Invading Pinterest

Farhad Manjoo didn’t get Pinterest.com when he reviewed it in Slate last month. This is unsurprising. They sent a tech writer to do a culture writer’s job, and he failed spectacularly.

Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that Pinterest is still largely an image-sharing board for middle-aged women, largely devoid of video game art, geek memes and pornography … so far.

As one of the pioneering males in this new online social experience, I’m just trying to stake a small beachhead for my brothers, because I think the site has the potential to be a great media-swapping place for grownups. However, I think there are a few things the developers should consider if they want to lure the boys out of 4chan and Reddit:

- Drop the requirement that I add a description to my posted images. A picture is worth 1,000 words. I don’t necessarily need to add any.

- Write, buy or steal some kind of Facebook-style image enlarging widget. I do not want to go to an entirely new page to view something I’ve clicked on, only to have to hit the back button and lose my place in the torrent of pics.

- Fix the database so my last umpteen pins do not show up under the “Pinners You Follow” heading. I have no need to follow myself. There are plenty of tools for seeing my own posts.

- Develop an Android app already!

Mooching on an MMO

My Knight of the Round Bottom

I got two really great games for Christmas – Professor Layton and the Last Specter and Super Mario Galaxy 2. And I have inFamous: Festival of Blood sitting on my PS3, ready to go.

I’m not playing them nearly as much as I should be. Instead, I’m checking out the “Freemium” experience on a seven-year-old MMO, Everquest II.

This is not the first time I’ve mooched on an MMO. I got a free ride, courtesy of an achievement-hungry friend, on World of Warcraft. The experience was instructive, but devoid of much context. It was the first MMO I spent serious time with, and so I didn’t have much to judge it by.

Playing Everquest II in its recently incarnated “Freemium” form has given me much of that missing context. Everquest was one of the Elder Gods of the MMO industry, and its sequel is notorious for being vanquished, though never entirely, by Blizzard’s Warcraft juggernaut. It’s frightening how very alike the two games are, sharing everything from mythology to battle systems to environments to quest structures.

However, there is a vast gulf of style between the two games, and Everquest II is a much more entertaining game for the casual soloist like me. The writing is far better. There’s actually humor, like the dock worker who asked if I’d be slaughtering baby chicks next, when I brought in a requisition for a dozen or so bear cub ears. There’s self-awareness in the form of pop-culture references, especially in the quest names like “The Kobold and the Beautiful” and “Ape is Enough.” Even the music is playful, curious and inspiring.

Warcraft was just fascist drek. The Wagnerian scores, the irony-free writing and the disturbing emphasis on racial conflict and purity made the game a drag to play at times.

But at their cores, both games are still massive grind fests, and both have a rhythm that nudges you toward group dungeon crawling and manifests itself in the form of questing “dry spells” in the overworld at times. So, soloing is still a bitch at times in EQII. And the game’s Freemium model dictates that it harass me every hour with a pitch to upgrade my membership for the pleasure of playing a less gimped game that is marginally more convenient. I have also noticed the Crimson Alliance Effect at work as I see characters in their teens race by my Level 30 knight with magnificent mounts and spectacular outfits.

I don’t think I’ll be giving any of my dough to Sony for the full EQII experiance. I have too many good games sitting around that need playing, but it’s been an entertaining ride.

Yes, stagecraft still matters

If you want to see the difference that good writing and voice acting can make in a video game, play through inFamous and inFamous 2 on the Playstation 3.

inFamous is a competent sandbox action hero game that I played only because I got it for free and finished only because it was very well built. The animations were well done, and the action was frantic, yet manageable. In all other respects (plot, dialogue, voice acting, pacing, etc.) the game was a shitty B movie action grind with serious manchild/woman issues that was best endured rather than experienced.

When my friend recently purchased a PS3 with inFamous 2 packed in, he let me play the disc while he worked through the first game in the series to catch up. After playing the sequel for just an hour or so, I called him and told him not to bother with the first game. The two games may have shared a title and parts of a story, but they are worlds apart. Of course, inFamous 2 expands on the gameplay of the first in every way that makes nerdcore game reviewers swoon – more powers, more weapons, etc. But it was the sharp upgrade in acting, animation and writing that caught my attention. The themes were more subdued; the characters were three-dimensional and dynamic;  and the acting was superb. The main character had evolved from a growling, sneering Clint Eastwood knockoff to a more complex cipher with a sense of *gasp* humor. It looked like developer Sucker Punch had spent some time reviewing the excellent Uncharted series. This game seriously deserves a game-of-the-year nomination. And it certainly doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with its pedestrian predecessor.

