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wordwhackerSadly re: this week's reading topic, I haven't been playing a lot of video games lately, but that's nothing new. (Just Rock Band. I love it because it's a bit of physical exertion as well as a totally different way of engaging my brain. Makes for wonderful study breaks!) Mostly I'm spending a lot of time on email, making appointments to meet with profs and people for school groups, occasionally conversing with friends. I also tend to email my papers to myself as I work on them so I always have a backup (I also have saves at several stages).
I liked this week's reading, though (namely, "Playing on the digital commons: collectivities, capital and contestation in videogame culture" by Sarah Coleman and Nick Dyer-Witheford,) and I want to comment on a couple of things re: my own gaming history, a gaming mod project I was involved in at one time, and some hopes I have about the future of rhythm-based gaming like Rock Band/Guitar Hero - a future that may very well revolve around hacking/modding.
ROMS are cool. I used to be more into them a few years ago, during what I'd call my frist phase of nostalgia. I was a big fan of the SNES, so when I found out about ROMS I immediately had to go see if they had some of my favourite games. I also loved RPGs for the original nintendo, but console issues had kept me from playing them for a long time (there's nothing quite like having your save file MAGICALLLY disappear!) ROMS were a potential fix of that issue. My emulators tended to have problems and I was too lazy to fix them, though, so I didn't really invest a lot of time in playing them. There's probably something significantly more stable available now - I should check it out. (It's amazing how many NES ROMS are available through Facebook! Recently I got into playing "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiago" again because Google/Wikipedia makes me an instant expert. X-D)
Another problem is the translation of the controls to keyboard commands. I don't know about any of you, but the visceral experience of holding a controller (even those little box things from the original NES) is really, REALLY key when I'm playing games. Sidescrollers are my favourites and I am pretty much a GENIUS at Mario Bro's, but I NEED to be using my thumbs. I grew up doing it that way and I just CAN'T use the arrow buttons and A/S buttons with the wrong hands on the keyboard to the same effect.
You can imagine how happy I was when the Game Boy Advance started re-releasing the old favourites. I am once again thumb-enabled, and mobile to boot! And it's nice that they recognized that this would be something that people would invest in, too. Instead of just shaking their fists at ROM sites but never making any effort to, y'know, PROVIDE the content, they seemed to put their money where their mouth was. The playstation re-released a bunch of the Final Fantasy games and Chrono Trigger, too, which was sweet. (Except for the ridiculous loading times. Cartridge games win hands-down for that sort of thing.)
The reading this week had this to say, which pretty much corresponds with what I'm saying:
HOWEVER. There are two problems, as far as I see it, with the way that the games were re-released on official consoles.
First: they were too freaking expensive. Who wants to pay 50$ for Mario Brothers 1 AGAIN? And I don't care how much they updated the graphics and sound, that price is TOO MUCH for the re-release of a twenty-year-old game.
Second: Having PLAYED ROMS, I know how much diskspace a game like Mario Brothers takes up. The WHOLE GAME was... well, let me check. This ROM site has a number of games listed, most of which are only about 100 or 200K. Mario Bros is 16K. "Okay," you say, "but the graphics upgrades probably made it a lot bigger." True enough. But even SNES ROMS are only a couple of megs at the VERY most, gauging from this site. The Game Boy Advance is able to handle games at around a SNES level, right? Gee, is it just me, or did they not release a game for the SNES which included Mario Bros 1, 2 and 3 AND "Lost Levels," all with graphics and sound upgrades? Nope, it's not just me! It was called "Mario All Stars" - I know, I BOUGHT it. Already. And they want me to pay 40-50$ for EACH of these games again for the Advance? Here's a tip, Nintendo: If you want people to pay to play retro games, charge a reasonable price.
They have some old games available on the Wii and X-Box 360 networks which you can download - I'm not sure how much they cost, since I don't own either system and have learned about this stuff second-hand, but I remember thinking that the dollar-to-point translation that made the transaction possible wasn't exactly economical if you wanted to own more than one or two of them.
Now that I've ragged on the evil evil greedy evil game developers (who are greedy and evil, did I mention that? ;-) I want to talk about a pretty cool experience I (almost) had with a group of people doing a Star Wars mod. I'll preface this with another brief quote from the reading:
A few years ago I was going through one of my phases where I was really keen on becoming a voice actor. (It never really goes away, I just quash it so that I can concentrate on school work.) I found the New Jedi Order project which was an X-Wing Alliance mod in the making. They needed someone to do the voice for a character, so I recorded a bunch of lines for them. The thing essentially went dead after that - every now and then I've gone back to see if anybody's tried to resrsurrect it...
