Apparently the president of Lucasarts, Darrel Rodriguez is not the president of Lucasarts anymore.  No word on why, but this is potentially very sad.

Why?

because Darrel Rodriguez is the man responsible for making possible all of the recent, (and awesome) Monkey Island games.  The special edition of the Secret of Monkey Island, Tales of Monkey Island, and soon the special edition of Monkey Island 2: Lechuck’s Revenge.  none of these would have happened, and that’s a very sad thought. 

The previous president, Jim Ward, was the dunderhead responsible for axing Sam and Max: Freelance Police, among other things. Now, obviously, Rodriguez’s departure is no guarantee that Lucasarts will cease to do the things that in the past year or so have gained their respect in my eyes, but  I can’t help but be super nervous that the focus is going to return to Star Wars, and nothing but Star Wars.

My reader mail was spoken about at some length on the most recent Idle Thumbs Podcast!

Kotaku just put up an article entitled What Has  Treyarch Done for Call of Duty?.

It’s an made for the sole purpose of pissing over all of Treyarch’s Call of Duty games.  I can’t understand why this was necessary.  I could see perhaps bringing up the quality of their work when a new game is announced, and certainly in a review, but an editorial hinged entirely on how they make lackluster games just seems mean. 

They close off the article with ‘but maybe Black Ops will be better!’ but it still just comes off as an excuse to be mean for a couple of hundred words.

I should start off by pointing out that the I don’t currently have a solid definition for ‘art’ and everytime I come up with one that I like  It tends to be fairly different than the previous one, with the exception being that they all containt the following caveat: art encompasses pretty much everything.  I think that’s probably for the better.  The general consensus is that we don’t want our art to stay constant;  We want it to evolve, to change.  Why, then, should the definition stay as such? 

On my bulletin board right now, there is a quote that someone printed out from a show I  once performed in, a birthday card, a large finger painting of my name, a coupon for 75 cents off of some Hot Pockets, and a picture of Simba from the Lion King that a friend colored in for me.  All of these are art.  Someone took the time to arrange all of these things in some way, from the size and layout of the text  in that quote and in that card, to the colors chosen for the picture and the painting.  Even the graphic design on the coupon was chosen for various reasons. 

I may not really care about the value of that coupon as a piece of art, and there is a lot of art that I’d much rather take in than that coupon, but the thing is still art.

My computer contains a folder called ‘Thrawn Shared’, which is where I keep all of the soundclips that I  find or rip from games, movies, TV shows, Podcasts, and whatever else happens to amuse me.  Certainly, there is more engaging sound to be heard, but they still fall under the broad category of ‘art’. 

From that, I guess that my definition of art is perhaps ‘a thing a person made’.  Fair enough.  It’s a broad definition, but that’s the entire idea. 

Some people are so adamant that games are not, and never will be art (until maybe a really long time has passed, then perhaps they can be the simplest, most basic, chicken-scratch level of art forms, maybe.)

I don’t get it.  does admitting that games are art somehow invalidate the potency of Citizen Kane, or the Mona Lisa?  Of course it doesn’t.  All art is not equal.  No one is claiming that it is.  Why, then, is the title ‘art’ like some exclusive club that games have to wait outside of? 

It pisses me off that Roger Ebert felt the need to ask why gamers needed so badly to have their chosen medium named as an art form, when he brought it up in the first place.  (Yes, he’s responding to Kellee Santiago, but she wasn’t requesting to be accepted in to the art club, she was declaring that she already had admission.) 

In fact, He really comes off as a bit of a troll during the course of his lengthy attack.  He’s clearly never played any of the games Kellee talks about, and, in fact, makes judgments about them based entirely on the trailers he found on Youtube.   Ron Gilbert pointed out that doing so was akin to judging the quality of a movie based on reading the script, and I can’t think of a better analogy.

I can’t understand why Ebert doesn’t learn something about the medium he’s shitting all over before he pulls down his pants. He’s obviously a smart enough guy that he knows what he’s saying is going to piss a lot of people off, and certainly ‘number of people pissed off’ shouldn’t be a factor in whether or not he writes about something.  I can’t for the life of me however, imagine a situation in which telling a group of people “The stuff you spend years slaving over isn’t good enough, and it never will be.’ is a good idea. 

I haven’t been following the Infinity Ward and Activision’s giant knife-fight-on-the-internet break up as closely recently as I had been when it first started, but this is a pretty good indicator of the state of things, I think:  PC Gamer took the credits from Modern Warfare two, and removed everyone who is no longer working for Activision.

