Videogames Category

Do You Want Fries With That?

Last year when I heard that Burger King was planning to release a series of video games for the Xbox 360, I thought the game industry was headed for a new low. To me, this went way beyond the shameless hordes of promotional tie-ins to popular movies and TV shows, and seemed more inappropriate than the solicitation of virtual product placement within a video game. Here was a giant fast food chain attempting to sell full-fledged console games to the general public that were literally nothing more than interactive advertisements. Who did they think they were kidding?

I certainly didn't expect what happened next. Continue reading...

The Long Road Back to Gaming

For the last nine months, I considered myself a non-gamer. Not a reformed gamer, mind you, but someone who just hasn't had the time to dedicate to playing games or keeping up with the industry. I had been adapting to the life of a new parent; I had been forever transformed. The days and nights were busy, and weekends were usually spent with family or trying to turn our house right side up. Everyone tells you that things will never be the same, and as an expectant parent you just kind of shake it off as if it's no big deal. It will be different. You'll manage your time better. Life doesn't have to change that much, does it? But it does.

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Gaming in a World of Grown-Ups

Every gamer thinks about gaming at work. Unless they review video games for a living, and then perhaps they dream about sitting in front of excel spreadsheets all day. The ridiculously absorbing MMORPG formula has players planning out their character's next level or what equipment to buy, surfing the official forums for hours on end just to feel close to the game. Then there's the Civilization IV session that had to be cut short, knowing work was just a few hours away. Or a few minutes away, depending on how many times the phrase "just one more turn, and then I'll go to bed" was uttered.

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Another Easy Sell for Apple

With the advances made by casual gaming in the mobile phone market, one could safely assume it was the portable gaming platform with the largest user base in the world. But what about the iPod? It certainly is the most advertised, most talked about and most lucrative piece of personal electronics ever to be released to the masses. In a not-so-unexpected move, the release of the 5th Generation iPod late last year saw Apple adding yet another form of consumable media to their repertoire: games.

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But Will Your Parents Play?

Based on the reaction to the November launch of the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii through sales and media attention, it's clear that gaming as a cultural phenomenon has cemented itself into the collective consciousness. Local news media observed in awe as the faithful lined up outside their local electronics retailer at midnight in order to be the first to get their sweaty mitts on the latest and greatest console gaming had to offer. Though like the theatrical release of Star Wars: Episode I or The Lord of the Rings, the attention garnered by this event was more human zoo-like spectacle than genuine interest.

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Everybody Dies

Introversion Software made their way into the spotlight last year with Darwinia (Introversion, 2005), an unquestionably unique take on the real time strategy genre. After winning the Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival earlier this year, they effectively became the poster child for independent game development and darling of the gaming media. And why shouldn't they? They dropped the F-bomb in their acceptance speech at the festival.

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Keep Playing, It Might Get Better

There comes a point in every game where the player asks themselves why they're wasting time on a terrible game. It's a scenario no gamer wants to be presented with - and it's a developer's worst nightmare. Depending on how the storyline is integrated with the game, a game's quality can be easily determined within the first few hours of playing. And like the movies that go straight to video or are shown at awkward times during the weekends, sometimes they're impossible to tear yourself away from. How much worse can it get?

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Click. Kill. Reward.

The mob of deranged and frothy beasts approaches quickly, my tower shield and fearsome-looking warhammer doing nothing to slow their approach. Blood is spilled as I dispatch the group quickly, their remains forming a pile at my feet. I loot the corpses, ignoring the broken weapons that were casualties of the skirmish. I drink a health potion, and continue on my journey towards the next objective.

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What Happened to the Arcade?

The arcade was a place of refuge for the outcasts of adolescent social circles, where time would be spent dumping quarters into some dumb machine instead of studying or playing ball hockey or parking their ass in front of the TV like every other kid. Communities were built among the cabinets with their sticky buttons and overly wobbly joysticks. The Street Fighters, the co-operative adventurers, and the high score champions basked in the glare of CRTs inside these dimly lit, stuffy caverns. Before the home console and PC effectively took hold as the ruling game platforms, this is where gaming lived.

