I’m fairly certain most of the MMO gaming population is currently in Northrend, but for those still stuck at work (you mean you didn’t take off?), I wanted to wish you all a happy WotLK release day. I’m currently waiting for the game to finish downloading and installing (thank you, MMO Champion). And then it’s bye bye Outland, hello frosty cold new place.

I’m taking the wait time to think about the most pressing question I believe most players ask themselves upon launching a new expansion: What to do first?

Which of my 70s do I want to level to 80? Should I start off with a Death Knight? Where do I want to start off my adventure? Should I focus on leveling my professions or just plow ahead through the levels?

Ah, Blizzard, you really know how to fill our heads with important, life-altering questions.

What are you guys planning to do first? I think I’ll focus on my mage first. No…. my druid. No… my priest.

Hmm…

Image taken by Ingrid Diaz

SCAD student Danial Floyd, inspired by insipid coverage of sex in games discussions and by the rambling rants of Yahtzee over at Zero Punctuation, put together a rousing Flash presentation as part of a Media Theory class that looks are the past, present, and Floyd’s suggestions for the future of sex in video games. Have a look:

Floyd calls for game developers to portray sex, rather than exploit sex and then proceeds to remind his viewers that the gaming industry is still a baby relative to other established mediums like film. Therein lies the key in my opinion, as the fine line between portrayal and exploitation is currently non-existent. Even though the odd game, like Custer’s Revenge, has included overt sexual material, the number of games containing what films label as “adult situations” is miniscule, and generally geared towards teenage boys. We’re still toying with the idea, we’re still trying to figure out what to do with it, and as a result, we’re still, more often than not, a bit clumsy with it. Like storytelling, sex in games would seem to be a natural element that seems to have developers oddly baffled.

As the gaming audience matures however, and people start to pay attention to the fact that a lot of legal adults, men and women are getting into gaming, you would hope that the use of sex in games becomes a) more frequent, b)more diversified to appeal to all segments of the gaming community and c) more mature. That’s not to say that we have to be rid of all things of a gratuitous sexual nature (hell no!), but there has to be that added element of a sense of purpose and place in additional games to give a better rounded experience.

My two cents.

I’m a slowpoke!

Aiza over at Gamerlite tagged me for a meme about week and a half ago that pokes around in my gaming preferences and most embarrassing moments.

1. Name and Job/s (if you want to share it) - Erin, winemaker (no really!) and not-so-closet uber-nerd.
2. You’re currently playing? - Stuck with Call of Duty 2 after switching to Mac, waiting for CoD4. Singstar, Guitar Hero, Casual Games on the road at Kongregate.
3. Favorite game genre/s - FPS, RPG, some MMO, some racing
4. Favorite game/s of all time - Medal of Honor: Allied Assault; Mario Kart; Rogue Spear; Final Fantasy VIII (I know…); Street Fighter; Mortal Kombat
5. Favorite game character/s - Chun-Li, Rayden, Duke Nukem
6. Earliest and fondest memory of gaming? - Kicking ass in Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego and Family Feud…in six colours.
7. Most hated gaming moment/s? - screaming at that bloody dog in Duck Hunt; getting demolished at SingStar by a 5 year old who didn’t even know the words to the songs.
8. Gaming gadgets/consoles you own/owned -I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate my bank account. It started with a Commodore 64…
9. If you had a “gamer’s shirt” what would the color and design be? (or if you have a favorite gamer shirt, what does it look like?) - Okay, girlie time, I want this tee from ThinkGeek but before you think I’ve gone squirrelly and pink-like, even higher on my list is the Cowbell Hero tee.
10. Gaming stuff on your wish list? - devs cluing in and doing more concurrent releases for Macs. That’s all I want for Christmas!

Anyone else that wants to take part in the meme, please feel free to post it on your own site and link back to this post at Play-Girlz to add your answers to the compilation.

Image Courtesy of Splitreason.com

Reporting from Montréal this week where, thankfully, I’m staying in a rather anglo-centric area so that I don’t insult/torment French culture with my mutilated Franglais. Although my reasons for being here are non-gaming, it certainly hasn’t stopped me from scouring my area around Saint-Catherine and Guy for information.

I’m happy to report that video game culture is alive and well here in Montréal. I’m staying two doors down from a large 24-hour gaming café, Ubisoft, Eidos and EA are all within a short walk (I’ll stalk them later), and the number of studios developing either games, or software for game development is continuing to rise. Last nightin another part of the city, on an after dinner walk, I randomly overheard a discussion that began “Well you Sandstorm them and then just wait…” Nothing like a UTIII reference in the posh shopping district to make you grin.

Montréal is a very happy place for video games at the moment.

