(Via. Ken Wong)

Posted in 8-bit on Monday September 18, 2006. Shoutouts.

Quake is ten, long live Quake. It certainly doesn’t feel like 10 years ago that we were fighting with 14.4 modems to download the then enormous fifteen meg archive. Installing it and realising that perhaps it was time to pool the newspaper delivery money and upgrade the beast to something that pushed a little more water under the bridge.

To those that played: Remember the first time you kicked on +mlook and what a mind fuck it was? The first shambler. That level where the blocks fly up and open the door, and then the fiend leaps out of the darkness and your heart tries to jump out of your chest while you strafe wildly in circles and shoot at the roof. dm6. dm2. Timing the armor and the quad and dominating. Lans and then quakeworld. The six month build-up while people realised just what they could do now they had an audience of willing players. Rocket Arena. Threewave. Team Fortress. QRally.

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of fun with Quake, and it was pretty much the catalyst for my becoming interested in the Internet. The catalyst for learning how to put a page together and get it up so people could see it. The reason I got my first real job. I feel sad that I don’t think I’ll ever be as engaged in a game ever again, because Quake had a great community and it felt like we were all learning what we could do, together.

A couple of years ago, I tried to play a PC game (it was called Counter-Strike) online for the first time in ages. They have voice chat as standard these days, and in the first ten minutes I got called gay four times, a cheater twice and a “cunt-arse faggot dick” once, by what sounded like a room of irate thirteen year olds. I felt like slapping them and saying, “Hey, we built this. We were fucking with cvars and console commands and servers before there was even an option that said ‘Multiplayer.’ We fought with modems and telephones and netcode. We mailed suggestions to developers and they mailed back the next day. We huddled around racks of servers, fought for stability and bonded. We learnt the ropes, practiced, and improved when it was a community, not an industry.”

And that made me feel old. Really, really old.

I just realised I have a copy of Quake on my laptop. Anyone up for a game?

Posted in 8-bit on Saturday June 24, 2006. Shoutouts [2].

After watching this 35 minute presentation about Spore by none other than Will Wright, I have to say that I’m really excited about this game. It’s funny because this is the first time I’ve been honestly pumped about something game-related for about four years. That’s a long, long time in the industry. Seriously, it’s scary to think how long it’s been since I really got into a game. I think it was probably Tribes 2 and that was, what, 2001 or so?

I suppose having a shitty laptop as your sole PC gaming platform limits you to zero new-releases and that’s a big factor in my not having played anything new for ages. I will tentatively admit that I’m kind of looking forward to heading home in August and stealing a couple of hours here and there on my brother’s tiny god, catching up on all the great stuff I’ve missed out on.

But yeah, Spore, what’s interesting there is how open-ended it is. There’s very little of the traditional reward structure in the game, the further you progress the more open-ended it gets. It looks like it’s essentially a huge sandbox for you to evolve a species. From scratch. Black and White gone galactic if you will. If it was anyone but Wright talking up the game I think I’d be more sceptical than I am. He’s got the ideas though, and the passion, and the money to back them up. And this game looks fantastic.

Posted in 8-bit on Friday March 3, 2006. Shoutouts [1].

Are you a geek? If yes please continue. Have you ever owned a Nintendo? If yes please continue. Have you played Mike Tyson’s Super Punch Out? If yes please continue. Are you in a place where you can laugh out loud and gasp in shock? If yes please continue.

This is what is referred to as a flawless recreation. Please enjoy.

Posted in 8-bit on Friday February 17, 2006. Shoutouts [2].

Best hilarious nerd/politics crossover blog-post in the history of all time: Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure.

Posted in 8-bit on Wednesday January 18, 2006. Shoutouts.

SAM: What ARE you guys? And why did you suddenly drop your half-assed pirate dialect?
PIRATE: We’re Buccaneers! We used to have mundane office jobs, working in cubicles with water coolers and coffee cups with clever slogans and those wacky calendars with photos of diseased-looking chimps wearing neckties.
SAM: But you’ve got hooks and peg legs.

Hey, they’re back, this can only be good.

Posted in 8-bit on Friday November 11, 2005. Shoutouts.

About a year ago I picked up an Xbox as part of the special platinum pack deal they had going. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Xbox was pretty much dead on arrival when it hit Japan, with the vast majority of the (huge) game playing populace over here just not being interested. This is a shame, because it’s a great system. Back home there’s a stack of great titles released every month and it has a lot of support. Surprisingly enough, in Perth I know more people that own Xboxes than PS2s by quite a decent margin but in Japan its exactly the opposite. So, because of the low take up in Japan its very hard to get decent games over here.

The problem is, I can’t import games from home or the US because of the ridiculous DVD region system the megacorps have in place. Last month I discovered Play-Asia.com, a site in Hong Kong that has a pretty awesome selection of Xbox games. The neat thing is, games from HK are the same region as Japan but most of them include both a Chinese and an English option. Why the Japanese insist on dubbing straight over the English tracks rather than leaving them and providing it as an option (easy to do on DVD) is something that absolutely infuriates me as it happens on foreign rental DVDs as well. It makes zero sense. If you’ve already got the content, why get rid of it? The mind boggles.

