covert.creations

Quiz. What do these three things have in common?

a) Hockey
b) Artillery
c) MMORPG Design

Give up?

The answer : it’s where you aim your shot.

In the immediacy of hockey, players don’t pass to where their teammate is, but where they’ll be in the next 0.5 seconds. In artillery, shots follow a ballistic trajectory. In sum, the game isn’t won by playing the current game. It’s won by anticipation.

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A big congratulations goes out to Neardeath Studios on the 10th year of Meridian 59. What a fantastic accomplishment. M59 is the first, the longest-running, and most respected MMORPG of them all.

This article is in response to M59 co-creator Brian “Psychochild” Green’s post, “Why middleware will not save us“. He hits pretty hard, and sets his sights on the “middleware market” in the MMORPG space. I’ll say I agree with the bulk of it. Yet, some of the specifics cause me trouble. Thus this post.

His argument noted two levels of the MMORPG industry, the indies and the AAAs (“the blockbuster games”). The gist of his article is that, as a technological cure-all, MMORPG middleware companies fail in their promise. They will make little impact on game development in MMORPG games. A gross-oversimplification on my part, so I’d encourage you go read Psychochild’s post.

First off, how does one define middleware?

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Via conceptart.org:

AreaNet’s artist team posted some samples of their sketchbook for ‘Guild Wars : Factions’. If you’re interested, there’s more available from the Guild Wars homepage.

I am entranced.

Guild Wars, concept art

Last month, footage for (the unfortunately named) Half life 2 : Episode 2 exploded onto the ‘net with tremendous speed and enthusiasm. And for good reason, too. The game looks fantastic, as we’ve come to expect. The interesting part of this story however, was not the continuing struggle of Alyx and Gordon Freeman, nor the next iteration of graphics and physics technology that the next chapter will have.

The excitement was about a little game that will be bundled alongside Episode 2. A little game called “Portal”.

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TerraNova highlighted it, I watched it, and ‘iCoke’ blazes a trail for World of Warcraft into China. The ad is actually somewhat old, but combine it with this :

With 7 million subscribers, WoW is now in the list of the world’s top 100 most populous countries.1 2

It easily exceeds the population of Lebanon or Israel. It will likely surpass them both put together. Think of how all those Wow players could represent a significant force for massive social change, if only the damned Horde would stop getting in the way!

Priorities, priorities.

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Thanks to the continued excellence of Valve, we get an old favourite from the Quake era, Team Fortress 2! I just had to show it. We suspect that it was featured for a select audience at either PAX or Leipzig. I’m surprised that this hasn’t seen a broader release.

I think I like the promo as much as I’ll like the game!

Words won’t do this justice. You have to see it to believe it.

Source : YouTube.

Technorati tags : half life, videogames, team fortress.

It’s no secret that the “end game” in World of Warcraft is broken. Once I had attained the splendour of Level 60, I could progress no longer. Without forty of my “closest friends”, I could not raid, I could not obtain better items, and the remaining hopeful sprigs of activity remaining became simply unattainable. The game was over.

This same story is about to be re-told. This time, within a much, much older game. Where the end-game is much like the brickwall that is WoW. The great game of Slashdot.What? News for Nerds? Stuff that matters? How is that a game?

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I wanted to do some original graphics for the site, so rather than doing what I usually do when I’m forced to do some quick graphics work (use GIMP on Ubuntu, my fav), I decided to try out Photoshop again. Years past at university, I used to design websites for weekend money. Back then, my PS skills were quite wretched. That is no less true today.

I imagined something reminiscent of the word “covert”, so obviously I had to do a spy of sorts. Not quite a character, just a nod towards the world of espionage. What better than a trenchcoated character? Yet, I had absolutely no clue how to draw something original in Photoshop. So I sort of cheated. I have no idea if this is what the gurus do. Unfortunately the ones that I know are never on IM, and generally unavailable for a quick, “how you doin?” much less a “how the h#ll do I do this??!11″. Anyhow, read on for the trials and tribulations of my voyage…
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Gamasutra reports that Microsoft is getting into the independant game biz. As of August 30th, anyone with a Windows XP can download Microsoft’s XNA “Game Studio Express” and start making various games for the Xbox 360.

For an additional fee of US100$, indie developers will then be able to access the Xbox Live Arcade service, both to list their titles and to possibly download content for their game dev needs.

The engine itself will be a “XNA version” of GarageGames’ Torque engine, plus some upporting tools. This engine has been a popular choice among indie developers, although I’m somewhat ashamed to say I’ve never played anything from there.

Putting aside my typical cynicism of Microsoft, I have to admit this is cool. Yes, they have an agenda – to sell more Xboxes. Yes, they’d love to envelope indie development. Sure it’s to their advantage to reel in fresh programmers and designers to get them accustomed to using their products.

But there’s a plus side too :

• it’s the first time anyone’s been able to create content for a major console without hacking into it.
• Also by creating a “community of interest” surrounding indie gamedev, it elevates it, bringing it closer to the mainstream.
• You have extensive Microsoft resources teaching you how to make games.

Not bad, for evil Microsoft.

I wonder what Greg thinks of this…

Links:

Microsoft XNA Dev Center
Coding4Fun

In my last post, I talked about technology’s promise. More specifically, how the PSP is proof in my hands of a very likely future. I shared a quick thought about the supposed “ubiquitous connector” – a theoretical device through which I can interact with my world. A system by which I freely overlay a “meta-world” atop the real one, either through interesting games and media, or via information. I’d love to talk more about what this fictional device could do, but I’m sure you can easily imagine your own specifics. Your ideas about it are just as valid is mine. Oh, and it will be a part of our future. I also held that the Sony PSP is a great little system, one that reminded me of my earliest encounter with technology as a whole. As a promise for my future, a digitally integrated world. Not a bad feat for a commercial product, and kudos to Sony for a nicely designed multimedia machine.

