Incomplete Gamer

Archive for the ‘Sound Off’ Category

It’s that time of the week again.  My weekly  musings over in the hallowed halls of PALGN has just been posted.

This week I take a look at video game narrative.  Dr Souvik Mukherjee, a researcher and computer game narrative expert from the School of Arts & Humanities at Nottingham Trent University, believes that ‘the complex mesh of possible storylines and deep levels of involvement in video game narratives relate to, and often surpass, the experience of earlier narrative media, such as books and films.’

He’d get no argument from Lionhead boss Peter Molyneux’s who back in March famously predicted “Godfather” levels of storytelling in games by 2016, then upped the ante even further last month at GDC, stating that he believed video games would actually surpass those levels of story telling.

What do I think?  You’ll have to read The Wrap #27 to find out.  And remember, you’ll find links to earlier columns at the end of this week’s ‘Wrap’.

Enjoy.

The Incomplete Gamer

A quick heads up – The Wrap #26 is has been spotted onboard the good ship PALGN.  You can read my latest rant here.

This week in ‘The Limited Edition Edition’ I report on two cases on opposite sides of the Atlantic where gamers got a little more than they bargained for.  Trouble was they weren’t happy.  Far from it in fact.  How then to impress your customer base? The Wrap puts forward a way to put the ‘special’ back into the special edition.

Don’t just sit there.  Get clicking, and remember; you’ll find links to all previous editions of The Wrap at the end of the column.

Cheers,

The Incomplete Gamer

What would you you do for a free TiVo? The good folks at the corporate home of Tivo Australia are banking on you doing quite a bit.  They’ve got  5 TiVo Media Devices up for grabs in their Easter Hunt challenge which runs from Easter Monday through until Friday the 24th of April.

You’ll be glad of those twelve days when you see what they’d like you to do.  There are seven (a clever Channel 7 tie in?) challenges in all.  Three are fairly painless – click to a website as directed and snap a picture of yourself and the desired image.  Two challenges will require you to drag yourself off the couch and into a video store and a TiVo retailer to take another two photos as directed.  Challenge Six will have you and as many of your friends as possible dressing up head to toe in one of the six TiVo colours for another photo opportunity.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Well it’s all seems a lot of bother to go to, but at least I don’t have to come up with twenty five words expressing my undying love of all things TiVo.”

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A quick heads up – The Wrap #25 just dropped over at PALGN.  You can read my latest musings here.

This week in ‘The Passion of the Critic’ we ask the question, should game reviewers be fans of video games?  Renowned video games designer, David Jaffe doesn’t think so, expressing some strong opinions on a recent Listen Up Game Developers Conference 2009 Special podcast.

Is being a fan at odds with being a critical balanced and fair video games reviewer?  You’ll have to read the article?  The Wrap looks at the issue, offers our thoughts and welcomes your opinions.

What are you waiting for?  Get clicking, and remember.  You’ll find links to all previous editions of The Wrap at the end of the column.

Cheers,

The Incomplete Gamer

If things have been a little quiet at The Incomplete Gamer it’s because I’ve taken on a new video games writing gig.  I’m back, writing a regular weekly column - The Wrap – after a two year hiatus; courtesy of the good folk at PALGN who thankfully don’t subscribe to the old adage that ‘you can never go home again’.  It turns out it was just my folks who believed that; although in their defence, they always swore that they had meant to tell me they had moved… but that’s another story.

The Incomplete Gamer isn’t going anywhere.  if anything you should start to see increased gaming coverage (both news and reviews) as a result of my additional game writing duties, as I spend more of my day immersed in gaming, reviewing and with my head, hard-wired into the online video game news world.

You can read my latest column over at PALGN here. It drops ever Saturday – think of it as your antidote to a slow news day.   The Wrap #24 looks at the health of the games industry in these rocky economic times.  Recent colums have looked at the way the motor industry use video games as a marketing tool, poked fun at the European Union’s efforts to enforce parental controls on consoles, and taken a (tongue planted firmly in cheek) look, at all the evil things video games are responsible for.

You’ll find links to all previous editions of The Wrap at the end of each article.  If I do say so myself, they’re a good read and I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

Cheers,

The Incomplete Gamer

I’ve been feeling a little uneasy, ever since the email arrived from Google News Alerts a few days back. I swear I didn’t even sign up for any ‘news alerts’. How did they get my email address and why are they sending me this spam? Who are these mysterious Google people anyway and what do they want with me? Sorry…, where was I? Ok, so I’m at Starbucks last Wednesday and I’m checking my email, and I see a Google News Alert link to this story about a study that shows violent video games make gamers paranoid. Please. Are they kidding me? I don’t have time for this rubbish.

Instead I fire up my DS Lite and dive stealthily back into Assasin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles, and proceed to climb another ladder.

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Throughout 2008, game developer Criterion Games earned plenty of well-deserved praise for its racing title Burnout Paradise (PS3/Xbox360).   Not content with creating a great, open-world racing game, Criterion spent the last twelve months delivering additional content, and further tweaking the game play, garnering respect from gamers and the gaming media alike along the way.  Best of all, that content cost nothing!  Feel free to correct The Incomplete Gamer, but if there’s a better supported title on the market today, then we don’t know about it.  That support continues this year, commencing with this major free update which landed on February 6th.

Criterion Games have done a sterling job in keeping the Burnout Paradise faithful happy, but what does a developer do to jump start sales of a 12 month old game in a crowded marketplace.  Criterion Games relaunched the game!  A new SKU, and a new title (Burnout Paradise: Ultimate Box), complete with all the free downloadable content to date as well as the new premium (read: not free) content; the Party Pack – a play at home, social, pass the controller type mode.

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The greatest leaders and diplomats of the 20th Century couldn’t bring a lasting peace to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but now there’s a chance that a young video gamer with nothing else but a bag of chips, a bad case of acne and a computer mouse can now do what no man before him has achieved, and broker peace in the Middle East.

It makes sense really. I mean if you can train a virtual dog to reliably follow almost one in every ten voice commands screamed into the microphone of your DS, then this is the next obvious step.

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The Australian TiVo website is up and running and in less than two days TiVo makes an in-store appearance at your friendly neighbourhood Harvey Norman. The Incomplete Gamer hopes they’ve built a golden shrine to TiVo in each and every store: a raised rotating dais, complete with sexy smiling Sale of the Century models, gifting plush TiVo dolls, TiVo Beach towels and TiVo Slippers to everyone who passes; all the while extolling the virtues of TiVo – the god of Digital Video Recording.

The reality we fear, will be something far less compelling. The way we see it, TiVo in-store demonstrations just don’t work.

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Quite a while back, gaming blog, Kotaku, posted a short item about Australia. It’s always good to see our little corner of the world getting a bit of videogaming exposure. This little gem was titled ‘How Australia destroys box art’. Expecting something dramatic (think – book burning for the new millennium) I clicked through, to read the post and accompanying comments, hoping to see exclusive footage of bonfires, molten game cases and smug angry zealots brandishing placards.

Turned out videogame box art wasn’t being destroyed by an angry mob, but by the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Apparently, the author of the post, as well as some of those who added their comments to the article, felt that the OFLC was guilty of a something no less disturbing than book burning – they were defacing their precious video gaming box art with the OFLC colour-coded classification markings.

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