FWIW, I write short reviews because 9 times out of 10 someone else has written a longer, better, more detailed one than I ever would. Here’s that review for this game: Cleopatra: Riddle of the Tomb (@ adventuregamers.com). (Note: they changed the title for some reason.)

My review: Decent graphics, slightly annoying UI (the click-and-drag to spin things part is basically awful and unintuitive given the cursor), ok voice acting, ok music. The puzzles are entirely too easy, and the game is too short. I paid $19 for this game, which is too much. This is a $6 game, at best.

We’ve been playing more non-computer games and it’s awesome. Included: Settlers of Catan (pictured above), Catan card game, and Munchkin. I’ve had some other games recommended to me lately but haven’t had a chance to really look into them at all. If you know of some kickass boardgames we should try (2-6 players, with 3-4 being the priority), leave a comment.

Update: If you don’t know what Pokemon are, Wikipedia has more background here.

My bookmark file, I discovered, is 1.5mb.

I’ve decided to start fresh. Instead of piling all those bookmarks back into my browser file, I’m going to hand select the few I use all the time and stash all the other used-only-occassionally-or-just-the-one-time bookmarks over in my Jots online bookmarking account.

Usually I have Jots post my daily bookmarks to my weblog, but since I’m going to be adding several hundred to it over the next few days, I’ve disabled that particular feature for the time being. If you would like to see what I’ve got stashed over there, you can go check out my whole Jots bookmark collection. You can even subscribe to its RSS feed if you like.

Exciting times.

I also picked up a copy of the train game so I can experience the joys of train time like my friend phik.

I’ll be getting this game for two basic reasons: 1) Sims2 is fun to play in fits and starts, although on the whole it’s sort of frustrating and a little boring — maybe this expansion (and the others) will make it a little less frustrating and boring; 2) As far as I can tell, all new games suck.

Raph Koster, who is apparently some sort of MMORPG guru or something, wrote a little ranty blog post today called What are the lessons of MMORPGs today? If you’ve played any of those sorts of games you will laugh. Bitterly. And when you stop laughing bitterly, you might look grumpy for a little while when you think back to how much damned time you wasted playing the blasted things, trying to find the “fun” that you lost when you figured out the game mechanics. (Once you figure out the core mechanics it’s all just rote time-filling, which is a lot like, oh, work.)

Anyhow. As I said to someone yesterday, “if they’d just create a site full of strange little web-based Tycoon style games, I’d happily subscribe”. There are caveats, of course — each game would have to have different base mechanics and influencing variables so solving one didn’t solve them all — but otherwise I pretty much stand by that. I like puzzles. I like games that provide me a sense of accomplishment commensurate to the amount of effort (be it time, brain power, or ideally a combination of both) I put in. I really like games that I can pop in and play for 30-60 mins, by myself, with a sense of having accomplished something.

For what it’s worth, one of my favourite games of all time is, to this day, Ragnarok. I’d just about kill for a Rogue-like game for the Nintendo DS. Sigh.

Stupid games.

Last night I decided to see if I could figure out how to draw maps with Illustrator, since, really, drawing maps on graph paper with a pencil is so…20th century. Several hours of fiddling later, and here are the results (no scale, no legend…I’m still fiddling):

Or see the big version.

For what it’s worth, this is (theoretically) a map of Perrowaithe, a largish island continent (probably a third of the size of Australia) that is home to seven kingdoms, the great port city of Hav’non, a pantheon of 42 gods, and roughly 12,000 years of civilised history. Among other things. I first dreamed up Perrowaithe probably 15 years ago, and, well…I’ve got about 300 pages of handwritten notes and maps about it in a filebox here. Yes, I’ve been a nerd for a really long time.

I say “theoretically” because I actually have other ideas for this particular map now that I’ve drawn it, but we’ll see.

What a silly fun way to spend a chunk of the weekend. :)

I miss pencil and paper roleplaying a lot. From those games came my strongest friendships and some of the most indelible memories of my gaming life. Computer games don’t even come close. But running a regular game with people my age (mid-30s) is a scheduling nightmare. It’s just not possible, particularly given that my friends are scattered across a half-dozen timezones.

Bah.

Update: Or just post here!

Anyhow, while Boolean was out and about on his ongoing shopping extravaganza (xbox, games, some sort of special cable, memory card, beer), he bought me a present: a brand new (blue!) Nintendo DS! Knowing that new game systems are basically useless without games, he also picked up a copy of Nintendogs which, essentially, boils down to being a puppy simulator. It’s unspeakably cute.

