Me working at an MMO company is like a pedophile getting a job at a preschool. Nevermind the games we publish; not a day goes by without at least one lengthy World of Warcraft discussion. My boss tells me about his pick-up Sunwell Plateau raid and relays last night’s PvP stories. Half the office does their daily quests during their lunch break. And then on Thursday night, I shared a BART ride home with a co-worker—A solid forty minutes spent reminiscing about those halcyon days of raiding at 60.

It was only a matter of time:

I’m weak. I couldn’t hold out until Wrath of the Lich King.

PvP zones, destructible buildings, siege weapons, and a new class that plays like the combination of an affliction warlock, a frost mage, and a vampire ensures I’ll at least level to 80. But in the meantime, arena season 4 starts on June 24, and I’ve got AVs to AFK in so I can buy the season 2 arena set when it’s downgraded to honor gear. If everyone’s favorite figureprintable priest is going to lay dormant, nothing more than a searchable query in the Armory, then he may as well look awesome while doing it.

EDIT – The first thing I see when I log in:

:(

Until YouTube educated me properly, I had no idea of the ridiculous number of emote animations in the Age of Conan.

Look at this thing:

I assume the list covers every conceivable aspect of human expression. On top of that, one can string together dance combos for MMO dance and emoting parties made of some fairly substantial win.

Emote RP and dance combos are what MMOs are made for.

And the toplessness.

It’s been my experience that liveblogs are most useful for events that are either completely mundane or readily available to everyone. Thus, liveblogging the season premiere of Law & Order meets both criteria simultaneously. Why bother turning on your TV when some fool on the Internet is giving you the play-by-play?

We’ve had to wait until January because of those pesky writers and their damned strike for new Law & Order, but the generous folks at NBC have rewarded our patience with two brand new episodes, both of which feature Sam “Jack McCoy” Waterson as DA. I guess the hundred or so people that have yelled “you’ll never be DA, Jack!” to his face over the years were all wrong. Jack McCoy: 307, His Enemies: 0.

Because I don’t hate you nearly as much as I let on, I’ve hidden the actual liveblog part of this liveblog behind a shockingly convenient cut. You’re welcome, future generations.

(more…)

While promoting Rudy Coaches a Baseball Team, Sean Astin told MTV that a Goonies sequel is “an absolute certainty” at this point. The movie would likely follow the adventures of the original Goonies’ kids and shamelessly exploit the fond memories of an entire generation. Strong DVD sales of the original are cited as the primary reason this idea is even on the table, effectively laying the blame for this inevitable disaster squarely on the fans. With Anne Ramsey long dead and the looming prospect of a CGI Sloth, hopefully someone with some sense realizes this is a bad idea before it’s too late. Or that Konami already made a ‘good enough’ sequel.

Later: more knee-jerk reactions and unwarranted scorn.

Clive Barker has become the mouthpiece for the “video games are art” crowd through no fault of his own. Roger Ebert’s now infamous anti-video game tirade came as a response to Barker’s comments at the Hollywood and Games Summit earlier this year. Besides galvanizing the gaming community against him, Roger Ebert’s assertion that games are incapable of artistic expression established Barker as the counterpoint to Ebert’s point. And though Ebert has continued to confront gamers directly in the weekly Q&A columns hosted on his website, Barker has remained almost entirely silent on the issue, going so far as to tear up his written response after learning of Ebert’s battle with cancer. Because of this, the gaming press has been slobbering over every scrap Barker throws their way. Conveniently, he also has a new game coming out.

His first game, Clive Barker’s Undying, is as unique amongst video games as it would be in any medium – it’s a horror story that’s genuinely frightening. The game puts players in control of Patrick Gallows, an occult researcher summoned to the gloomy shores of Ireland at the behest of his cursed friend. Over the course of the dialogue-heavy plot, players uncover the mysteries surrounding this supernatural curse. A first-person shooter with a fully developed magic system, Undying also features strange, otherworldly platforming sequences that blatantly embarrass Half-Life’s Xen segments. The game is really very good, the sort of critical success and commercial failure that serves as a sure-fire recipe for a cult hit. It’s tense, creepy, and challenging. And it features the only simultaneously phallic and yonic boss encounter in video game history.