There’s a point when yesterday’s innovation becomes today’s over-used, highly obnoxious crap. Call it a fad, call it a momentary lapse in development judgment, but sometimes things just get a little out of hand and a neat characteristic of one game (deemed successful), soon reaches out, propagates, and enslaves the entire gaming world.

Everyone’s favourite cranky game blog, Sarcastic Gamer, nominated 5 fads that it felt were the worst offenders over the last decade. I absolutely agree with all of them, and think that post could likely serve as a “what not to do” list for future game developers. We’ve all seen these little tricks, experienced these annoying hang-ups, and we’d like you to move on to creating some truly innovative gameplay if you wouldn’t mind.

The top fad, according to that article?

Quicktime Events:

There are two categories of Quicktime Events: The ones that allow you to do cool moves, and the ones that are essential to survive. I can’t stand either of them. Look, my reflexes are pretty good, from my years of gaming, but having an event pop up out of nowhere, asking me to hit ‘A’ as quickly as possible, then hit both triggers to survive is just irritating.

So very much agree, and it’s not just with games either…movies are equally to blame here, but there’s added annoyance when you’re actually required to perform in one of these time-warped dreamy sequences. One of the first games that I can remember this becoming an evident annoyance in was actually GUN. Great game (save for the fact that I could finish it in less time than it takes me to eat breakfast), but there were a lot of instances were you were forced to pop into slow-time, where the bloody game would then auto-aim for you, removing all skills and interactivity for the sake of looking pretty for a couple of seconds.

Other nominees include: unskippable cutscenes, broken controls, auto-aim (argh!) and invincible enemies/objects. Reading the rationale behind the fads will have you gritting your teeth in agreement, so if you’re up for some gnashing, have a go at the full article at Sarcastic Gamer.

image courtesy of Activision European Publishing

So you’ve always considered yourself a hardcore gamer. You’ve boasted to your friends and sat atop your throne of Gaming Greatness. But time has past. You’ve gotten older. Gotten married. Maybe have more responsibilities. So, are you still really hardcore? 

TechRadar has listed ‘11 Signs That You’re Not A Hardcore Gamer’ to help you answer the eternal question.

1. You prefer playing against the computer
2. You only play when your girlfriend is out
3. You believe that winning isn’t everything
4. It’s been days, not hours since you last switched on your console
5. You like your Xbox 360 and your PS3 equally
6. You fondly remember a ‘golden age’ of gaming
7. You avoid playing on the Wii because it’s too much effort
8. Your FPS experience consists of spawn, run, die … spawn, run, die…spawn…
9. You find the idea of videogames based on board games perfectly acceptable
10. You’ve pre-ordered GTA IV but don’t mind if it doesn’t turn up on launch day
11. You’re the oldest person trading in games at GameStation

So what do you think? Do you agree with the above? And do you think you can get older and still keep the hardcore stamp?

Image courtesy of SXC.

The race is one to build on an internet-wide phenomenon (Facebook) and apply it in a focussed fashion to the games industry. I’ve been reading quite a few press releases lately that detail several startups getting capital funding, and existing sites expanding their functionality, all in an effort to entire gamers to live out their gaming social lives on their site. Here’s some of the ones I’ve stumbled across:

GameStrata.com — an online ranking system and social network, the site develops “community tools for gamers”. Form Groups aligned with your game of choice, have your own personal forum, share tips and tricks, achievements and stats, form clans…you get the picture.

GamerDNA.com — “Bringing the world together through games”, GamerDNA.com just launched with a cool $3m in financing to expand development on a community that lets gamers meet up with friends, share exploits and keep on top of the who’s and what’s of their favourite games. They feel that “the scale and diversity of the gaming market demands a platform and genre-neutral community that encompasses all types of games and gamers.

RecruitingGrounds.com — Find and manage clans, play free arcade style games and build your own online gaming profile. Recruiting Grounds also offers tournaments, and tournament creation, gaming news and multimedia, as well as classified ads, groups and forums to get involved with.

Applied to a Facebook setting, where it’s built upon the appeal of communication between friends, family, and those of similar interest, it just might take off, but there’s not a lot of room in the niche to have multiple supported sites. Somewhat like the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray wars, one format (or site in this case) is bound to prevail. It’s kind of like a site development demolition derby and at this early stage of the game it’s difficult to predict who will come out on top.

To me, they might have a hard time marketing a broad-based social site for gamers, who tend to be very tightly clustered into niches and clans based on their own gaming preferences. Do die-hard SOCOM players really give a crap what’s going on in Guild Wars? People may, rather than being part of an entire community, self-marginalize into little cliques that operate under the larger umbrella of the site as separate, self-sufficient entities.

Image from Wikipedia.org

Scourge of fans of both quality cinema and protecting the unspoiled reputation of gaming’s great franchises, Uwe Boll has also been known to come out swinging at critics of his work with such vastly intelligent retorts as calling the reviewer “stupid”. For years, many in the gaming community have been praying that no more of his hijinxs get funded by major movie studios and it looks like we may just get our way, thanks to Boll himself.

