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Games and Sports

Laureta: Change Of Life In Vanadiel

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI Online on my Playstation 2 since it came out for the PS2 in the U.S. last spring. I readily admit that I am an FFXI dilettante. I’m not a level grinder and don’t really like to play that way. My Elvaan monk Phareaude is rank 2 and almost at level 14. That’s not very powerful, but good enough to move with a lot of confidence, and I’ve enjoyed a number of special events and learned a lot about the game and the game world. It’s been a lot of fun!

The recent Christmas season event gave me the opportunity to visit several of the other nations for the first time. I enjoyed that so much that I began to think about creating another character to play in one of the other nations. So yesterday I created Laureta, a petite female Hume warrior living in Bastok. So yes, I’m yet another guy using a female avatar in the game world! The change of life has been fun so far. I really haven’t noticed anything different about playing as a girl, but Bastok isn’t as busy as San D’Oria so this may take some time. As for the rest, it’s just what I had hoped for, a new city, new job, new quests!

I haven’t given up on Phareaude, but I’m going to enjoy being Laureta for a while!

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Games and Sports

Final Fantasy XI Chess Expansion

Every now and then I think we all have a moment when we realize that life is imitating art or vice versa. I had one of those today at my son’s chess tournament.

It was the Latin School Chess Championship at Navy Pier and only the second that my son was playing in. He was very excited as were most of the players there who ranged from Kindergarteners to High School aged. I had a lot of fun taking him there, especially since I didn’t get to do things like that until I was in High School.

Anyway, if you are a parent at a such an event, you spend a lot of time standing around, mainly because there wasn’t anywhere to sit except the floor. While standing around between rounds, I noticed that all of the players were running around everywhere. It was as if walking was not even a valid mode of transportation. That’s when I had my moment, this is like Final Fantasy XI Online! In the game most players run everywhere. Walking can be done, but most never do. This is something in the game that I always think is kind of funny. But after today, perhaps it merely reflects the age spread of most of the players, for whom running is the first and best option both online and off!

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Games and Sports

Chinese Characters for the Gwai Lo Mahjong Player

Over the holidays my inlaws gave my wife and I a bit of a Mahjong beginner’s clinic. Several hours later, my head hurt quite a bit, but I did know how to play the game. Obviously, I’d do a much better job knowing the characters on the pieces better. So I asked my wife to compile a cheat sheet of characters for me with Cantonese pronunciations which I’ll share here. If you have Chinese language support in your browser, you’ll see these below.

Mahjong Characters 麻 雀 字

東 dung east
南 naam south
西 sai west
北 buk north
中 jung central
發 faat prosperous
白 baak white, blank
萬 maan ten thousand
一 yut one
二 yee two
三 saam three
å›› sei four
五 m (or ng) five
å…­ luk six
七 tsut seven
å…« baat eight
九 gau nine
十 sup ten

春 chun spring
夏 haa summer
秋 chau autumn
冬 dong winter

梅 mui plum blossom
蘭 laan orchid
菊 guk chrysanthemum
竹 juk bamboo

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Games and Sports

How About A Real Puffy AmiYumi Game?

I’ve been reading Chris Kohler’s excellent book, Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life and I’ve almost finished Chapter 9 which covers game music and music games. Music in games has always been a big deal for me and back in the day I even ripped songs from some of my Saturn game CDs to play in the car (the Virtual Cop, Wipeout, and Nights music are my favs). One of my favorite music games was the PS1 game Parappa the Rapper. Anyway, what does this have to do with Puffy AmiYumi?

Well, I was watching last night’s show whose first episode featured Yumi singing opera (I really liked the mouth animations in this one which added to the hilarity of the episode, good show!), followed by an episode in which they literally save a farm by playing a concert. This got me to thinking that Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi would be perfect for a console game in the style of Parappa the Rapper and its sequel (there was a Parappa 2 eventually but this came out firs) Um Jammer Lammy! The stories they’ve done so far would lend themselves to a music game of this sort quite well I think. The minigames on the Cartoon Network site are okay, but this show deserves a real game. Parappa the Rapper was a big success in Japan and a little less so in the U.S. while Um Jammer Lammy did not fair so well. Both of these titles got pretty good reviews, so maybe all they really lacked for U.S. success was a really good hook. Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi has been a pretty big hit for Cartoon Network, so maybe Puffy AmiYumi is the hook that a Parappa/Lammy style game would need in this market. I hope they’ll give it a shot!

