About 10 years ago, the Super NES had a game called Mario Paint, which had a component on there called Composer, in which the player could arrange notes with a Super NES Mouse to compose musical scores; while I personally never composed anything other than discordant rhythms, this fellow has managed to put together the Mario Paint Composer rendition of "Still Alive" from Portal:
Here's a lesson to learn folks: if you're running for President of the United States, don't plagiarize and steal a scene from a famous novelist and take it as your own wartime experience, because someone on the internet will call you on it.
Here's more on the story of the cross, and how it changes over time.
In response, Michael Goldfarb, campaign blogger for McCain writes:
One of the best games ever made for the Nintendo Entertainment System was Capcom's Bionic Commando. Taking control of "Spencer", a soldier with an grappling bionic arm, you fought your way through "Badds" (renamed from Nazis) to rescue Super Joe (the hero of the Capcom classic Commando) and assassinate Master-D (Hitler) . As a platformer, the game was unique in that the character could not jump -- to ascend vertically or cross ledges and chasms, Spencer had to use his bionic arm to grapple and swing himself to the other side. The game, while being very popular in the United States and Europe, wasn't much of a success in Japan, so no sequels were ever made for the game. After almost 20 years of letting this license languish, Capcom set out remaking the game as a XBox Live and PSN game, and the result is Bionic Commando Rearmed, a retro-styled updating of the classic NES game. At ComicCon this year, they premiered the anime-style trailer for the game, which is a parody of anime openings of that era:
The normal trailer makes me yearn for a system to play this on:
A few years ago, when the first BlizzCon was hosted at Anaheim Convention Center, it took a few days to sell out; At $100 per ticket, people were rather unsure whether the convention would be worth that kind of money. Last year, at the second BlizzCon, I think people decided that it was worth the trip to Anaheim, if only for the cool factor of the Murloc Suit in the goody bag; this year, the goody bag includes a polar bear mount with a flag waving murloc, and apparently that's a good enough goody that some ticket scalpers are already selling their extra BlizzCon tickets for $400.
Consider for a moment that people were going nuts for the Murloc suit, an inventory item that gave no stat enhancements, but did change your avatar into a flag-waving Murloc. Murlocs are the love-hate villain of World of Warcraft -- you fight them as a newbie, all the way up to the high level undead murlocs -- I often joked that WoW really should have been WoM - World of Murlocs, just because of the sheer number of the amphibious reptile men that need to be slaughtered in the name of the Horde (or the Alliance). Mounts, even after all this time are still one of the most desired items in WoW -- they look cool, and are sure attention grabbers (especially if you have one of the ones that you can ride at any level, but may not necessarily give a speed boost).
With BlizzCon 2008, the convention sold out in less than a day; while we aren't talking Comic-Con crowds of 130,000+, we are talking about 10,000+ tickets sold in a matter of minutes.
Yesterday at around noon, BlizzCon sales went live; it became quickly clear that their servers could not handle the amount of users hitting their site, buying up tickets, and they promptly took it down. They brought it back up, and the server died again, going down for an hour or more. They did this a few more times up until 6pm when they brought down the server until the next day at noon. Today at noon, there were close to 10,000 tickets available, in a matter of minutes, those tickets were sold, the server died a few times, and the server was closed for ticket sales until 8PM tonight. At 8PM, the server promptly died, and came back 10 minutes later, and sold out the remaining tickets in the next five minutes. This process was a major fiasco; instead of a escrow system to buy the tickets, the tickets required several steps before you were given the option to confirm your purchase, and at each step required the server to send a message back to the potential purchaser; however, when the server can't handle all the requests, it sends back errors, and one is forced to hit reload over and over again; at the same time the potential purchaser has no idea what's going wrong, or if their order is going through. I tried to purchase tickets 4 or 5 different times; in all cases, the batch of tickets sold out as I was putting in my credit card information. How did I know they sold out? The shopping cart kindly told me so AFTER booting me back to the front page of the store.
Here's the thing -- I can almost guarantee you that almost 50 - 75% of those tickets sold may not actually be used for admission, but rather for the purchase of the goody bag for resale, so Blizzard is fully capable of overselling the convention, because even with the crowds of people at BlizzCon 2007, I'd say there were no more than 3,000 to 5,000 people in attendance; the convention floor never got so full of people that one felt crowded. However, this year's BlizzCon should be a good one: Diablo III, Starcraft II and Wrath of the Lich King all make their appearance this year, which are all upcoming products with a massive fan-following.
