No Time To Play

Remember this article from three months ago, which decried the treatment classic game franchises get nowadays? Turns out, the feeling is shared. Which isn’t exactly surprising, and maybe I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it, but for the remarks I made in my previous article.

See, the fact that many modern games (and movies) have terrible stories can be forgiven. It’s a matter of fashion, and fashions go as easily as they come. But when you make a sequel of a cult classic from decades ago, turning it into a brainless GFX-fest — as is the current trend — simply can’t go unnoticed.

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So, the world of Warcraft is coming to an end… Wait, I am not a doomsayer and no, I am not talking about the “World of Warcraft” game itself, but about the current state of the virtual world inside it. In Azeroth the year 2012 will come sooner than expected. On December the 7th, 2010 to be more precisely. That sounds more accurate than the Mayan predictions, doesn’t it?

And, apparently we are not talking about any meteor, nor an asteroid, nor aliens but… a mighty dragon. Yes, the end of all will be… Deathwing, a bad-ass dragon.
Say what? A dragon? But wait, we’ve been killing dragons in WOW since 2005, how could a dragon put an end to the… world?

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Every time some artist, or author, or publisher moves to a “pay what you want” or “freemium” business model, trolls inevitably show up to yell how this is never going to work, despite numerous examples to the contrary. A similar outcry could be heard a few months ago, when several high-profile MMORPGs announced moving to a free-to-play model. So I guess they’re in trouble by now?

In a word, NOPE. Ars Technica gives a quick heads-up on how Lord of the Rings Online is doing:

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So, this week’s been abuzz with talk of old games. And I don’t mean Good Old Games — is there anyone who hasn’t heard of their little publicity stunt and its aftermath? No, this is about something closer to my heart, namely classic computer games, and how they are or not suitable to a modern audience.

It all started with this article about giving old games to young students and the, ahem, interesting results of the experiment. This was followed by a flurry of reactions, ranging from Jeff Vogel writing, essentially, “well duh, old games suck” to Jay Barnson of Rampant Games fame defending them fiercely (unsurprisingly, given his recent declaration of love for retrogaming), with The Escapist going for an unbiased summary that failed to draw any conclusion.

This is all very subjective, of course. But I would like to point out a few things.

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For the last few weeks there has been an abundance of information related to Square Enix’s new title. And it’s well deserved since the new mmo seems to be the new “monster” in town.

Some would say it is too big of a monster — the system requirements are harsh indeed.These conditions alone will drive away a large chunk of the market. I mean – Intel® Core™ i7 (2.66 GHz) or faster, NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460 with 768 MB VRAM or equivalent – RECOMMENDED??? I really don’t want to find out what kind of rig is needed for all settings maxed out

For the rest who do possess the “beasts” required… will they buy it? Play it? I mean, seriously… how many fans does the Final Fantasy IP really have? Quite a lot, apparently

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Programmers love to trash programming languages. The more successful a language, the more likely you are to find someone who will, happily and in excruciating detail, explain its many failings to you. One of the favorite victims nowadays appears to be Java. And while Java does have its bad points, most of the criticism appears to focus around a handful of old myths that should have been put to rest long ago.

Myth #1: Java is slow.

Um, no. For years now, the Java Virtual Machine has been using a technique known as JIT (Just In Time compilation). It is the same thing that makes Javascript in modern browsers rival the speed of native code. And if it works for Javascript… Besides, in a game, most of the work will be done by various library bindings, which are natively compiled code in the first place.

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A long time ago, on a blog far, far away…

…I was pointing out that playing games a lot and playing a lot of games are different things. Turns out, this isn’t such an original idea; while preparing to revisit that topic, I ran across this Massively interview with Cory Doctorow, in which he makes the point that games are so ubiquitous nowadays, that many people have played lots of games without ever considering themselves gamers. That puts an even heavier burden on (would-be) game developers, who are supposed to know more about what’s out there than the average gamer, especially in their niche of choice. Well, I consider myself a developer (amateur, mind you), so it occurred to me to check a very simple thing: how many games do I keep around?

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