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Games and Sports

EA Kills Madden NFL Competition! Will Quality Die Too?

In a move that just screams monopoly, Electronic Arts has secured exclusive rights to NFL properties and players for the next 5 years. That basically means that every other football video game that used NFL players and stadiums is out of luck and essentially out of business. This all happens just as we were seeing the competition between Madden and ESPN really heat up, even leading to consumer friendly price drops!

In the end this cannot be good news for the consumer. Without competition, there’s nothing to stop EA from keeping prices high. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Madden hit $60/copy on the next generation of consoles. Now $60 for a game is not automatically out of the question if the game rates it. But given recent news about the way EA treats its employees, there is little reason to believe that there are going to be innovations that merit the higher price tag. I remember back in the early Playstation days that EA actually cancelled Madden 96 because the quality of the game wasn’t up to snuff compared to Sony’s NFL Gameday. That was during a time of intense competition before EA had secured a virtual lock on NFL football games. In the absence of real competition, I wonder if they would have cancelled?

Now in all fairness, EA also has an exclusive deal with NASCAR, which as an old Papyrus NASCAR Racing fan, did not sit too well with me. But so far EA has continued to make improvements each year. So perhaps the same will hold true for Madden as well. On the whole, game developers are a passionate lot and will do great things if the suits will just stay out of the way.

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Games and Sports

Is The Phantom Party Over?

Well it looks like the Phantom party is nearly over at Infinium Labs! GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Infinium Labs is nearly out of money and is seeking fresh financing to the tune of about $11M USD. Infinium, maker of the yet to be launched Phantom gaming console, has been the center of much controversy and even threatened a lawsuit against HardOCP over coverage that criticized Infinium’s business plan and company officers. In response, HardOCP launched its own lawsuit and won. With only about $21K USD on hand, it looks like the Phantom console, already delayed to Q2 2005, won’t ever see the light of day.

This whole Phantom episode reminds me of The Producers. In the movie two theatre producers over sell shares in their production and then set out to make the worst play ever so that it would close on opening night. That way there wouldn’t be a any profits to pay out to the shareholders. Unfortunately for them, their production of Springtime for Hitler turns out to be a wildly successful farce unraveling their plan and sending them to prison.

Now I’m not saying that that was the plan in the case of Infinium’s Phantom console! It’s just an interesting thought. I do wonder though, what will happen to all of the money invested if the Phantom never comes out. I suppose the stage will be set for write-offs and lawsuits.

As for the actual plan of downloading PC games to a consolized PC where they would self configure and install using scripts, it’s not totally crazy. It’s just that the world of PC games is too different from the world of console games. PC games tend to cater to people who know what to do with a PC and are not afraid of hours of building and tweaking to squeeze out extra performance. They also aren’t afraid to spends hundreds of dollars upgrading their boxes every year to play the latest and greatest.

Practically speaking, Infinium would be hard pressed to both keep their install scripts up to date, and upgrade the Phantom hardware for their customers. I doubt Microsoft or Sony could do this either! Not only that, these days the most popular PC games are first person shooters like Half Life 2 and Unreal Tournament and online games like World of Warcraft and Everquest. The people who are into these games are likely the very last who would ever sign up for the Phantom console service, and those who would won’t find the most popular games there. I think this is a classic no win situation.

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Games and Sports

Madden 2006, Oops! I did it again!

American football is a funny game. It’s rough and tough and so are its overwhelmingly male fans, or at least they’d like to be, I think… That’s why it is with some wonder and a little cynicism that I receive stories like the Janet Jackson Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction or now the ABC Monday Night Football steamy intro ruckus. I mean come on! Most of the people watching the game actually like seeing naked women. Who are these people calling in to complain? Meanwhile ABC has apologized to the viewers and the NFL (like they really care). Come on, ABC knew this would happen. Oh me oh my, look at all of this free publicity. Oh yeah, they’re really sorry.

Now back to the fans. Every year, like clockwork, a new Madden football game is released by Electronic Arts. And every year now, it sells millions of copies. Some fans complain that it’s just last year’s game with some tweaks and new stats. I don’t really believe that myself, but if EA really wants to shake things up, maybe they should slip in some of the naughtiness we’ve been seeing around the real game like steamy intros and wardrobe malfunctions. That would spice things up a bit for the 2006 edition! Of course, I guess they would have to add a 5 second delay too.

