Insert Credit has posted some of their thoughts on the Game Developers Conference sessions. Of particular interest to me was their commentary on preserving video game history and video game criticism and cultural analysis. Do yourself a favor and read these. It brings up a lot of what I've been thinking lately.

Obviously in working at a museum like the Walker, we're fairly concerned about archiving works, but even to us (and many other institutions), new media archival is a big challenge. Hardware becomes obsolete, as does software, and new standards are made. What concerns me is not how to archive media for the next 10 years, it's the next 100 that's the most troubling.

While there is a definite process for the archiving of media like film, but no such formal process exists for digital media. We may still have arcade machines that play Pac-Man today, but that is not a guarantee in 2104. Some may say that emulation could take care of this, as it does today in MAME, but again, who's to say that MAME will last 100 years? What about systems like the Vectrex, with its vector monitor and limited production run? True archival of that system over the next 100 years is a daunting task. There's a very real problem with software and hardware incompatibilities and degradation, as we move ever forward without a real process of archiving digital work.

This should probably start at the institutions most concerned with archiving, that being museums and hopefully the companies/individuals who created the original content. Unfortunately, even museums are cutting back on digital media initiatives, which doesn't bode well for that side of the equation. Like the former Curator of New Media at the Walker, Steve Dietz, once said, "For society not to be concerned with preserving [digital media] is akin to burning books". Now, perhaps the intentions are different, but the results are the same. Steve has always been one to appreciate the importance of digital media archiving, proven by his support in me and my Arcade Console project that he curated for a Carleton College exhibition. It was great as a platform to actually talk about these issues in a public forum.

On to my other point, that of gaming criticism. Since my short stint as a gaming journalist in the early 90's, gaming journalism has changed little. In some ways it has gotten worse. I think the entire notion of what gaming journalism *is* has become a self fulfilling prophecy. No one has stepped forward to give an alternative viewpoint to the norm, to step outside what has come to pass for journalism over the course of 20 years, and in essence we haven't grown at all from it. Mr. Bittani's comments in the Insert Credit piece just drive this point home.

I've often wondered if we just weren't ready for it. Gaming isn't that old, and perhaps it's just not a mature field of study. But having worked at the Walker and having seen their panel discussions and screenings for films, and the amount of dialogue and ideas presented at them, I truly believe there can be a similar dialogue to be had with games and gaming. Perhaps gaming is just lacking some sort of cultural legitimacy, and perhaps art institutions should be giving video games and interactive entertainment the same attention as film. Perhaps it will only happen from a grassroots movement. Perhaps the gaming industry itself needs to mature, I'm not sure.

But I will say there is way too much to say about gaming that hasn't been said for it to sit quietly. Going back to the issue of archiving our past, as games and developers/designers age, it becomes more and more important to have these conversations and to encourage these dialogues. I really feel we'll be missing out on a huge part of gaming if we don't.

In my never ending quest to once again bowl a 600 series, I got that much closer last night, a 591, with games of 200, 190 and 201. This beat the last time I went and got a 587, but it's still shy of the mark I'm shooting for. I've been doing so well recently it's just a matter of time before I get it, but man if I wasn't close last night. One or two extra pins here and there and it would have been mine. Oh well.

Screenshot leak of the new Gamecube Online login screen or elaborate April Fool's joke? You decide! Aparently this was spotted in a French game magazine (yes, I know, it sounds like a hoax already), but apparently, if legit, Nintendo will announce this at their E3 press conference, before demoing the new DS system, so we'll find out soon enough. Nintendo did sign an agreement with Gamespy for their online software a while ago, and also an agreement with AOL a while back as well, which only adds fuel to the fire. So which is it?

Personally I would love this, although I can't think of any games they plan on using this with in the coming year. Let's look at the big hitters of 2004 on GC and thier release dates to see if we can find any correlation, shall we?