Fast forward six years and one cancelled project later, and Clive Barker’s second game is less than a month away from release. Clive Barker’s Jericho, like Undying before it, is a horror-themed first-person shooter. Far darker than its predecessor, the game follows the Jericho Squad, part of the United States’ Department of Occult Warfare, as they fight to reclaim the city of Al Khalid from demonic influence. The game is a squad-based shooter, with players hopping between members of the Jericho Squad on the fly, each of which sports unique weaponry and paranormal powers.

Jericho is being developed by MercurySteam, a Spanish developer whose sole credit is another possessively titled game – American McGee’s Scrapland, the very pretty, if very dull, GTA rip-off. Add mixed impressions from those who’ve played it, and Jericho doesn’t inspire as much confidence as a game from the man that has become an unintended champion of the medium should. At least it looks nice, anyway.

Today, Codemasters released a Jericho demo across all platforms the game will be appearing on (PC, 360, PS3). Eager to see how Clive Barker’s second foray into the world of video gaming turned out, I downloaded the demo despite not meeting the game’s minimum requirements. Though my graphics card isn’t even in the same ballpark as those supported, the rest of my four-year-old machine skirts in just above or below the suggested specs. Sure, it would be an ugly slideshow of an experience, but at the very least I could get a gauge on the overall quality of the game.

Having spent far too much time downloading and installing the game twice, each time from a different source, I can state with authority that Jericho will not run on my PC. Unfortunately, it just crashes almost immediately after launching, giving me a general error message. As I have no way to actually play the game, this is the point where the update loses all momentum and whimpers away with its tail between its legs. I seriously considered continuing from this point, writing as though I had played the game by pulling information from the various impressions and previews saturating the Internet, but for your sake as much as mine, I won’t.

Generally, this isn’t the sort of update I would bother uploading, but seeing as how I just spent the last three hours working on this disaster, I’m going to put it online anyway. The day’s almost done and I have a quota to meet. Just because I can’t run the demo on my PC doesn’t mean you can’t play it on yours. Unless you fail to meet the system requirements too, in which case just ignore the rest of this.

In true Web 2.0 style, I leave it to you, the one reader whose PC can run this game (Jeremy Hahn), to download the demo and continue where I have failed by posting your impressions of the game and whether or not they live up to the persona Clive Barker has had constructed around him. Sure, the demo’s only ten minutes long, ends abruptly with a Shenmue-inspired QTE, and almost certainly offers no real insight into the quality of the final product, but don’t let that stop you from making broad, sweeping judgments. This is the Internet, after all. The Web 2.0 Internet.

Tomorrow: Something less terrible. I promise.

The perfect video game: Diablo 3 co-developed by Blizzard North and Flagship Studios. No monthly fee. Monthly patching. So much character customization that it is technically impossible for two identical characters to exist. Simultaneous release on Mac, PC, and all major home consoles. The final boss is Bill Roper’s head on a stick.

The perfect movie: a western staring Kevin Costner, Christian Bale, David Bowie, and a CGI young Clint Eastwood voiced by Kurt Russel. A total running time of just under four hours. No gun is fired until the last 15 minutes.

The perfect TV series: Law & Order: Trial by Transformers. Taking place in the mid-1980s, a young Jack McCoy teams up with Prowl and Nightbeat to bring justice to the streets of Autobot City on Earth. Teletran-1 serves as the city’s DA. All cases, in one way or another, involve the Witwicky family.

The perfect novel: a rogue AI from the future accidentally ends up in 1930s New York. It becomes a Christ-like figure for a community of poor Jews. Every fifth word is a Biblical reference. Every seventh word is an anagram of a Biblical reference. Every nineteen word is “boi.”

I played some Star Fox Adventures today. About five hours worth, to be exact. I hadn’t played the game since the weekend I bought it and subsequently played through it, back in 2002. The game is still graphically very impressive and proof positive that the last console generation ended too early. Anyway, I wanted to write about Star Fox Adventures being indicative of Nintendo 64-era Rareware as a whole and a symbol for the relationship between Nintendo and the British developer. I had also planned to categorize the various widgets and wingdings players collect along the way. I still can, I guess.

As you can imagine, the game wasn’t holding my attention. I would play for a while, take a break to take a shower or look up Japanese Beast Wars Neo characters on Wikipedia, and then play a little more. I’d just pause the game and leave it running, never bothering to turn the GameCube off or actually save my progress. Imagine my surprise when I returned from one such diversion to find that the game had returned to the title screen. With no explanation in sight, I’ll just take this as a sign from the almighty.