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Revisionist Fantasy

Games are fantasy. Whether it's casting a fireball spell or commanding thousands of troops on the rolling plains of an ancient battlefield, they allow us to do things that are otherwise impossible in real life. It's part of what makes them so engaging. Games based on fictional events like movies or books often take liberties with the plot to make a good game, creating a new plot with the player as the central character. As a result, it allows a certain level of re-imagining of the events in the original source material. In the best cases, the player has control of the action's outcome, ultimately changing the course of the story and creating an entirely different conclusion. However in the world of licensed intellectual property, this isn't always an option available to developers – especially when the game is intended to be a direct tie-in as part of a larger advertising strategy. A lot of games end up this way, and it's why most people refuse to consider movie tie-ins anything other than interactive commercials. There has been a shift towards more freedom with intellectual properties in games: recent successes like The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Starbreeze, 2004) and Spider-Man 2 (Treyarch, 2004) have proven that movie licenses don't always result in an inferior product. But is this move towards player freedom even necessary?

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the not-so casual gamer

As the game industry continues to expand at an alarming rate, the hunt for mindshare continues. Hardware manufacturers and game publishers don't care about people like me, the guy that buys at least one game a month and considers part of their daily intake of current events visiting sites like Gamespot and Evil Avatar. I've already been assimilated. They want the person who has a computer, but uses it for email and surfing a few websites. The person that finds the simple games that come with their cellphone strangely addictive. The person who orders a CD-ROM of Bejeweled when it is available for free. There is a constant search for the game to capture this demographic and get them to put a console next to their TV or upgrade their PC's video card. But there is another archetype that quietly enjoys their genre, relatively free of the shackles of the hardware arms race, but having enough sense of what games have to offer to stay away from inconsequential puzzlers and the barrage of first-person shooter clones. They take their love of flight and manifest it inside a game. They are the flight simulator enthusiasts.

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Teaching the Value of Human Life

When you're put behind the crosshairs of a gun, do you assume you have to shoot to kill? Better still, do you have to shoot to win? For the majority of First Person Shooters, that is certainly the case. What if you were given the choice to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, but still be able to complete your objectives? It sounds like the trend of stealth action games starring super-spies in skin-tight bodysuits. But it’s not. It’s a law enforcement simulation.

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The Time Machines

I hated studying history in high school. It was as if the curriculum had been designed to leave out everything that impressionable minds could possibly associate with, while making no provisions to seem like it was anything but handed down from an institution. However, in recent years it's a totally different story. I won't read any book that isn't related to history. I can watch History Television and the Discovery Channel and be immediately engrossed in a program related to some aspect of world history or anthropological pursuits. How did this happen? In a word: games.

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A Just War

Every time a new World War 2 First Person Shooter is announced, the collective groans from gamers and game media can be heard for miles, as if nothing more could be possibly done with this setting. The genre receives a bad reputation mainly because of the sheer amount of mediocre copycat titles that seem to be released every year. However, for every Elite Forces: WWII Normandy (Third Law, 2001) or World War II Sniper (Jarhead, 2004) there is a Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003) that genuinely makes an effort to advance the gameplay.

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Welcome to Azeroth

In World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004), I am a night elf hunter. I have a wolf named Meadow (named after my dog in real life). We journey the neighboring continents of Azeroth together, in search of new gear, more quests to complete, and raw meat to keep her happy so I don't end up losing an arm. On the backs of griffons I ride to get from one area to another, occasionally hopping on board a ship to voyage across the sea to the other continent. The variation between areas in the gameworld is sometimes staggering; walking through the dark and foreboding Duskwood will lead to the lush jungles of Stranglethorn vale. There are visibly different species located in each area, to be killed for their leather or the most basic need of experience. In World of Warcraft I am on a mission, whether I want to be or not. There is always something to do, no matter where I am. There are no loading screens. I am always in the game. There is no end.

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Civil Engineer

Jeff Chapman started playing Civilization (MicroProse, 1991) when it came out and never stopped. He's played the strategy turn-based videogame series for the past decade I've known him. Far from letting it consume him, he's balanced his job as editor of History Magazine with a plethora of other projects, and so I thought he would be an excellent tour guide to introduce readers to the highly regarded videogame series. I went over to his place recently and he fired up the latest version -- Sid Meier's Civilization III: Conquests (Atari, 2003) -- and showed me how he'd like to take over the world. Continue reading...

The Sociable Horde

Readers of this column may remember a previous interview with Sean Stewart, who was one of the puppetmasters behind the Alternative Reality Game (ARG) The Beast ("Collective Detective," Sept. 30, 2004). An example of pull marketing, this innovative, puzzle-based narrative based in the world of Spielberg's A.I. succeeded in gaining an intense following, independent of the movie it was commissioned for. When I saw mentions on Slashdot and in blogs about I Love Bees (a similar campaign for Halo 2) I suspected Sean might be involved -- it had his trademark characterization and subtlety. Sure enough, he later mentioned in an email that he was going to the Game Developers' Conference (GDC) because I Love Bees was getting an award -- which, he said, was explained to him as "kind of like the Academy giving an Oscar for a skywriting demonstration." I Love Bees was a real-time game that, if anything, relied on the computer even less than The Beast, requiring players to collaborate with other people in their area and involving people singing songs into pay phones. I met up with Sean and Elan Lee of 42 Entertainment at the GDC to talk about what made their game different from everything else that got awards the night before.