Note : One thing I didn’t mention, is that you could have taken my post, search/replace on “Sony” and “PSP” with the words “Nintendo” and “DS”, and it all still applies. I like both these systems for their respective innovations, and for what they bring to the world of gaming and mobile entertainment.

Politics and Proprietorship

It’s unfortunate that neither of these systems fulfill even my most conservative leaps of inductive speculation. Yet, they could have. Remember, I briefly mentioned politics and the Internet. I’m not well qualified to go in-depth about it, but there are obviously countless reasons for this situation. For simplicity again lets restrict this to social impacts. That is, the way that internetworked applications have the potential to adjust our very social realm. Email is the first “killer app” that comes to mind, turning traditional means of communicating on its ear.

So politics comes into play as a controlling measure, to protect ourselves and reliant entities from disaster in the face of new, sweeping technologies. Take the music industry as an example, and I’ll oversimplify even further. On one side is the business of music. Royalties and other income for the employees, from radio stations to merchants. On the other side, it’s about free speech and devices that are immune from inefficient (and grossly unfair) control mechanisms. Ideally, a free and democratic society would attempt to strike a balance between the sides, to the betterment of all. Magic happens, and we get “pay-for” mechanisms that seamlessly allow us to obtain the music we want, whenever we want. So politicking is the necessary evil by which we obtain such a lovely and peaceful outcome.

Supposedly.

Not so, in the case of Sony and their PSP. Not even close. To protect itself, the PSP system is a closed one. The minidisc format, that Sony pretty much invented, is not copyable. For example, I cannot buy a writer for these discs. I have to buy them, pre-written, directly from a Sony-approved vendor. The “Universal Media Disc” (UMD), is great. Small form-factor, reliable read stats, smooth ejection and insertion, all engineered very slickly and sweetly. Yet, UMDs suck. They suck because they are closed and unwritable. They suck because they are extremely expensive. They suck because they come from a tech company that is also a huge music company, selling them to you at grossly inflated prices. They suck because they inherit the sensibilities of a hardware company that wants not only to sell them, but control the mechanism by which information contained within them is PUBLISHED.

Their agenda was not to create a ubiquitous wireless media experience. They clearly set out to construct, publish and sell UMDs.

Please tell me we aren’t back to Gutenburg versus the Church? This type of measure is regressive and backward, and the realisation of a sick corporate fantasy. Lock down the thing, control the product from publisher to consumer, and punish anyone who tries to circumvent any of it. Yes, hack your PSP and go to jail. Its a meaningless threat since its happened and will continue to do so. But again, why even bother creating a system that does not meet the desires of its users?

Remember Aibo?

A Footnote in History

Happily, all of these ridiculous corporate tactics won’t work, which is why the PSP will be sadly nothing more than a historical footnote. I promise you, one day you will say : “Oh yeah, I remember THOSE!”

The next problem, and why I hate my PSP, is where Sony has stumbled again.

I paid $79.00AU for “Tomb Raider : Legend” on UMD. I went physically into a store, took the item off of a shelf, paid for it with a stack of paper-based currency, and took it home and unwrapped the layers of plastic off its cover. Tell me how this is the future of mobile entertainment in the Internet age? Why can I not use the device itself to securely purchase additional content?

Well, here’s a hint. They didn’t even try to do this. Using the builtin 802.11b security with WPA and TKIP would be YOUR responsibility if you transmitted your credit card number over the airwaves. Talk to me sometime about the headaches of wireless infrastructure security.

Esther Dyson, famous tech futurist and investor (whom, through chance and the magic of a mutual colleague, I’ve had the sincere pleasure of meeting some time ago), said of the future of big-media,

“Well they’re going to lose worse. All the gate keepers who were controlling access to things. Many distribution channels for content , which are dependent on putting content in inefficient containers, putting it somewhere where it sat on a shelves, only half of it was used. The other half had to be destroyed. So all these things that create inefficiencies and benefit from them are going to lose…”

Profit from inefficiency and die, that’s the message. Is this not the very definition of the UMD?

That ubiquitous wireless Internet dream, is exactly that. Politics (especially in North America) have slowed the wheels of progress in order to exact a measure of control on this promise. Its funny, I could have sworn Casey and I were discussing this… back in 1996. We should have bought stock in something, preferably a lobbying organization.

The Meat of the PSP

So if you’ve skimmed this terribly lengthy post, I hope you get to this part. If all that political or techie stuff is not relevant to you, then how about the games?

Well, to this, I can unashamedly admit that many of them are totally excellent – balancing gameplay with its natural form factor, designed perfectly for console-style interaction, and solid integration with the other features of the system (i.e. networked multiplay). Yet, if I were to complain about the third-person interaction of MANY of the titles (Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Acid, Grand Theft Auto, and so on) – the camera view absolutely sucks in all of them. In some cases, it is so frustrating to control as to make the games virtually unplayable. I’m not the first person to say this. And these games were the “big titles” that attracted me to the system in the first place. What a disappointment.

So. The Sony PSP, for what it is, is totally fantastic. The Sony PSP, for what it could have been, miserably fails. In fact, I’m somewhat despondent about the platform as a whole. It’s not going to last.

That promise of my ubiquitous connector? Sigh. Such long way to go.

Or maybe I’m just pissed off that my girlfriend kicks my ass at Lumines.