I’m holding off on Golden Sun: Dark Dawn for now (thanks Paul!). It will be my travel game next week. This weekend will be brought to me by Namco-Bandai! I’ve played a bit of Splatterhouse and I’m not sure I’ll keep with it due to annoying technical glitches. I definitely want to play some Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom and hope to get some Enslaved in too.
How about you? What’s on your weekend playlist?
Back in Coffee Talk #250, RPadholic SlickyFats asked me, “Do you get invited to events or do you have to actively seek them out and invite yourself?” I wanted to answer that question in a Coffee Talk column to pull back the curtain on the videogame business and for self therapy.
Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, your thoughts on the Grammy nominations, what Carl Froch’s wife was looking for, or Jayson Werth possibly signing with the Red Sox, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
Back in Coffee Talk #250, RPadholic SlickyFats asked me, “Do you get invited to events or do you have to actively seek them out and invite yourself?” I wanted to answer that question in a Coffee Talk column to pull back the curtain on the videogame business and for self therapy. When I worked at Happy Puppy, GameSpy, Yahoo!, and G4tv, event invites were pretty much automatic. When I freelanced for high-profile outlets like FHM, GigaOm, Amazon, GamePro, etc., invites were pretty frequent. These days…not so much.
No matter what you’ve done in your career, PR people will forget about you once you stop serving a large audience. Their job is to promote their games to as many people as possible. Once you’re no longer useful to them, they stop calling, they stop returning your phone calls, they stop sending you games, and they stop sending you press releases. That’s just how it works.
Obviously this is a source of frustration for me. I’m trying to build and grow a web site. I need support from PR people. They control the information and coverage opportunities. On one hand, I completely understand where they’re coming from — I’m not as useful to them as I once was. On the other hand, I naively hope that people I’ve known for more than 10 years will help me grow my site. At the very least, I’d like to be invited to events that are miles away from my apartment. To be fair, I suck at self promotion and I hate groveling for stuff; I need to get over this in 2011 for the good of the site.
The good news is that I have several relationships with developers that many of you like. I will try to pull in favors for video interviews and stuff. Recently I was chatting with a pretty famous developer and he asked me what I thought about a recent press release. I told him, “I don’t know. Your flacks took me off the mailing lists. I don’t get your games or press releases anymore.” He was surprised and a little pissed off. He asked me if I wanted him to “fix” that situation. I declined. I’ll try to “fix” that myself next year.
So yeah, I get a fraction of the coverage opportunities I used to get and it kind of sucks. I’m going to try to change that in 2011. Also, I’m making a list and checking it thrice — I will never forget the PR people that still send me games, email me press releases, and invite me to events…nor will I forget the PR people that completely dropped me.
Thanks SlickyFats! This was therapeutic.
Eurogamer posted a hot rumor that the original Halo is going to be remade using the Halo: Reach engine. When asked about this rumor, Microsoft PR responded with the following:
Right now our focus is on supporting Halo: Reach. We have nothing to announce at this time.
In my head this is the PR equivalent of *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*, “It’s coming!” What do you think? Is a Halo remake in the works? Would you buy it?
Kindly check out these screens of Sega’s upcoming Binary Domain for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This squad-based shooter is being headed up by Toshihiro Nagoshi, best known as the producer on the Yakuza and Super Monkey Ball Games.
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Kindly check out these screens of Sega’s upcoming Binary Domain for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This squad-based shooter is being headed up by Toshihiro Nagoshi, best known as the producer on the Yakuza and Super Monkey Ball Games. In a recent press release, Nagoshi described his vision for Binary Domain:
What I wanted to create this time was a dramatic and energetic sci-fi shooter. When you hear sci-fi you may think of cold, clinical environments but with Binary Domain I wanted to combine this with a deep human drama. The keyword we have in mind for this project is ’Life’. I wanted to make something that will be accepted by both the Japanese and Western markets, and this fundamental theme is something everyone knows but which the full extent of can be difficult to grasp.
It sounds cool on paper! What do y’all think of Binary Domain’s concept and screens?
In a Q&A with Big Think about his novel Luka and the Fire of Life, author Salman Rushdie spent some time talking about Rockstar Games’ Read Dead Redemption. He seemed fascinated by the game’s mix of storytelling and open-world interactivity. Rushdie said:
The game that my 13 year-old boy Milan and his friends all seem to be playing right now is this wild west game called Red Dead Redemption and one of the things looking over… I mean I don’t even pretend to understand what is going on really, but one of the things that is interesting about it to me is the much looser structure of the game and the much greater agency that the player has to choose how he will explore and inhabit the world that is provided for you. He doesn’t… in fact, doesn’t really have to follow the main narrative line of the game at all for long periods of time. There is all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose to go on and find many stories to participate in instead of the big story, the macro story. I think that really interests me as a storyteller because I’ve always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end — to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.