As an experiment, the first game I picked up from PA was Bungie’s Halo 2, probably the most anticipated Xbox title this year and one that’s apparently been selling like hotcakes. As an aside, the sales data for Japan is also available and for the first week of release in Japan Halo 2 sold around 40,000 copies. To put that in perspective one retailer in America, Gamestop, sold 500,000 copies of Halo 2 in the first day. That’s how small the Xbox is in Japan. Anyway, Halo 2.

It’s great. Really great. A perfect example of how a simple idea can be made a million times better through careful execution and a whole lot of polish. Halo is a bog-standard 3d shooter, there isn’t a whole lot to set it apart from the pack in terms of gameplay dynamics. However, where Bungie come into their own is in telling stories. The world of Halo 2 is rich and detailed, with believable characters and stunning environments. The story is well paced and the ingame cutscenes do an excellent job of advancing the plot. At times you really do feel like you’re playing around on the set of a high budget sci-fi movie. The best moments in Halo 2 come when you’re interacting with the AI in a believable fashion. Burning down an 8 lane mega-highway in a converted jeep while the guy on the back frantically plugs away at tailgating hovercraft with the mounted machinegun, and the dude in the passenger seat leans out the side to pick off an oncoming tank with his rocket launcher is as close as it gets to gaming nirvana. After the ending though, I’m already set for part 3 in the series, the sooner the better.

Posted in 8-bit on Monday December 6, 2004. .

Check it out, DHTML Lemmings. You can barely tell the difference between this and the original. Another tool to add my ever increasing arsenal of procrastination utilities.

Posted in 8-bit on Wednesday August 11, 2004. Comments [1].

Cool shit from the latest E3 Expo in LA, the game show that’s managed to get spastically huge over the past couple of years:

• Portable: The PSP from Sony. Apparently it’s more powerful than a PS1 and can also play movies. Sweet. Nintento also have their own super fancy gameboy thing that has two screens.
  
• Xbox: Halo 2 and Doom 3 for the Xbox both look fantastic.
  
• PC: Tribes: Vengeance, Ghost Recon 2 , F.E.A.R., GTA: San Andreas, Half-Life 2 and The Matrix: Online>

  

  Posted in 8-bit on Tuesday May 18, 2004. .

There have been flurry of cancellations in the PC gaming industry recently, but none of them have been quite as terse as the announcement that Lucasarts released earlier this week confirming rumours that their graphic adventure, Sam and Max: Freelance Police, had been cancelled:

“After careful evaluation of current market place realities and underlying economic considerations, we’ve decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC” says Mike Nelson, Acting General Manager and VP of Finance and Operations. There is currently no plan to reduce staff.”

It’s a great relief to see that the suits at Lucasarts are still good friends with the crack pipe and have cancelled the one game they still had in development was looking to finally breathe some new life into their failing original franchises.

For several years now, Lucasarts have been all about pumping out about twenty mediocre Star Wars movie tie-in games a year usually with the same “been-done” ideas and execution. While there have been some notable exceptions (namely the stunning Knights of the Old Republic, developed out of house at Bioware) on the whole none of these games have been memorable or recieved any great amount of positive coverage in the gaming press. However, thanks to the unwavering strength of the Star Wars brand most of these games have sold well.

It wasn’t always this way though, in the mid 90s, Lucasarts created several highly regarded and massively popular adventure games set in original universes. You could usually count on Lucasarts releasing both a good original and a good Star Wars game each year. Then they seemed to about face and focused solely on the Star Wars brand that seems to be a license to print money. A few years ago, they issued a press release stating they intended to focus on their original properties and slow down a little on the Star Wars mania. Two years later, after the cancellation of both the new Full Throttle and Sam and Max games and the release of several mediocre titles to poor reception by both the gaming press and public and we’re still waiting for this revitalisation to happen.

Sam and Max: Freelance Police was to be the sequel to the 1993 graphic adventure, Sam and Max Hit the Road. Hit the Road remains in my opinion, to this day, the funniest PC game ever created:

M: Who was it?
S: Just the commissioner with another idiotic and baffling assignment
M: Does it involve wanton destruction?
S: We can only hope

If you’re unfamiliar with Sam and Max it began its life as a comic book created and penned by Steve Purcell. The two main characters are a human sized dog detective, Sam, and his hyperactive bunny sidekick with a penchant for violence, Max. In Hit the Road, Sam and Max romp across America on the hunt for a missing Bigfoot and his giraffe necked girlfriend and well, it all gets a little weird. In between bungie jumping from presidents’ nostrils, riding the tunnel of love and whacking rats, the only constant is Max beating the shit out of people every now and then and Sam generally being laid back and sardonic about absolutely everything.

