Naked Gaming

Modern Warfare 2...

2009-11-15T14:20:00.001-06:00

I don't know how this has happened, but Modern Warfare 2 has a grip on me that I haven't experienced since Ghost Recon, and only X-Wing before that...

On Modern Warfare 2 Silliness

2009-11-06T20:35:00.004-06:00

I want to point something out to PC Gamers who think they're raising an effective stink by boycotting MW2 because it won't have dedicated servers:

Do you think Activision cares?

...industry analyst Anita Frazier says there's a very good chance it will break Halo 3's record for 3.3 million copies sold at launch.

The biggest one-day entertainment event in history and you're going to sit it out? Enjoy.

About Health Care...

2009-02-17T09:57:00.000-06:00

Whoops, too late:

The first 5 links all have consequences for health care, regardless of which side of the aisle you're on. As I wrote in a discussion about Marvel Comics and politics recently, everybody likes to dress up bread-and-butter issues as the Defining Moment Of Our Time, and there can only be Winners and Losers, all of which makes good politics, none of which is relevant to effective policy.

The last links are indicative as well:
- if Black patients are more likely to suffer post-surgery complications, does this transcend class as well? Are upper-class blacks more likely than all whites to suffer post-surgery complications? What color are their doctors in these cases? Once again, the next questions are never answered because our medical infrastructure gets in the way of our medicine.
- Bird flu is always a "Meh" story until it happens to you. Having seen the extent of the fraud, waste and abuse of emergency preparedness training and funds during the previous 8 years, does anybody know if we're prepared for another epidemic? With crazies on the left and the right calling vaccination the new antichrist, do you think any of the poorly informed are getting flu shots? Are they listening to the television when it says "stay at home?" Will Wal-Mart actually close its doors if we have to quarantine people, or will it demand that its workers show up and its doors stay open until things get much, much worse?

And even though a lot of us can work from home, the majority of us cannot...

Today Health Care, Tomorrow the World...

2009-02-16T09:36:00.001-06:00

Maybe the coffee hasn't taken effect, or maybe it's exhaustion, but I think the fact that now a majority of us WANT government health care has guaranteed that we'll go and mess it up.

Yeah - who are you and what have you done with the real Echo4Mike? No, hear me out...

The idea has long existed that government should tackle unprofitable enterprises that benefit life and liberty, and/or benefit commerce. The Interstate Highway system and NASA (and its precursor, NACA) are excellent examples of taxpayer outlay that ended up bringing about the American Century.

So the idea grew that the twin capital sinks of health insurance and health care might have a place in government. A healthy populace is a productive populace, while an unhealthy populace is essentially immoral - it's one of the true black-and-white issues of our time.

And let's give credit where credit is due. The alternative view - that health care should be privately paid for and that the poor should die - has had its time on the stage, both in the past and in the modern, industrialized world. I think at the very least, that while we might not agree on the conclusions of the experiment, we can certainly agree that it's gotten a significant trial period.

So after decades, the idea is getting some traction. And now, after decades of no progress, no plan, no strategy, no study of successful models and no idea how to transition from largely regional models of privately-managed and fenced-ff patient and provider pools, the public is starting to demand that we Do Something.

I've made two successful predictions in my life. 1. Buster Douglas will mop up the ring with Mike Tyson. 2. This World Wide Web Thing will change everything. I'd like to make Big Prediction #3: Unless some serious thought is given over the next 12-24 months about the caduceus - like twin snakes of health care and health insurance, we will do it wrong, and in a way that'll make some of our more misguided adventures look like child's play...

Marvel Comics - Anti-Liberal?

2008-12-31T11:00:00.001-06:00

This anti-Quesada argument seems to place Quesada in a comic vacuum, entirely bereft of the influences of Marvel's history or even two highly influential comic works about the nature of evil and superheroes - Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.
- Marvel used to refuse free comics to the troops in Vietnam because they didn't support the war. Just sayin'.
- The Dark Knight Returns ping-pongs between jingoistic fascism on one side and do-gooder anti-fascism on the other hand, while ignoring Batman's real concerns. He's not too concerned about the nature of evil or the greatness of America, or the uniqueness of every human being. He's more concerned about fighting crime in Gotham while adhering to his own code.
- Rorschach in Watchmen is portrayed as a fascist or right-winger, inspired by an inexcusable crime fostered by a society that, in his eyes, makes room for this sort of thing. He's vilified by liberals throughout the book, who are horrified by his treatment of criminals but almost never clearly state the real problem with Rorschach - everybody gets his or her day in court, and superheroes aren't there to supercede that.