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Games and Sports

Halo 2 First Impressions

Heh heh! First let me say that I must be the kind of customer that Amazon just hates! Back in August I put in a preorder for Halo 2 Limited Edition just to make sure I would be able to get a copy when it came out. Halo 2 was released in the U.S. yesterday with hundreds if not thousands of gamers lining up at midnight across the country to be one of the first to get a legitimate copy of the game.

I checked my order on Amazon and noticed that not only had it not shipped, it actually had an arrival date of November 8. So I guess they had meant to get it to me by release time, but something had gone wrong. Well, the nearby Virgin Megastore had Halo 2 including the Limited Edition, so being fundamentally impatient, I cancelled my Amazon order and high tailed it over to the Virgin store in the closing minutes of my lunch break. I got the last copy of the limited edition! 🙂 Not only that, it cost me $4 less than the Amazon price with shipping! So I could even brag to my wife of my frugality! 😉 If Amazon did have shipping issues, I wonder if they saw a lot of cancellations yesterday?

As for the game itself, I’ve only had time to put in a hour’s worth of play and have died about a half dozen times, but I must say that I like it! There’s a lot of debate online about mouse keyboard versus console controller for first person shooters (fps). Most PC gamers believe that mouse and keyboard are best, and I tend to agree. But for Halo at least, getting used to using the controller is pretty easy. So don’t let controller bigotry keep you from playing this game! Oh so why have I died so much? Well, I suck! At least for now, and I haven’t read the manual either. I used to be a crusader with regard to manuals, but these days I like to just jump in and see how much I can pick up just playing. People generally won’t read manuals anyway, which is something I keep in mind when designing and writing software for my own projects and work.

Anyway, if you like fps games, this is a good one to get. The graphics and sound are very good and the control scheme is easy to get into, even for old school fps gamers. Hey, it even has a decent story developing. So that’s my one hour review! I’ll add to this later, I hope! The real fun won’t begin until I try it on Xbox Live! Here are some links to other reviews.

GameSpy

1up.com

Yahoo! Games Domain

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Games and Sports

PSP Details Revealed: Killing Me Softly…

Yesterday Sony revealed more details concerning their upcoming portable games console, the Playstation Portable (PSP). The PSP will launch in Japan on December 12 for 19800 Yen. If U.S. pricing is similar, then this means the PSP will cost less than $200! Sony also said that battery life will be between 4 and 6 hours between charges depending on use.

Now first of all, the price is unbelievable. Obviously this is meant to be competitive with Nintendo’s upcoming DS which will launch at $149 in the U.S.. But there’s no way Sony will be making a profit on the hardware at $200 a unit. You can’t get a low end iPod for that much, and arguably there’s a lot more going on in the PSP relative to the iPod. So a wild eyed guess says that Sony will be losing $200 or more per sale! Granted, losing money on the console hardware and making it up on game royalties is standard in the games industry. But this is a lot of money to lose on an unproven console going against a very successful and entrenched competitor like Nintendo.

The other unbelievable thing is the 4 to 6 hours of battery life. Like laptop battery life claims from the manufacturer, this must be taken with a huge grain of salt. If the PSP video display sucks power anything like the one on my kids’ Leapster, cut Sony’s claims in half. At 2 to 3 hours, the PSP could prove to be a bit frustrating for the hard core gamer on the go. On the point of battery life, Sony had better be telling the truth or else they could become quite a laughing stock and the butt of jokes, much as the Apple Newton’s much touted handwriting recognition became when it proved to be less than advertised.

All of that said, Sony, you’re killin’ me! I still think that of the two new handhelds, the PSP is the sexier/cooler/hipper one to have. And at $200, it’s well in range. But Sony, why no movies until 2005? The Playstation 2 launched in Japan with very few games, but the ability to play DVD movies. That movie playing ability really supported early sales of a console that was rather difficult for developers to work with initially. And since Sony owns movie studios, selling more DVDs still helps the bottom line. So why no movies at PSP launch? Writing movies to the new UMD format shouldn’t be any more trouble than writing games to it, so I’m guessing that they haven’t got all of the bugs out of mass producing UMDs yet. So they simply made a choice to go with games over movies. Still, a few block busters from their library should not have been too much trouble.

