Internet Wanderings

Here are a couple of items I found today that, while could be full length articles, I feel are best left as blurbs.

Kutaragi Obsessed with Tech, Internal Sony Strife & PS3 Seen as "Risk"
My two cents - I've been ranting about this for weeks. Namely, Sony has confused the consumers about what their system is, and now we see that they are confused internally as well. This does not bode well, get ready to take it on the chin during this round Sony and try to come out on top later.

What game designers hate about Video Game Reviewers
My two cents - This is fairly accurate from both sides. Here's an except from the response I wrote.

"You mention front-loading games so that reviewers hit the meat of gameplay as soon as possible. Well, this seems good in theory, but not in practice. When writing for a newspaper one is supposed to give a first paragraph full a tidbit of information. The second paragraph is referred to as the "nut-graph" it's the one geared to catching the audience to read further, but if they choose not to they still know basically what the whole of the article is about. This idea, I would argue, does not bode well for a game as a whole.

A majority of my recent projects have had this idea being pushed, "make the beginning bizzow! and our reviews will rock". Well this runs us into the issue of having to blow our proverbial wad well before we should have to. Yes the game should be good through and through, but what happened to wanting to save a bit of whammy for a ways into the game. Consider it a reward to the player for making it further. If we, on the development side, come up with a great mechanic, does it really need to be in the first 2 levels of a 20 level game? I believe it shouldn't, but the industry view is skewing to appease reviewers and as such our fancy is getting pulled closer and closer to the beginning, leaving little excitement for the end."

I went on to talk about other things but this was an important point I tried to convey.

And finally...

Samuel L Jackson voices God
My Two Cents - Yes, I typed that correctly, in a new audio version of The Bible, actor and black man extraordinaire will be recording an audio version of The New Testament as none other than the big G O D himself.... all I have to say is W O W.

\\drew