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Rethinking Brain Eating

If he feels vindicated, he doesn't show it. As Marc Laidlaw waits for his co-workers to finish a talk, we sit down at a table in San Francisco's cavernous Moscone Center and talk about Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2004).

Its 1998 predecessor is legendary for pushing the form both narratively (bringing atmosphere and intelligence to the first-person shooter) and technologically (the Half-Life engine having been used for the online phenomenon Counterstrike). As if living up to that wasn't enough, the sequel took six years to make and was plagued by delays and a code leak of a beta version of the game. But I meet up with Marc the day after the first-person shooter game has swept the Game Developers Choice Awards: it won Best Game, Technology, Character Design and Writing. Continue reading...

Pirates of the Pacific

This past winter, Bruce and I took the trip out to Pacific Mall to get his PlayStation 2 modded. He was excited that he'd soon be able to play the pirated games he'd downloaded off the net, and I was excited about the amazing dim sum we'd be eating after. It was a pain getting to Kennedy and Steeles on transit in the snow, but had we waited till the spring Bruce would have been shit out of luck. The pirates have all now set sail.

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Nightmare Rental

For a few weeks, Carma spent most of her free time trying to leave a room. There were massive chains barring the inside of the door, and the apartment's windows wouldn't open even if she wanted to risk climbing out. The monotony of the sallow walls was broken by the occasional eerie photograph of someone she didn't know, and she was scared to open the fridge.

She wasn't house-sitting for an eccentric relative -- she was playing Silent Hill 4: The Room (Konami, 2004), the latest instalment in the survival horror videogame series.

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Rolling Pleasure

In a brief flashback to the hip Queen Street West I remember from the '80s, I chanced upon a cult-hit videogame there. I was killing time and wandered into Microplay and asked the counter guy if any interesting games had come down the pike lately. "Yeah," he said, "There's this Japanese game..." He passed me a PlayStation 2 game with a curiously static image on the cover: a cow standing in a field next to a gigantic ball of... stuff. I made a mental note of the name: Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004). Continue reading...

Indie-meets-industry shindig

It might have been the buckets of beer or just the balmy San Francisco night that had me feeling so upbeat after the Game Developers Choice Awards and the Independent Games Festival but even in sober retrospect it was pretty remarkable. On a basic level, it was simply seeing the best videogames of the year take awards they deserved: notably, Half-Life 2, Katamari Damacy and Toronto's own N. It's rare that I see my taste vindicated in such a forum. Continue reading...

Hanging With Heroes

When I was 11 or 12, at the variety store near my Grandma's house, I made a life-changing purchase. It was probably Christmas and I was probably killing time until I had to go back to a room full of adults. When I did return to the festive nest, I went home with the New Mutants.

The New Mutants, my introduction to superhero comics, were the teenaged superteam taught by Professor X. The X-Men were more powerful and had more exciting missions, sure, but I identified more with the younger, more awkward characters and the lower key, more plausible storylines. Plus the title had just started -- I was able to collect the dozen or so earlier issues of the New Mutants when the X-Men were already in the triple digits. But I wasn't really hooked by either power fantasies or collector fever; it was the social dynamics. As I delivered papers, I imagined what it would be like if I were a new student at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Would my sudden appearance irk the hothead Brazilian, Sunspot? Would I be taken under Cannonball's big-brother wing? Could I turn Magick from the dark side, or at least long enough to get a smooch?

Which goes a long way to explaining why I felt at home in City of Heroes (NCSoft, 2004). Continue reading...

Pushing Kim Jong-Il's Buttons

I've done my share of North Korea mocking. My favourite story? When I was living in the South Korean countryside in 1996, there had been a recent drama aired on South Korea's KBS network that characterized North Korea in some way they didn't like. The North Korean radio issued a response: they would kill all of the employees of KBS so quickly and so quietly that not even a bird or mouse would notice.

The folksiness and the violence were odd enough -- it was the emptiness of the threat that struck me as crazy. And I'm not alone in thinking that. Everyone loves the North Koreans -- even cynical hipsters find their kitschy groupthink hilarious. It gives the military a loose-cannon threat to point to. And Hollywood has bad guys that fit the bill for action flicks (Die Another Day) or comedies (Team America: World Police).

