The Code Games News Report 05.11.07
Posted by Shawn Struck on 05.11.2007
More Videos Than You Can Shake A Stick At; Warren Ellis Will Beat YOU Up, Game Mods = Terroism and more inside!
First off, a hearty congratulations to mr_beefy, for the shiny new logo ! Drop me a line with your mailing address, and I'll be sending you a copy of The Black Mages's self-titled debut album, 3 random dragon knick-knacks, and a copy of Konami Arcade Classics for the Nintendo DS!
Secondly, I'm not quite sure what the hell happened with my column last week; this only seems to happen when I try uploading things from work on my lunch break, but I have a workaround. To make up for it, you'll have a double-stuffed version of the column this week.
Thirdly, welcome, one and all! In a world full of big news announcements, previews, reviews, and debuts, I like to help you all start your weekend right with a look at some of the news in the world of video games that may have been overlooked. In the frenzied bar fight that is video game news, this is your broken bar stool. This is... The Code.
High School Student Expelled For Mapping His School In CounterStrike (via Pascifist.net and Game|Life)
A high school senior in Texas has been transferred to an "Alternative Education Center" and will not be allowed to participate in graduation ceremonies later this year because he created a Counter Strike map of his school.
You read that right.
There are lots of ways to visually represent your high school. You can sketch it in pen, or with broad stokes in Chinese ink, or subdued watercolors. You can take an artsy-fartsy black-and-white photograph of your school, or a Quick Time Panorama. You can print it onto edible paper for placing on a cake, create an animated gif of it for a web page or iron it onto the front of a t-shirt. But whatever you do, however you choose to express yourself, you may not recreate your school building within a video game.
A day after the Virginia Tech shootings, a parent called the high school and told of a "killing game" which took place "inside the school". That's all that was needed to get the cops involved the the kid kicked out.
PBS On Video Games Being Accessible For All (via KQED and mr_beefy)
Recently, a PBS station in California did a feature special report: called Video Games - Access For All. Don't live in Cali? Well, that's okay; the site has a streaming video version of it on the site! The segment covered parts of the International Game Developers Conference where a group of gamers used colorful tactics to convince mainstream developers to make video games that are accessible for everyone. What sort of colorful tactics? Well, if I told you, I'd spoil it! Check out the link, man!
I really hope that more game developers embrace acessability; I really don't think that coding stuff important to accessability would increase costs or lead time if they panned for it in advance!
This Week's Now That's Cool:
Super Mario Clock DIY
Will D'Angelo of the Wiicast.com recently got obsessed with his world of timecraft again and made this Super Mario Bros. clock representing World 1-1 from the classic. A few weeks ago, after drinking a glass of impulse and ambition, he made a Donkey Kong clock and decided to continue bridging the gap between crafts and gaming. Sure, it's not "art," but for under $20 it's still a neat project for a lazy afternoon, or when trying to keep the kids busy on the weekend.
This time around D'Angelo makes the instructions for creating the clock expressly clear. He also seems to be getting the hang of the game-clock-craft as he's also included tips on how to make construction easier on yourself during construction. If people start obsessing about game clocks as much as they do game cakes we may have to make a gallery.
Alter Ego: portraits of gamers and their avatars
Robbie Cooper's Alter Ego project collected photos of gamers and paired them with their in-game avatars. It's just been collected in a handsome hardcover edition with a nifty lenticular cover that shows a nice Korean couple morphing into chaotic evil game-characters.
I read this last night -- what I loved about it was the broadly construed notion of "player." Cooper doesn't just get people who play games for the fun of it, but also an old-school MUD developer (his "avatar" is a block of text from his game), several gold-farmers and miscellaneous other cheats; game developers and models for in-game avatars, and so on.
The breadth of gamers interviewed by Cooper is really awe-inspiring: rich and poor, western and Asian, able-bodied and disabled, young and old. It's not all terminally shy, heavyset guys playing skinny little women (though there are some of those) -- Cooper has plenty of people who defy the stereotypes, too.
The net effect is to demonstrate the common cause between all the players, no matter what their background: they are all living virtual lives.
Also: it doesn't hurt that these are beautifully shot portrait photos.
Over at Square Haven, they have a pretty decent interview with freelance Square localizer Alexander O. Smith, whose "...projects for Square include Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. We touched base with Alex to learn more about his career in the game industry, and his most recent projects adapting Square Enix games for the English-language market."
There's some interesting and sophisticated talk about localizing the uber-cult classic Vagrant Story: "Usually the goal with any game at the beginning is to make it not suck in the time you are given. That said, I think every Japanese game has an inner English game hidden away, and once you start to find it, it sets its own bar and the goal then becomes to meet those expectations, again within the constraints of time available. Vagrant Story was one of those rare projects that was just screaming to be in English from the moment it was made, so the bar, though high, was very clear."
Also, holy crap, we get into some otaku territory with a discussion about Final Fantasy X (mild spoilers here!): "Oh, and one thing I've already seen in print from an interview with Nojima, so I know it's okay to talk about: yes, I specifically went to Nojima ahead of time to discuss the pros and cons of translating Yuna's last line to Tidus from "arigatou" to "I love you." I've actually written a whole article about that decision for a Japanese literary magazine, Subaru, if anyone cares to look it up. I think it's a great example of translating a cultural context, like I mentioned above." [Via gamesetwatch]
This Week's "All You Tube, All The Time":
OMG, Halo 3!; RE2 for GBA; It's-a neat, debug room; Live Action Punch-Out; SMB: The Soap Opera and Full Metal Jacket: Wii Edition.