I’m a big fan of Rushdie and was totally jazzed to hear his thoughts on videogames. (On a side note, I totally marked out when he asked J.K. Rowling about Severus Snapes’ motivations in a Deathly Hallows Q&A.) However, not everything he said was positive. Check out the video clip if you have a chance and let me know what you think (please)!
Although my dad played The Beatles’ Rubber Soul for me hundreds of times, it didn’t “click” with me until I got older. I’ve always loved music, but Rubber Soul changed my perception of what music could be. Is there a game you’ve played that did the same thing for you?
Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, Verve Roaster’s Guatemala La Maravilla, Taylor Swift dating the Prince of Persia, or Anne Hathaway acting topless, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
Although my dad played The Beatles’ Rubber Soul for me hundreds of times, it didn’t “click” with me until I got older. I’ve always loved music, but Rubber Soul changed my perception of what music could be. Is there a game you’ve played that did the same thing for you? Is there a game that changed your perception of what videogames could be?
As for me, there are two that come to mind…and they happen to be in the same series. Similar to music, I’ve always loved games. Final Fantasy VI (FFIII in America) changed my perception of what games could be. Until then, I didn’t realize that games could offer an interactive experience that combined an epic story, outstanding music, and deep gameplay — an experience that rivaled or surpassed what movies and television offered.
As much as I loved FFVI, I didn’t think RPGs could be as popular as action games or sports games. Final Fantasy VII changed all that. The videogame genre I loved the most hit the mainstream! Although I have my problems with FFVII, I appreciate and love what it did for the genre.
Now it’s your turn! What games transformed the way you perceived the medium?
Earlier in the month when I asked you who should buy Harmonix, a few of you pointed to Electronic Arts. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. According to Bloomberg (not Goldberg), EA CEO John Riccitiello made an unfavorable analogy regarding Harmonix:
I’m sure some smart investor will buy the business feeling that they can catch a falling knife, but more people have been cut trying to catch falling knives than have benefitted from getting the timing exactly right.
A lot of people in the Twitterverse claim that Riccitiello is being a dick, but I disagree. He has a point — buying a developer that specializes in “plastic instrument” music games is a risky gambit at the moment. I also love his poetic analogy. Falling knives are cool…and I hope Riccitiello uses furry walls in his next analogy.
Square Enix has launched the official site for the Final Fantasy trading card game (TCG). Set to launch on February 25, 2011, the teaser site reveals Cloud, Sephiroth, and Zidane as playable cards.
Any of you guys into TCGs? Would you be down with a Final Fantasy TCG? Can you name the characters that are currently shadowed in the teaser image? Some of ’em are obvious, while others aren’t so easy. Get your thinking caps on and give it a go (please)!
Source via Andriasang
It was cool watching you guys talk about your first videogame console in yesterday’s Coffee Talk. To follow that up, I’d like to know about your first console games.
Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, the NFL going light with player fines, President George W. Bush interviewed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Christina Aguilera finding a new boyfriend (*sniff*), Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
It was cool watching you guys talk about your first videogame console in yesterday’s Coffee Talk. To follow that up, I’d like to know about your first console games. What was the first console game you ever played? What was the first console game you bought with your own money?
I honestly can’t remember the first game I purchased on my own. I do remember playing Videocart-1: Tic Tac Toe, Shooting Gallery, Doodle, Quadradoodle for the Fairchild Channel F. I was completely fascinated that I could play Tic Tac Toe with something other than a crayon or a pencil. In some ways it’s funny looking back at how enamored I was with digital Tic Tac Toe. In other ways it’s amazing how far videogames have come. Going from Tic Tac Toe to Heavy Rain is quite a leap. Ha!
Now it’s your turn! What was the first console game you ever played? What was the first console game you bought with your own money?
There’s not a whole lot going on this week, but if you want quality over quantity then this is a brilliant week to be a gamer. Disney’s Epic Mickey will be one of the most critically acclaimed games of the year. I’m a huge Warren Spector mark, so I hope you give the game a try. As most of you know, I’m an RPG mark as well, so I’m super psyched for Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.
Any of you picking up new games this week?
