Category: Games and Sports

Yugi Oh GX got started on Cartoon Network today. It’s basically young aspiring duelists in Duelist Academy, all seeking to become the King of Games. Well, I sit here as the Wimp of Games! My poor SP sits almost forgotten as I get cozier with my PSP and Ubuntu Linux. The SP’s original mission was to provide gaming goodness during the lunch hour on days when I’m not out walking around. But I just haven’t been able to get over the feeling that I’ll look like I’m goofing off if I play games on the SP in my office. So yes, I am the Wimp of Games!

Well no time to sulk, it’s time to get the FFXI October update!

Okay, first things first. There is no porn on this site! Nevertheless, my top read post is an item that mentions porn on the psp. Of course most of the traffic is probably due to search engine bots, nevertheless it does once again confirm that one of the most searched for items on the internet is porn (or pr0n 4 l337 dudes). So why am I writing about this? Simple, remember the episode of Sponge Bob Squarepants where Sponge Bob and  Patrick keep saying swear words that are bleeped out by the sounds of dolphins? That was one of the funniest episodes ever and like a kid who enjoys the shock value of using forbidden words, I love screwin with the search engines by using the word porn whenever it is appropriate. LOL

Anyway, I was curious about where the couple of thousand extra hits might be coming from and while searching I came across the PSP Porn blog. The hits weren’t coming from any references there, but it is a pretty cool looking blog. As for web porn on the PSP itself, it isn’t worth the bother because searching for that stuff really requires keying in  a lot of stuff which is a bit of a pain in the PSP web browser and you definitely don’t want to stumble over a graphics heavy site with the PSP because the memory buffer will fill up. It’s just too too hard… Oh I just had to say that!

As for porn on UMDs, I haven’t seen any in the U.S. yet, not that I’ve been looking of course. But if I were to make a wild guess, I would not be too surprised if it showed up in Virgin Megastores within a year. They seem to be trying to cater to the cool stuff niche, and they already carry a good selection of UMD movies which I have not seen elsewhere yet and they already carry adult DVDs. So porn UMDs at Virgin would not be a big stretch. Will I be buying them? Nope, probably not. Not because porn is bad and evil, though a lot of it is, but because most of it is crap! I don’t have a lot of patience with low quality products, even porn. So, have I said porn enough today?

SecurityFocus is carrying this story about a digital plague in the World of Warcraft. Basically, the game developers, Blizzard, introduced a monster which a self replicating curse which could spread from player to player. But they failed to limit the curse’s active area to the dungeon. This allowed mischievous/curious players to teleport to populated areas such as cities and spread the curse to other players!

It’s an interesting study of what happens when you mix self replicating code with unpredictable human players. While I’m sure that a lot of WoW players were surprised and pissed at getting sick and dying in the supposedly safe cities, it certainly must have added some spice to the game. Sometimes I wish the cities in the MMORPG I play, Final Fantasy XI, were not so safe. I’d love to see the beastmen invade the cities for a change. The carnage and heroism would be pretty cool!

WTF! That was my first reaction when I saw the new controller for the Nintendo Revolution. Now, hours later…WTF! Nintendo certainly has an interesting idea here though, but somehow I am not sure that a controller that looks like a TV remote is going to get more nongamers to play.

The real test will be what the game developers design around this controller. While I’m sure that some of it will be interesting, I cannot help but notice that titles that take full advantage of the new controller will not be easily portable to other game consoles or the PC. Is this “innovation lock-in” a sneaky way for Nintendo to get more exclusives? I don’t know, but clearly Nintendo is trying to do something different here and I have to admire them for that.

I was sitting in/on my reading room today perusing the October GamePro and ran across a couple of interesting ads. One of the ads says,"If you’re going to sit in your basement PRETENDING TO BE AN ELF, you should at least have some friends over to help." This is an ad for the pencil and paper version of Dungeons and Dragons, you know, what we played before computer and console games took over. While playing D&D is not what I’d call the real world, playing with real physical humans in the room with you is at least a step in that direction.

The second ad features a beautiful landscape image, trees, a lake, and distant mountain tops. In the foreground on the grass lies a game control with the words, "Maybe the last level isn’t." The controller is between the words "level" and "isn’t". This is an ad for for Outward Bound wilderness adventures. Now this is a direct appeal to gamers to get out and adventure in the real world. Though I suppose you could still play D&D on your wilderness adventure by the camp fire.