Wario Ware Inc. Mega Party Game$ -- April 4th, 2004
Custom Robo -- May 10th, 2004
The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures -- June 7th, 2004
Pikmin 2 -- July 1st, 2004
Donkey Konga -- July 15th, 2004
Star Fox 2 -- October 15th, 2004
Metroid Prime 2 -- November 18th, 2004
Paper Mario 2 -- December 10th, 2004

Geist -- TBA 2004
Super Mario 128 -- TBA 2004
Stage Debut -- TBA 2004
Kuju Action Nintendo Game -- TBA 2004
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker 2 -- TBA 2004

Well, on second thought, I could see this built into a lot of these games. Sounds good to me! Oh, and did you see the release date for Metroid Prime 2? Or that Paper Mario 2 is on the list? Yes, they're coming. ;)

Update: If you said elaborate April Fool's joke, you win! It's just some lame Windows Blinds theme. At least the release dates above are legit. My Thanksgiving will be occupied by MP2 goodness. ;)

A couple weeks ago I got an IM from the president of the old company I used to work for. She said that they had somehow gotten a CD I had ordered off of Amazon. To which my reply was, "I didn't order any CD off of Amazon". But apparently there was one sitting there for me, and she wanted to know where to send it. So I tell her to send it to my house when she gets a chance.

Of course after this conversation I'm confused, because I have no idea where this CD is from. Then it dawns on me, hey, maybe someone bought me something off my wishlist. So I log into Amazon online and check out my wishlist. Sure enough, someone did buy me something, Eric B. & Rakim's "Let The Rhythm Hit 'Em". This was like a day after my birthday, so I'm thinking, ah, it's one of my friends who got this for me. Nice!

This same day I see a post on my buddy Dave's site wishing me a Happy Birthday. Dave and I used to listen to a bit of Eric B. & Rakim when we were younger, and he's also a wish list friend of mine, so I put the two together, and figured it was he who sent me this. But I thought I'd wait until I got it to thank him.

Well it took a little longer than I had expected to get the CD. Just a couple days ago, I was thinking about just emailing Dave and thanking him for the CD, even before I got it, because it was just taking too long and I didn't want him to think I got it, but was too much of a bastard to say thanks. But I still figured it'd be here any day and I could thank him then.

Well, lo and behold I get it today and it's not from Dave, but someone I didn't even know! That is, until I looked through my old emails. The person who sent it said it was a thank you for advice I gave him a long time ago on web design. So I looked through my emails and sure enough, I still had them. I even had all of the old designs he sent me to have me critique. This was over 4 years ago! I hadn't even made my first version of Assembler at that point. And of course it all came back to me.

I just thought the whole chain of events was amusing. And of course I wrote him and thanked him. I never thought a good deed done over 4 years ago could end up benefiting me today. But I guess it goes to show that little things can indeed make a lasting impact in peoples lives. And that's pretty damn cool.

Looks like Nintendo is taking a cue from their 20th anniversary Famicom edition GBA, and coming out with NES Mini in America, if this leaked image is legit (which from what I've been hearing it is, though I'm still cautious). I was pretty hyped about the Famicom edition, and this one looks even better. Perhaps I should have held off on getting an SP for a bit.

Still, what's up with the boxarts? One of the coolest things about the Japanese versions of this were that the boxarts were replicas of the original Famicom games. While we have some resemblance here, there's that gaudy GBA stripe on the left side of all these games. Given the fact that these games will be overpriced (they were in Japan), what incentive do I have to get them? Collectors are gonna be pissed. Yet another dumb marketing move by NOA if this turns out to be real. Still, I like the overall idea. Here's hoping they release Kid Icarus.

Update: Aparently this is confirmed. Should be in the stores around around May (E3?).

Something I've been thinking about recently is the difficulty of games, and how it has changed over the years (and not necessarily for the better). I don't want to get too much into a "back in my day" arguement (of course that's what I'll do), but the way game designers have set difficulty levels these days is something I'm not all that happy about.

Lets start with the games that "cheat". You know the ones, the football team that comes from behind with unstoppable running backs and such. To me this is one of the weakest forms of making a game harder. There's no real AI involved, just the computer trying to fuck you over to make a game more "fun". Mario Kart 64 was notorious for this. So was NBA Jam. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and one of the worst.