Since Boolean was all caught up driving some seriously shiny virtual cars around, I ran off to the bookstore, stopping at the game shop long enough to pick up three more DS titles: MarioKart, Sims2, and Trace Memory. Quick reviews: MarioKart is fun, Sims2 is fun (but not even remotely Simmish), and Trace Memory (so far) is a lot of really boring dialogue interspersed by me getting annoyed because I’m already stuck. Chances are good that I’ll pick up a few more games today. Currently my “to buy” list is: Kirby, Space Invaders Revolution, Zoo Keeper, Lost in Blue, and Advance Wars.

If you know of any DS games you might think I’d like, feel free to leave a comment. I’m actively looking for recommendations, particularly for RPGs, Puzzle games, and Adventure titles (or interesting FPSs such as Tomb Raider or No One Lives Forever).

My most recent two forays into gamedom were World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. WoW held my interest for roughly two months. After that I played on and off out of a desire for it to stop sucking, and then I just held my subscription for a couple of months out of forgetfulness. Then I quit, and I haven’t really considered going back even once.

Guild Wars, luckily, doesn’t have the same guilt-factor as WoW (or other subscription games), because there’s no monthly fee. It doesn’t matter if I don’t play at all this month, because I’m not forking money into the bottomless furnace of the internet just in case I decide I want to give it a go some random Saturday afternoon. On the other hand, I played for a little over a week, left it for a week, and haven’t really thought about logging in since.

WoW and Guild Wars, you see, are both basically the same goddamned game. Fantasy role-playing in a massively multiplayer world (caveats aside), where you quest to gain levels and loot. These are basically the same as Horizons, and Anarchy Online, and Star Wars Galaxies, and Asheron’s Call (1 & 2), and City of Heroes. As a matter of fact, they’re the same as the Baldur’s Gates, the Morrowinds, NeverWinter Nights, the Diablos.

In all of these games the basic premise is that you, for whatever reason, are a hero in a mythical land — usually armed with a sword, a bow, or magic — running about doing quests in an attempt to get gold and loot and experience so you get bigger, faster, and stronger. You’re working to get bigger, faster, and stronger so you can go out and get more gold and loot and experience while fighting bigger and badder bad guys. In the end (if there is an end, and as often as not there isn’t), you vanquish the biggest and baddest bad guy and save the realm from whatever horrors that bad guy was unleashing upon it.

I think I just have to finally accept the fact that most RPGs just suck, whether they be Massively Multiplayer, Limited Multiplayer, or Single Player.

So, by discounting RPGs entirely, what’s left? I’ve already abandoned the following genres in the past:

• First Person Shooters (the Doom-alikes)
• Real Time Strategy (the Starcraft-alikes)
• Sims (the SimCity-alikes)
• Turn Based Strategy that involves combat (the Civ-alikes)
• Puzzle games (the Myst-alikes)
• Choose Your Own Adventures (the Longest Journey-alikes)
• Racing Games (the Project Gotham-alikes)
• Sport Games (the Madden Football-alikes)

I don’t play FPSs, Racing Games, RTSs, or Sport Games at all. The rest of these genres will occassionally cough something up that I’ll take a look at and even buy, but in the past 3 years none of them have produced a game I’ve “finished” in any meaningful way.

So, what’s left? Bejeweled. Katamari Damacy. The bittersweet memory of the first Tomb Raider.

The thought of finally having to admit to myself that I just don’t like contemporary RPGs is just depressing. I think I’m going to have to find a new hobby.

HHGttG: The Movie

I finally went to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie. I remain ambivalent. I didn’t hate it, by any means, but I also didn’t particularly like it. The new Marvin is cute, yes, but didn’t quite convey the utter pathos of the Marvin in the TV Series. The movie’s Ford simply doesn’t hold a candle to the TV Series’ Ford. I actually dislike the movie’s Zaphod, while the TV Series’ Zaphod remains one of my favourite ne’er-do-well characters of all time. Also, for obvious reasons*, I do not like Vogons and am somewhat upset that they were given such a central role in the movie. All in all, I found myself wishing the parts that overlapped the TV Series were more like the TV Series, and the new parts just didn’t have the same comedic zing I’m accustomed to in Adam’s work.

