Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • Derivative games in 2008

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 22 Comments

    2008 is the year of gaming | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

    Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be inundated with titles that will let us explore totally new worlds and enjoy totally new ways of playing video games. Unlike many other years where most of the titles were derivative, this year we may have something to propel creativity in the industry.

    Emphasis is mine. Their list?

    • Grand Theft Auto IV – sequel
    • Ninja Gaiden 2 – sequel
    • Ghostbusters: The Video Game – semi-sequel, plus the movie is how old?
    • Devil May Cry 4 – sequel
    • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots – sequel
    • Killzone 2 – sequel
    • Far Cry 2 – sequel
    • Rainbow Six Vegas 2 – sequel
    • Super Smash Bros. Brawl – sequel
    • Mario Kart Wii – sequel
    • Fallout 3 – sequel
    • Lost Odyssey – a spiritual sequel and pretty derivative
    • Fable 2 – sequel
    • Starcraft 2 – sequel
    • Gran Turismo 5 – sequel
    • Little Big Planet
    • Spore

    So, by my count, two. Thank goodness for the smaller titles.

  • More on the blog hacking

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 17 Comments

    I keep updating this post as I learn more. So if you’re affected, there’s new material at the bottom. I am currently running this full sweep every day, because each day I find something different. But three days ago there were twenty things, yesterday five, and today only one, so maybe I am getting closer.

    Latest news 4/25/08: blog seems secure again. But be sure to do the “secret key” thing newly listed at the bottom as well!

    So, I mentioned before that I was a victim of a hack. It was a spam injection attack — the one known as the Goro injection attack. But my symptoms were slightly different from some of the ones I have seen on the net, so here’s some war stories even though I suspect the blog is STILL not clean.

    First, read these two posts:

    Also read the advice from Jeff Freeman in the last post on this.

    OK, in addition to that advice, I also had the following problems:

    Read More “More on the blog hacking”

  • Stephen King on videogame violence

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 17 Comments

    Stephen King fights the censorship!

    Of course, this is the same guy who wrote a short story about a man stranded on an island slowly eating himself because he had no other food. Classic last line, too: “Ladyfingers… they taste just like ladyfingers…”

    Could Massachusetts legislators find better ways to watch out for the kiddies? Man, I sure hope so, because there’s a lot more to America’s culture of violence than Resident Evil 4.

    What really makes me insane is how eager politicians are to use the pop culture — not just videogames but TV, movies, even Harry Potter — as a whipping boy. It’s easy for them, even sort of fun, because the pop-cult always hollers nice and loud. Also, it allows legislators to ignore the elephants in the living room. Elephant One is the ever-deepening divide between the haves and have-nots in this country, a situation guys like Fiddy and Snoop have been indirectly rapping about for years. Elephant Two is America’s almost pathological love of guns. It was too easy for critics to claim — falsely, it turned out — that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun.

  • Disney decides to close VMK

    Hours Categories Game talk, Writing
    Comments 35 Comments

    Disney is shuttering Virtual Magic Kingdom. Nobody knows how many active users it has these days, and Disney is of course moving aggressively into more virtual worlds, encouraging users to switch to Toontown, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, and Club Penguin. But as longtime virtual worlders know, that’s not acceptable to the current community, who not only have a lengthy thread on the discussion boards, but have also started threads even on the new coverage elsewhere begging for their world to remain open.

    Generally, a virtual world with any momentum at all will not die unless it is actively killed. And the result is always heartrending posts like this one: Read More “Disney decides to close VMK”