For all the good excellent stagecraft did for the inFamous series, it wasn’t enough to save L.A. Noire. This title was a painful disappointment, because it suffered from the opposite problem of inFamous – all style, no substance. I’m not sure why the open world conceit was even used. A meticulously rendered 1940s L.A. is a waste if you don’t have much reason to explore it. The game ends up being a meticulously curated 1980s point-and-click adventure with great acting from the 80 percent of cast of Mad Men.

Playstation Plus … yeah, still underwhelmed

I have thoroughly enjoyed Sony’s Welcome Back package. The free stuff in Home is fun, the Wipeout package is awesome, inFamous is tolerable (mostly, more on that later) and Playstation Plus is … well, it still sucks.

I appreciate Sony telling me that they turned on my subscription renewal thingy for PS Plus, so I could be sure to go right into the menu and turn it off. So, yes, I was a bit prejudiced and skeptical to begin with. I’ve always seen the service as a way to separate fools from their money.

There isn’t much in the Plus package that interests me. The Minis are terrible. The free retro games are available on any emulator (although Sonic the Hedgehog 2 with trophies was pretty cool). And the discounts are tepid. A whole 2 bucks off! Really, Sony? That’s called Sony giving up its PSN cut in order to get their money upfront.

The one quality feature that the service offers is automatic update downloading, a perk that just ends up pissing me off, because it should be part of the basic Playstation operating system in the first place. Who thought it was a good idea to charge for something that Steam does free?

Needless to say, I won’t be renewing at the end of the month trial.

Sodium 2 unveiled!

Lookwood Entertainment has posted this video to its YouTube account, showing off the features of its new Sodium 2 racing game for Playstation Home. As a result, they’ve kneecapped the embargo keeping me quiet about a few things in the game beta test. You may notice several things on this video, so allow me to provide some context:

You may notice that the vehicles are huge, hulking things in stark contrast to the compact bullets featured in games like Wipeout and F-Zero. I love them. They look experimental and grotesque. Very cyberpunk. They appear to fly as a result of brute physics, not glide on their own coolness. The vibe is very dragster/muscle car.

You may notice that the cars handle like grease-coated boulders. This is very much by design. You can earn in-game cash to upgrade the beasts (the same as the cash you earn from the Salt Shooter), but you will be competing against people who buy upgrades for real cash. You will pay, many times, for the privilage of staying competitive, and you will pay far more than you did in the Salt Shooter. With the Salt Shooter, you could pay $5 to access the  full game and another $2 if you didn’t feel like grinding and wanted a pair of super weapons. These weapons could even be displayed in your Home apartment. Project Velocity, on the other hand, demanded $7 from me within the first half hour of play for marginal improvements to my vehicle. Lord knows where this gravy train ends.

Finally, you may notice that the video keeps showing the same two tracks and didn’t show multiplayer mode. There’s a reason for that. In all fairness to Lockwood, the company has not really been able to stay on their testing schedule, thanks to PSN’s month-long “episode,” but the game is hard to judge without more tracks and opponents. And Sony has made life even harder on Lockwood by making the excellent Wipeout XL/Fury absolutely free as part of its Welcome Back package.

Too early to call

So, Nintendo will release a new console next year featuring HD graphics and the strangest controller we’ve seen from them since the Nintendo 64. I haven’t decided how I feel about the machine, and I won’t until I see some real software, but I have a few observations:

- I like the branding. It capitalizes on the solid Wii brand much in the same way that the SNES name capitalized on the popular NES. And the backward compatibility will go a long way toward appeasing parents.

- I don’t like what I’m hearing about the hardware. Flash storage? That’s expensive, so I doubt there will be a lot of it. Modern consoles need fat hard drives, not SD cards. “Comparable” graphics to Sony and Microsoft’s machines? Not going to cut it, even if this thing does ship at a $250 price point.