As someone else (somewhere) said: It started as a radio show, so dialogue is everything. They butchered the dialogue, and so a lot of the “funny” just got mislaid. That said, if the rumours are true and they do turn the movie into a trilogy (of however many parts) I will go see them all. In the meantime, however, I will be rereading the books and rewatching the TV Series (now out on DVD). If you haven’t seen the TV Series, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you shell out $25 and order the DVDs. It’s really, really funny.

On Tiger

The novelty of the new Tiger features has worn off so I can be a little more objective about it now.

Dashboard: The eye-candy is nice, but overall the usefulness is low. Widgets tend to eat system resources like crazy, so I’ve minimized the ones I have running to: World Clock (x2), the Dictionary/Thesaurus, and the weather widget. The others don’t provide enough actual value to make up for the system resources they suck up like little sponges.

Spotlight: I use this all the damned time. Cmd-Space brings up the Spotlight search, type in the name of an app, then hit Cmd-Enter and the app will launch. This is what I largely used Quicksilver for, so I’ve been able to get rid of Quicksilver, freeing up more resources for other things (like browsers and email clients and things I actually use all the time).

Smart Folders: I haven’t really mastered these yet, so don’t use them too much at the moment. Where “too much” actually means “at all”. I need to sort out how to use Automator to meta-tag my files in bunches. Once I do that, Smart Folders will become much more useful to me.

BluePhonElite (3rd party): My trial ran out and I haven’t purchased a proper copy yet. Downside: I have to use my phone’s keypad to write SMSs. Upside: my phone’s battery lasts 3-4x longer when bluetooth is turned off. I doubt I will buy a license.

DragThing: Cute, but largely pointless. I used it for a little while to make really complex docks full of things that would let me organize and launch all kinds of applications. Spotlight’s search-then-launch feature obviates the need for that. Got rid of it and freed up more system resources. My regular dock is also back to a nice manageable size of 12 icons (Finder, XChat, Firefox, Thunderbird, iChat, AdiumX, SubEthaEdit, Terminal, Calculator, iCal, System Prefs).

Guild Wars

I picked up Guild Wars last weekend and have been playing semi-regularly since. It’s a very fun game, but also very different.

First off, there’s no monthly fee. This is Highly Compelling for the obvious reasons. I finally unsubscribed from World of Warcraft after not logging in to seriously play for 3-4 months. During that 3-4 months, in spite of putting in roughly 4-5 hours of play time, Blizzard hit my credit card for roughly ~$80. Screw that. No monthly fee means no serious commitment, no pressure to “get your money’s worth”, and so forth.

Second, everything outside of common areas (towns) is an instance. That means when you’re out being an Intrepid Adventurer doing quests and killing critters and getting loot, you (or your party) are the only players there. No killstealing, no camping spawns, no random jerks being jerks, etc. That part of it plays exactly as a single- or limited-multiplayer-game would play. Common areas are for recruiting people into your party, trading, chatting, etc. I actually complained about this in Anarchy Online, but it doesn’t bother me in this game. I’m not sure why.

Third, if forced to describe it by comparing it to other games, I would have to say it’s like a cross between DiabloII, NeverWinter Nights, Dungeon Siege, and a MMORPG.

• Henchmen make it like NWN

.

• The loot system and linearity of areas makes it like Diablo II
• The Henchmen and linearity and loot and general appearance of avatars make it like Dungeon Siege
• The MMORPG part makes it like a MMORPG.
• None of these comparisons really do it justice.

Anyhow, it’s fun, it’s different, it’s free online play. If you like these sorts of games at all, I recommend it highly.

1) I’m way more likely to work out in the privacy of my own home than anywhere else.
2) It’s way cheaper than getting a gym membership.
3) It looks like fun.
4) It would be a decent way to actually do some exercise, which I don’t currently do. At all.

My only problem is picking a DDR pad. If you can recommend one, please drop a comment here. There seem to be a lot of choices out there, so I’m looking for something a) reliable, b) not too expensive, and c) stable enough that I won’t end up killing myself slipping on it (or having it slip on the hardwood).

The actual reason for getting a PS2 was Katamari Damacy. If you haven’t heard of this game by now, you’re probably a sub-rock-dweller, as it’s quite possibly the most universally-adored game since Tetris. The premise is utterly ridiculous: You are a tiny Cosmic Prince. Your father, King of the Cosmos, got drunk one day and managed to destroy all the stars in the sky. He’s decided that it’s up to you to fix the situation, and thus sends you to Earth to roll objects up into large balls (katamaris). When the balls of rolled up things are large enough, they are launched into the night sky where they then turn into stars. Yes. The premise of the game is to make large garbage balls.