However, back to the issue at hand. That is, why do Lucasarts seem to keep making these bizarre cancellation decisions? One of the reasons I’ve pretty much given up PC gaming is because shit like this just keeps happening in the industry. I can’t think of any PC release in the past 3 years or so that’s held my attention even a quarter as much as any of the titles released during the golden days of Lucasarts where basically everything they put out was solid gold. Who remembers Day of the Tentacle, The Dig and Full Throttle? Amazing games that would hold you enthralled from start to finish.

Those days it was all about creativity and innovation. You weren’t waiting for Star Wars Galactic Quake Clone Invaders Strategy Master 23: The Return of Throgsaur but instead there was a sense of anticipation before Lucasarts annouced their next project. You were nigh-on assured of a game filled with unique and likable characters and a fantastic and engaging world. Back in 1995 it wasn’t so much about the genre of the game you were releasing but rather whether it was a bad game or a game. I’m a firm believer that there is always a good economic climate to release a good game into and now more than ever. In this age of a trillion internet review sites and as the influence of print magazines wanes word of mouth is still king. If you build it (and it is fun) people will come (and buy).

There are a couple of shining examples of this recently but the one I’ll use to illustrate my point is gaming’s poster child, Counter Strike. Played by millions around the world, few would realise that it started its life as a pretty buggy and simplistic modification for a game whose multiplayer community was, at the time, well and truly in the shadow of Quake 2. Counter Strike released with a single map and a handful of weapons. The two teams looked basically identical, hostages were at the best of times retarded, it was incredibly unbalanced, there were no hand to hand weapons and to go with the ridiculous netcode was the mods’ habit of crashing the server every couple of hours. Production wise, it was pretty laughable but, damn, it was fun. Really fun.

People got behind the project, more and more servers sprung up, the word spread and production continued. Five years later and it’s the most popular online game ever created, it’s been packaged and sold, there’s a sequel in the works, an expansion pack on shelves, ports to consoles and more people are playing at any one time that almost all other online games put together. Why is this? Surely any one of the carefully formulated on-line games with the weight of huge publishers and developers behind them should be wearing this throne? I guess in the end it doesn’t matter so much how big your advertising budget is, or which hardware companies you sign exclusive deals with but rather whether your game is enjoyable to play. Funny that.

The whole idea of giving parts of games away for free is not a new one, look at Duke Nukem, Quake and other huge franchises that had their start in shareware. If you’re giving players the first quarter of the game for free, it better be damn good or there’s no bloody way they’re going to buy the rest of it. If you make a good game, and give the word time to spread, it will sell. The copies of Half-Life still sitting on stores shelves some six or more years after its release are more than testament to this.

S: Max, where can I put this bomb where it doesn’t hurt anyone we know or care about?
M: Out the window Sam, there’s no one but strangers out there
Sam tosses the bomb out the window. There is a huge explosion.
S: I hope there was nobody on that bus
M: Nobody we know, at least.

I suppose this rant has kind of lost focus and is heading in a “games those days are better than now” but I don’t think that’s strictly true. Amazing games are still released these days, they’re just fewer and further between. Usually they’re the ones that step out on a limb and do something a little different, take the risks rather than sticking to the beaten path. Regardless, the industry has to wake up and work out that while consoles are the future of gaming there is still a very real market for good PC games that aren’t first person shooters or massively multiplayer online RPGs.

Cancelling a project like Sam & Max because it’s not easily ported to consoles (which is what I suspect might have happened) isn’t going to win you any fans, especially when the title cancelled is as well known and loved as Sam & Max. While I don’t spend a lot of money on games, I do tend to spend a bit on adventures because they generally afford pretty good value for money. The money I would have spent on Sam & Max is just going to go on the next graphic adventure I hear good things about. If it’s a small company and an original title then all the better, I’m sure I’ll get my moneys worth.

Update

There’s now a site dedicated to saving the game with a whole stack of information. Among other things there’s a petition you can sign that’s currently got more than 25,000 signatures. Even more interesting is this note from Steve Purcell:

LucasArts’ sudden decision to stop production on Sam & Max is mystifying. Sam & Max was on schedule and coming together beautifully.

I couldn’t have been more pleased with the quality of the writing, gameplay, hilarious animation and the gorgeous 3D world that Mike Stemmle’s team has created. The rug has been pulled out from under this brilliant team who’ve so expertly retooled Sam & Max for the 21st century.

I’m extremely frustrated and disappointed especially for the team who have devoted so much effort and creativity to Sam & Max. It’s a shame to think that their accomplishments, as well as the goodwill that has been growing in the gaming press toward this project, will all go to waste due to this shortsighted decision.

Thanks everyone, for continuing to make your feelings known.
—Steve Purcell

It really seems our friends at Lucasarts may have made the wrong call on this one, there is some serious community unhappiness at the moment.

Posted in 8-bit on Sunday March 14, 2004. Comments [2].