I can't help wondering if Kim Jong-Il has played Mercenaries. Continue reading...

Coding Collagers

The internet is packed with funny. A clever idea, executed well, can move quickly through the blogosphere. So when I first saw Pac-Mondrian, a videogame that juxtaposes the famous mouth against a famous painting, I wasn't bowled over. I did like the incongruous old-time jazz soundtrack, however, and the text on the website hooked me: "Each play of the game is an improvisational jazz session. Pac-Mondrian sits in as a session drummer with Ammons, Lewis and Johnson, hitting hi-hats, cymbals and snares as he eats pellets."

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When Spheres of Interest Collide

Why people read what they read and watch what they watch has recently been of interest to me. As a cultural consumer and producer both, I know that advertisements and reviews are hardly the overwhelming factors, just the most reassuringly quantifiable. Recommendations from friends have the advantage of being motivated by passion rather than profits, but subjective passion can also misfire: as anyone who's had someone feverishly press something into their hand and heard "It's gonna change your life" can attest. That said, I have a few friends whose recommendations have hugely enriched my life, people with shared sensibilities that span genre and medium.

But that wasn't why I finally played StarCraft (Blizzard, 1998).

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The Scientist-Hero Returns

I was a little nervous as I waited for Half-Life 2 (Vivendi, 2004) to start. The original Half-Life (Sierra, 1998) is one of the reasons this column exists -- the game brought atmosphere and intelligence to the first-person shooter without skimping on the visceral kickassocity, and brought me back to videogames after a decade of neglect.

The sequel had been talked up in the gaming community for years, and even being over a year late hadn't destroyed the enthusiasm. (Though coming out at the same time as Halo 2 [Microsoft, 2004] did destroy the chance of mainstream press attention -- the much less interesting game on Microsoft's Xbox console was backed by much more marketing money.) We remembered being Gordon Freeman, the scientist in the hazmat suit -- a hero in glasses, for Christ's sake -- having to shoot himself out of the Black Mesa lab turned horrific by an inter-dimensional snafu. We were willing to wait. Continue reading...

A Novel Approach to Games

Lucky Wander Boy (Plume, 2003) is a novel that starts with the protagonist rediscovering the videogames of his youth through the MAME arcade emulator. But the game that he most wants to play, an obscure Japanese game for which the book is named, lies beyond his reach -- it can't be emulated, since its innovations required a specially built arcade cabinet. This epic quest might drive the story, but its strengths are the loopy humour and the opportunities it offers the author, D. B. Weiss, to play with concepts of childhood and obsession.

I read the book a while back and emailed the author to thank him. Finally, someone had brought up the existential question: for the brief time between Pac-Man disappearing from one side of the screen and appearing on the other, where does he go? Weiss suggests a few possibilities in the novel (that the pixelated mouth goes to Pac-Man Valhalla, where there's a infinite amount of dots to gobble, was my favourite) and was equally generous with the questions I had for him.

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Questing For Answers

While in New Orleans on a book tour, I noticed a fellow with a t-shirt that read: EverQuest Fan Faire, New Orleans 2004. Aw, I thought as the guy stepped onto the escalator, I wonder when that was?

Kind of like seeing a show poster for a gig already passed, I presumed it'd already happened. I was bummed. I'd never played the world's most famous MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game), dubbed EverCrack for its addictive hold on its players, but I would have liked to check out the convention.

After wandering back to our car after the obligatory stroll around the French Quarter, I noticed the signs for it at the Hilton. It was happening now! It made sense, really, it being Halloween weekend and in one of the most wonderfully strange cities in North America, a great setting for a conference about the fantasy videogame.

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Hard Driven

The Sims 2 (Electronic Arts, 2004) was making my hard drive complain. Not the usual grinding noise, but a louder, tap-knock, ominous kind of noise. I have had hard drives go corrupt on me before, so I powered down and switched a few cords. When I powered up again, I got a series of 01 01 01s on the screen.

I always do a pre-emptory body count when it comes to crashes -- this was better than usual, since my latest book was just out and I'd yet to start another one -- even as I work to save what I expect is a dying patient. But, as it turned out, it was my willy-nilly wire switching, not a hard drive failure, that was the source of the trouble and before long I had The Sims 2 booting up again.

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Player Hater

"Vince Carter's a dick," Marty says when I choose him.

"He's from the Toronto team," I say lamely. I'm not really a hometown booster or anything, I'd just been happy I'd been able to recognize any of the players I had to choose from.

"Yeah, but he wants to leave," Marty grumbles.