Sounds ludicrous, but it’s really fun and silly. If you have a PS2, you should go buy the game. If you don’t have a PS2, you should go buy a PS2 along with a copy of the game. It’s just plain old fun.

Today, Boolean and I went to EB. He needed a copy of Splinter Cell: Something Something for XBox. I tagged along so I could check out the used PS2 bin. The used PS2 bin turned out to be two very large sections of wall, lined floor to ceiling with games. Ho ho! I ended up buying used copies of Bard’s Tale, Shadow Hearts, Silent Hill 3, Beyond Good and Evil, and Final Fantasy X. Five huge games for the price of two-and-a-half new copies. The expensive one was Bard’s Tale, of course, since it’s still on the “New Releases” shelf. The rest ranged from $17 to $24. Given that almost all new games had copies on the used game shelf, I can’t see myself ever shelling out full price for a new PS2 title.

If you have PS2 games to recommend, feel free to drop a comment here. Here are some hints about what I do and don’t like in games:

1) I despise first person shooters of all descriptions. I just suck at them. I doubt driving with my thumbs is going to help that at all.

2) I suck at real time strategy games, and thus hate them. This definitely isn’t going to change because I’m simply too ADD to remember stuff for very long.

3) I like RPGs. The more RPG-y, the better. Favourite RPGs of all time include: Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, Diablo, Dungeon Siege. Note: I have never finished any of these, see #2 re: ADD.

4) I like action puzzle games, but am of the opinion that most action puzzle games suck. I loved the first Tomb Raider. The rest of them sucked. Everything I’ve tried like Tomb Raider since has sucked. The Thief series had a lot of potential, but they blew it by making me actually have to disable/kill people. The shooting part of the original Tomb Raider was utterly incidental. Note: I also hate jumping/timed puzzles. Prince of Persia came close to being the sort of action puzzle game I like, except there was too much combat. No combat + all puzzles would be ideal. If you know of a game like this (any platform), please let me know.

5) I like sims. Sim City, the Sims, etc. The Sims: the Urbz looks retarded, so don’t recommend that one. I don’t think sim games really translate well to consoles, but maybe there’s an exception to the rule out there somewhere.

6) I like cute games. Katamari Damacy is relentlessly cute. I actually played Pokemon on my GBA for altogether too many hours. Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance sucked up a huge chunk of my life.

Right. Time to hit Egypt to check the beetles, then maybe log in to WoW for a while if it decides to cooperate. Then, maybe Bard’s Tale ’til I pass out. Yay weekends.

2) There are a lot of people on the internet who seem to care way too much about really stupid things. The examples of this are endless, so I won’t bother going into specifics. Mostly I just want to say that a lot of folks just need to get a grip.

3) There are a lot of people on the internet who care a great deal about things that aren’t so stupid. Sifting these few delicious grains out of the deluge of chaff is hard. I’m becoming increasingly impatient with the internet and the content it provides. We need some sort of system that can help with this. Google is good at what it does, but it does not help sort by quality. Technorati and Blogdex and other similar services also suffer from the quantity-over-quality disease. There has to be a better way.

4) House M.D. is a good TV show. You should watch it. Hopefully it won’t get cancelled.

5) The new Battlestar Galactica, I’ve decided after long consideration, is the best sci-fi television series in history. I’m not kidding. It blows all the Star Treks clear out of the water, and I actually liked some of those. Firefly is the only other sci-fi series I can think of that even comes close.

6) I am sad that Enterprise has been cancelled, but not nearly so sad as I was about Firefly.

7) I wish the Max Headroom Show would just come out on DVD already. Come on, people.

8) Over the past couple of years I’ve realized that geek culture is now mainstream. Games, Comic Books, Bad TV Shows, Computers, and all that. I guess there were a lot more of us holed up in our parents’ basements playing Space Invaders, reading X-Men, programming NPC-generators on our Commodore 64s, and watching Kung-Fu than I thought. I wonder what constitutes “geek culture” now that will become mainstream when today’s young geek hits her 30s? I bet I wouldn’t recognize it if it hit me in the face.

9) I like ecto.