Harvest Moon 64 was a game I rented entirely after reading about it in an issue of Nintendo Power.  The premise was fairly simple-  you’re some kid taking over his grandfather’s old farm, trying to revitalize it, and making friends with the townspeople in the meantime.    There’s no shortage of things to do, from taking care of your crops, to taking care of your animals, to mining in the winter mine, to upgrading your property, to making friends with people, to seeking out the hidden mysteries of the game.  which is what I want to bring up, actually. 
    If Harvest Moon could be faulted for one thing, it was a lack of clarity in some cases.  You could build a greenhouse, but a hurricane might well destroy it.  unless, maybe, you had a wooden pig.  by way of winning a festival, you could win this amusing tree-made hog that sat in your house, doing nothing at all.  Except that, for some reason,  people on the internet got wind that perhaps what your pig did was prevent hurricanes.  an amazing feat, no?  except that it didn’t prevent hurricanes all the time, just sometimes. 
    I think of this being a time during which the internet was still fairly young, (though that may not actually be the case…) and, as a result, rumours and speculation about such things were doomed to remain only that.  There was no way to get a straight answer about such a gameplay device, and no way to propagate it even you DID manage to produce such magic. 
    Gamefaqs was in existance at this time, and there was one particular FAQ that my friends and I spent a long time pouring over.  Haunter120 wrote an FAQ that, in retrospect, was pretty horrific.  full of random tangents and stuff that he appears to have completely made up. talk of secret festivals, photo albums, and house extensions that no other FAQ had any idea of.  but we believed that there might be a grain of truth to it, because, after all, the game itself had left plenty unexplained.  Why couldn’t there be a ton more? 

Of course, there never was a second photo album.  your house was as built up as it could possibly be, and no amount of wishing was going to change that. But the idea that a game could have that many secrets was, and still is, something that I find incredibly appealing.

from the newest Mass Effect 2 patch notes:

-Fixed an issue where pressing F9 after the mission completion screen reset Shepard to Level 1

an issue?!

Ubisoft recently announced that most (all?) of its upcoming games for the PC will require you to be connected to the internet at all times.  All saved games will be stored on their servers, with the effect that, if you are away the internet, for any reason, you don’t get to play whatever Ubi title you’ve been pouring hours in to.   You get to start over.    (actually, the article isn’t entirely clear on whether or not you’ll actually be able to play the game at all without internet, but seems to lean towards just not  being able to access your saves.) Obviously, the internet is in an uproar about this.    I’m kind of upset about it myself, actually.

I’m not sure I’ll be getting Splinter Cell Conviction for the PC, (because Double Agent was the shittiest port I’ve ever had the displeasure to play, but also because splitscreen co-op is awesome,) but if I do, I sure as hell want to be able to play it even when we lose internet down here, which is a frequent enough occurrence to be worth mentioning.

Tycho from Penny Arcade wrote a pretty awesome bit on how stupid people sound when they threaten to pirate a game due to the publisher or developer doing something they don’t like, and he’s right. But the thing is,  if I buy anything, I get to choose how I use it.  If I do end up getting it for the PC, then the first thing I do will be to find a crack that circumvents this ridiculous DRM.

These kind of DRM arguments shouldn’t be happening anymore.  We as a people should be past this.  Steam has proven that the DRM they have in place (That is, you have to run Steam while playing the game,) is effective enough to make them RIDICULOUSLY FUCKING RICH, and people still aren’t getting the hint.

Fail.

Shadow Complex is a game that is pretty awesome, I’m told.  I don’t know much more about it than that it is based on the metroidvania style of exploration-based gameplay. Which does sound awesome.  Oh, and that it was based on the novel Empire, by Orson Scott Card, which could be awesome.  I haven’t read anything by him other than his Enderverse books, 2 of them being my favorite books of all time, ever.

The problem with this, is that while he is a fantastic writer of beautiful words and novels, OSC is also an enormous douche in real life.  It would seem that all the time he doesn’t spend writing wonderful books is spent telling people how much of a menace gay people are, and how earth-shatteringly bad an idea it is for them to get married to each other.  For this reason, there is a movement to, among other things, boycott the game. Gamasutra has a write-up and editorial on the whole mess, which, as far as I’m concerned, gets it mostly right.

The big thing that he says that eats at me is that we can’t judge games like we used to when we were children, which is just entirely false.  People can (and do) play games for  every reason under the sun.  Just because I play, say, Bioshock because I think that the storyline is ethically and morally interesting, doesn’t mean I can’t play, say, Assassin’s Creed because I just enjoy watching people climb shit.  It’s the same story with movies:  I love V for Vendetta because of the political warning and the ties to 1984, but I enjoyed the (first) Transformers Live-Action Movie because it was a bunch of shape-changing robots fighting the crap out of each other.  It’s the same with books, and any and every other medium of art that exists:  You enjoy this things for whatever reason you want, be it simple or complex, political, or… (what’s the opposite of political?) reasonable?

By extension, Even if I disagree with everything the author stands for, I’m not going to not read his books, or play his games, or whatever, unless what I’m reading and playing are designed to push forward his plan for whatever it is I’m in disagreement with.  Ender’s shadow has exactly zero to do with gay rights, and I’d be willing to bet that Shadow Complex matches that amount.

Christian Nutt ends his his article with the question “Are we ‘just gamers’ or are we adults?”  And I believe the clear answer is that we whatever we want to be, whenever we want to be it.  In the end, boycotting Shadow Complex isn’t going to help anyone, or, I suppose, more importantly, hurt anyone.  You’ll just have missed out on what could potentially be a very good game.  There’s no reason to restrain potential enjoyment in order to make a political statement that has nothing to do with said enojoyment.  That said, there’s also no reason not to go, say, protest OSC’s papers and speeches that actually have anything at all to do with homosexuality.  Or don’t.  That’s the beauty of it.  You have a choice.