This article by The Verge‘s Laura June has gotten a lot of buzz online, and deservedly so. There’s so many bits of information I had no idea about (pinball was banned in NYC until 1974?!). The page layout is stellar as well, with pull quotes in big typography against a parallax-style background.
Robert Rath, writing for The Escapist, on Corvo, the protagonist of the stealth adventure Dishonored:
In the eyes of British honor culture, Corvo is a villain. His conduct is not that of a gentleman: he allows himself to be subjugated, he takes unfair advantage, and his vicious methods speak to his foreign origins. Interestingly, when we look at Dishonored from this perspective of honor culture, its themes appear very different.
This was a really fascinating read, and not just because I recently finished Dishonored. It’s primarily because there’s a lot of insights here on British vs. Italian honor culture that make solid contextual sense, both for history and this game.
Valve CEO Gabe Newell:
We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting thing to have.
I’m going to take a guess and say an ‘official’ Steam Box should make it ways out by the end of 2013, coinciding nicely with the launch of next-gen consoles by Sony and Microsoft. We could have a potential PC (Steam) vs. console (Sony, Microsoft) vs. mobile (iOS) race ahead of us, fighting for attention in the living room. I think iOS mobile gaming will inevitably stay strong and get stronger, but all bets are off in terms of how consoles and PCs will end up two years from now.
2012 was the first year I really started taking iOS games seriously, and the first I found the device a life saver for gaming over long subway rides and vacation trips. A lot of great titles were released, and as usual Touch Arcade has a great handle on what stood out. (I still find Punch Quest and Pinball Arcade monopolizing far more time than I expected.)
Gaming site Giant Bomb has always distinguished itself with stellar video work, but they have outdone themselves with their game of the year recap videos. Their TV spoofs, especially their dead on 60 Minutes send up (“reporter” Brad Shoemaker has the vocal cadence down cold) linked here, just kills.
Garnett Murray writes an epic takedown of the Wii U. His commentary on system load times and are especially damming:
Keep in mind it took 25 seconds on average to return to the Wii U Menu after loading each of these others apps, so if you were to start each app listed above once and return to the Wii U menu afterward, it would take eight and a half minutes, not including initial startup and loading time, to do it. That can only be described as fucking insane.
I’m rooting for Nintendo; more competition only makes Sony, Microsoft and other gaming competition step up their game. But there are way too many ‘what were they thinking?’ moments associated with this Wii U launch.
Eurogamer’s Richard Leadbetter:
In every COD game we’ve looked at since Infinity Ward’s groundbreaking work in the original Modern Warfare, we’ve seen an Xbox 360 advantage over the PlayStation 3 versions. Up until now, our supposition has been that the architecture thrives on the more powerful Xenos graphics core in the Microsoft platform. However, in Wii U we now find ourselves looking at a console with what we’re told possesses a significant bump in GPU performance over the old AMD design in the 360, and yet the veteran hardware still commands an easy lead. Lack of experience with the new console and work-in-progress dev tools will play a part in these results, but it could well be that the Wii U’s lackluster CPU is also a contributory factor.
Gaming is a lot more than sheer horsepower and tech stats (just ask Apple), but this is very bad news for the Wii U. How will it compete against new consoles from Microsoft and Sony next year?
Ben Kuchera writes a compelling argument for why select games should be considered art (though before I read this Rock Band was not necessarily in that list). This was my favorite part:
This is why you can’t argue for or against games as an art form without taking the time to play through the games themselves. I’ve seen clever people at cocktail parties claim that a few shapes on a canvas can’t be art, and this is usually combined with a sneering contempt for what passes for “art” in our modern times… although it seems like that argument has been going on for the past century or so. There is an intense difference between seeing an image of a Jackson Pollock painting in a book and coming upon a Jackson Pollock painting in a gallery.
U.S. Army sergeant Dave Mull on what games like Call of Duty don’t get right:
A lot of times it’s simple things like nomenclature, the positioning of equipment, or a feature on the rifle. I remember Counterstrike used to have the M4 eject on the wrong side so there would be more interesting things occurring on the screen when you fired. Also, you have the realism aspects: There’s almost never any calculation for bullet drop or ambient wind, and dropped weapons and magazines are magically full when the player walks over them to pick them up.I happened to notice in the opening [of Call of Duty Black Ops 2], Frank Woods rambling about a C-130, but the plane that was shown had a high tail and a body more like a C-17 Globemaster … just with turboprops.
Nice reporting and interview work by Wired writer Chris Kohler with Nintendo heads on the eve of the big Wii U launch. More than any other part of the article, this statement by Miyamoto gave me pause:
Nintendo unveiled Wii U at E3 last year. At this year’s show, Microsoft showed off a similar concept called SmartGlass, by which users could interact with their Xbox 360 using a tablet or phone. Miyamoto took the announcement as the sincerest form of flattery. “We’re seeing the emulation [of our ideas] occur very quickly, which if anything tells us they know this is a good idea,” he said.
I think Nintendo is missing the boat here. SmartGlass wasn’t imitation of Wii U, instead more of a reaction to the tablet explosion spearheaded by the iPad. Based on early reactions on how weak the touch screen responsiveness is on the Wii U controller, I’m worried Nintendo will let down a lot of people’s expectations.