Quest to Nowhere

With so much talk about FarmVille, I felt like it was something that I needed to play to understand why it was popular. I had my own theories for why people played FarmVille, especially after reading A. J. Partick Liszkiewicz article a few months back, but figured that I probably wouldn’t understand it without actually trying it out. So about two months ago I started playing, and recently I started playing Zynga’s new Facebook game FrontierVille, and I think I’ve got an understanding now of what gets people to play these games.

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I have spent more time then I care to imagine playing videogames, a lot of that has been playing multiplayer shooter games like Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Perfect Dark, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and the like. As such, over that time I’ve come to some derive some theories on how multiplayer levels should be designed, based on my experiences.

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While I was at GDC this past year I went to a lecture called “Get Your Game out of my Movie! Interactive Storytelling in Mass Effect 2,” which was being given by Armando Troisi of BioWare. The one thing he said that has been stuck in my head since then was this idea of objective and subjective storytelling.

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I never finished Mass Effect 1, at least until the day Mass Effect 2 was released. I picked up ME1 on PC during Steam’s holiday sale intending to finish it so I would have a save to import into ME2. I played ME1 on 360 originally but never finished it, so the Steam sale provided a nice way to play the game over again, and get the save to import.

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Well its that time of year again, when everyone is putting out their lists of the best videogames of the year. I contemplated putting out just a list of my favorite games from the past year, in no particular order, but even so there was still one game for me that was just seemed to be better then all the others, in my mind. So I’m going to do both, honor my favorite game of the year as well as give a list of my best games of the year.

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I signed the petition against dedicated servers being removed from the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I was signature 121,594.

I signed it after reading this editorial by the editor of PC Gamer magazine.

Infinity Ward rather stealthily announced a few days back on a CoD fan podcast that in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that there would be no dedicated fan run servers, because they want everything to be done as matchmaking through their servers. Of course this has caused quite a kerfuffle on the ol’ internets, leading to (last I checked) 85,000 people signing an online petition asking IW to reconsider.

Although I can understand to an extent why they are doing this (helps to prevent piracy, more ad money from ads on their servers, etc.) it seems to me that they … Continue Reading

With E3 just wrapping up its hard to not be excited for all the games set to come out this year, especially in the fall. When you actually look at them all though you’ll likely begin to realize that this fall may in fact be the best one for videogames ever. In terms of quality games that is. Here is just a partial list of what is going to be released this fall, between the end of August and the start of 2010:
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Valve, this is an intervention.

Valve, first off I love your work. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2 (at launch,) all amazing games which I have spent more time then I want to think about playing, but every moment was great and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Which is what brings me here today, having this intervention for you, you need to realize Valve that you are hurting Team Fortress 2. I know you guys love it as much as I do, and you think you are doing the right thing, that’s it’s, “for its own good,” and that you “are just making it better.” But you guys need to take a step back an really think about what you are doing.

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With Amazon and Toys R Us muscling in on GameStop’s almost monopoly of buying back videogames, and selling used copies, the discussion of used games has popped up in a lot of the podcasts I listen to again. Now I’m not going to say that it’s not fair that video game developers/publishers don’t get a cut from these sales, because it is fair. Which is to say this is not a industry vs. retailer issue, but rather a secondary market/right of first sale issue for consumers.

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