This is why I invited Marty. We were hanging out a few weeks ago and he'd been rhapsodizing about Charles Barkley's interviewing style. Not only does he watch basketball, but he plays it -- so he's two up on me when it comes to critiquing NBA Ballers(Midway, 2004). Continue reading...

Antagonistic Amusement

Now that the Matrix franchise has collapsed under its own hype and mystical mumbo-jumbo, it's refreshing to see a well-executed cyberpunk tale in what is perhaps its ideal medium: the videogame. Because it's not just about the style -- the leather overcoats and the sunglasses -- that shit was embarrassing in the '80s when it was still edgy. It's about the hard business of getting by in a deeply fucked-up world. Sometimes you have to install implants that allow you to derive energy from corpses for those heavy-combat days. Sometimes you have to spend your last creds to get your sniper rifles modified so that assassination goes off without a hitch. All part of a day's work for a corporate rent-a-cop in the year 2030. Continue reading...

Sickly Doom

When I was young, the ideal situation was being too sick for school but not too sick for videogames. So that after a good long sleep I could get up, get myself some toast, and play for a couple hours before my mom got home -- and I was wiser to be back in bed lest she arrive with sympathy and freezies to find me doing something more active than reading.

Now, sick with a damnably tenacious late-summer flu, I've decided to review Doom 3 (Activision, 2004). In my weakened, hypersensitive state, even coffee can make me break out in a dizzying sweat -- a single cup of the stimulant ravages my body. So I'm a little worried that the infamously brutal videogame, the game whose predecessor brought first-person shooters to office networks and introduced "frag" to the general lexicon, will literally blow my head off.

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I Am Woman, Hear Me Purr

When I got Sudeki for review, I sighed. An anime babe smiled out from the cover, her armoured boobs thrust forward and her arms upstretched as she cast a spell -- presumably on the teenage-boy market. The following two strikes were the five-star recommendation from Maxim and the name of the game company (Climax).

But I decided to invite Daniel Heath Justice to play it with me. I'd read his terrific story in the Girls Who Bite Back anthology, which features a full-figured female sorceress who defeats an evil arch mage with her sheer fabulousness -- and a few fashion tips. Continue reading...

Cracking a Moral Code

For those of you who paid for your copy of Tony Hawk 4 (Aspyr, 2003) on the PC, here's what you missed. Running INSTALLER.EXE in the pirated version brings up a window that shows a flat-monitor screen hanging painting-style on what looks to be a castle wall. A bouncy-yet-mournful synth tune plays in the background. Across the monitor, which has a circuit-board patterned background, there runs the text, "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 © Aspyr. Enjoy another nice game from your friends at Class." And the friendly game crackers have outdone themselves with this installer: by using the arrow buttons you can move to another flat-screened monitor further along the castle wall, this one with the option to INSTALL. As you go between monitors, the perspective pulls out and then zooms back in dramatically. One of the options is to read the .NFO, a text file that is included with cracks to furnish more info. Continue reading...

Consoling Jim

To create what The Onion called his "wispy, quirky, homemade folk-pop," Toronto musician Jim Guthrie uses sounds from everything from mimeograph machines to the elbows of evestroughs. But it's his use of the Playstation 1 game console that has attracted the most attention. There's not a lot of it on his most recent album, but as he's powering up his console for a show at the Tranzac on July 24th I thought I'd ask him a few questions about it. Continue reading...

Geeky Secrets

Everyone loves getting in on a good secret. The same feeling of invulnerability and anonymity that makes email flaming such a big part of the internet encourages the trading in verboten information. It's been going on for a long time, as least as long as the BBS scene in the '80s.

I recently came across an old, battered green duotang with a collection of "Phun Philes" from that era. I had my dot-matrix working overtime, printing out dozens of my favourites into different sections: Smoke and Explosives, Fone Phun, and Tricks and Chuckles. There were instructions on how to make a shit bomb, LSD, or napalm; ASCII diagrams on how to build a Black Box for free long-distance calls; tips on lock-picking, credit card fraud and how to make bugs breakdance.

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Mario's Pain

A man is having his first physiotherapy appointment. A woman comes in wearing a white doctor's coat. Their conversation begins on a clinical level, the doctor asking the man about how he sustained his injuries. The man explains that he works in the videogame industry, and in fact has come from work. She assumes that he works as a labourer, because of his overalls, but he admits in the tone of a reluctant celebrity that he's Mario from the Mario Bros. games.
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How to Spoil a Game

You wake up in a centuries-old asylum. Your face is in bandages and your memory is in tatters, only coming back to you in black and white cinematic flashes. As you walk around and talk to people, you solve puzzles and unearth the mystery of your identity, travelling to different places that may only exist in your mind.