Well, both Sony and Nintendo are taking big risks with their new handhelds. Sony’s seem to be primarily technical, while Nintendo’s is more of wtf to do with the second screen. This should be an interesting Christmas.

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Games and Sports

Xbox 2 Announcement Nears

A story on Gamesindustry.biz states that Bill Gates will be the keynote speaker at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. He is expected to make the formal announcement of Xbox 2 at that time. Lately, news coming out of the Xbox camp has been pretty good. Peter Molyneux’s action RPG Fable was released for the platform and went on to become the fastest selling game in Xbox history. Though this record is not likely to stand as Halo 2 has surpassed 1.5 million preorders for its November 9 release date.

And to that good news, I would add that the likelihood of backwards compatibility on Xbox 2 has increased with the recent release of Microsoft Virtual PC for MacOS X. Why? Because today’s Macintosh computers are built around the a PowerPC (PPC) architecture similar to that is rumored to be at the core of Xbox 2. Well this is more than rumor since early development kits are also based on PPC. So it is more plausible that backwards compatibility can be achieved using Virtual PC-like emulation. This could also get them around the challenge presented by going from Nvidia to ATI for the graphics chip set. Backwards compatibility would go a long way towards supporting the launch of Xbox 2.

So far from being dead, Xbox 2 is alive and kicking. This probably due in no small part to Bill Gates’ personal involvement or at least interest in the project. Gates didn’t make his money being stupid. Perhaps he realizes that if Microsoft is going to thrive in a post-PC, post-Windows era, it needs to get into other markets. Games are a natural progression and a huge growth market rivalling movies and television. If MS can get a piece of that pie, it won’t hurt so much when Windows and Office shipments start to drop off.

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Games and Sports

Playboy: The Mansion Slips Past XMas

Well it looks like Playboy: The Mansion won’t be under the tree this year! Citing quality issues, developer Groove Games has pushed the game into early next year. Now why is this here? Why do I care? Well actually, I don’t care about the game itself at all and had no plans to promote or buy it. What I have is the morbid curiousity of one passing a traffic accident in the all too common gaper’s delays we have here in Chicagoland. When hyped up games miss the crucial Christmas shopping season, the best time of the year to release any game, it usually means something catastrophic has happened.

So this leads to the question of, just how badly does Playboy: The Mansion suck at this point? There’s been a bit of a flurry of titillation games released lately. There’s the Guy Game, a new Leisure Suit Larry game, and you even throw in the Sims 2 for that matter. With the exception of the Sims 2, I wouldn’t expect very much since the main selling point of these games is boobs, boobs, boobs! So why the delay? screenshots of the game look pretty good, so it must be play mechanics, or maybe the bounces are not just right. Or maybe the thing just isn’t any fun… Polygonal vixens alone do not a good game make! This reminds me a bit of Showgirls, a movie so bad that even the gratuitous nudity could not make it interesting! Could it just be the curse of the licensed game? Games based on movie and tv licenses are notorious for sucking big time, cough! Matrix! Cough! This usually happens because the game is rushed out with the idea of making a quick buck off of naive fans of the property the game is based on.

Well, perhaps Playboy fans should rejoice. If promises of quality are delivered on, they may just get a good game afterall.

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Games and Sports

Good Time To Be A Gamer

It looks like this is a very good time to be a gamer. Nintendo and Sony are introducing some much anticipated new hardware at the Tokyo Game Show. Nintendo’s new dual screen DS looks like a nice machine, but I still don’t really get it. I can’t think of just how much more compelling gameplay the second screen adds and certainly not enough to go out and plunk down $150. I’d rather buy a couple of SPs for the kids, or maybe some copies of the new Pokemon titles.

As for Sony’s PSP, weighing in at $300 definitely puts it in wait and see land for me. I like the looks (oh sooo sexy) and the potential, but I won’t be an early adopter there as I have other bills to pay first! Sony also introduced a new slimmed down version of the PS, the PStwo. At $149 with network adapter built in, it’s a tempting cute little package. I don’t really need another PS2, but the small form factor just screams out, portable DVD player!

There are a lot of interesting games coming out too. Maybe I’ll write a bit about that next time.

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Games and Sports

Will Gran Turismo 4 Miss XMas?

