Blizzard recently won its case against MDY, the makers of Glider, a program that played the World of Warcraft game by itself.  The court banned the distribution of Glider on the ludicrous claim of copyright violations.  Blizzard pointed to its EULA document (which can only be read after buying the game and are “enforced” once you open the package) that tries to limit what users can do with a product they legally purchased.  Blizzard says it sells you a limited license of the game, not the game itself thus negating your First Sale Doctrine rights.  Courts have been mixed on the power of EULA agreements since no one reads them or actually agrees to them.

Now that Blizzard won its summary judgement, it’s looking to push harder on Glider, asking the court to ban the source code from being open-sourced and preventing the developers from helping anyone else create a similar product.

I already have issue with the initial ruling, negating consumer’s first sale doctrine rights just because Blizzard says those don’t count because of a document no one read or agreed to.  The court believes this instance is copyright infringement, but now Blizzard wants the court to basically ban any future products just because.

This case already sets a bad precedent for future EULA and software modification cases.

Comic book video games have well documented crapiness with a few shining gems.  The problem is comic book geeks (like me) want these comic book games. We want to feel like Spider-Man, and Superman, and Batman.  These are the comic books game that will best bring to life a new super hero experience.

7. Flash

A sandbox Central City might not be on everyone’s Christmas list, but it’s the only way to do Flash justice.  This speedster needs a huge environment to zoom through, fighting Gorilla Grodd, Mirror Master, and Reverse Flash as he tries to save his wife and kids (this is the Wally West Flash, Barry Allen’s unlockable). Key battles pit you against teamed up villains for high pressure boss battles.

6. Real Iron Man game

The recent Iron Man game unfortunately sucked. But this awesome character should be a video game staple.  Let’s revamp the controls (more control, less speed) and focus the campaign on the Mandarin and his rag-tag group of baddies. The twist is this is an action/business simulation game.

In Mega Man-esque level choosing, you fight Whirlwind, Dreadknight, Crimson Dynamo, and more. Give us some epic boss battles with Fin Fang Foom and Ultimo and even a Dr. Doom sidequest.

The business sim comes from Tony Stark. You choose how to run Stark Enterprises, with some investments making the company more valuable and other investments making your armor more powerful.  By running the company well, you make money in order to buy those upgrades and other armor types. If you run the company badly, Justin Hammer will buy it up and you won’t be able to upgrade your armor.

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Gamers love their love/hate relationship with video game critics.  When the critics agree with us, we’re happy. When they don’t, they’re trash. But the problem with video game reviews is not the reviewers, but the games.

The problem with video games is they often have problems: technical problems.  You never see a movie, no matter how cheap or out of the mainstream, released in theaters with bad audio, poor lighting, or people getting stuck in walls. Sure you’ll have a bad actor and some bad artistic choices, but most of the “bad things” were some director’s bad choice.  Video games, however, haven’t achieved that baseline to legitimize the medium as a storytelling and artistic form.

This means video game critics must assess the quality of the game in addition to its technical prowess, namely, does it break?  Bad camera, unresponsive controls, chugging frame rates, graphics pop-in/out, and more hurt games more than a crappy story or repetitive gameplay.  A game might be awesome, but enough glitches can turn it into a dud. Games like Advent Rising, Enter the Matrix, and Two Worlds were rushed products buried under paragraphs of reviews attacking the terrible technical quality of what could have been great games.

With the technical specs out of the way, reviews could devote their time to reviewing the actual game.  We all hate bad frame rates, so reviews need to explain gameplay, story, visual style with greater depth.  Doing so would help develop video game criticism, giving us time to discuss themes and methods rather than glitches and bugs. With flawless technical presentation inline with films, video games can start being looked at for their richer and deeper qualities.

Bug checking video games, especially the epics we now have, is hard to impossible.  But the industry needs to work to find a baseline of quality guaranteed by every game so games don’t have to fear buying a game only to have it crash because they went left instead of right.

Ralph Koster outlines the tangled web of patents covering the popular world of music-based video games.  A patent thicket describes when several patents cover a single product, owned by several different groups.  Music based video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are finding themselves mixed up in a web of lawsuits.  First Konami is suing Harmonix for patents on music games, even though Harmonix has its own assortment of music game patents (including a patent on a “game controller simulating a musical instrument”).  Konami previous made GuitarFreaks and is looking to get back into the music game genre since Harmonix help make it such a success (more than Konami ever did).

Let’s not forget Red Octane and Activision, the team still responsible for Guitar Hero (which Harmonix headlined before getting bought by MTV). They’ve been licensing patents from Konami while getting sued by Gibson who also has patents on music games even though they sold likeness rights to the game for toy Gibson guitars. And let’s not forget Harmonix had sued Activision over unpaid royalties (now bargaining instead).

