind them about who ultimately gets burned when you steal these games. – L.B. Jeffries Ding! Idea. Ship the game without DRM, but crammed to the gills with in-game advertising. When you get the game home and register it online, the registry server detects whether the key is one that has been vended or not; if it’s a vended one, the ads go away so long as the game gets to check the authenticity each time it boots. If the key used isn’t one that was vended, or if the game can’t verify the authenticity of the key, the ads stay. Even better, if R. Matey keeps playing his unregistered/keygenned copy online, the authentication server tracks ad impressions and bills the sponsors appropriately. Pirates then cease to be “noble rebels against the system” and instead become yet more ad mules, and developers get paid when their games are played. — Steve – Anton P. Nym No matter how much piracy there is, I think that there will always be artists who develop games, and there will always be people who manage to make a living off writing them. Of course will there be big-budget, 40 million dollars in development games if piracy is allowed to be too convenient? No. And honestly I don’t care, because my best game experiences have all been in garage games without the huge cinematic, voice-over budgets. I think I got more entertainment value out of a shareware copy of Scorched Earth that we played for months in the dorms in college than in my $60 copy of Oblivion which now sits on the shelf, having been drained of every bit of interest it once had over a couple weekend. – caross73