... Holy crap. Apparently they finished it! FINALLY! The hell?! I'm downloading a file called "Voice Talent" now to see if my voice actually made it into this thing. If it did, how sweet is that? (And how awesome is the timing?! X-D) Anyway, go to the website and check it out. I wanted to mention it because it seemed to me that the plot, characters, and general application of the mod were very much in the "Star Wars" spirit (which is why I decided to give it a try.) I sort of wish I had the game so I could try it out!
My last thoughts for this week, being somewhat relevant to my actual gaming life (such as it is), revolve around Rock Band. I rave about this game a lot because it is essentially the EXACT kind of game that I wanted to exist as a kid. I'm glad that Guitar Hero is making its equipment and games compatible with the Rock Band equipment and games, because if they hadn't it would have pissed a LOT of people off. Rock Band players are, I imagine, generally coming out of a Guitar Hero tradition anyway, and a mutually exclusive rivalry between the two companies would just make things difficult.
I'm hoping to get Rock Band 2 for Christmas (note to self: ask for it already) - it's got lots of songs on it. Which is nice. I have only a PS2, so I don't have access to all of the downloadable content. What I'm wondering, though, is how long it's going to take before someone manages to crack Guitar Hero / Rock Band and start importing and coding whatever songs they want. This is definitely something that the developers want to avoid because now they can charge a flat fee per song, but I have a strong feeling that this is going to go the same way as music has.
Will it have the requisite witch-hunts and finger-waggling? Probably. And it is going to open some really interesting debates about intellectual property, because this infringes both video game AND music copyright. But fee-per-song isn't working all that well for music, anyway: 99 cents sounds good until you realize that you have 60 gigs of iPod space to fill up, which translates to, like, a hundred thousand dollars worth of songs. There has GOT to be a better way. People already have to pay for their X-box live subscriptions and whatever - could that dollar-power be harnessed somehow that would work better for both users and developers / music industry people?
Personally, I just hope I have the right system to cash in on it once it starts happening. ;-)
I liked this week's reading, though (namely, "Playing on the digital commons: collectivities, capital and contestation in videogame culture" by Sarah Coleman and Nick Dyer-Witheford,) and I want to comment on a couple of things re: my own gaming history, a gaming mod project I was involved in at one time, and some hopes I have about the future of rhythm-based gaming like Rock Band/Guitar Hero - a future that may very well revolve around hacking/modding.
ROMS are cool. I used to be more into them a few years ago, during what I'd call my frist phase of nostalgia. I was a big fan of the SNES, so when I found out about ROMS I immediately had to go see if they had some of my favourite games. I also loved RPGs for the original nintendo, but console issues had kept me from playing them for a long time (there's nothing quite like having your save file MAGICALLLY disappear!) ROMS were a potential fix of that issue. My emulators tended to have problems and I was too lazy to fix them, though, so I didn't really invest a lot of time in playing them. There's probably something significantly more stable available now - I should check it out. (It's amazing how many NES ROMS are available through Facebook! Recently I got into playing "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiago" again because Google/Wikipedia makes me an instant expert. X-D)
Another problem is the translation of the controls to keyboard commands. I don't know about any of you, but the visceral experience of holding a controller (even those little box things from the original NES) is really, REALLY key when I'm playing games. Sidescrollers are my favourites and I am pretty much a GENIUS at Mario Bro's, but I NEED to be using my thumbs. I grew up doing it that way and I just CAN'T use the arrow buttons and A/S buttons with the wrong hands on the keyboard to the same effect.
You can imagine how happy I was when the Game Boy Advance started re-releasing the old favourites. I am once again thumb-enabled, and mobile to boot! And it's nice that they recognized that this would be something that people would invest in, too. Instead of just shaking their fists at ROM sites but never making any effort to, y'know, PROVIDE the content, they seemed to put their money where their mouth was. The playstation re-released a bunch of the Final Fantasy games and Chrono Trigger, too, which was sweet. (Except for the ridiculous loading times. Cartridge games win hands-down for that sort of thing.)
The reading this week had this to say, which pretty much corresponds with what I'm saying:
"'Abandonware' pirates have garnered sympathy as renegade archivists of an ephemeral art form, and some credit them with altering the industry to the commercial potential of 'retro' games."