10) RSS feeds change how I use the internet. I am not entirely sure I like these changes. With RSS feeds, I do not browse, I scan. I also find myself relying on them, when there are a large number of sites out there that do not have them or to which I haven’t subscribed. Push technology just ain’t all that, no more now than it was in 1997. There’s a lesson in here somewhere about quantity over quality again, and how the sheer quantity of poorly-filtered (it’s not really unfiltered any more) information forces us to skim reams and reams of garbage simply because we don’t have time to dig through it all to find the stuff that’s actually worth reading.

11) We need much, much better filters. Also, librarians.

Once upon a time I, and legions of my like-minded brethren, believed that Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights was going to be all that and more. NWN did ship with a full editor suite, and the community has, over the past 3-4 years, produced some amazing modules and add-ons for the game. The editor, however, misses the mark for the “quickly” and “easily” parts of the equation by a very wide margin. I have spent altogether too many hours trying to create modules with the editor, but it is so clunky, anger-inducing, and esoteric that I have never been mule-headed enough to actually finish one. I strongly suspect that I’m not alone, and that’s with a decent technical/programming background. The best and most creative DMs I’ve known are not so technically minded, so the barrier to entry for those who would most benefit from such a tool is astronomically high.

So, the great promise of NWN never really bore fruit. People still use the editor, and more people do benefit from the results, but even so, the modules are prone to bugs (oh god, the bugs), crashing, lost save games, lost progress, and so much more. In the end, it’s a sad and frustrating system.

Here we are in 2005, surrounded by technology on all sides, and we’re still waiting for a game system that really puts the creative tools to make cool games in the hands of those who would best be able to use them.

Expanding on that, I look forward to the day where someone puts out a system that allows fledgling game-designer wannabes (like myself) to create persistent, massively-multiplayer game worlds. Sort of a NWN-like editor system (only significantly less painful to use) only for designing whole worlds and game systems that we can then host online. The “massively” part doesn’t even have to be that massive. Even if a world only hosts a maximum of 500 concurrent connections, that would be a good start. I strongly suspect this is a lot harder than I think, and I’m pretty sure it’s awfully hard. Someday someone will pull it off, and upon that day I will rejoice.

I’m also looking forward to the day where TV is less stupid and more like iTunes. I would happily pay for a service (either subscription, or piecemeal) that would let me download and view commercial-free TV shows on demand. Gleefully, I would pay for such a thing. Our current alternative, which is becoming very popular, is to not watch TV at all, but instead wait for TV shows to be released on DVD. We buy lots of TV shows on DVD and then watch them on our own schedule without the annoyance of having to fastforward through commercials. I’m hoping some giant mega-corporation comes up with a TV-on-demand service like this in the near future. There is TV out there worth watching, but the current delivery mechanism sucks.

Finally (for now): I’m looking forward to someone (probably Microsoft, since they own the rights) doing something interesting with the Shadowrun franchise. Think “Matrix Online” only gritter, cooler, and with 100% less Keanu Reeves. Mmm. And street shamans. Booyah.

Q. Are the files in e23 copy protected?

A. No. That would interfere with your use of them. We just have to hope that we can sell enough to honest people to make up for what gets stolen by the kiddies and cheapskates.

Sadly, life is such that pencil + paper gaming is never likely to become a serious hobby for me again. When I was a student (highschool, dropout, and university) I used to play all the time. For the full length of one glorioius summer we had 5-7 people playing at least weekly, if not more often. From these times emerged such things as my love for King Crimson, and such strange insider funninesses as “Grope the Mega”.

Ah, me. Good times, good times.

Now, however, I’m a grown up and all my friends are grown up, and most of my friends don’t live anywhere near me (distributed, for the most part, evenly across North America from Nova Scotia to California and back again). Scheduling is nearly impossible, even for the local crew (all, like, 4 of us), and so forth.

Games like World of Warcraft sort of fill that gamery urge for me, but it’s a different animal than P&P gaming on almost every level. It wears a thin mask that makes it look a little bit like a “role playing game”, but it’s not. There’s no role playing. There’s no creativity. There’s no bending the rules. There’s no chance to stock your rogue’s pack with thin wire, chalk, packets of the Dust of Disappearance, thin bladed saws, silk rope, fine lockpicks, a bag of marbles, tiny caltrops…and other such “just in case there’s an emergency” items. Quests are static and unchangeable — everyone who runs a particular quest does the exact same thing — there’s no opportunity for a Dungeon Master to tweak the details to fit the party.