Star Fox Adventures isn’t a good game. I’ve collected enough pukpuk eggs, bafomdads, and blue grubtubs to last a lifetime. Actually, now that I’m thinking about all the mean things I could say about this (five-year-old) game (that nobody would care about), I might just go ahead and write my Star Fox Adventures update anyway. This update basically would have served as an excuse to post the following picture regardless of whether or not my game ate itself.

Never one to wallow long in defeat, I quickly moved on to equally productive activities:

Yet. Because Square-Enix still has a dozen spin-offs to pawn off to delusional fans.

Can a Legend of Dragoon remake be that far behind?

I’ve had Killer7 stuck in my head the last couple of days. I wonder why there aren’t more games like it, why the list of “art house video games” is so short. Why do so few developers take the really big risks? The answer, obviously, is that there simply aren’t enough consumers out there to justify such risks, especially early in a console cycle. The video game industry is unique in that every four to five years the entire thing resets. Console userbases shrink to zero. Hardware manufacturers’ potential – and to some extend their relationship with publishers – reboots. Just look at the GameCube’s initial burst of 3rd party support. Last generation’s loser is not necessarily this generation’s failure.

When this reset occurs, the sort of games that sell shift with it. An influx of new technology and a rush to meet launch dates hinders development while an insignificant install base cripples potential sales. Smaller niche titles don’t stand a chance simply because the numbers aren’t there to support them. They aren’t made at this point. Instead, games at the beginning of a hardware cycle tend to be licensed, part of an established franchise, or feature extremely broad appeal, often hinging their success on the desirability of next generation graphical improvements. With so few consoles in existence at this point in the game, publishers need to sell to every console owner they can.

Later in the cycle, we begin to see more original games, with a peak in quality usually hitting just before a console’s violent death at the hands of its offspring. History is filled with fantastic game lineups at the end of a console’s life. As developers master the intricacies of the hardware and the number of consoles in homes hits critical mass, publishers can begin to take larger risks and produce more interesting games. In fact, many of the games considered to be the “best” in a platform’s library are released at the end of the console’s life.

Unfortunately, this continual need to restart console cycles down through the generations is a necessity fueled by technology. The technology used to create video games simply increases too quickly not to try to keep up. If one hardware developer doesn’t, another will. Though Nintendo has certainly made its point with the Wii and DS, the need to buy a new console every four to five years keeps the market from expanding just as much as the fact that Halo is a really, really complicated game. Add exclusivity on top of that – the fact that certain games are only released for certain consoles – and it leaves many non-gamers wondering why they should even take the plunge in the first place. After all, their new piece of hardware is going to need replacing in the time it takes to get a high school diploma, and they won’t be able to play all the games that interest them on only a single console. You don’t need to buy a new TV or CD player every four years. And you don’t need a Sony TV to watch NBC, a Magnavox to watch ABC, or a Zenith to watch CBS.

The “one console future” became a gaming community in-joke prior to this generation, thanks largely to Denis Dyack. Such an idea, however, is also a publisher, developer, and consumer’s dream. Developers and publishers would no longer need to create multiple versions of the same game or worry about multiple consoles cannibalizing their software sales. Consumers wouldn’t need to buy multiple consoles or deal with determining the superior version of a multiplatform title. Of course, a one console future, even if multiple hardware manufacturers produce different versions of the same console, doesn’t benefit the hardware makers at all. Obviously, Dyack’s ideal gaming future, like so many of his half-cocked statements, lacks any sort of real world plausibility.

One thing’s for certain though: truly unique niche/art house/whatever video games cannot exist without an installbase to support them. Under the current model, such games can only exist once a platform has successfully established itself. Then the next generation begins and all the backwards compatibility in the world isn’t going to see games developed for a console sitting in 20 million closets.

Realistically, an art house video game isn’t going to make anybody wealthy even with a technologically stalled, single console market. The very nature of the beast keeps such games from becoming anything more than niche titles. It’d just be nice to see more made, is all. Gaming has so many talented development teams and so few auteurs.

Ultimatley, the dream team of Green, Van Buren, Fontana, McCoy, Branch, and Southerlyn beat all comers.