MetaFilter posts tagged with VideoGames

"I definitely play more games I don't enjoy than games I do."

jbickers — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:27:56 -0800

"She bought Jumper: Griffin's Story - one of the worst reviewed games ever in Xbox 360 history. The day Modern Warfare 2 was released, she spent all her time on Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. American Idol? She put the microphone in front of a speaker and played songs into it to ace the performances that much faster." The story of Kristen and her gamerscore addiction. Gamerscore addicts swap tips on message boards and flaunt their numbers, blog about where the easy points are ("Avatar The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth is such a poorly-designed game that you can get a full 1000 gamerscore in about five minutes, repeatedly mashing the “B” button – it’s totally worth renting at your local video store."), connect and brag on Facebook. Sites like Xbox360Achievements and Achieve360Points lay out the road maps for finding points within games.

Pirates Paying for Downloadable Content: a Viable Niche Market

filthy light thief — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:51:49 -0800

Piracy of PC games is nothing new, and has been discussed previously. Due to the high levels of PC game piracy, some development companies have decreased (or eliminated) PC game development, shifting support to console development. But piracy isn't limited to PCs, as modchips and other hacks have allowed users to play pirated and homebrewed games. In the continuing struggle for control, Microsoft banned as many as 1 million modded systems from Xbox Live, resulting in a surge of people reselling Xbox 360s that have been banned from online play (and modders finding a fix for the ban). Some developers have adopted another tactic - increased development of downloadable content (DLC), which has been seen as both good and bad by gamers. John Riccitiello, the head of Electronic Arts, seems to have embraced DLC as a marketing option, in noting that "[people] can steal the disc, but they can't steal the DLC."

Hey! It's a bunch of lists we can all agree on!

Navelgazer — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:02:32 -0800

The A.V. Club's Best of the Decade: Films. Performances. Scenes. Bad Movies. Books. Short Story Collections. Comics. Video Games Music. Metal. Electronic Music. Comedy Albums. Television Series. Television Episodes. Reality Series/Competitions. Made-For-TV Movies/Miniseries. Late-Night Comedy/Talk Shows. One-Season Wonders. And the orphans.

Play 5,000+ classic video games in your browser

Rhaomi — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:12:22 -0800

TheSmartAss.info's suite of Java emulators allows smooth, in-browser playback of literally thousands of old-school video games: 517 Atari titles, 148 for DOS, 636 Game Boy games (and 410 for Game Boy Color), 2,019 (!) NES titles, 238 GameGear games, 802 Sega Genesis titles, and 284 for the Sega Master System. Highlights include Space Invaders, Frogger, Galaga, Pitfall!, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, SimCity, Zero Wing, Duke Nukem, Sonic the Hedgehog, Aladdin, Earthworm Jim, Pokemon, and Metal Gear Solid. Use the search function to find your favorites! You can also register an account to save games on emulators that support it. Make sure to check the purple bar below each game for control info and links to alternate emulators in case the default one is buggy or slow.

Clickin' it old-school

jbickers — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:30:29 -0800

The newly launched Atari.com includes the Atari Arcade, wherein you may play Adventure, Asteroids, Battlezone, Crystal Castles, Lunar Lander and Yars' Revenge in your browser.

"It will cost you a piece of yourself."

jbickers — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:14:13 -0800

Destructoid has posted a full video play-through of the controversial "No Russian" level from the newly released Modern Warfare 2 (warning: possibly disturbing). The level, in which the player is asked to infiltrate a Russian terrorist group and, as a result, take part in a terrorist attack on civilians, has divided gamers and journalists. Destructoid's Brad Rice is disgusted by the level, saying that "what the scene actually does is take the will to fight out of me." Kotaku's Michael McWhertor also hated the scene, saying it "puts the player in a very uncomfortable, disturbingly violent situation that may offend or upset some players." Australian game blogger Jarno Kokko says the developers "crossed a line here and went for the distasteful. It'll put the game into headlines, Grand Theft Auto style, but it may also cause a backlash that harms mature games as a whole." And the timing of the release - days after the incident at Fort Hood, hours before Veterans Day - has not gone unnoticed. On the other side, Simon Brew raises the "games are art" argument, asking "Shall we all just play Tetris, then?" And Destructoid's Jim Sterling counter-points his colleague, saying the scene is a statement "that videogames don't need to invent fantastical worlds of elves and goblins in order to portray violence. It's a statement that videogames can affect emotions and provide stories that don't just entertain, but also shock, surprise and even disturb."