I miss proper P&P gaming. Even if Never Winter Nights had managed to deliver a module creation/editor system that wasn’t eye-stabbingly difficult to use (in other words, one that regular creative DM types could pick up and actually do something interesting with in about, oh, 2% of the current time it takes), it wouldn’t have been the same. As soon as you add graphics and sounds to this, it stops being a vehicle for imagination.

There is only one generation of gamers who grew up pencil and paper gaming. The original Dungeons & Dragons (Chainmail) was produced by Gary Gygax in 1971. The year I was born. Zork (arguably the first mass-market CRPG) was released in 1980. The Atari 2600 (for many of us, our first home game console) came out in 1982. Now the world is saturated with XBoxes, PS2s, GameCubes, high end gaming PCs, Game Boys, and an ever growing collection of other new gaming devices.

P&P gaming is a fringe thing, relegated again to the nerd world of back rooms at comic/game shops with big folding tables, bad chairs, too much Coke, and huge bags of chips. Video gaming is mainstream. In the end, however, will anyone think back, 20 years from now, and fondly recall that one time in Halo when they were the Master Chief and blew up hundreds of The Flood to finish the level? Will there be the same warm nostalgia I feel when I think back today to that time when my not-too-bright but hellishly-strong fighter (nicknamed “Slay” by the rest of the party) hauled out her gleaming bastard sword (shields are for pussies), ran through that guarded jail, and killed everything that moved before the mage could even get his wand out?

I bet not.

World of Warcraft is a good game, but it’s not a collaborative piece of interactive fiction. It’s fiction, and it’s interactive, but it’s not a collaboration. I miss that part most of all.

Ah, good times.

Game reviews need to be smarter, while book reviews need to be less scholarly and more targeted towards regular people.

Maybe I should write something less over-coffeeish about why these book reviews are overwrought. Ostensibly the game reviews and the book reviews have, in me, the same audience. Why are they so different? Is it so inconceivable that a gamer might also be a reader, and vice versa?

I’m not even entirely sure why this is bothering me so much today. Why isn’t there a good, collaborative, non-commercial book review weblog out there?

Or is there?

Game Review Excerpts

• Delivers more onscreen pyrotechnics than a Kiss concert.
• The new mech designs with new weapons also give a strong presence but it’s the addition of the battle armor and VTOL that makes the biggest impact.
• There is still a bit of linear gameplay in the single player mode which could be a bit more in depth and dynamic, but as it is, blowing stuff up has never been more fun.
• It’s the perfect mix of old school mech action with an arcade feel to it.
• While there’s occasional pop-up and clipping, those glitches are trumped by smooth animation and incredible explosions. When an enemy Mech is trashed, the bright blast lights up the screen and ripples the surrounding terrain in the most satisfyingly way.
• The sheer joy of destruction, variety of mechs and plethora of game types result in a fun if slower-paced online action game. This giant robot might not save the world, but it’s still a pretty good pal.

Book Review Excerpts

• More than a trifle but less than a masterpiece, the novel is an entertainment, and as such it seeks first to amuse and second to inform.
• So: sermon, melodrama, dystopian vision — I Am Charlotte Simmons partakes of all these, and does so stunningly. But it’s still as much polemic as novel. One closes the book feeling soiled by its cloacal vision and emotionally manipulated by its author.
• Mr Wolfe’s gifts for sartorial detail, verbal tics and all the tiny gestures that define place in the social pecking order are on hyperkinetic, at times tiresome, display.
• If it shares some Dickensian virtues, such as exuberant, lovingly crafted grotesquery, it also has Dickensian vices, such as long-windedness, and a fundamentally unbelievable heroine.
• The proportion of rant overload to silky observation has much increased.
• The problem is that Wolfe, whose writing has always been grossly adjectival and chic-specific, has failed to capture any news of interest about American youth, and comes off instead like one of those horrible professors who tried to make you listen to Imagine while simultaneously getting off on his status as a pedagogical errant.

The world, I think, needs a blending of these. At very least, we need book reviews written by people who sound less like annoying college professors who have never learned how to write for a non-academic audience. Less intellectual wanking, please, and more actual communication. Thx!