- The controller is strange and weirdly amazing, but it will only work if implemented right. It took developers using the PlayStation Move to suddenly discover that, wow, they could actually make good motion-controlled shooters. I tend to think that Sega did the heavy lifting of figuring out how to make The Conduit work the Wii, and then everyone changed their minds about motion control once they got to work on a high-def machine. Nintendo will have the same trouble get developers to snap out of the herd mentality with this controller.

- Parents will LOVE this controller if it gives them their TVs back. They will HATE this controller if the screen is not as hard as diamond.

- This is the first console truly capable of hosting an affordable LAN party. Shooter fans, take notice. Strike that.  This console just got a lot more boring.

- The augmented reality potential for this device is enormous, as is the potential for gambling, strategy and sports games. Developers, take notice.

- Finally, this new hardware feels like Nintendo maneuvering against Apple while covering their flanks against Sony and Microsoft, but doing neither particularly well. The beefier hardware aims to get them back into the 3rd party game, but it will only work until the next two flagship consoles emerge and the Valley dorks recede back into their money-losing comic book world of brilliantly rendered crap. Meanwhile, the Nintendo eStore aims to square off against the iTunes and Android app model, but doesn’t do it cheaply or easily. By limiting the drive space on its console, Nintendo prevents anyone from building a serious retro collection at a reasonable price.

Portal 2 is a social creature; get over it

If you ever need a ready example of the vast gulf separating gaming journalists from the game-buying public they service, you could point to their collective hatred of all things motion controlled or Ben Croshaw’s continuous loathing for the Uncharted series. Or you could pull up Peter Bright’s new article in Ars Technica about why Portal 2 “isn’t as good as the original” and “what went wrong.”

Who could hate that face?

Bright starts sending out hardcore, socially-damaged vibe almost immediately by complaining that Portal 2 isn’t as lonely as the original. I’ve been playing Portal 2 for a day or so, and I haven’t noticed this being a problem. The game has more depth and potential for drama than its predecessor as the result of new characters. In fact, I think it would be very hard for Valve to mine any new dramatic territory if this sequel was again limited to a single robot character and a voiceless protagonist.

But Bright doesn’t like the new robot character, Wheatley, calling his amazing voice acting and fully realized nervous animations a “tireless, relentlessly stupid shtick” that “got old. Fast.” Peter, my boy, we social creatures call this “comic relief,” which is apparently not something you welcome to the intrinsic absurdity of Portal’s sterile, lifeless world you profess to admire. Also, Wheatley’s repeated reluctance to use his innate abilities is something we call “a running joke.”

Bright’s inability to decode interpersonal subtlety is evident in his interpretations of Portal’s girlie-voiced sentry turrets:

Oh, the turrets. Was a computerized killing machine ever so heartbreakingly melancholy? Their solitude is almost as profound as our own. “Are you still there?” they plaintively cry out into the void. With every turret I killed, I died a little more inside.

Really? Because I interpreted them as extensions of GlaDOS’s malevolent paternalism  and manipulation. The turrets aren’t “lonely”; they’re transparently mirroring the test subjects’ loneliness in order to lure and kill them.

But Bright’s mostly just pissed that he can’t break the game. Puzzle solutions in Portal 2 aren’t as maliable as they were in Portal. This means you have to actually figure out an intended solution, rather than exploiting loopholes in the game’s code. Most people would call this “good thematic design” that reinforces GlaDOS’s controlling character. But Bright wants a sandbox to play in … all by himself.

Chasing news pirates? Ask the music industry how that’s going…

I did not pay for this photo of Tom Curley.

Associated Press President & CEO Tom Curley showed up at the Maryland/Delaware/DC Press Association Awards Conference outside Baltimore, MD yesterday to pitch the AP’s latest attempt to reign in the news aggregators – the News Licensing Group.

The idea behind this new startup is to raise $30 million from publishers; have publishers submit their content to a big, Internet-sniffing server array; and track down the news aggregators and other bandits who reprint their breaking news without permission. The idea is to extract licensing fees from republishers. Curley estimates the News Licensing Group could return $27 million in licensing fees to original publishers … by 2014, maybe.

