Very disturbing video...

http://dynamic.cnn.com/apps/tp/video/wor...deo.ws.asx

Yeah, it just went live sometime yesterday for all the people that bought Crackdown. I haven't played it very much yet since it didn't finish downloading until after midnight last night.

Once I get some more time into it, I'll let everyone know what's up.

it links to a counter on the blizzard site to the soon to be officially announced game.

Could this be a hint?

http://www.starcraft2.com/

Completely hated the man's politics and commentary, but saying HOORAY would probably be pretty tasteless. He was 73, now he gets to find out if he was right or not.

Well, this is weird. I logged into my Japanese account on Xbox Live today (it STILL WORKS) and found a playable demo of Eternal Sonata, the upcoming RPG of AWESOME where the battle system is based on MUSIC. You can't get it using a US account, I checked. But, oddly enough, when I play it, it shows the US rating system and the entire demo is in english. Maybe it detected my system's location code and has an english translation built in that's sensitive to that.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/st...61,00.html

I guess... What possible information can they get on our psychological state based on the games we make? Feel free to invent all sorts of hypothesees and then sell a book based on the unproven system, but in reality this seems about as evidence based as the great majority of all "psychological profile questionairs" they provide online. I'd be afraid if I thought this was a competent assessment.

But really the question I have is how the heck would they do this "covert monitering"? I myself don't even have the google toolbar, nor do I want it, as it's a memory waste that I'd never use anyway, so it wouldn't be through that. Other than that, how's it going to, for example, watch me play Counter-Strike or whatever online game? Unless it makes deals for all these companies to intentionally shunt the online network's bandwidth through Google's servers (which, among other things, could easily cause noticable lag, and would very much be rallied against by the user base), I don't see that happening.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/96/19

An interesting article. However, I think a very obvious point seems to escape a lot of opinion articles. I keep hearing "they say they want innovation but they never want to plunk down the cash". However, there's something a lot more basic behind it. People don't KNOW about these amazing original games, especially in the white noise of terrible original games.

Someone already knows what to expect with a Final Fantasy game, but no one's ever heard of Okami. For all they know, it might totally suck, and in all likelihood, it probably is if one considers just the odds. The majority aren't running around reading news posts on gaming web logs like us. Further, there's the issue of money.

People WOULD spend the money on Okami if they could know beforehand that it was a good game.

So no, don't assume this is some artistic/political statement just like you always "KNEW" about the masses and you're totally so much more enlightened than they are. Most likely this has nothing to do with your crusade and it's just a lack of information on these newcomers.

In all honesty, you do it too. I never even considered TRYING Ty the Tazmanian Tiger, because it just looked like "yet another" platformer, you know, the churned out hundreds of boring platformers? In fact, I say that's the VERY REASON Psychonauts didn't sell well. Every person I talk to says they didn't think it would be a fun game not because "it was too original and different looking" (no one ever says or thinks that EVER), but the opposite, it looked "just like any other boring platformer". It took playing it myself to realize it actually WAS a fun game in it's own right and NOT just a boring clone.

In short, it's not that people "don't want an original game", it's much more likely that they just don't KNOW it's an original and fun game to begin with, and how WOULD they? No seriously, in the end that's the question we need to solve. How do you "tell the people"? I guess the first part would be convincing the advertisers to spend the money on these new games, but they did that with Psychonauts. Maybe the commercials should show gameplay and not just have "witty narrator dialog" and completely unrelated real world jokes. I think above all that, downloadable demos.

http://www.blizzard.com/

So apparently they did a history of their own games (Lost Vikings missing?) and a big ol' question mark at the end of that list. They have announced they are going to announce something... hurray?

Don't eat the government rationed greenly-tinted rolls distributed to the starving masses, they're actually made from the euthanized starving masses!!

Discuss.

(Funcom: The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, Anarchy Online, Age of Conan (upcoming))

It's got Ragnar Tornquist designing it, so the story and writing are guaranteed to be exceptional (Ragnar Tornquist is awesome! TLJ... so great... and his writing about game design is quite good too, in his blog and stuff.). It's also got some great concept art... gameplay? Who knows, we'll see. But I'm definitely interested.

Oh, they're also actually aiming at an adult marketplace... horror theme, M rating, concept art with partial (monster) nudity, and (best of all) presumably actually a script that assumes you're not an idiot...

http://kotaku.com/gaming/the-mmo-formerl...259777.php
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=154656

There are a lot of pieces of concept art now (and more gameplay details), but I'll post just a few...