GameSetLinks: The Ogre Says - Trade In Games!
Returning for a near-weekend brush with GameSetLinks, we feature such delights as the (pictured) GameStop trade-in air freshener gimmick, which I am still recovering from opening, nasally, and those awesome Blik Nintendo-themed wall decals.
Also in here - some very game community-applicable Yahoo! community patterns from the Habitat folks, an awesome lecture on game culture, more No More Heroes critiques, and more Nintendo DS oddness, sniffle, *bawl*.
Inside it's shining:
WhatIsBlik.com: Nintendo Wall Decals
Oo, officially licensed surface graphics for walls, totally awesome.
Jeremy's 1UP Blog: MGS4, EGM, NDAs and YOU
Explanations are good!
GameStop Uses Air Fresheners to Promote Trades - Shacknews - PC Games, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii video game news, previews and downloads
We just got one of these, and it stunk up the entiiire office, haha.
NCSX Import Video Games & Toys: 99 No Namida - New Japanese DS Game
'The Namida software throws a few personality questions at the user and creates a sort of emotional profile from the answers. A short story then plays out on the screen which is designed to make the reader cry.'
Dispatches: No More Heroes, Part Three; Or: Raise High the Beam Katana, Carpenters! at Game Design Advance
I swear, there's been more decent thought-pieces about No More Heroes than almost any other recent game. Is it all the pop culture crammed into it?
GP EXCLUSIVE: Read the Transcript as Jack Thompson Storms Out of Court | GamePolitics
A playwright couldn't have playwrote it better.
Sean Malstrom: 'Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy'
Slightly lunatic, extremely fascinating rant on casual gaming, Nintendo, etc - via Dubious Quality.
Three Wishes: Game Genie Grants Developers Their Hearts' Desires from 1UP.com
'If you could, at the wave of a magic wand, overcome some technological hurdle in game development, what would it be?' Neat people reply!
Functional Autonomy » Blog Archive » Under The Mask: Games Culture
Transcript of a phenomenally good lecture on gaming culture by David Hayward. Read it.
Habitat Chronicles: Reputation Patterns for Everyone
'During almost five years working on these tools and ecosystems, I developed several rules-of-thumb about how and when to use devices such as points, ranking, ratings, reviews and especially when not to use them.'
Comments
Malstrom's Birdman rant was excellently communicated! Among the best essays I've read on this whole "casual vs hardcore" topic.
Posted by: Nhexima | June 13, 2008 1:40 AM
As if anyone would ever buy that New SMB wall art!! UUUUUUGLY!
Posted by: raigan | June 13, 2008 11:23 AM
I'm all over them Super Mario Bros. decals.
Posted by: Bryson Whiteman | June 13, 2008 11:52 AM
That Malstrom article is awesome, but I disagree that yesterday's classics (Pac-Man , Tetris, SMB) are now "casual".
They may be approachable (relatively simple controls), but they're HARD, and there's a lot of room for skill development. Those last two are definitely the antithesis of casual games.
Posted by: raigan | June 13, 2008 12:22 PM
Raigan, I think that was his point, sort of.
I enjoyed the 'Birdman rant' quite a bit, personally, and it made me re-evaluate the Wii. It didn't make me change my mind about it (I think that even if it doesn't 'crash', Nintendo's stock is really over-valued, and it's going to seem like it crashes in a year or two) but it did cause me to think about the Wii differently. The article most reminded me of hearing that Solitaire was included with Windows to provide a sort of training program that would get people used to using the mouse. Replace "using the mouse" with "playing video games" and that seemed like the gist of what he thinks Nintendo is doing with the Wii.
The other thing I found interesting in these links: 1UP's '3 Wishes' article had a number of developers who wished making content could be done with the mind or with speech, but there were only a couple of backhanded references to the Star Trek holodeck as far as wishing that player input could come from the same sources. As a gamer who's not a developer, I'd think that direct interface of that sort would be a much more revolutionary technology than just letting developers provide venues for button-pressing in a timelier manner.
It seemed like a blind-spot that was really obvious.
Posted by: devlocke | June 15, 2008 2:49 AM