HOWEVER. There are two problems, as far as I see it, with the way that the games were re-released on official consoles.
First: they were too freaking expensive. Who wants to pay 50$ for Mario Brothers 1 AGAIN? And I don't care how much they updated the graphics and sound, that price is TOO MUCH for the re-release of a twenty-year-old game.
Second: Having PLAYED ROMS, I know how much diskspace a game like Mario Brothers takes up. The WHOLE GAME was... well, let me check. This ROM site has a number of games listed, most of which are only about 100 or 200K. Mario Bros is 16K. "Okay," you say, "but the graphics upgrades probably made it a lot bigger." True enough. But even SNES ROMS are only a couple of megs at the VERY most, gauging from this site. The Game Boy Advance is able to handle games at around a SNES level, right? Gee, is it just me, or did they not release a game for the SNES which included Mario Bros 1, 2 and 3 AND "Lost Levels," all with graphics and sound upgrades? Nope, it's not just me! It was called "Mario All Stars" - I know, I BOUGHT it. Already. And they want me to pay 40-50$ for EACH of these games again for the Advance? Here's a tip, Nintendo: If you want people to pay to play retro games, charge a reasonable price.
They have some old games available on the Wii and X-Box 360 networks which you can download - I'm not sure how much they cost, since I don't own either system and have learned about this stuff second-hand, but I remember thinking that the dollar-to-point translation that made the transaction possible wasn't exactly economical if you wanted to own more than one or two of them.
Now that I've ragged on the evil evil greedy evil game developers (who are greedy and evil, did I mention that? ;-) I want to talk about a pretty cool experience I (almost) had with a group of people doing a Star Wars mod. I'll preface this with another brief quote from the reading:
"One point that mutes potential hostilities between modders and publishers is that most mods are thematically conservative, undertaken by technically accomplished fans who love a particular game and want more of it – more weapons and monstrous opponents for shooters, different campaigns and battles for war games – in variants that don’t stray far from the spirit of the original."
A few years ago I was going through one of my phases where I was really keen on becoming a voice actor. (It never really goes away, I just quash it so that I can concentrate on school work.) I found the New Jedi Order project which was an X-Wing Alliance mod in the making. They needed someone to do the voice for a character, so I recorded a bunch of lines for them. The thing essentially went dead after that - every now and then I've gone back to see if anybody's tried to resrsurrect it...
... Holy crap. Apparently they finished it! FINALLY! The hell?! I'm downloading a file called "Voice Talent" now to see if my voice actually made it into this thing. If it did, how sweet is that? (And how awesome is the timing?! X-D) Anyway, go to the website and check it out. I wanted to mention it because it seemed to me that the plot, characters, and general application of the mod were very much in the "Star Wars" spirit (which is why I decided to give it a try.) I sort of wish I had the game so I could try it out!
My last thoughts for this week, being somewhat relevant to my actual gaming life (such as it is), revolve around Rock Band. I rave about this game a lot because it is essentially the EXACT kind of game that I wanted to exist as a kid. I'm glad that Guitar Hero is making its equipment and games compatible with the Rock Band equipment and games, because if they hadn't it would have pissed a LOT of people off. Rock Band players are, I imagine, generally coming out of a Guitar Hero tradition anyway, and a mutually exclusive rivalry between the two companies would just make things difficult.
I'm hoping to get Rock Band 2 for Christmas (note to self: ask for it already) - it's got lots of songs on it. Which is nice. I have only a PS2, so I don't have access to all of the downloadable content. What I'm wondering, though, is how long it's going to take before someone manages to crack Guitar Hero / Rock Band and start importing and coding whatever songs they want. This is definitely something that the developers want to avoid because now they can charge a flat fee per song, but I have a strong feeling that this is going to go the same way as music has.
Will it have the requisite witch-hunts and finger-waggling? Probably. And it is going to open some really interesting debates about intellectual property, because this infringes both video game AND music copyright. But fee-per-song isn't working all that well for music, anyway: 99 cents sounds good until you realize that you have 60 gigs of iPod space to fill up, which translates to, like, a hundred thousand dollars worth of songs. There has GOT to be a better way. People already have to pay for their X-box live subscriptions and whatever - could that dollar-power be harnessed somehow that would work better for both users and developers / music industry people?
Personally, I just hope I have the right system to cash in on it once it starts happening. ;-)