Toe Jam and Earl Jam

joshwa — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:38:24 -0800

Os Gameboys are a band from Brazil who play only music from classic videogames. They are really, really good. (via waxy: "the best live Mario cover I've ever seen")

Step 1. Make an utterly fantastic game. Step 3. Profit!

straight — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:24:08 -0800

2D BOY made around $100,000 in a week. That’s $50,000 each for writing a blog post about a game they finished a year ago. By letting people pay whatever they wanted. 2D Boy stirred up a lot of discussion (previously) about game piracy when they used online scoreboard data to estimate an 82% piracy rate for their fantastic indie game World of Goo (previously). For World of Goo's first birthday, they decided to try the Radiohead model and let people buy the game for any price they choose. Now they've released extensive data about the results. Short version? "A huge success," even though the most commonly chosen price was only a penny. Don't miss the excellent analysis in the Rock Paper Shotgun article (that first link), including the comments where one reader has created a chart showing that the bottom 40% of the downloads account for 1.5% of the profit and the top 30% of the downloads account for 83% of the profit.

Artificial Intelligence?

flatluigi — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:24:47 -0800

Hell is Other People "Fight the ghosts of those that have come before by moving in two dimensions and shooting missiles. The fiercer you fight, the harder it shall be for those that come after. How much past can you cope with before you are overwhelmed?"

Where did you learn to fly?

joedan — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:45:25 -0800

"So why bring up this sore spot in 2009, roughly 16 years after the Jaguar's ill-fated launch? Because as an artifact of video game history, the Jaguar speaks volumes about where we've been, where we are, and where we're going." Linking the past, present, and future: The Atari Jaguar as console artifact Buying the Jaguar at launch was, without a shadow of a doubt, the single worst gaming decision I ever made. I still have it. I keep it in its box. I left the $250 Walden Software price tag on it, as a reminder to never buy into PR hype.

Demon's Souls

Prospero — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:32:33 -0800

"Demon's Souls, an Atlus-published action-RPG out this week on the PS3, is way too hard for you. We say this without knowing a thing about your skills and with no equivocation." Demon's Souls was released this week in North America, and its reviewers are coming to terms with its staggering difficulty level. "We're not in the business of reviewing games we don't finish, so I'll say right away that I did not finish Demon's Souls. [...] Because of this, we will not be giving it a review score this week. [...] It's not that I didn't want to finish it. I truly do, and I look forward to doing so. [...] My problem is that I died far too often. You'll see: you will die in minutes." "[Its] punishment systems ensure that life has far greater value than in most games, especially as the incessant autosaving ensures restoring from a back-up is impossible. As such, you inch forward, shield up, knees-a-knocking. Demon’s Souls is the antithesis of the fashionable approach to gaming. It encourages mastery over mere perseverance and every reward is so hard won as to make it almost unattainable." "You may have heard this already, but let me say this, just to make sure: Demon's Souls is hard. This is not the same kind of hard that comes from too many enemies attacking at once, from having your level too low to fight a boss, or from having too many guards to take out, lest you be seen. This is a game where you may defeat a tough opponent through attrition and pain, winning with nary a sliver of health left before letting out a battle cry and promptly mis-stepping into a pit that kills you." The game's US publisher is keeping a running total of the number of deaths occurring in the very first area after the tutorial--before the evening of the release day had even begun, the death toll stood at 3,479. (From that link: "I have a copy of the game in transit and I am kind of terrified. Waiting to receive a copy of the game is like being on death row.") Demon's Souls is probably best described as an action RPG with roguelike gameplay elements--however, it marries those elements (along with the uncompromising difficulty of many roguelikes) to graphics and sound design that are characteristic of big-budget, mainstream console games. (Here's an interesting analysis that focuses primarily on the emotional effect of the game's design decisions). It's considered the spiritual successor to the King's Field series, also developed by From Software. There are two wikis for it--one that covers the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and North American versions of the game, and another, hosted by Atlus, dedicated specifically to the North American version. (Previously on MeFi, we discussed the design of difficult games.)

The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion

Pope Guilty — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:27:26 -0800

Douglas Crockford, who oversaw the porting of Maniac Mansion to the NES, would like for you to know how the game changed in the porting process and why.

Not now James, we're busy

Artw — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:38:40 -0800

Robert Yang on the homophobic response to his Half-Life 2 mod Handle With Care.