When I received my weekly update from gamesindustry.biz today, I was a bit disappointed to read that there are rumors that Gran Turismo 4 for the Playstation 2 may miss a Christmas 2004 release date in the United States. In the games industry, missing the biggest shopping season of the year is usually a sign that something catastrophic has happened in the development process. This tends to be supported by the observation that games that get pushed out the door in order to meet the holidays or a movie release date (cough!Matrix!cough!!), tend to be full of bugs.

Without any other information, I can only speculate that further delays in Gran Turismo 4 are due to performance issues related to online network play. Why? Because network play is the biggest thing to be added to the next iteration of the series and easily the most complex. Players have come to expect a lot of what is arguably the greatest driving game ever. If the framerate drops to 20fps when you hook up with your buddies to race online, that will be big trouble! High resolution graphics, detailed models, and online play may not get along too well on the PS2. If that is the case, Polyphony’s engineers may be madly rebuilding and tweaking the car models even as we speak in order to get acceptable performance. Don’t be too surprised if the maximum number of players able to race online drops from 6 to 4. The upcoming NASCAR 2005 from EA only supports 4 online players on Xbox and PS2 and the car models and environments probably are not nearly as complex as Gran Turismo is reported to be. The Xbox can probably support more online players, but they likely develop from a shared code base which means having to meet the lowest common denominator. That is, the PS2 may not have the horses to support more than 4 online racers.

I might further speculate that development of Gran Turismo 4 for the Playstation Portable (PSP) due out in Japan next Spring, could be interfering as well. It has been reported that GT for PSP will be nearly a straight port of the PS2 version. Assuming the same team is working on both versions, the need to port to the PSP may place constraints on available solutions to other development problems. The bottom line is that it all takes more time, and the feature set may be reduced in order to get the thing out.

This is of course all speculative and could be completely wrong. It doesn’t really matter though because whenever it comes out GT4 will be a huge hit and it will be good. It has to be.

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Games and Sports

New From Hong Kong! A Virtual Girlfriend!

I’m not making this up! In what might appear to be a effort to one up the Japanese in the all important dating sim market, Hong Kong based Artificial Life, Inc. will soon release a virtual girlfriend game for 3G cell phones. I first heard about this on Slashdot and here’s the link to the BBC News story.

This is all very interesting because it sounds like a  tamagotchi pet for men, an expensive one at that. According to the BBC story, the player will have to keep his girlfriend’s affections by buying her gifts and flowers. On top of the subscription fee, these additional gifts incur additional fees. At some point, one has to wonder if the cyber girlfriend is more expensive than a real one would be! And the cynical might further wonder just who is being played! Despite these questions, I suspect that the game will be a big hit which will only spawn numerous imitators. It might even make it to the U.S. considering that Artificial Life, whose global HQ is in Hong Kong, is also incorporated in the United States.

I’m also rather interested in the technology behind the game. Is there real AI technology in play here? In any case, the heavy processing would be done on remote servers. The real trick in the handset will be handling the graphics, essential for a game like this. The clips on the Artificial Life web site also have a very Final Fantasy-esque look to them. Those are cut scenes I would guess, but they probably do define the game’s overall esthetic and may again indicate the market being pursued. The game play described in the company’s press release is also very reminiscent of Shenmue in that the virtual girlfriend has her own virtual daily routine so she’s doing different things in different places throughout the day.

And since the virtual girlfriend looks the same for every player, if the game proves a success, a new star will be born with product endorsements to follow!:) The ladies need not feel left out, as virtual boyfriend is scheduled for a February 2005 release.

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Games and Sports

Camp Astro Boy — Kyampu Tetsuwan Atom

Oh the wonder of summer camp! My two oldest are away at camp until Friday, leaving us the two youngest and me with a little more time for gaming! Today I’m hoping to pick up Astro Boy Omega Factor for GBA. All of the reviews I’ve read on this have been good, and with my oldest son away in the woods, I might get a chance to play it through myself! Oh joy of joys!

Nintendo has a nice Quicktime movie of the action right here. And here’s a review on 1up.com. I haven’t seen the original Astro Boy anime or read the manga yet (saw a couple of eps of the new series), but I became quite enamored with Osamu Tezuka’s artistic style as reflected in Android Kikaider and Cyborg 009. So I’m adding Astro Boy to my growing list of manga and anime interests.