Sanitarium (DreamForge, 1998) is a puzzle-based adventure game for the PC, and playing the game caused me to stumble across another mystery from my own past: why does taking hints when I'm stuck in a game ruin it for me?

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Well-rendered Television

The show's opening sequence starts with a woman in a black bodysuit facing off against a hulking monster. When she finishes him off with a jump-kick, the music swells and the words "Game Over" come up. "Did you ever wonder what happens after the game ends?" a voice reminiscent of Laurence Fishburne intones. "Welcome to the other side."

The woman looks at her watch, says, "Shoot, I'm late for dinner," and runs off to her waiting helicopter, unlocking it remotely with the familiar "squark" sound and the headlight flash. It was a subtle touch, one I didn't notice until the opening sequence of the fifth episode -- and by then it was too late.

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The Name Game

While I wait in the lobby of one of the largest game studios in the world, I watch someone go through to the inner sanctum. The shiny barrier, with transparent doors that whir apart at the wave of a card-pass, looks familiar -- I think I've seen the devices being used as turnstiles in a Tokyo subway.

Most places of work are satisfied with a locked door, but someone at Ubisoft Montreal decided they needed something with a little more panache. Something that made the employees feel important and impressed visitors. And something that said, "No, you won't just be waltzing in here and stealing our secrets."

I half-wonder if I'm being tested.
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Read Only Memories

I'm fairly suspicious of nostalgia, and I hate how advertisers leverage our emotions to sell us the same products twice. So while I'm happy that people are rediscovering videogames from their youth, and that the games and their blocky aesthetic are mushrooming up all over the culture, I wonder about the retro-gaming phenomenon.

Are these games really that good?

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The Power of N

N (MetaNet Software, 2004) is a perfect pop song of a videogame, an addictive platformer in which you use three keys to direct your ninja towards the gold and away from the robots. Its two-dimensional and mostly two-colour simplicity lure you into its cunning level designs and give you an appreciation for the subtle characterization of the ninja, more defined by grace than by gore. Game creators, Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard, who met in a computer science class when they were at U of T, took some time to chat to myself and Marc Ngui about their new freeware game.
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No Love For the Glove

The line between gimmick and innovation is sometimes hard to draw. Game purists look down on specialized peripherals, and while I like my shotguns and dance-pads in single-purpose arcade games, I rarely think they're justified in a multi-purpose home system. Maybe I know too many people who bought the Power Glove. This Mattel peripheral was introduced in 1989. It worked with the Nintendo Entertainment System, but not as well as it worked for Fred Savage in the movie The Wizard.
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Going Public with our Joysticks

One of the biggest contributors to videogaming's nerd factor is that it's most often a solitary act. The bepimpled teenager channelling his angst through a controller in the darkness of his parent's basement is a cliché with more than a few grains of truth. But it hasn't always been so.

Before the home entertainment system's 8-bit siren's song that promised endless, quarterless fun fully took hold, there was the arcade.

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Blaspheming in the Church of Zelda

When I posted my bad review of Zelda: The Legend of Windwaker(Nintendo, 2003) to this site it immediately inspired a flood of outraged comments. Twenty-eight in total, and if you count the side discussions on other sites, over 8,000 words about a column that was about 800 words long. One comment insisted I "never write an article about videogames again." Someone else said that I didn't like the game because I "got my ass kicked by the old man." And one of them said that one of my points "bordered on blasphemy."

No one likes it when their chosen religion is mocked, and mock Zelda I did.

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Simple Pleasures

Jeff sent me an email a few days ago. Subject: Fishy. "Maybe you should consider writing a column about this awful, far-too-addictive game -- if you do, my advice is to write about it without actually playing it, because if you start playing it you will never get around to writing the column."
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The Way We're Being Played

Here's how I learned to stop worrying and learned to love the console.

For years I'd thought it was a sucker's game to buy a dedicated machine when you could play on your multi-use PC. I looked on the proliferation of PlayStations in the ghetto as electronic malt liquor: sure, it was only $300, but you paid for it later in games.

But my anti-console bias has been worn away, bit by bit, by video-card makers and game developers forming strategic alliances that are benefiting both, but screwing over the gamer.