Then there's something a bit more recent, that of just bad camera angles/controls in games. While there were games that lacked good gameplay in the 2D days, it seems today that developers are still trying to figure out how to properly allow someone to move in a 3D space effectively. Nothing is more frustrating than knowing what you need to do in a game, but not quite being able to accomplish it because of a bad camera, collision detection, physics, and the like. Of course mastery of the controls is a part of gaming, but you shouldn't have to battle the controls and the camera while you're battling a boss. There's a fine line here and I think a lot of times developers cross it.

I understand that developers want to give players a lot of options in games, but it's also been proven time and again that you don't need a complicated game to make it challenging. A game like Ikaruga or Tetris has very simple rules, yet both are harder than most games out there. I think if developers want to make an engrossing game that lets a player do quite a bit, they need to make sure each element of the game works as well as a game that would just have a simpler rule set. For example, if you're making Grand Theft Auto, there's a driving control scheme, a walking/jumping control scheme, a shooting control scheme, a camera scheme, etc. Each of these should be tight on their own, as tight as they would be if they were in thier own game, and I think then you wouldn't have as many issues with control unnecesarily making the game more complicated than it needs to be. Thankfully GTA does a fairly decent job in this regard (although there's room for improvement).

And speaking of giving players more options, one thing I'm not a huge fan of is giving players the option of difficulty levels in games. Yeah, it's the old schooler in me, but not only does this create lazy gamers, it also creates cheap difficulty. This is why I usually only play a game on the default setting, never harder or easier. Usually this isn't so much a problem until you start talking to other players. People say, "ah that games too easy", and then you find out they played it on the easy level. Of course it's too easy! But more often than not, even if you do think a game is fairly easy on the normal level, playing it on the harder level is usually an excercise in frustration. Not because it actually offers a better challenge mind you, but beacuse it's that cheat (or cheap) difficulty coming back into play. Nothing has really changed to make it harder per se, but now all the enemies are just that much more powerful! To me that's not a better challenge, that's just cheap.

Want to make a game harder? Give me more enemies, smarter enemies, give me changed levels with out the normal hiding spots. Give me some value. But please, for the love of god, do not just make the enemies stronger. If that's the case, don't even bother putting in a difficulty selector. A lot of old school games didn't have it, and they worked just fine. And guess what? You could actually brag that you beat a game back then. It was a right of passage. Now it seems like beating a game is a right every player should just have automatically. Unfortunate, that is.

I'm certianly not harping on all games. There are quite a few these days that get it exactly right (Super Monkey Ball comes to mind), but lately there have been so many bad examples that it makes one a little frustrated to be a gamer. Or, perhaps I'm just getting old and jaded (that's probably the case), so maybe I'm alone in these thoughts.

Right now I'm on a cell phone. Yup this post is comming from a Treo phone that my friend Giao has. The browser in this thing is pretty good, and renders all the sites I've tried really well. The download speeds are a bit slow, but this thibg is so cool I may just pick one up. Adios from cell land!

Got a new book today, straight from Japan, called Fami-Complete. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Nintendo Famicom, this double volume set includes information on the entire 1,249 library of the system. Every game has an image of the boxart, the cart, the title screen, and a gameplay screen, along with info about each. It's basically the definitive volume on the system.

There's also a section on "gagets", basically info about the system itself and various peripherals. This shows some rather unique items, such as the Nintendo 3D glasses, which are very similar to the ones Sega used on thier Master System. There's also a section on rare items, like gold carts, and special prize carts.

The major barrier to entry here is the Japanese. There's very little english at all. Of course I'm hoping this helps me on my quest to learn Japanese, but for now at least it's cool just to see all the pictures, and the amazing library for the system. It's hard to believe it's already been 20 years.

I finished R-Type Final over the weekend. It wasn't as hard as I had expected it to be, actually. On my very first play I got half way through stage three, and that was before I found out I could speed up my ship or use my super weapon. It does ratchet up in difficulty after that stage, but I'd say there were only a couple seriously hard areas that I encountered. That could just be from my previous R-Type experience however.