Best Selling Games of All Time. There's a lot of Mario and Pokemon on the list...
I love old arcade cabinets, as they evoke a time in my childhood of roller skating rinks and pizza parlors. The thing is, I've taken enough woodworking and engineering classes to know how to build one, but until I have an empty basement that I can line up with wall-to-wall arcade machines, I'll live vicariously through other arcade geeks.
An Australian fan of Doctor Who goes through the steps of making a Doctor Who TARDIS MAME cabinet. Yes, it's even signed by one of the Doctors (Sylvester McCoy -- 7th Doctor). I think this is a pretty sweet cabinet, because everyone needs a TARDIS in their parlor. I love the detail that makes it into the final design of the console, as well as the Police Box exterior.
parakkum, littlestar and I have been having a blast with Rock Band. The Canadian band Rush didn't do so well when they tried it backstage during the Colbert Report:
E3 started today, but with so many of the videogame companies withdrawn from E3, the media circus that used to be E3 is really just a shadow of it's former self; even E-for-All, the $60 version of E3 had a poor turn out last year. So, just where are all the companies headed these days to show off their games to gamers?
Next week is the San Diego Comic Con, which is entirely sold out. With nearly a quarter million people in attendance, there's bound to be some games at the show, and with so many properties crossing over from comics to big and little screens, the likelyhood of having a comics-based game is high.
A month from now is the GenCon in Milwaukee. GenCon is the premiere geeky game convention in North America; focusing on all types of gaming, and in recent years has seen an increasing number of companies showing off their latest fantasy video games.
In August is PAX in Seattle, which one can consider to be the large-scale evolution of a LAN party turned convention, complete with famous speakers, rock concerts and a huge expo floor.
In October is Blizzard's own BlizzCon, which is their own convention to promote Blizzard titles (while charging $100 for admission and a wicked goodie bag).
Companies that have pulled out from E3 include Activision Blizzard, NCSoft, Her Interactive, id Software, Atlus and Foundation 9. Glancing through the Comic Con Exhibitor's list, I see Activision Blizzard there, as well as NCSoft, all of which leads me to suspect that their target is the mass market, not the games industry. In a way, this evolution away from the industry-only events make sense; competing against other media heavyweights only expends energy that could be focused elsewhere, and with most gamers looking online for reviews before they buy, there's little need to hype through the magazines anymore.
When I left Blizzard in '03, Blizzard North had done quite a bit of pre-production work on Diablo III, as well as some protoyping on the 3d-game engine. Today at the Blizzard Invitational in Paris, they announced the release of Diablo III. Since much of the work we had done on Diablo III was concept and prototype work, seeing the development they've done over the last 5 years was very interesting; while some of the concepts we were developing definitely looks like it made it through to the version of the game they displayed, some of the design choices they appear to have made seem counter to the decisions the original Diablo team members would have made had they remained on development of the title -- the most apparent change that I can point to is the appearance of "floating numbers" as seen in the gameplay video -- this was a feature that Blizzard Irvine continually "suggested" during development on Diablo II, which Blizzard North refused to implement -- with development now located within Irvine, the decision to add floating numbers to the game isn't one which surprises me.
One of the design choices which again shows Blizzard Irvine's hand in the changes made is the re-appearance of the Barbarian character class -- the original design documents for Diablo III included a set of all new character classes, with no reappearance of old character classes (our reasons for this was simple -- since we were enhancing and improving the skill system, we didn't want to try and adapt old skills into a new system -- we'd rather create all new skills for the new character classes. The return of the Barbarian class feels like a change that was made after development of the title was moved to Irvine 3 years ago.
One of the reasons why the Barbarian return shocks me so much is that I always felt that the Barbarian character class was the most broken of the classes in Diablo II. The Barbarian's ability to Leap, for instance gave him advantage over other classes which had to walk around the barrier -- it is the showcasing of this skill in the video (during which a bridge crumbles away, leaving no way to cross the gap) which makes me wonder if they have an alternate way for other characters to cross the gap or if all the characters have Leap now.
Of course, going 3D means that a lot of the things that were hard to do with sprites (such as actual armor looks being reflected on the character) is much easier using polygons and textures, as well as real 3d lighting. The use of a physics engine (Havoc, according to the game specs) is also a nice touch.
While I have more or less given up on the PC as a gaming platform, I'm glad to see that Blizzard is still committed to releasing titles that aren't first-person shooters; such a shame that we won't be seeing this title on the shelves for another year or two at the earliest.
