Category: Games and Sports

Nostalgia is a bug that bites very hard. Last week I watched an Icons episode featuring Yu Suzuki who is probably best known for the Virtua Fighter series of 3D fighting games and more recently the sprawling adventure/rpg Shenmue. The young Suzuki sounded a lot like my oldest son, so I TiVo’d the show and watched it again with my son. This lead to digging up my old Shenmue discs for movie clips and to my joy finding the soundtrack available free and legal online. Now my son has discovered my old Sega Saturn games, including Virtua Fighter and Virtua Fighter 2. So the Saturn is being dragged out this weekend for some serious gameplay. I hope the thing still works!

While the rest of the world is enjoying the Winter Olympics, I’ve been counting down the days until the Daytona 500 kicks off my favorite sport, NASCAR auto racing. So I was absolutely shocked when I read the news that Jimmy Johnson’s crew chief Chad Knaus had been ejected from NASCAR’s premiere event. The thing that got me was just how blatant the attempt to break the rules had been. I mean, things like the car being too low, or a spoiler angle being off are one thing, but a device to raise the rear window is no accident or oversight!

Knaus’ team has been one of the strongest and most consistent during his tenure, but this rules violation suddenly casts all of their success under a different light. Allegations of cheating and forbidden technologies, like traction control, abound during a typical season. But for a team of such stature as Hendrick’s number 48 Lowes Chevy team to be caught red handed is a real bombshell. And it is also a warning for any other teams out there that think that they’ve gotten too big for NASCAR.

Well, in the end, Knaus should count himself lucky. In some other sports blatantly breaking the rules like this might draw a full season suspension or even a ban. So based on what has been reported so far, Mr. Hendrick might not want to complain too loudly.

I don’t usually pay much attention to Slashdot on Sundays, but a documentary (or mockumentary) film on D&D players caught my eye today. After watching it and having a good laugh, I thought, “there but for the grace of God go I!” I was never into the D&D scene in highschool, Starfleet Battles was more my thing, but these games were played by the same crowd in my school. None of us had girlfriends at the time.
Fortunately, the 20-sided die of life rolled in my favor and I found the woman of my dreams (and sometimes nightmares). I think though, that the guys in the film are in a bit of denial. They’d be a lot happier if they just accepted who they are and just forget about girls.  Of course I don’t think anyone should take this too seriously. Anyway, here’s a link to the video on Google.

Fear of Girls

It’s been on the E3 rule books for some time now, but E3 is finally going to crack down on the use of scantily clad women in exhibition booths at the show. It’ll be interesting to see what some exhibitors will do to get around the rules. Perhaps this year, the nearly naked booth babes will be replaced by smartly dressed booth OL’s!

Toyota is coming to NASCAR’s Nextel Cup racing series in 2007 and things are already starting to heat up. I know the purists out there won’t be happy, but I think Toyota’s going to come in and shake things up a bit. And that can only be good for competition and, ultimately, the fans paying top dollar for a good show. I mean, Jack Roush of all people is already concerned/worried that Toyota is going to be spending some major money in the series. This is 5 Teams Jack Roush!

Well don’t worry Mr. Roush, I don’t think that Ford, Chevy, and Dodge are going to leave you high and dry. So it won’t be easy for Toyota to simply come in and clean house. I like Greg Biffle’s attitude much better, “It doesn’t bother me any,” he said. “It’s free enterprise. C’mon, bring your best stuff.” You can bet that Toyota, no stranger to racing, will bring their best stuff. And as far as I’m concerned, Toyota has been in this country for a long time making cars and employing American workers. They’re naturalized enough for me!

Now 10 days past my 14 day World of Warcraft trial, I’m very tempted to buy the game, except for one little thing… I’m too cheap and lazy to haul my ass off to the store to buy the retail box that they insist I need to convert my trial account! Why should I need the box? As near as I can tell, I’ve already got all of the code on my PC from the trial DVD and patches. All that I really need from the box is the auth code. Why can’t I just pay Blizzard for the code and skip this box thing and the messy hauling my ass out into the streets or waiting for UPS? In an age of Direct2Drive and Steam for online game distribution, making me go buy the boxed game is just another barrier to the sale. Oh well, I guess I’ll get around to buying that box sometime…

By now it is no secret that the Xbox 360 got off to a slow start in Japan. Part of this may be explained by the delay of Dead or Alive 4, which would have been a nice launch title to have. But I don’t think anyone was expecting Earth moving sales in Japan even if DoA 4 had appeared on time. Sales will probably pick up once DoA 4 comes out along with a number of titles from a number of prominent Japanese developers that Microsoft went to great lengths to sign up.

Xbox 360 will almost certainly do better in Japan than the orginal Xbox did, but that may not actually be the point at all. Consider that the U.S. video game market is bigger than the Japanese market (which has actually been in decline the last few years), and what looks like a growing European market. Plenty of money can be made with successes in the more familiar U.S. and European markets alone. So why bother with Japan?

It’s all about the games. Some of the most innovative video games are still being developed in Japan. It is likely that some of the Japanese software under development for the 360 will also make its way to U.S. shores. So even if a Japanese 360 title strikes out in Japan because of the relatively low number of 360 consoles there, it may do quite well in the U.S. and Europe. And a more well rounded line up of games, relative to the original Xbox, will only help Xbox 360 sales everywhere.

I finally managed to login to a World of Warcraft server last night to try out my trial edition of the game. I ended up logging onto one of the role playing servers (RP) since the so called "normal" servers continued to be full and I didn’t want to get killed in 5 minutes on the player versus player (PvP) servers. I figured that I could do a little role playing if need be.