Unique HL2 horror mod, Korsakovia

The Devil Tesla — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:18:05 -0800

Korsakovia is a Half Life 2 mod from research driven developer The Chinese Room. It melds the abstract driven story of their previous mod, Dear Esther (previously), with more traditional gameplay. The end result is an equally distinctive horror FPS with minimal narrative cues. Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a nice write up about it. The mod's ModDB page includes a comments section that is a mix of loving adoration and extreme frustration. Korsakovia lack of narrative clues means it's never clear that you are going the right way, and the game has a few bugs. I personally wasn't able to get through without cheating (remember, you have to type "sv_cheats 1" before any of these will work). Consider yourself warned.

Lose/Lose: The Game That Deletes Your Files

Plutor — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:24:07 -0800

"Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the player's computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted." via

Batman dies in cloud of poison gas – unless you actually buy the game

joeclark — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:24:41 -0800

DRM as a cloud of poison gas. Run an illegally-downloaded prerelease version of the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman always dies in a vat of poison gas. Run the legit version once it gets released and (apparently) there won’t even be any poison gas. (Game developers: “[Y]ou have encountered... a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free. It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code.”)

"I wish Phil Spector were here..."

Artw — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:30:04 -0800

Zombies Vs Beatles (slyt)

The hit Esperanto interactive simulator "Pato Viro Simulilo" available in English Language.

jbickers — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:09:51 -0800

78641 is a "hit Esperanto interactive simulator" now available in English - a surreal freeware adventure game in which you play a frying pan named Dougo Beaches who deals with car trouble. There is time traveling. And don't worry, the Ethiopian children who drew the artwork were "paid in candy / peanut substance." Video trailer. Windows only. Inspired silliness from GZ Storm, which also brought you "Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden" the rogue-like "Sewer Goblet - The Wu-Tang Clan and the Wu-Tang Baby" and the Ungus Fungus comic strip.

Fat, Depressed & 35 y.o.

ericb — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:11:52 -0800

"The average video gamer is not the stereotypical adolescent locked to a computer screen 24/7."* According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Emory University and Andrews University: "A new study [PDF] says the average age of video-game players in the United States is 35 [PDF], and oh, by the way: They're overweight and tend to be depressed."

"'Health-risk factors, specifically, a higher BMI and a greater number of poor mental-health days differentiated adult video-game players from non-players,' said Dr. James B. Weaver III of the CDC in Atlanta. 'Video-game players also reported lower extroversion, consistent with research on adolescents that linked video game playing to a sedentary lifestyle and overweight status, and to mental-health concerns.'"*

Videogames: Play or "Playlike Activiy?" [PDF]

Sonic Adventures

feelinglistless — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:48:12 -0800

Sonic Adventures An astonishingly thorough history of Sonic The Hedgehog taking in the games, animated series and more. There are games mentioned here I'd never even heard of, on long forgotten platforms, and the overall impression I have is that like most things, the essence of what originally made it brilliant has been degraded over time.

WHY HULK-MARG MAD (AND THEREFORE SMASH)

filthy light thief — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:35:17 -0800

Hulk-Margaret smash stupid Sony. Girls not stupid lilac people. Girls strong and awesome! AAAAARRRRR! Hulk-Marg like gems. Hulk-Marg like gem sweaters (previously). But Hulk-Marg no like pandering only to gem interests. Hulk-Marg well-rounded, has many interests and layers. Hulk-Marg give example: SMASHING. Let Hulk-Marg find PowerPoint and laser pointer. Hulk-Marg has PowerPoint here somewhere. Ahem. Hulk-Marg found PowerPoint. Made slides. [via mefi projects] Sony's PSP product marketing joins more than Miss Bimbo in the ranks of shallow portrayals of the interests of women. Dell created the "female focused" sub-site "Della" with softer colors, and Even LEGO has their girl-centric sets, focusing on pinks, purples, and ponies. While the number of female gamers increases, Sony is limiting the games they push with the OMG Lilac PSP marketing scheme to Patapon 2, Locoroco 2, Hannah Montana, Petz, Pangya Fantasy Golf, and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, to the concern of some female gamers ("I can't help but feel as if young female gamers are being smothered into a niche where they have little chance to be open to trying different types of video games"). On the GameGirl blog, a top 7 list for upcoming PSP games is a much different world from golf and ponies, as suggested by Sony.

D-don't you l-like my new look?