Most of the difficulty for me, and really the downer of the game, was just trying to get the depth perception right. It tries to be both 2D and 3D at the same time, and sometimes the camera moves around you, buildings stick out into the play area, etc. Some of this was cool, some of it was very disorienting. There were many times where I didn't know if when I hit something I'd crash or not. It seems that the backgrounds are able to be touched without incident, but with the enemies you die on impact. The biggest problem was sometimes telling what was an enemy and what wasn't. Unfortunatley this comes at the cost of losing lives to learn, and it's never really something you grow accustom to (or at least I didn't). Personally I'd prefer a straight 2D experience, even if it's 3D rendered (like Ikaruga).

Still there are some very good parts of the game, the ship stage as the hat tip to the original R-Type was excellent, as was the Bydo "eye" monster (only this time you fly into it). Still I thought the really good moments were too few and far between. There just didn't seem to be enough going on. Perhaps it was the rather large size of the enemies, but it didn't give me much in the sense of survival-of-the-fitest. It's definitely not a bullet grazer, but I guess R-Type never was.

The graphics are great, and in one stage the entire screen seems to undulate, making things move in weird ways, sort of like if you were on a ship floating on a choppy sea. Objects (like enemies and bullets) take on this effect and it makes for some rather interesting gameplay (you never know quite where the bullets will go). It's very unique and I highly enjoyed this level (its boss was perhaps the best in the game).

But then there's the final stage. I absolutely hated it. You have this solid brown background, and when you move your ship it makes water-like "waves" on the screen. It's quite gimmicky. To add to this, you see the sillouette of a man and woman in the background making out, and then getting it on. I'm not sure if this was for the prepubecent teens who would to stare at it and make this level "harder" (pun intended), but it did absolutely nothing for me (in either sense). How is this R-Type? It has nothing to do with the Bydo empire, and just seems like a cheezy add on. Did I expect too much in my final fight to rid the universe of the Bydo for good? Blah.

I did like the amount of ships in the game and getting all 100 will prove to be a chore. I also liked that depending on what you do in the game, you can take different routes through it (level 2 I believe has 4 different "themes" to it, all different). I still have yet to explore many of these. The amount of stats that are kept about your missions are great as well, better than most games. It makes replaying the game quite worth it.

Well, worth it if the game itself was better. I'm not saying it's bad, far from it, but for the final R-Type ever, I really wished for better. It's not as good as the first R-Type, and doesn't even come close to touching Mars Matrix (the best shooter I've played to date), although they are different in their approach. But it just left me wanting more. Oh well, at least I have 82 more ships to unlock. ;)

So today we got a new phone system at work, and all got new Cisco 7940 series phones. Aparently they don't plug into regular phone jacks, they use a network cable instead, which made us ponder, what can this thing do?

A little searching and we've found the answer. The phones actually come w/ a small webserver in them, and each have their own IP address. A few more searches and we came up with a dev kit for the phones. 20 mintues later and we installed our own server for our dept phones and rerouted all our IP's to that server instead of the main one. Then it was just a matter of figuring out what we could add to our phones.

The first was easy, we made a directory list for our dept, for quick dialing. Since it all sits on our own server, we can update it in one spot and it updates all of our records for us. But then the fun really started when we found out how to add images! Now we have Drunk Homer phone!! Aparently we can add any images we want to our nice big LCD screen. We're going to try working on animating them.

Next up is adding new ring tones. That's shouldn't be hard, we just need a 2 second .wav file, and we'll all be able to use some really annoying new tones to piss off everyone else (especially frustrating to others since nobody else can access them except us). Let the Mario Bros ring commence!

We also tried to crash the phone, or screw it up. I set my phone to automatically forward all incoming calls to Eric and he sent all his to mine. Nate then called one of us and the phone just beeped like mad. Fun recursion! Then Nate found a hack online, to send a ping to our phones that is an illegal instruction and makes the phone crash. Woohoo!