All the lawsuits shows none of this is about innovation, but is about greed and strong arming bargaining positions for more licensing fees.  That’s not what the patent system is supposed to be for.  The more these companies fight over music game patents, the worse consumers will be as the games will be more expensive, if they can even afford to be made.

Video games have made mundane jobs like mayor and farmer fun, so just think how good good jobs can be. These are the jobs we’ve gotten to taste in video games and realized we really like them and wouldn’t mind getting paid for our labors. Hell, for 20-40 hours, getting paid to play video games is the real number 1

7. Treasure hunter

The swamps might be gross and the monsters might be terrifying, but just think of the excitement. Now the best you can hope for is to vicariously live through your slutty friend’s dating drama. I’ll take Indiana Jones style tomb raiding over slutty friend’s any day.

6. Rock star

Color matching like a 2-year-old was never so fun. And add the cheering crowds, wild parties, and maybe even a psycho circus you’ve got a recipe for awesome fun and inappropriateness, which is by default fun. So let’s get ready to rock.

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For the doomsaying that PC gaming is in it last throes, game publishers keep releasing games. Several publishers including Infinity Ward and Crytek blame piracy for low sales of their PC games, Call of Duty 4 and Crysis respectively. Thus publishers are packing their games with more and more restrictive and complex DRM, a surefire sales pitch to increase sales.

Electronic Arts released a PC-port of Mass Effect last month and users are already complaining they are being locked out of the game. The company restricts the game to only be installed three times and uninstalling it doesn’t reinstate an install. This is a step up from the proposed DRM which would have rechecked the game’s serial number every 10 days, requiring an internet connection to play a game that doesn’t require an internet connection. After the internet backlash, EA dropped the 10-day check, but made sure Mass Effect was still to difficult to be worth purchasing.

The upcoming game Spore is likely to have similar DRM.

The challenge for PC game publishers is not piracy, because pirates will pirate games. Fighting these pirates becomes an arms war of technology that the pirates constantly win. Publishers waste their time and money fighting them, and alienating paying customers at the same time.

Stardock takes a different approach. Their games contain no DRM and don’t require keeping the CD in the drive to play. Users with valid serial numbers get regular updates with rich lists of new features. Obviously pirates get their hands on Stardock’s games, but the publisher makes a significant profit with a loyal fan base and, shockingly, not spending so much money.

Brad Wardell, founder of Stardock writes:

Anyone who keeps track of how many PCs the “Gamer PC” vendors sell each year could tell you that it’s insane to develop a game explicitly for hard core gamers. Insane. I think people would be shocked to find out how few hard core gamers there really are out there. This data is available. So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? If you need to sell 500,000 of your game to break even and your game requires Pixel Shader 3 to not look like crap or play like crap, do you you really think that there are 50 MILLION PC users with Pixel Shader 3 capable machines who a) play games and b) will actually buy your game if a pirated version is available?

He goes on to explain why Stardock is successful without copy-protection.

When you develop for a market, you don’t go by the user base. You go by the potential customer base. That’s what most software companies do. They base what they want to create on the size of the market they’re developing for. But not PC game developers.

PC game developers seem to focus more on the “cool” factor. What game can they make that will get them glory with the game magazines and gaming websites and hard core gamers? These days, it seems like game developers want to be like rock stars more than businessmen. I’ve never considered myself a real game developer. I’m a gamer who happens to know how to code and also happens to be reasonably good at business.

Stardock games, like “Galactic Civilizations II sold 300,000 copies making 8 digits in revenue on a budget of less than $1 million” according to Wardell. Sins of a Solar Empire was the best-selling PC game of February, ahead of Call of Duty 4 and a World of Warcraft expansion.

Stardock is not praying for people to actually buy their games. They cater to a large enough market, spend an appropriate amount to make the game, and provide an on-going service to encourage people to pay for the game rather than pirate it. People pirate Stardock games, just like they’re pirating EA’s DRM-filled Mass Effect. But Stardock is making huge profits and not pissing off its paying customers. Revolutionary.

There are many factions within the geek community, most viciously opposing and plot the death of other factions. Just try to get a Star Trek fan to agree with a Star Wars fan on anything. The truth is there is a hierarchy of geeks, and geeks in higher parts of that hierarchy are well in their power to look down on those lower in the hierarchy, the same way jocks and cheerleaders look down on all geeks. This list ranks the geekiest of geek hobbies in, well, order of geekiness. Enjoy one of these doesn’t make you a bad person. Just really, really geeky.

7. Star Wars geek

When it comes to sci-fi geekdom, Star Wars wins. It’s just huge, with every comic book, novel, action figure, and video game to collect, memorize, and horde. No other single franchise can match this insanity.

How to know if you are one: You have read anything Star Wars related outside of the 6 movies

Wastes money on: Anything Star Wars related outside of the 6 movies

6. Anime

Pokemon has helped turn anime into a less embarrassing hobby, as long as you are younger than 12. Once you his puberty, it’s time to hide those big-eyed cartoons and start watching South Park. But some geeks can’t break the habit. They just love the speed lines.