Now call me crazy, creepy, or whatever, but I’ve grown fond of playing female characters in online games, so I created a lovely female night elf warrior to play as. Since the trial is only for 14 days, I chose to start as a warrior since they tend to be pretty straight forward to play and I like to mix it up anyway. Next I just jumped into the game without reading the fine manual. I wanted to see how much I could do without RTFM first.

Cutting to the chase, I had fun! Yeah, first you have to level up in the usual slaughter the small animals sort of fashion. But, I was impressed with how well the automatic help system answered my questions as they came up in the game. And it only took a few minutes to get used to using mouse and keyboard for movement after being spoiled with a gamepad in FFXI for so long. I only played for about an hour, but I’m looking forward to going back in, after I spend some quality time with the manual.

Well, with over 4 million paying subscribers, I suppose I should have expected it, nevertheless I’m still bummed out that all of the World of Warcraft servers I try to log onto are full! After a number of installation glitches followed by the expected hour or two of downloading and patching, I was finally ready to give my trial edition of World of Warcraft a whirl.

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI for over a year and a half now, but I hadn’t been online for a while. Upon my return, I discovered that my favorite linkshell had disbanded and feeling a bit lonely in the world, I decided to give WoW a try. But if it is always so hard to get on as it was tonight, I probably won’t be plunking down any cash for the full version any time soon. I guess at this point their holiday season marketing is a bit self-defeating.

In what continues to be a major PR setback for Sony, Sony has decided to recall all of their copy protected CDs which include the now infamous rootkit. It’s kind of funny that all by themselves, Sony has managed to add the previously obscure hacker term, "rootkit", to the public lexicon.

This could not have come at a worst time for Sony with respect to promoting the Playstation 3 as Microsoft launches the Xbox 360 next week. Up until now, Sony had been fairly vocal about their next generation console in an attempt to avoid losing mindshare during the 360 launch. But since the rootkit story broke, I haven’t seen anything about the PS 3. There are already rumors that the PS 3 will not launch in the U.S. until fall 2006 at the earliest. As for Microsoft, they get the double bonus because Sony can’t hype the PS 3 during the 360 launch and Microsoft has offered software to remove the Sony rootkit from PCs. Apple gets a double bonus too because the copy protected CDs can’t install the rootkit on Macs and Sony will also have a hard time promoting sometimes iPod competitor PSP with the controversy grabbing the headlines. In short, Sony’s competitors have gotta love this!

I hope that Sony will learn a lesson from this and stop treating their customers like criminals. The real pirates will never be stopped by some rinky dink copy protection. Now Sony faces millions of dollars in costs associated with the recall and the inevitable class action lawsuits. And they have lost a lot of good will as well. I for one will think twice about any future purchases of Sony electronics and I certainly won’t be buying any Sony CDs either.

Just 16 days from now the Xbox 360 launches in the U.S.. I currently have no plans to buy one any time soon, so why am I so excited? I’ve already got a big backlog of games waiting to be beat, so why should I care? Well part of it is that I tend to take a dim sum approach to gaming, eating a little here and tasting a bit there. So in a year’s time I may have a 360, but my main excitement is in watching the battle between Microsoft and Sony for the hearts and minds (and money) of gamers all over the world.

I really want to see the 360 succeed and snatch 1st place from Sony because in the end it will mean better games for everyone and I’d love to see an American company snatch back what Atari fumbled away so many years ago. That said though, I’m not a big nationalist by any means. Heck, I’m listening to J-Pop tunes while typing this. But I guess it is very American to root for the underdog, even if it is the often reviled Microsoft. I’d especially love to see the 360 make it big in Japan. Many believe that a gaijin (foreign) console could never make it in Japan. But I believe that the Japanese gamer is bigger than that and will be happy to buy a 360 if it has games he/she wants to play. 1up.com has an interesting article right now that draws comparisons between the Dreamcast and the 360 that in light of the DC’s failure are a little chilling. But they also point out some important and compelling reasons that Xbox 360 may succeed where the DC failed.

Dreamcast 2.0: Is Xbox 360 the second coming of the Sega Dreamcast?

A couple of days ago I received the sad news that the remaining shows of the Video Games Live concert tour had been cancelled. It just seems that whenever I want to hear and see the music of video games performed live, some mishap occurs. Perhaps it just isn’t meant to be… Naaah! They just over estimated the audience and didn’t do enough marketing. I never saw any sign of marketing beyond the web site and I think restricting themselves to a few large markets would have made more sense. Yes, video games are big now, but you still have to do good marketing. Some ads on Adult Swim, G4, and the Anime Network would have helped.

I don’t know if they’ll revive the tour or not, but I definitely won’t be buying any tickets far in advance the next time.

The good news is that Sony has released PSP Media Manager which reportedly makes managing media on the PSP a lot easier than it is now. The bad news is that they are charging $19.95 to download the software!

WTF? I wrestled with getting movie clips and music on my PSP last night and while it is not that hard for the tech saavy and the determined to do this, I couldn’t help but think about how easy it is to do the same kinds of things with my iPod. Apple didn’t charge me extra in order to make using the device they sold me easier. When is Sony going to wake up and realize that the iPod is a major competitor to the PSP and that ease of use should not be something that you have to pay extra for?

w00t! Video Games Live is coming to Chicago on Saturday November 12 and I got two tickets today! Normally I try to keep spending down on the eve of a convention (Reactor), but after what happened to me with the Uematsu Dear Friends concert, I did not want to miss out this time. The Chicago Theatre is a pretty cozy venue, so even the cheap seats should be pretty good!