I'm pretty sure it's a requirement that every column that deals with video games have footage of the Halo 3 trailer. So, enjoy:
Up next, some beta video of another game that coulda-been, but never was: Resident Evil 2 for the GBA:
Wow, that was pretty good looking!
Blast from the past-- a look at the hidden "debug room" in the last RPG Squaresoft produced for the SNES, Super Mario RPG:
Now if only someone could find the debug rooms for Final Fantasy X.
Live Action Punch Out
It's wasn't Great Tiger the usually got me, it was Soda Popinski. Darn Commie.
Super Mario as a funny soap opera
Game Over is an hilarious little video about Super Mario and Princess Peach's stormy relationship after the Super Mario World stories are over. Mario is all strung out on mushrooms, Peach is a nagging shrew, and Luigi is permanently alienated from his brother. Link
Second Life and the "elevator effect," for avatars
NPR contributor Luke Burbank is hosting a new, experimental kind of show on the network, code-named Bryant Park Project until they come up with a better name.
They have a blog where they're periodically posting these cool, smart little video segments.
I really like this video they uploaded this week, about the sociology of personal avatar space inside Second Life. They explore how people playing SL get really creeped out when someone's avatar stands too close to their avatar... just like in real life. This phenomenon is what's known as "the elevator effect." Link.
First Person Shooter: The Play
GameSetWatch recently went to point out First Person Shooter: The Play, which premiered in San Francisco on Saturday night, and "...takes us inside ‘JetPack Games', a start-up video game company, where the hottest, most violent game on the market has brought instant success to its twenty-something tech geniuses."
According to the SF Playhouse page for the play: "Their celebration fizzles when their game is blamed for a schoolyard shooting. As the young CEO of Jet Pack deals with an impending lawsuit and the father of one of the victims, he must confront whether he has any responsibilities in the world beyond his computer screen."
Avatar of Awesome Warren Ellis is currently working on the straight-to-DVD animated Castlevania flick. Konami's Koji Igarashi, who only makes Castlevania games, is involved and adding his two cents to the project. Blogs Ellis:
The film is, of course, set in Wallachia in 1476. We've worked with Koji Igarashi to get the film solidly inside the Castlevania timeline, and he's approved everything I came up with, including some new embroidering to the timeline. To make it work as a film, I had to introduce new backstory, and I went through five drafts of the premise and three of the full outline to get the material where IGA wanted it. He remains absolutely passionate about Castlevania.
After eight rewrites of pre-production material, I remain absolutely passionate about beating the crap out of IGA in a dark alleyway one day.
I can't wait for this because Ellis? S eriously, he's AWESOME. Like his post explaining his reasons for not having Grant DaNasty from the 3rd NES game in the (first) movie:
What use is a pirate in a landlocked country anyway?
(Wallachia was cut off from the Black Sea by the Ottoman Empire by 1420 or thereabouts)
Yes.
I cut Grant DaNasty out of the film.
The reasons were:
Grant DaNasty is a stupid name that I cannot take seriously. (When he does turn up, I'll probably use the alternate spelling of Grant DiNesti.)
I only have 80 minutes. And in that 80 minutes I need to set up the backdrop, the history, the themes and five major characters to tell the story I want to tell. Because this isn't going to be the usual kind of videogame adaptation, the kind that just transposes the least challenging parts of gameplay to the screen. This is going to be an actual goddamn film with an actual goddamn story. But I only have 80 minutes. To try and shoehorn Grant in there, when I'm already trying to create the space for Trevor, Sypha and Alucard to breathe and fill the screen (not even mentioning Dracula, Lisa or the Bishop for the moment)…no. I'd end up doing a bad job on all of them, and giving up whole chunks of the plot. At which point you might as well just call Uwe Boll, you know?
Seriously, what use is a pirate on dry land? "Avast, ye swabs, and push me fecking cart! Arrr!" No. Just no.
Did you see that thing I did in the first reason there?
And Finally... When Games And Art Meet (Again) [via Kotaku]
With the question of "Are video games art? Can they be art?" being something of a hot issue in recent years, it's always interesting to see how "art for art's sake" and a profit-driven enterprise like, well, video games mash together occasionally. This week's Escapist Magazine has an interesting article entitled "Limit and Measure: Welcome to the World of Art Mods". Something of a cross between (frequently wacky) performance art and run of the mill mods that many people add to their games, art mods
... strip away some of the games' basic elements and ideas, rather than adding on or multiplying the things you can do. In that sense, art mods pull back the technology a little to reveal the little human decisions we take for granted. Violence is slowed down, exaggerated and poked fun at. Sexual politics in games are examined, mocked and re-organized.
The Escapist, as usual, is worth a read, and I think the question of the art/game divide is made more interesting (and more complex) by the addition of little works of art in games, added by people other than the designers.
Well, that's all for this installment. Remember: stay excellent to each other and read my stuff!
Robbie Cooper's Alter Ego project collected photos of gamers and paired them with their in-game avatars. It's just been collected in a handsome hardcover edition with a nifty lenticular cover that shows a nice Korean couple morphing into chaotic evil game-characters.