I find it interesting to see ads like this in a video game magazine because it offers another clue as to how much a part of the mainstream culture video games have become. There have been stories about how TV viewership among young males has fallen due to competition from video games. Companies spending money on ads to pull them away from video games is additional evidence of this.

I must admit though, that my adventures in the online world of Vana’diel and others has given me a renewed appreciation for adventures in the real world, even if there are no monsters to kill! And like the Outward Bound ad says, real world graphics are infinitely better. And there’s no load time! 🙂

With BnetD having been ruled illegal, I wonder if the outcome would have been different if everything else were the same, except BnetD prevented the use of pirated copies of Diablo or Starcraft. I think it’s great when a game has such a following, that the players want do all kinds of cool mods, but if the game’s creators aren’t onboard, then it can only end badly. It’s hard to make the interoperability argument for something as proprietary as a game service, and the judge didn’t buy it.

In any case, the BnetD genie has already escaped the bottle, so I guess the next step for Blizzard is the probably impossible task of shutting down all of these servers out in the wild. Oddly enough, their best bet may be to just leave them alone as long as none of them take on too high of a profile. Afterall, people playing on small private servers can get hooked on the game and eventually be enticed to play on the official servers which presumably should be able to offer a  wider range of experiences. That may just persuade them to buy legitimate copies of the game. Indeed, Blizzard might be well served to provide a mechanism for legitimizing a pirated copy to play on Battle.net servers if they haven’t already.

It has now been about 31.5 hours since my last 4+ hour romp in Final Fantasy XI. This was only the 2nd time in over a year of playing that I had engaged in such a long session. This time I avoided the arm cramping but having stayed up until 2am, found myself suffering severe sleep deprivation and something entirely new, cravings. The long session had consisted of a fair amount of traveling and fighting in the company of a small party of other players. It was a lot of fun and by the end of it I could probably have continued another hour or two. So I’m guessing that my brain was awash in endorphines in which case withdrawal symptoms would be expected. After that, I had a better understanding of why people get addicted to these games. I haven’t played again since that time, but I sure have been thinking about it!

Another interesting thing during the session was the dreaded question of, are you a guy? I’ve been playing a lot as a female character because it just seemed more fun that way to me, but I hadn’t really decided how I wanted to answer the question of gender if it were raised. Until now, no one had asked directly so I never raised it myself, preferring to maintain the illusion. But when asked directly I decided to just play it straight and honest. As it turned out, it was no big deal and interestingly enough no one else who joined our party later even asked about it. You don’t see lots of female characters in the game anyway, so I would guess that most players prefer to maintain the illusion too. This is just a game afterall, right?

There’s been no question that for the last few years the console gaming market has been growing in leaps and bounds rapidly eclipsing the PC gaming market with each generation. It has even lead many to believe that the PC is dead as a gaming platform. But there are still certain genres that are still better played on a PC. One of those is the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game or MMORPG. The primary reason for this advantage is the need of a keyboard (and by implication a stable surface for the keyboard) for efficient communication with other players. There’s no getting around the need of some method of easy free form communication. Mike Smith writes in his Virtual Worlds column that this keyboard issue is one of the things holding back the MMORPG on the console.

In the column, he writes that while voice chat is an option for player to player communication over services and games that support it, for more than a few players the ensuing bedlam would be totally unworkable. At least with text the player can see who is talking, when they are talking and what their relationship is to them via color coded text. Voice chat alone cannot do that, but what if we added voice recognition into the mix?

Voice recognition could be used to convert the player’s spoken words into text. Then all of the strengths of text communication would be available without the need of a keyboard. Something like this is described in the new .hack//AI Buster novel. The conversion would not even need to be perfect to get the message across in most cases. The next generation of consoles should have enough horsepower for the recognition task and if not, let the game servers do it. A good implementation of voice to text could be the killer feature in console MMORPGs. Ironically, I bet we’ll see this on the PC before it hits the consoles maybe as a hack or third party addon.

I’d laugh out loud if this were not so sad and true. An 85 year grandmother has filed a lawsuit against Rockstar Games because of the hidden sex minigame in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas which lead the ESRB to change the rating of the game from M for Mature, to AO for Adults Only. The grandmother originally purchased the game for her 14 year old grandson.