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Fragging is Not a Crime

Karl Deckard was a senior designer on Metroid Prime (Nintendo, 2002) and also worked on Half-Life (Sierra, 1998). When I invited him to be on a panel at South by Southwest last year to talk about gaming, I discovered his skateboarding side, and he recently had time to answer a few questions.
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The Romance of Indie Games

I came across Ernest Adams as the writer of a column for the excellent gamasutra.com, a website dedicated to "the art and science of making games." Adams' column, The Designer's Notebook, discusses some of the arcane and complex issues facing game designers in language understandable to people outside the inner circle, managing to be rigorous and accessible at the same time. His critical eye on the industry he's spent 14 years in allows him to raise questions like "How can we introduce sexuality into computer games?" and "Why are most black videogame characters rappers or athletes?"

I met up with him for lunch at Saving Grace and he answered a few of my questions about Dogma 2001, a tongue-in-cheek call to the videogame avant-garde that was a reference to Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg's movie manifesto, Dogme 95. Dogma 2001 requires the designer to submit to rules such as "There shall be no knights, elves, dwarves or dragons" and furthermore bans cut-scenes and first-person shooters.
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What Little Boys Are Made Of

No one wants to give a kid a bucket of blood for Christmas. But give them a videogame that's too dorky, and they'll be trading it in before you can say Rated E for Everyone.

I'd heard good things about The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo, 2003) and was excited to play it. It's one of Nintendo's most beloved franchises, and the screenshots I'd seen made me smile -- a big-eyed cartoon boy running around a brightly coloured world. Part of me was hoping to find the innocent doppelgänger of the Grand Theft Auto series: certainly it looked like the visual opposite of GTA's dark and gritty Liberty City.

I played it once, and was unimpressed.

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War Reporting

I know how Tim Carter feels. When I tell some people that punk rock saved my life, I get funny looks too.

In his documentary about Counter-Strike (Sierra, 2000), Carter tries to make a connection between videogames and martial arts. I think he fails at this, but he makes a valiant and genuine attempt to communicate what he knows to be true: that despite how bloody, violent and pointless the military first-person shooter looks to people on the outside, the game had a positive impact on his life.

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Making smarter trash cans

I've managed to climb down the scaffolding in the pouring rain and get to an open window. It leads to a kitchen, and from there I hear voices: it's the cleaners, or rather the hired killers masquerading as cleaners who have been dogging my every step.

They're watching a program called "Lords and Ladies" when I burst in on them, my 9mm taking one of them out immediately. The other one is able to roll behind a pillar and return fire so I leap over the couch to get a better shot at him.

Time slows down. Bullets fly by me and hit the television -- as it goes dark, I'm able to reflect that a gun is also a remote control in a pinch. In mid-air, I turn and squeeze off three shots, winging him. I hit the ground and continue firing from a prone position.

After he slumps dead against the bloodied wall, time returns to normal and I notice another movement -- I swing my gun around but I realize it is just something that's been hit in the firefight falling to the ground.

I immediately forget the cleaners, my angst and my mission and investigate it -- it's a painting. A few more shots make it jerk across the floor, splinters bursting from its wooden frame.

I am impressed.

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Professor Zork

Problem-solving is fun! I learned this lesson not from my teachers, not from a book, but from computer games. Specifically, from text adventure games like Zork, Lurking Horror and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Typing in commands like "go north," "take candy," "ask sam about instrument," allowed you to move around and do things in these entirely text-based environments.

I've decided that my somewhat creative approach to life's problems -- how I tend to keep trying different things until one works, confident that there's an answer out there, and not being worn down by failure -- is something that I picked up from these games. Finding a place to sleep in a new city when I don't have any money or friends may not be a puzzle that has a predestined answer concocted by a game designer, but I've fruitfully approached it with the same playful attitude.

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Playing Soldier

Wargames are huge and always have been. If you think the latest videogames are anything new, think chess. Think toy soldiers. They're fun, they're violent, and they have a moralistic narrative frame that makes them palatable to most political persuasions.

Not mine, however. I'd always prefer to be a thug than a soldier, not because I dig on evil but because I hate taking orders. So, in the interest of not sending an anarchist to do a grunt's job, I've gotten Scott Waters, who spent three years the military, to comment on some wargames.
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My Wicked Moves, Quantified

I love to dance. This always seems to come as a surprise to people, me with my big gangly 6'3" frame and all, but I quickly qualify: "Oh, I'm not good at dancing -- I just love to dance."

It all started at a grade seven school mixer in 1985.

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When Reality Bleeds

Two ravers are discussing how ridiculous it is that videogames are blamed for inciting killing sprees. "Yeah," one says to the other. "We grew up playing Pac-Man, and it's not like we're running around in the dark, popping pills, and listening to repetitive electronic music."

