Teh Gamblo

Jesus is teh uberz!

Expanding markets.  That's where the industry is going.  I saw this little article today.  Now, I'm a fairly religious person but not the screaming-hollering-holier-than-thou variety and while I don't thing a "christian themed" video game is exactly for me, I'm appreciative of the fact that they are being made to fill a market niche.

I'd really like to give the game a whirl.  I hope the trailer isn't representative of the graphics and mechanics of the title.  Just having a "christian" themed video game isn't going to be enough.  Sure, it might be enough in authoritarian homes in the rural America where there is no Internet and Aunt Suzy runs the Wal Mart Electronics section so you can't smuggle home Need for Speed: Most Wanted.

Here's the question  the guys at Bibleman and parents have to ask themselves:

"Is it fun?"

Sure it has to be true to the brand and the vision, but IS IT FUN? 

Beyond that, class balance, graphics, environments, cohesive settings are important but secondary.  Will you or your kid play "Bibleman: A Fight for Faith" more than three times before it's relegated to the dusty bottom shelf of the TV Stand?

Profits Down! Dogs & Cats Sleeping Together!

No surprise to those of us in the industry, video game sales are down and it's impacting the publishers.  Meh.  After the DS and the PSP, two much ballyhooed and underperforming devices there just wasn't a lot of anything this year.  If anything, it seems that games are enjoying much longer life expectancy than ever and we're seeing less and less innovation.  I don't go out and pick up Tiger Wood's 2006 immediately and you know why?  It's because I'm fine with TW 2004!  I'll spend my money on Nintendogs or tracking down a less worn disc of Capcom's Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. Go ahead.  Play it. 

For pete's sake, how many sequels will we see of Grand Theft Auto?  Do I really need NBA Street V3 game set on the streets of NYC and a Virtual Mike D?  Granted, there is a market.  Smaller than I think is given credit for, but a market nonetheless. 

MMO's and online connectivity is drastically limiting our ability to multi-play.  Sure, I do it.  I'll take my flight sim out and tool around the grand canyon, laugh at how ridiculous Doom3 was, play F.E.A.R. in a well lit area in daylight, gank Alliance in WoW and finish the day wiping up the floor with Noobs in a (steel yourself) Halo Death Island CTF match.  If I'm out with the wifey, I've got Pop!Trivia fired up on my RAZR.  But I'm in the industry.  I'm not normal.  I'm the uberuser.

They shoot penguins. Don't they Daddy?

In the category of "Why, God?  Why?" comes the iPodLinux Project.  Granted, give a Linux geek a LED calculator and they'll lament the fact that its internal ti60355 machine language processor could be much improved with an uber scaled down version of the latest linux kernel...  Whatever... 

For the record, the ipod is not an effective gaming machine (see engadget's review of Doom for the "pod") and from what I understand, installing Linux on the little box impacts your music catalog (doesn't entirely prevent you from listening to it) and may destroy your video playback abilities. 

On WoW; Castes, Inflation and the CDC

In case you've been hiding under a rock for the past year, Blizzard's World of Warcraft has officially become more popular than the Planet Earth itself.  Not only is it a fair encapsulation of what is right with a video game (skillz, lewtz & hackz) it's also, oddly, become a mirror of our own world with rampant inflation, jobs, disease and politics that make the back rooms of Baton Rouge look like Romper Room on quaaludes. 

I'm kind of ambivalent about playing at this point.  I've played off and on for a year with huge lag times in my playing between new content releases and I can't play with enough frequency to aspire to any real rank in PvP.  There's no reason to run the high end instances over and over after the first few times to see the bosses and marvel at the design.  What's the next MMORPG to tickle my fancy?  I've heard a few rumors and rumblings.... 

When video games are outlawed....

You know the rest... 

As Judge Richard Posner so eloquently put it when he struck down an Indiana Law banning the sale of "violent" video games; "Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture.  To shield children right up until the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to deal with the world as we know it."

Now, three democratic Senators, Clinton, Bayh and Lieberman have introduced legislation than would, in effect criminalize "excessivley violent" video games and puts the onus for policing these new regulations squarely on the video game publishing industry (overseen, no doubt, by a minimalistically effective bureaucracy).

It's probably inevitable and Glenn Reynolds of instapundit fame and law professor has said it better than I can, but the long and short of it is; the cost and stiffling of creativity this legislation will introduce cannot help but negatively impact the industry as a whole.  Will we weather it?  Of course.  Will it harm our bottom line?  Absolutely.