Addendum: This is not to say, of course, that I like most game reviews. I don’t. I find the authors generally untrustworthy and usually under-informed. The only game reviewers I actually trust and rely upon are the Penny Arcade guys, but that’s because 1) I know they’re not on the take, and 2) I know they actually play games. Tycho also writes well.

OMFG LOLZ 4TW!!!1!1~~1!

So, ok, maybe I’m a prude, but I don’t like games such as Grand Theft Auto. Not only do I not like them, I find them offensive, plausibly damaging, and utterly unnecessary. It’s a very particular sort of game that I don’t like at this level — games that work to provide a reasonable emulation of real-life crime, violence, drug-culture, and that encourage you, as a player, to become part of that world, rather than setting you up to fight against it. In other words, I’m not a big fan of games where the whole point is to have the player role-play a real-life bad guy.

Give me aliens. Give me Sith. Let me run around being a dagger-wielding zombie chick with a bad attitude and a distaste for Night Elves. Set me up with a BFG and some nail guns running around being a Space Marine on Mars. Better yet, give me a hunk of desert and a bit of fertile land along a river and I will build a civilisation. Let me build. Let me create. Let me fight the bad guys. Let me solve crimes. Let me make-believe in a fantasy world. Don’t…don’t have me commit serious (epic, even) analogs of real-world crimes and reward me based on how many people I kill, prostitutes I control, or drug money I bring in. Well, you can offer me the chance to do that if you like, but don’t sell it to the ten-to-fifteen year old set, m’kay?

Now, of course, there’s the ESRB and their video games rating guide, but it’s not exactly all that useful. First off, “the ESRB does not have the authority to enforce the ratings at the retail level, [but] we do work closely with retailers and game centers to encourage them to display ratings information and not sell or rent certain product to minors”. Secondly, most parents don’t have the time or wherewithal to a) know about the rating system, b) actually use the rating system to select games for their children, or c) really have the first clue wtf the kids are doing downstairs on the X-Box in the first place.

I guess that’s actually secondly, thirdly, and fourthly.

Anyhow, I think the actual creation of these games is ethically questionable at the best of times, but I understand the most fundamental reasons for doing so: they make millions and millions of dollars. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for example, “could be looking at 3 million copies sold in the opening weekend”. At around $50 US per copy, that’s, oh, $150,000,000. In the first weekend. Not an insignificant motivation.

I suppose I just wish that ESRB ratings were (far) more rigorous and better enforced. People are going to continue making these games, for obvious bottom-line-feeding reasons. Parents, however, aren’t going to suddenly wake up tomorrow and be more actively involved and responsible with regards to their childrens’ lives. Which is sad, but true. This being the case, I’d just like to see the video games treated more like…well, more like something that’s rigorously rated that has those ratings enforced at the point of sale. Movies, I suppose. Or…porn mags. Or something.

That’s enough of that, however. I started this post talking about Apple for a reason, and that’s because the Postal people have just released their sequel, Postal2: Running With Scissors for the Mac, and Apple is refusing to carry the title. “The controversial game has been given a M-rating (Mature audiences) along with a first-ever ‘Intense Violence’ sublabel from the ESRB.” Really, if you go look at their website (WARNING: FRONT PAGE IS NOT WORK FRIENDLY) you’ll see that the “M” rating really doesn’t cut it. “AO” (Adult Only, 18+) is what it should have, and that should be enforced at the point of sale by retail drones checking valid photo ID. But I digress…

The Postal site describes their latest product as follows:

Forget what you know about first person shooters. Walk a week in the Postal Dude’s shoes.

Freely explore full 3-D open-ended environments. Interact with over 100 unique NPC’s including Gary Coleman, marching bands, dogs, cats and elephants, protesters, policemen and civilians, with or without weapons.

POSTAL 2 is all about choice; experiment with everyone and everything.

And remember… it’s only as violent as you are!

Which really begs the question: if you’re not running around exploring this open-ended environment with a shotgun and a lust to kill anything that moves, what, exactly, are your interaction options? For all I know there’s a learn-to-be-a-chef-while-playing-mahjongg mini-game, but I’m doubting it.

Wrapping up: I think the Postal people are basically dumbasses for saying things like “The company that brought us the famous ’1984′ Superbowl commercial has obviously become Big Brother” and believing it.

You buy the ticket, you take the ride. That’s all there is to it.

China, sensitive about issues of national sovereignty, has banned a computer sports game that classifies Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet as countries and has threatened to fine Web sites that supply the game and net cafes that let patrons download it.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.