Uh, did I miss something here? The M rating clearly labels the game as for players 17 and older. So she’s suing over a game that she should never have purchased for a 14 year old in the first place. The icing on the cake of course is that the lawsuit is about a hidden, relatively hard to get to, sex game and not all of the gore and mayhem the player can engage in without very much effort. As the story is written, it appears that the game was only taken away from the kid after the stories about the sex game came out. Caps in asses, okay. But hard to get to sex, well that’s right out!

I’m not surprised that someone is suing, but as far as a class action suit goes, you really don’t want this granny as your poster child.

The ESRB has rerated Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as AO, Adults Only, due to the sex minigame recently discovered (not created!) by hackers. All along I’ve thought that the code was probably left in there locked away because it would be too much trouble to rip it out and fix any code dependencies and still ship on time. And heck, if it was discovered, so what? It’s just more sales, right? But after actually seeing a film clip of the Hot Coffee minigame, I think Rockstar must have been crazy to let this slide!

As crazy as it may seem, most of those gun-toting, Bible thumping, conservative Americans may actually have a point this time. The sex scene is definitely pornographic in the cinematic sense, i.e. it features everything you might see in a porn film. As soon as the girlfriend went down on him, it became X-rated and the other positions just slammed the ball out of the park (no bukkake though!), even though the guy keeps his clothes on the whole time. Generally, I prefer sex to violence, but in a strange twisted way many Americans have real problems with sex. Heck, a lot of Americans think most of the sexual positions in the Hot Coffee minigame are evil!

Now I don’t want the government to get involved in this, but clearly a major QA breakdown occured with GTA. Even locked away, you simply cannot take the chance that content like this is going to be found. If they want to make hentai games, fine, but don’t ship something like this in a game that you know a lot of kids are likely to be playing. Showing porn to kids is illegal in Illinois and probably other states as well under statutory rape provisions. So I guess Rockstar had better prepare for the inevitable lawsuits now.

Oh well, on the bright side, I guess that makes GTA: San Andreas a bit of a collector’s item now having been officially recalled now. But I don’t know how much collector’s value there is in something that has millions of copies out there already.

When I got the latest issue of GamePro magazine in the mail today, I wasn’t really expecting a big ol’ centerfold of a buxom computer generated babe in the middle of the magazine. But that’s exactly what I got as the latest incarnation of video games as marketing vehicle left the garage (ugh). The centerfold is a promotional poster for the game Mojo Master which is a free game promoting the use of Axe products for men. In this game, the player, or playa, uses clever moves (ie lines), and Axe products to seduce women in various venues. With all of the furor over some hidden sex game code in GTA: San Andreas, I can only wonder what the prudes and grandstanding politicians are going to think of this game.

The game is actually pretty good for what it is and even compares favorably to games like Playboy: The Mansion and the most recent Leisure Suit Larry game. The graphics and sound is surprisingly good. I only played it for an hour, so I don’t really know yet what shape the "relationships" will take or how far they’ll go, but my guess is that there won’t be more than the flirting and corny lines I’ve seen so far, which is fine for a game that didn’t cost me any green. I guess the arrival of such games on the American scene means that the dating sim, a long time Japanese gaming staple, has taken up residence on these shores as well.

The game play is very simple. After picking a venue, the player equips his avatar with various clothing items and Axe product power-ups. Upon entering the venue, one or more women will be available to pick up. The player engages the "target" in what is essentially a trading card battle of moves. Winning the battle gets the player the woman’s phone number, new moves, and power-ups (ie Axe products). One thing I noticed was that you really can’t progress in the game without the Axe power-ups which makes me wonder if at some point in the future, actual product will be distributed with codes that can be used in the game. It’s a logical tie-in.

So why waste time on this game? Because it’s easy to pick up and good for a few laughs especially since it playfully pokes a finger in the eye of all of the neo-prudism that seems to be going around in the U.S. lately. The only bad thing I see here is that some poor awkward young guys out there are going to actually try to use some of the in game pick-up moves. Ladies beware!

Once again California assemblyman Leland Yee is offering up some free publicity for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This time Yee is complaining about locked hidden sex scenes in the PC version of the game. He says that the game should have gotten an Adults Only AO rating rather than the Mature M rating. Now not to be confused by facts, but the scenes can only be accessed by downloading some files from someone other than publisher Rockstar and hacking the game! Children too young to play the game will most likely not be able to unlock the sexual content. So Yee’s efforts will in the end result in a few more sales for Rockstar. Way to go assemblyman!