In a typically Bollian reaction to an online petition at FearNet, Uwe the Wonderful brushed aside the pleas of 18,000 people, all requesting that he stop making movies, by saying that the tally wasn’t enough. But there’s hope! As part of an interview with FearNet, Boll stated exactly how many signatures it would take for him to stop tormenting us and non-gaming movie-goers alike:

FearNet: Are you aware that there is a petition online, signed by 18,000 people, requesting that you stop making movies?

UB: Yeah, I know that. 18,000 is not enough to convince me.

Fearnet: How many would it take?

UB: One million. Now we have a new goal.

A million? Is that all? And here I thought this would be difficult. Since April 7th (yesterday), the petition tally has quadrupled to 121062 signatures.

Via | CaVG.com

Another take on the platform wars predicts that consoles will go the way of the dinosaur, a somewhat surprising statement given that it was spoken by Sandy Duncan, the former Vice President of Microsoft’s European “Home and Entertainment” division.

Duncan, whose opinion I whole-heartedly agree with, cites convergence as the major threat to the ongoing viability of dedicated gaming equipments, such as consoles. Nothing illustrates technological convergence quite as clearly as mobile phone technology. In the last decade, bulky, expensive phones have metamorphisized into sleek, stylish personal accessories that not only act as phones, but also as dayplanners, emailers, cameras, camcorders, gaming devices, alarm clocks and instant messengers (SMS). The do-everything gadget world in expanding quickly, as more and more functionality is being crammed into less and less space. If similar convergence occurs that includes gaming, then why spend $500 on a console that only allows you to play games and chat ineffectively with friends (who also play games), when you can have something that is multi-function for the same price?

Some believe that adaptation to this trend of amalgamation is one of the strongest things in favour of the PC, which has long been the hub of the wired world for many households. As our poll last month showed, our readers also feel that PC gaming is going strong thanks to the ever evolving nature and non-traditional avenues that it’s exploring. Consoles, however, are becoming an increasingly risky venture for development and manufacture, given the high costs of getting them onto the market, and the sometimes slow rate (or no rate) at which they are embraced by the everyday gamer. Duncan feels that:

“The business model is very risky and the costs associated with creating new hardware are incredibly high. There is a definite convergence of other devices such as set top boxes. There’s hardly any technology difference between some hard disc video recorders and an Xbox 360 for example. In fact, in 5 to 10 years I don’t think you’ll have any box at all under your TV; most of this stuff will be ‘virtualized’ as Web services by your content provider.”

If you’re interested in where things might be going, b5media’s Jayvee Fernandez had a look at the concept site for the Nokia Morph recently. Two thumbs up from me! The thing looks mighty spiffy.

Via | GameSpot

Image from HDGameNews.com

Based on recent statistics that show PC platform games accounting for only 14% of the total game sales in 2007, the alarmists are back at the oft-heard panic button, ringing in the doom of PC gaming in the face of the uber-advanced technology now present in consoles. It used to be that PC processors slaughtered the capabilities and in-game performance of any and all console challengers, but with things like PS3 “The Cell” processor and graphics ships rivalling top of the line PC products…is the PC a dying gaming beast?

If you take the figures at face value than sure, PCs are in a whole whack of trouble, but there are a couple of points that have to be considered before last rites are read and the critics, so eager for a major doomsday to dissect and moan about, get their bitter ending.

The big one, of course, is digital distribution. This, in cases where the gaming publishers have their own portals, takes the sales power out of the hands of the major retailers and cuts the middle man from the transaction between publisher and consumer. NPD Group, the analysis firm that has been spitting out all of these numbers has, in fact, acknowledged that the pitiful percentage for PC gaming can be partially attributed to the growth of digital distribution (DD) as a sales vector. While highly networked consoles like the 360 and PS3 might claim further sales because of DD, their use of micro-transactions, and slow acceptance of large scale downloading has meant that they have lagged behind the PC in taking advantage of this channel. Eventually, I think that they’ll catch up, and potentially over-take the PC in this area, making alarm bells a little more appropriate of a reaction.

Casual games, portal sites, and the lumbering behemoth of MMOs all keep the PC scene alive, kicking, and innovating, in my opinion, at an exponentially greater rate than consoles that are, at their core, hardware dependent and somewhat shackled by ties to the developers of the systems rather than being a free-wheeling design sphere capable of reaching hundreds of millions of people largely without regard for computer hardware concerns (unless you’re Crysis…bloody PC-soul leeching game).

So is it that PC gaming is dying, or that it’s exploring other channels for profitability that the number crunchers just aren’t cool enough to track properly yet? Hard to say, but I’d like to know what you folks think…

Img via the BBC