By satirizing political points of view or portraying their efforts in a negative light, comics writers are able to strip away politics from their narrative and narrow the frame to the immediate conflict on the page. Calling Marvel conservative because they parodize liberals misses the point - liberals and conservatives both dress up real, bread-and-butter, life and death issues in grandiose clothing. And there's only room for one superhero on the page. As a liberal reader, I expect to be entertained first from comics, and whoever the target of the week may be, it interests me less than if it's a good story.

Great URL, Great site

2008-10-03T10:02:00.000-06:00

Do not miss Cheerleader Of Doom

Old Fashioned Book-Burnin'!

2008-09-05T08:43:00.001-06:00

Sadly No nails the question.

Big layoffs in the game industry are seasonal

2008-08-20T13:57:00.001-06:00

MSNBC Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated

"This is not an industry issue, so far. This is a games-specific and company-specific issue," says Ben Schacter, an analyst with UBS Securities. "In every industry, there are winners and losers. And right now, the losers are getting smaller, and the big guys are getting bigger."
- he's half right, it's not an industry issue. But being Shachter, who can't stay right across the same breath, he goes on to say that the big guys are getting bigger and the small guys are getting smaller. If that's so, how does that explain the layoffs at Activision?

Actually, the rest is blather and avoids the whole point - bad games get cancelled. When games get cancelled, the nomads get laid off. But as games get bigger, the nomads move on to find more work on bigger teams. Revenues are up, players are up, total units are up, PC Gaming itself is waaaaaay up.

It's like Hollywood - Carolco closed after making Terminator 2, but the movies kept on gettin' made.

90 layoffs means 90 jobs filled in other parts of the industry, helping a lot more people hit Christmas this year.

GTA on DS

2008-07-15T10:44:00.001-06:00

What more could you ask for? GTA Chinatown Wars! Wahoo!

You got Netflix on my 360

2008-07-14T12:29:00.001-06:00

MS just announced seconds ago that the Netflix downloadable catalog will soon be available over Xbox Live. Got a Netflix membership? Watch those instant-play movies on your TV with no delay...

Sweeeet.

My Frozen Dinner Today...

2008-07-14T11:51:00.001-06:00

The chicken felt like shrimp.
The shrimp tasted like Broccoli.
The Broccoli tasted like pasta.
The pasta tasted like packaging.
I'm upset that I threw away the packaging, because I want to see if it tasted like chicken.

This is historic

2008-05-14T10:37:00.003-06:00

For the last - what, 15 years? - EA has been a shareholder-driven, fiscal-quarter-sensitive company. This meant that EA would ship a title before the end of the quarter no matter what, and in the holiday quarter especially, in order to make numbers for that quarter so that the shareholders don't revolt.

For the longest time, shareholders didn't care what the hell the game quality was like, as the numbers were the only thing that mattered.

Then EA got hammered by quality. It took some missteps (Catwoman, Superman), killed some franchises with poor-quality followups (SSX, we miss you) and relied too heavily on perennials - Sims, Madden, Battlefield - to make their quarterly numbers.

No more.

This means that creative studios like EA Montreal, Bioware and Pandemic will be given the time and resources to make good games, quarterly results be damned.

Now, I'm sure pragmatic business decisions like "this better not be a year late," and "this HAS to ship with the movie" will still drive some dates. But EA has put a stake in the ground with this and other statements and said "we're going to make good games in the time that it takes to make them."

End Lag Now!

2008-05-05T13:27:00.000-06:00

Hmmm. Wonder if I know anybody here.
:)

In-Game Advertising Done Right

2008-03-31T07:53:00.002-06:00

Say what you will about Gearbox, but their philosophy of in-game advertising is dead on the money. I stressed to everybody who wanted to buy advertising space in any of my titles that the ads had to be relevant and congruent with the environment. Axe billboards in Mexico City? Honda Element ads on the mountains of SSX? Anybody remember those? Nope, but you WILL remember that there's a Phillips factory in Niemegen, and that the Dutch did their part to make life for the invading Nazis difficult, and that Operation Market Garden was not only a debacle, but a Montgomery-sized Bloodbath of a Debacle.

And you'll remember Phillips. Money well spent, and money well earned by Gearbox.

The Waiting Game

2008-02-27T11:00:00.001-06:00

Hm.

Do I lay claim to my favorites now, or wait until SadNo plays their next hand? Maybe I should see what Amanda has cooking in this fight...

People-Powered Warfare.