This internet joke is funny on one level, but vaguely unsettling on another. Have we been affected by videogames in ways we're not even aware of? Obviously our culture has been affected by videogames, but do games have a lasting subliminal impact on an individual's intellectual and emotional self?

Of course they do.

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Too Damn Talky

Games are often criticised for not having any plot. What isn't given much consideration is whether it's possible for there to be too much story.

The Longest Journey (Funcom, 2000) made me think about this a lot.

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The pothead gamer

A recent letter to eye (Letters, June 12) implied that this column was in league with SARS. "The locals going out and spending their dollars is all we have to cling to right now. And I want to open your paper and be encouraged to go out and spend, spend, spend. Not to sit at home, flame up a doobie and play Corpse Killer."

As funny as I found this letter, I was most interested in the characterization of the game player as a weed-smoking wastrel. The pothead gamer. It's quite prevalent, often appearing in comedy sketches and the like, and yet it's hard to pinpoint where the characterization solidified into a cultural icon. It's just one of those "it's so true!" things that just appears from thin air.

Or did it? Isn't it kind of similar to the dude in the '60s who retreated to his bedroom, flamed up a doobie and listened to Hendrix while staring at his black light posters? And was his way paved by the denizen of the opium den, passing the time with solitaire? Is there a continuum in the wastrel figure throughout history?

And more importantly, what have I been missing? Playing games stoned must be fucking great! Research was obviously called for.
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Mission: Look at Neat Stuff

Ninjalicious is the founder of Infiltration, a zine documenting his urban exploration hobby in hilarious and diagram-enhanced travelogues. He's recently been playing Thief II (Eidos, 2000), a videogame with a focus on stealth, and I asked him about how the first-person sneaker measured up to his real-life experience.
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Lara's more interesting sisters

Powerful women are sexy, and this cuts both ways. MobyGames, a game documentation and review project, has a categorization for female protagonists that shows that there have been about as many games released in the first three years of this decade as there was in the entire previous one. There's a bunch of factors involved, one of the biggest being that if women took to playing games like guys do, the market would effectively double.

But Lara Croft is the real reason.

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Punchy pixels

My grandfather was a boxer. Came here from Scotland barely out of his teens as Philip Heron, but his manager figured "Red Munroe" would look better on the fight bill, so he changed it. Either his new name or his right hook worked well, I guess, because he ended up as middleweight champion of Canada back in the '30s. He married a Finnish gal named Esther, and the two of them grew old together.

By the time I knew Grandpa, he was rarely far from his pipe and easy chair. He would, on prompting, show us the tiny golden gloves he'd won, made tinier by his huge, battered hands. He'd gently unfold the yellowed newspaper clipping that he kept in the trophy that sat on top of the china cabinet, and point at his picture with his pipe.

All of which goes to explain why I was drawn across the arcade as if by strings when I noticed the gloves hanging from MoCap Boxing (Konami, 2001).
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Stealing Grand Theft Auto

I tried, you know. I tried to go legit.

I sent two emails and left one voice message with Jeff Castaneda, Media Relations at Rockstar Games, explaining that I was starting a videogame column and that I'd be interested in considering the material for review. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, was coming out for the PC after six months burning up the charts as a PlayStation exclusive. I'd played the previous episode in the criminal adventure series and enjoyed the black humour and its attention to gritty detail.

A week passed. Nothing from Jeff. I was complaining about it to my friend Paul, and he told me that his brother had already downloaded it. A week before the official May 13 release date and it was already in circulation -- the people who had pre-ordered the game were waiting longer than the pirate scum.

I went back to the screenshots of the lavish Floridian world that was denied me. I watched the trailer, which features an exciting speedboat chase set to '80s music. I went and looked at the email I had sent to Jeff. Was it not professional enough? Cool enough? I guess if you sell 10 million copies of something, you don't have to return reviewers' calls. Fucking rockstar.

So I slipped back into old habits.
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Is it possible to have too much fun?

Is it possible to have a pleasure circuit overload?

"Girls are to be kept away from those activities of civilization that over-stimulate the imagination and the senses, such as fashionable novels, paintings, music, balls, theaters... as this can lead to uterine epilepsy, sapphic tastes, and nymphomania."

While this is Victorian-era advice, it's reflective of how certain people deal with something that's new and sexy: hysteria. It's the same people who are now blaming video games, today's over-stimulant of choice, for everything from obesity to mass murder. Even those of us who aren't concerned parents or members of the religious community have a tendency to look at video games as a waste of time when compared, say, to reading a novel.

As someone who makes his living from writing novels, let me tell you that this is sanctimonious horseshit.
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