How to know if you are one: You understand anime

Wastes money on: Subtitle software and Japanese lessons

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After $60 and 20 hours of effort, I want to feel closure. I do not want a dark, to be continued screen. More games seem to end with an anti-climatic final battle only to find out the real big-bad was kept hidden until the next next, yet-to-be announced sequel. I enjoy my franchises, but waiting two to four years for a conclusion is just cruel. Video games take too much time to play and sometimes (not always) longer to make for half a story.

Halo 2 infamously left players floating (and only partially resolved in Halo 3). But several cliffhanger games have yet to get sequels like Shenmue II and Beyond Good and Evil, a cruel act since these are great games with amazing stories. And who knows if we’ll see real answers to God of War and Kingdom Hearts ever.

A recent trend has started announcing games as trilogies. Halo had that distinction as has the recently released Mass Effect and upcoming Too Human. This will only make things worse.
Too Human is a great example of the dangers in video game development. This yet-to-be-released action title first appeared back in 1999 as a Playstation title (Playstation 1 to be precise). Then it moved to Nintendo’s GameCube until recently showing up on the Xbox 360. Of course, now the developer is mixed up in a lawsuit with Epic, the makers of Unreal 3 engine powering Too Human. It’s unknown if this lawsuit will further delay the game.

And this is all for part one of three. At this rate of development, assuming the game even sells enough for a sequel, we won’t see the conclusion until almost 2020. No story is that good.

Movies have figured out how to make cliffhangers work - film movies at the same time. Lord of the Rings and the Matrix left short windows between releases to alleviate the cliffhanger sting. Video games don’t have that luxury. Compared to movies, video games don’t have the variety of revenue opportunities to make up money badly spent. A Hollywood blockbuster has theatrical release, DVD sales and rentals, enforcement deals, and cable and TV royalties to help pad the bottom line. This means Hollywood has more wiggle room when thinking about how much ticket sales alone bring in. Video games, however, have initial sales and rentals and that’s it. It makes taking a financial risk that much riskier.

On top of that, gamers require each part of a video game franchise to provide some kind of enhanced experience. This prevents simultaneous development of a game and its sequel. Though it’s unknown if gamers would accept less advancement if release windows were shortened.

Since simultaneous development like Lord of the Rings seems unreasonable at present, video game companies need to rethink how to develop game stories. Stop thinking about games as trilogies and more as series or franchises. We all know Halo won’t end as a trilogy. Aside from the cliffhanger ending in Halo 3 (which kinda defeats the trilogy idea), the game makes too much money to not make a fourth. So let’s model games more like an X-Men comic and less like an episode of Lost.

Basically, each game can be a self-contained story. With 10 to 40 hours of gameplay, there’s no excuse you can’t fit everything in one game (I’m looking at you Mass Effect). That’s called bad editing.

But self-contained doesn’t mean the story totally ends. Older comics had the major villain die after every issue with some hint that they might, just might come back (which they always did next month). Allusions to sequels are okay, but closure is required. Similarly, it’s okay to leave some questions unanswered. It only adds to our love of Master Chief not seeing his face or questioning why Marcus Fenix was in prison in Gears of War. Just make sure the game we play has a beginning, middle, and a real end. I don’t to beat the final boss only to find out they were just a pawn (much like - LIGHT SPOILER - Gears of Wars’ ending).

Basically, when I pay $60 for a game, I don’t expect half or a third of anything. I want the whole story. Just like wouldn’t accept half of the gameplay (like waiting a year for combos to be added to Street Fighter) I don’t want to wait forever for the story.

BoingBoing reports a secret code in Google Reader. The famous Konami Code used in dozens of Konami (and non-Konami games) since the NES days has made its way into Google Reader. Press Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A will reset your unread items to 30 (like Contra’s 30-extra lives) and decorate your sidebar with a ninja. Reloading the page puts everything back to normal. Researchers are still analyzing the code’s usefulness.

One of the greatest Star Wars video games owes it all to those little building blocks called Legos. Lego Star Wars gave the duel trilogy a hilarious and enjoyable romp through the galaxy with tons of collectables, vehicles, and playable characters. More Lego games including the just released Indiana Jones and upccoming Batman lead me to wonder what else can the franchise build.

7. Power Rangers

They might be campy and kiddy, but they still have awesome video game potential yet to be realized. Awesome martial arts moves with cool weapons and giant robots all to fight a bizarre assortment of monsters. With hundreds of monsters, Zords, and different kinds of Power Rangers over the years, there’s tons of unlockables to give this game long legs. Just remember co-op. This is a team effort.

6. South Park

Let’s see the mature side of Legos by turning the foul mouthed kids of Colorado into colorful blocks of fun. Let’s even risk the cliched sandbox approach, rebuilding the entire town of South Park in Legos with missions from the show, like fighting vicious turkeys and Mecha-Streisand.

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