2008-02-27T10:51:00.004-06:00

So, the gang at Sadly, No! thinks they like own bad music video championships, just 'cause they own a fancy site and post a lot more than twice a month.

But they forget, that a lot of us lived the '80s, and a lot of us will never, ever be the same.

This? Boys Don't Cry? This is just what I came up with first. My reserve battalions know no decency, and SadNo has exhausted themselves with their "Weapon X."

Mass Effect DLC... Reset to n00b

2008-02-08T16:12:00.000-06:00

If true, this is just silly.

Seriously, this is one of those things where I feel completely at ease blaming marketing. I can, because I'm in marketing. Either somebody's rushing the content through development, or somebody's not standing up for the customer and saying "Um, maybe customers should be able to use an existing character?"

And both of those possibilities can be laid square at the feet of marketing.

I'm certain that there are lots of development difficulties that I don't know about, but this is either due to boneheaded marketing or the odd possibility that Mass Effect shipped without the capability to slipstream in DLC. In that case, marketing was STILL asleep at the wheel by allowing it to roll that way, but when ship comes to shove, sometimes those considerations fall by the wayside.

Sheesh.

Sheesh Again. Edited to say "Whoops." All you need is to reload a save where you've got a spaceship.

On the Mass Effect DLC

2008-02-06T11:50:00.000-06:00

Woohoo!

However...

From a development point of view, wouldn't it have been easier to clean up or expand on things hinted at in the main game? Like the Salarians - why did the Reavers seem to know "everything" about the Galaxy and Citadel defenses? Aren't the Salarians sorta proud about knowing everything? What about making somebody pay for the Genophage? What about a mission to root out the Secret Evil Science Dudes who apparently operate at the behest of the Council? You could do all this with existing assets and a new planet map or two. This first chapter just makes it into "Shepard, Galactic Cop on a 911 Call" rather than a realization of Shepard's new role and prominence in the Galaxy.

And of course I'm shelling out the $ for it...

Nvidia to acquire AGEIA - HELLO?!?!

2008-02-05T09:33:00.000-06:00

How did everybody and Grandma miss this one?

Hello?

Okay, looking at the news feeds, it appears that only I missed it.

But anyway - this is huge. One-stop integrated gaming and simulation tools on a card, integrated development tools for that card, and seriously easy DirectX / XNA development paths after a while. Who wins? Xbox 360, that's who, unless Sony comes up with a better PC - to - PS3 development path than XNA - to - Xbox.

Who knows?

Cloverfield Last Shot

2008-01-18T16:32:00.000-06:00

SPOILERS follow!!

*
*
*
So, the very last shot, at Coney Island. I can't find anything about this on the net this early in the showing, but I hope everybody caught the BIG splash in the Atlantic right before the camera turns back to see our friends on the Ferris Wheel.

And as for Cloverfield's ARG, GREAT use of the greater fiction to actually dictate content and make a relevant, evocative marketing message.

Finally - easily as shaky-scary as Saving Private Ryan.

Will I go to Hell...

2007-08-06T13:07:00.001-06:00

...If I pre-order Halo 3? Or should I just buy Crysis?

My 13-year-old self is refreshed and challenged...

2007-07-31T16:13:00.000-06:00

... by the possibility of this little bugger.

Seriously, it seems like most of my life has been spent waiting for one iteration of Indy or another to pop up and set me alight...

Ubi Successful, Wiibe Illin'

2007-07-31T16:07:00.000-06:00

Who didn't see this? I mean, besides EA. As soon as we all figured out exactly what the Wii would be, we knew explicitly that anybody who launched on the platform would enjoy awesome success.

Like I've said before, it wasn't all EA's fault. Nintendo was really slow in letting the industry know what it had up its sleeve. By the time most of the publishers saw the fun factor inherent in the Wii, it was too late to stop the development train and ask for all your GameCube assets back.

Wiiware, however, will make this year seem like smooth sailing for publishers. The barriers to entry are so low on Wiiware that anybody with a good idea's going to be on that channel. And if you're the platform with good ideas, and the other guys are the platforms with good graphics, who wins?

Ask Popcap.

I should learn...

2007-07-31T16:05:00.000-06:00

... not to address ads I find objectionable - they invariably lead to more ads with the same objectionable content being served up.

On to the news of the day...

Drawn to Life

2007-07-26T20:45:00.000-06:00

I was just about to post about how games this year seemed to be derivative, and how there were no big "must-haves" for me on PC or consoles. Not a big deal - I'll have more than enough fun repalying stuff I haven;t had time to visit.
But then these guys came along.
Draw your character.
Draw your own intro screen.
Schweet.