Admittedly, I’m giving them some free publicity too, but at least I’m aware of it! 😉

Another July 4th weekend has come around and once again this is the weekend that I’m gonna level up some more in FFXI, finish Shenmue II, and .hack//Infection. Yeah, right! I tell myself that every weekend and it always comes out the same. I’m not complaining though because I don’t finish those things because I have too much going on in real life. My RL is actually pretty good. The biggest thing happening this weekend is the return of my oldest daughter from Japanese camp, so if I only get a few hours in of gaming, that’s okay. Foton’s take on The Agony of Leveling at AFK Gamer had me lmfao! I could never get away with that though!

"There is no real life. Goes without saying, but get your house
in order before you set up at camp. Real life distractions = downtime.
(Downtime bad.) Lock the kids in their bedroom with a stack of R-rated
DVDÂ’s, load up the minifridge with refreshments, and for the love of
Keeeyrist, donÂ’t waste your time out here on the web looking at porn or
reading blogs."

Some day I’ll finish those games and more, but for now I’ll continue to enjoy my virtual dim sum of gaming!

On Father’s Day I was doing what I usually do on a spring time Sunday afternoon. I was watching the NASCAR race taking place at the Michigan superspeedway. This year, the tires supplied by Goodyear and used by all entrants are using a softer rubber compound. On this afternoon, these soft tires were not getting along with the track at all. The Michigan track is 2 miles around, giving most cars a 40 lap fuel window. This Sunday, the tires weren’t surviving more than about 30 laps before being worn to the threads, not a good thing!

Watching any NASCAR event, you hear a lot about tires, how they wear, how many to take, yadda, yadda, yadda. But never before had I heard of teams dropping out of the race because of tires, even before it began! This is indeed what happened at the U.S. Grand Prix this year. Seven teams refused to race citing concerns that Michelin raised over how its tires would fare on the Indianapolis track. As a result, only six teams raced (all with Bridgestone tires) and Michael Schumacher won the race. Now several fans are suing over it.

As a race fan, I can only see this as another reason I believe Formula One is in decline. I’ve watched the races in the past, but stopped because they simply weren’t as competitive as NASCAR or Indy Racing League. Last season, a single driver, Michael Schumacher won most of the races and of course there was the infamous "team orders" race in which a teammate who was winning the race, moved over to let Schumacher win! What happened to putting on a good show for the fans? Those teams that pulled out of the U.S. Grand Prix must have had other options than that. I don’t think you would ever see something like that happen in NASCAR because, for now at least, there appears to be a very conscious desire to put on the best show possible for the fans. They haven’t lost touch win the single reason modern sports exist in the first place, the fans! And as competitive as race car drivers are, it must have been a bitter pill to swallow for the seven drivers who didn’t get a chance to race at the U.S. Grand Prix.

I can only guess that the latest Formula One fiasco is just the surface layer of deeper problems. Those seven teams didn’t pull out just because of tires. Maybe they were trying to make a statement of another nature. Maybe they too would like to see a more competitive series where the team with the most money isn’t the one to win week in and week out. But I think it would have been better to settle these problems off of the track rather than leaving the fans hanging out to dry.

Come on now, how transparent can they be? GamesIndustry.biz reports that while Sony Computer Entertainment is dismayed that adult content is going to be released for the PSP in its UMD video format, they are powerless to stop it. Didn’t Sony create the UMD format in the first place? And who actually manufactures the disks? This looks like a pretty transparent tactical move to me. The article speculates that one reason the VHS format won out over Sony’s Betamax was the refusal of Sony to allow pornography on Betamax. I’d never heard that one before, but clearly, with respect to competing with Nintendo in the handheld console space, porn is something we will never see allowed on any Nintendo machine. So by giving a wink and nod to porn on the PSP, Sony can score points on a field where Nintendo will never play. Oddly enough, if pornographic movies do happen to boost PSP sales, it will likely encourage the release of more "legitimate" fare in the UMD video format.

American moralists need not get upset yet. Adult movies will only be available for the PSP in Japan. And we all know how much Americans hate to import porn….riiiiiight…