All the interface is in XML so there's actually something useful we can do with this, like add in XML feeds from our website into our phone display if we wanted. All in all, I thought these phones were a bit of overkill when we got them, and in fact they are, but it turns out that's a good thing. ;)

I've been playing quite a bit of GTA3 lately, on my way to playing through Vice City. Two quality games that are being followed up by GTA: San Andreas this fall. There was a bit of debate a while back on whether or not the next GTA game would be called San Andreas or Sin City, as retailers seemed to be given both names as possible future products. We now know that San Andreas won out, and Sin City is on the backburner.

Or perhaps it isn't. While thinking about this today, an idea poped into my head. What if both games were in production, and worked together? San Andreas is obviously a refference to Los Angeles, as Sin City is to Las Vegas. Those who live out west know that many people from California and LA take road trips out to Vegas to gamble. It's well known that the gangs in LA hang out in Vegas as well. Would it be a stretch to say that San Andreas is just the start of more to come?

Think of it like this. You play through San Andreas in LA, on whatever missions there are. Next year Sin City comes out and works with San Andreas. When you "leave" Sin City, you can travel to San Andreas, just by swapping out the discs, and carrying out your mission there, and vice versa. The two games would work together to make one large epic game. Call me crazy, but I think that could work, and actually make sense! *crosses fingers*

Aparently, someone has figured out how to overclock a Genesis. They were able to get it up to 16Mhz (from the stock 7.6Mhz) with no overheating. I guess this cures any lag games may have from the default settings.

Of course this makes me curious why Sega didn't opt for this in the first place. It certainly would have been a crushing blow to Nintendo, although Sega did have the faster console even without any speed up. I'm sure Sega had their reasons (or perhaps their chip manufacturer did).

I actually have a spare Genesis laying around and I may just try this at some point. I was going to sell my spare this spring, when I plan on going through all of my games and trimming my collection down (I'll post more here when I sell off some stuff, be warned), but instead I may just try this hack. I'd be curious to try it side by side with the original on a couple of games (Gaiares comes to mind). Might be an interesting experiment.

I finally went and splurged and got a Playstation 2. I was eyeing an Atari 7800 on eBay which was in really nice condition, but when it went over $125, I just couldn't get myself to drop that much, so I went out and grabbed a PS2 instead.

I of course got R-Type Final with it, as well as the Grand Theft Auto double pack, which happened to be on sale. Played a bit of R-Type, and it's pretty good, though I'm reserving judgement until I get further in it. I got to the 3rd stage already, and that was before I read the manual and realized I could speed up my craft and had a special weapon. No wonder some of those spots were so hard. ;)

Now I have more games to play than I even know what to do with. I even have an unopened Final Fantasy IX that needs some attention, since I never got to play it on my PSX which I've since packed away. Enough writing, time to play!!

Made a few more tweaks to the site, the main one being that I've moved the Thoughts RSS Feed to its final destination. You can find it here now. I moved it since I figured it belonged within the Thoughts directory in case I decide to add more feeds for other sections in the future. I also have RSS auto discovery on the site as well if you just want to use that.

Otherwise I've just been playing with the nav and the like. Nothing too major, but I figured I should get organized a little better as I'll be adding new sections to the site soon. Just be sure to update the RSS feed link in your favorite agrigator if you want to see updates, because the old link will not exist for very much longer.

I picked up Jimi's Book of Japanese from the library tonight, which I had been eyeing for a while now. My buddy Eric and I were thinking of taking an intro Japanese class this fall at the U of M, but I wanted to get a head start and read up on it a bit before hand.

The book is really well designed, very colorful with cute illustrations. It doesn't get too deep, just shows you the basic forms of Hiragana, shows you how to draw and pronounce them, and a few words that use each. I'm certainly not going to be talking full sentances with this (there's no way I'm going to learn sentance structure, or enough words to even put together a sentance from this), but it at least should give me a basis on which to grow from, and to learn a few of the characters in the meantime.

Besides, the book is so darn cute and loveable it's hard to put down. Hopefully someday I can actually read and comprened real Japanese. It'll make importing games a whole lot easier. Those fall classes can't come soon enough. Actually, it's funny how when you've been out of school for a long time, it seems so exciting to go back. But I guess that's another topic entirely.