Category: video games

GTA IV is making waves

Wired…article

NYT…

“To the actors it is a simple issue of equity: equal pay for equal work, regardless of the medium.”

“Grand Theft Auto IV is such a simultaneously adoring and insightful take on modern America that it almost had to come from somewhere else. The game’s main production studio is in Edinburgh, and Rockstar’s leaders, the brothers Dan and Sam Houser, are British expatriates who moved to New York to indulge their fascination with urban American culture. Their success places them firmly among the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup.”>”Grand Theft Auto IV is such a simultaneously adoring and insightful take on modern America that it almost had to come from somewhere else. The game’s main production studio is in Edinburgh, and Rockstar’s leaders, the brothers Dan and Sam Houser, are British expatriates who moved to New York to indulge their fascination with urban American culture. Their success places them firmly among the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup.”

George and Kyle’s Game Analysis

So Kyle and I got a little caught up in what we where doing and we made this…. 10 minutes of video game analysis.

I cut down what we had to around five minutes and this version is what we want to show in class tomorrow (or I guess today by now). Watch the ten minute version only if you have way too much time on your hands.

[youtube eHgZujoOgR4]

Enjoy.

Ikariam game

Jessie sent me this link to a browser game called Ikariam, wherein you take charge of an ancient Greek town and (very) gradually build it into an empire, Civilization-style. It’s still in the beta stage, but I’ve been playing it literally non-stop for the past four days, and when I say literally, I mean that one primary feature of the game is that it proceeds in real time, so that you never technically stop playing unless you deactivate your account. Researching something like “wine press” or “expansion” takes up to two days, but the research continues even if you leave your computer (which, thankfully, I do occasionally). Sending supply ships to other cities in your empire also takes minutes or even hours, depending on how far away they are. I have yet to engage in warfare in the game, but apparently it functions the same way. This seems to be a new genre of sorts, one that is hard to define. It’s a strategy game that takes place in real time, but it’s not an “RTS” (real-time strategy) in the sense that we have come to define the term.

Oh, and your economic and military competitors are other players with accounts in the game. You can “engage in diplomacy” (i.e. communicate) with them via the game’s messaging system to request certain types of goods, declare war, or just chat. The rhetoric of the game seems to emphasize commerce and trade so far, but I’m waiting for that to change as soon as I progress further. The fact that Ikariam is a browser game seems to encourage casual play.

Rock Band song

Since Thompson is a musician and I love editing, we decided to make a music video about RockBand. We both play guitar and find that there is absolutely no correlation between playing real guitar and playing RockBand, and that’s pretty much the theme of our song. Hope you enjoy it!

[youtube ZHc12QfC-a8]

Gaming Footage

A couple groups have tries to record footage to dvd, only to find that the disc seems to be empty. Before you toss it, try finalizing the disc back in the machine you recorded from.

  1. Put the dvd back in the tray.
  2. On the remote to the DVD player select options.
  3. Click Disc Information.
  4. Choose Finalize.
  5. It will take a few minutes to finish writing.

Once it is on the dvd, you will need to use MPEG Streamclip, SnapZ or Hanbrake to extract the footage and use it in iMovie or Final Cut.

Not Social Networking… but Social Gaming

I came across this article about a new multiplayer online game that involves the territorial conquest of colleges and universities. Students make teams and recruit people in the real world, in order to play in the virtual world. It is a new way for networking between students around campus and is apparently going to grow into a huge phenomenon around every campus… maybe even Middlebury.

A quote from the article about social networking:
“No one is claiming this is the next Facebook, the social networking phenomenon that began on the Harvard campus. But GoCrossCampus represents the new kind of online games that unite the participants of real-world communities in a common online cause.”

Here’s the link to the article:

“Storming the Campuses”

Speaking of Interface…

In light of our interface discussion\testing, I thought I’d post this clip from Apple’s press conference a few weeks ago unveiling the iPhone SDK (software development kit). They demonstrate simple game (they wrote it in two weeks) that takes advantage of the iPhone’s graphics capabilities, touch screen, and Wiimote-esque accelerometer…

[youtube jn83wizEMAw]