The legal stick that AP plans to use to enforce this licensing regime is the so-called “hot news” doctrine, a 1918 Supreme Court decision that protects the commercial viability of breaking news from copying competitors. AP dusted off this case law in its lawsuit against All Headline News Corp. The NLG would have to whip that tort out a lot to stay in business.

I have a few predictions about how this will pan out:

A) If AP succeeds in accomplishing this dream, the Aols and Gawkers of the world will get their balls kicked in. Despite the pouting, defiant game being talked by the geniuses at Tech Crunch, they will get their teeth smashed in with a sledgehammer if they try to take on AP as a for-profit entity. AP is, for all intents and purposes, The News in North America. Even if bloggers don’t directly copy from AP feeds, they won’t be able to survive without copying news from AP’s customers. The for-profit bloggers will either fall in line or get ground under. The West Coast’s money-for-nothing, chicks-for-free era is over. Too many writers are getting laid off, and they aren’t going to feed their families off content farms.

B) If AP succeeds, their problem will merely morph to a new one. The music industry smashed Napster, only to have the headless, formless peer-to-peer monster reform and begin devouring profits again. Peer-to-peer news or even just anonymous, profitless blogs will fill the any void left by a chastened for-profit blogosphere. And it’s harder to sue someone who is reprinting news for no profit.

C) Not enough people are even reading news anymore, online or off, to make this whole fight anything more than two mangy cats fighting in the bottom of a trash can for scraps. Even if AP succeeds in policing the blogs and News Licensing Group becomes the iTunes of the industry, we are now two generations into a behavioral shift away from text-based, in-depth news. It’s all about the video, now. AP is not going to rescue the moribund print industry, even if it does rescue its dwindling profits.

Keeping it in perspective

OMFG I TOTALLY GOT INTO THE SODIUM TWO BETA!!!1!!

What? You’re not impressed?

I know. It’s not exactly a new Warcraft expansion. And yes, that sneaking suspicion that you’ve been there and done that is probably warranted.

Lockwood’s own preview of the new sim gives the impression that it is building in Playstation Home a game that has already been released on the PS3 and advertised in Home – Wipeout HD. The parallel comparisons are inevitable, as are comparisons with the venerable F-Zero series and its legion of clones.

Lockwood Entertainment has gagged me with a reasonably long EULA, whose enforcement potential is dodgy at best. But the company has a lot riding on this release, so I’ll humor this bit of paranoiac legal overkill until the street release date.

In the meantime, snag a teleporter from the Sodium One store for the beta test … if you still can.

Thoughts of Home: Low Sodium content

The third entry in an occasional series.

Such a tease.

Lockwood Entertainment announced yesterday that their Sodium Hub sim in Playstation Home would get a small update and teased something about a “mystery in the desert.” The update appeared this morning, giving the sim a simplified layout, extra inactive teleporters for the upcoming Sodium Two racing game, and a bunch of weird crackle in the audio.

By mid afternoon Eastern time, the server fell apart, kicking this user off every few seconds.

From all the traffic to the sim, you would think that Sodium Two had actually launched. Perhaps Home users are starved for new content?

The Sodium Hub is the sim to watch in Home. It’s the central base for the virtual world’s best game – the Salt Shooter – and it still manages to attract steady traffic with its minigames and virtual currency. The pending Sodium Two: Project Velocity update will be the first test bed of Home’s attempt to host true simultaneous multiplayer.

Oh, about that “desert mystery”: Alphazone4 is totally on the case. I found the cave and the code (Vickors-842543) inside this afternoon. What struck me as funny was the name “Vickors” in the code. This name is mentioned nowhere in Lockwood’s official backstory for Sodium. However, it does appear in a piece of fan fiction posted on Facebook a few days ago. Which begs the question: Is this “fan fiction” actually a Lockwood marketing ploy, or is the company using fan-created content to form Sodium lore? If the latter is the case, then that is a really c00l idea … and they need some better writers.

Update: “Vickors” is the robot VICKIE’s last name on her Facebook page. Ugh. Terrible. In other news, “842543″ is “VICKIE” on a phone keypad. No place to enter this “code,” though.