Askiba — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:01:54 -0800

"That was one of the most memorable scenes for me. Namely because his expression made it look like he wasn’t terrified of the fact he was hanging, but what was watching him hang." System Shock 2, the highly influential sci-fi horror game, was released 10 years ago today. It's been 10 years, and the game's effects can still be seen. System Shock 2 was one of the few games that created a (good) hybrid of both first person shooter and role playing game, with heavy emphasis on each. It is also one of the very few games to use audio logs. The effect of the logs is chilling. The biggest legacy of the game is largely in its story. A science fiction slash horror story, you awake onboard the Von Braun to find the space ship overtaken by a hideous infestation, and the memories start there. Most personal stories go to the effect of "scariest game ever"; even Penny Arcade had its own comments. Most credit the game's terrifying sound effects... but don't forget SHODAN! SHODAN came to be known as one of the most frightening robotic villains in games; her damaged, robotic voice recalls a very, very bitter GLADoS. She's probably one of the game's most recognizable icons, and a large part of the scares. The game also has another small legacy- the door code found in the beginning of the game, "45100", has shown up in later games involving System Shock 2 dev members, including Bioshock. Rock Paper Shotgun has an excellent article on the development of the game. One of the developers also did a three page write up on the successes and failures of the dev team back in December 1999. Bioshock is known as being a "spiritual successor" to System Shock 2. System Shock's rights eventually went over to EA, and rumors of a sequel quickly surfaced, but no news of any progress has appeared in recent months. A dedicated fan community quickly sprung up around the game. Due to a strange programming error, the graphics were low quality even for the time of release. Fan projects such as SHTUP and Rebirth improved the game's graphics, and a patch was created by Irrational Studios, the developer, to balance the game and add a multiplayer mode. A patch was also released to allow support for more modern operating systems. Of course, due to the game's age, the community is less active then in recent years, with a year between recent postings on one of the game's more active fan sites. Sadly, the game did poorly. While receiving critical acclaim from reviewers around the globe, it failed to sell well (in comparison to the recently released Half Life) Any interesting tales to share from the halls of the Von Braun, fellow Marines/Navy Cadets/OSA Recruits? Quick personal anecdote: the Sgt. Bronson death log probably freaked me out the most in the game, no question. Also, the Tommy Saurez and Siddons love plot was also really compelling, especially its overall large effect on the story. (Bonus: You can listen to all the audio logs (for all the nostalgia it will surely bring) on this webpage, but warning: SPOILERS, and music plays when you enter (can be turned off near the top))

Ethnography of Rock Band Bar Night

k8t — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:56:02 -0800

Ethnography of Rock Band Bar Night. The Rock Band video game (and the similar Guitar Hero) are more than video games where players try to earn points and some are exploring the deeper meaning of such games. In this ethnographic study of a Rock Band bar night, Kiri Miller, discovers that Rock Band bar night is, surprisingly, a friendly, accessible musical scene with a tight-knit group of friends at its core—more like an open Irish session than a karaoke night, and with fewer barriers to participation than either of those other typical bar events. Miller researches GH and RB and is currently collecting data from players, if you're interested in participating. She keeps a blog on her research as well. Read her (interesting) thoughts on being a researcher on this topic. She also provides some audio interviews with players. She argues that "[a]nyone who has played Guitar Hero or Rock Band for more than five minutes will tell you that it requires a deeper level of musical engagement than listening to an iPod—intellectually, emotionally, physically, and often socially" and "the games have substantially changed the way they listen to popular music when they’re not playing." She also asks if GH/RB playing "authentic"? It certainly is a performance.

Alright! Let's go on a journey — through time and space! There are 95 Pokemon stamps! Let's get all of them!

silby — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:08:37 -0800

"And much like Christmas, originally about the birth of a religious savior-figure named Jesus, is now about buying things for people and hoping that they buy more things for you, much how Easter, originally about the death of a religious savior-figure named Jesus, is now about receiving rabbit- or egg-shaped chocolates, now and forever Obon is about collecting all of the Pokemon." Japan, trains, marketing, pachinko, hordes of stamp-seeking children.

Kicking koopas and stomping goombas, for Science!

tybeet — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:20:30 -0800

A couple of professors, in collaboration with two upcoming IEEE conferences, have organized a Mario A.I. Competition (via), inviting programmers to create controllers for a modified version of Infinite Mario Brothers (previously). One contender has stepped up and posted a demo of his controller in action. Overview (from the site): "This competition is about learning, or otherwise developing, the best controller (agent) for a version of Super Mario Bros. The controller's job is to win as many levels (of increasing difficulty) as possible. Each time step (24 per second in simualated time) the controller has to decide what action to take (left, right, jump etc) in response to the environment around Mario. We are basing the competition on a heavily modified version of the Infinite Mario Bros game by Markus Persson. That game is an all-Java tribute to the Nintendo's seminal Super Mario Bros game, with the added benefit of endless random level generation. We believe that playing this game well is a challenge worthy of the best players, the best programmers and the best learning algorithms alike."