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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Forbes provided some hyped linkbaiting today with an article on why Apple’s iPhone could kill, not compete with, but kill the Nintendo DS. I’m taking the bait to quash Apple’s gaming might once and for now.

Tech pundits love finding that new “killer” app to quash the incumbent which, in recent memory, always seems to be something Apple related: iPod “killer”, iPhone “killer”, and even Apple TV “killer” (do you need to kill something that isn’t even selling?).

Nintendo’s DS is the powerhouse of handheld gaming, the benefit of almost 20 years and more than half-a-dozen hardware generations. Sony launched its first handheld competitor, the PSP, barely clutching to 30 percent of the market, a credit to the system’s power and Sony’s well-established Playstation brand. Apple comes to the gaming world with no experience (except the tragic Pippin), no game studio, no retail presence or expandable memory, and most importantly, no interest in killing Nintendo.

Forbes writes its article ahead of Apple’s release of 3rd-party software include, presumably, an assortment of games. When Apple announced its developer’s kit for 3rd-parties, major game publishers Sega and EA were there to show off the first games for the platform. These high-profile releases led blogs to speculate on the iPhone’s potential as an actual handheld gaming platform.

This assumes Apple wants to be a handheld platform. The recently announced $25 for games sales Apple has other priorities. Gaming platforms have relied on low priced hardware subsidized by royalties from game sales. Sony’s PSP struggled initially at its $200 price point - how can Apple’s $400 iPhone think to fare better.

The other point against Apple’s gaming interests are its lack of actual gaming. EA’s cute flOw clone, if holding to Apple’s aforementioned price, costs $8 on the PS3. A rare $20 game on the PSP, Patapon, featured dozens of hours of gameplay. The DS offers assorted casual games like those likely to dominate on the iPhone, but also offers a varied library of epic stories and varied genres. Casual gaming is big business, yes, but hard core gaming is still bigger. The Wii sells amazingly, but software beyond Nintendo (first-party) fails to sell like games on the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Games will never sell the iPhone. The iPhone sells itself because of its variety of features and solid casual gaming will appeal to that user base in ways even the Nintendo DS can’t. The result will be different markets, not competitors.

The mature rated MMORPG Age of Conan sold itself on the key selling point of “You’ll see titties.” The game has unsurprisingly been selling quite well.

News is leaking (ha) that the game’s buxom female characters are suffering shrinkage an it’s not even cold outside. Publisher Funcom made code changes in a patch that accidentally resulted in shrinking the size of character’s breasts.

Funcom can confirm that some of the female models in the game have had the size of their breasts changed. This is due to an unintended change in data that was introduced in an earlier patch, data which controls the so-called morph values associated with character models and the size of their respective body parts. We are working on a fix for this and your breasts should be back to normal soon.

I will repeat that:

Your breasts should be back to normal soon.

I doubt college prepares you for writing press releases like this. How fast Funcom takes to fix this problem will be telling about how much boobs are to selling this game. Also makes me wonder how many women actually play it. Any thoughts?

Video game developer Square-Enix deserves credit for giving credit where credit’s due. The makers of the blockbuster Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest franchises, has released disappointing 2007 financials, leading the company’s president, Yoichi Wada, to say his developers need to “stop making games that only they wanted to play.”

Square-Enix’s profits dropped 20 percent and it ceded significant North American market share to competitors. Most of last years sales game from Final Fantasy spin-offs.

Square already seems to have a strategy in place involving new, innovative properties as Wada says, “We need to go beyond traditional Square-Enix.” Instead of shaking the Final Fantasy-tree to economic death, Square released The World Ends with You, an amazing, creative, and deep game that plays to Square’s longevity as the premiere RPG developer while expanding include a myriad of genres in one game. Upcoming new franchises like Infinite Undiscovery and Last Remnant could be Final Fantasy-lite or rejuvenating franchises. The company doesn’t need to do away with RPGs or even focus on other genres. Diversity and innovation in any capacity can feed the industry and be rewarded with rejuvenated fans.

While the actors unions mull their contract negotiations, one actor feels slighted by the video game industry.  Actor Michael Hollick portrayed Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV, providing voice work and motion-capture acting over a 15 month period.  Hollick earned $100,000 for his efforts, which came out to $1,050 per day he worked, almost 50 percent more than the standard $730 rate.  GTA IV earned $600 million within its first week, none of which Hollick will see.  And that’s the way it should be.

Hollick negotiated his contract for a fee he found reasonable at the time - you can’t renegotiate after the fact just because you think you didn’t get enough before.  I’ve express issues with royalties before, but Hollick’s complaint shows an lack of understand the economics of his business rather than mistreatment by evil corporations. 

As Hollick admits, he was paid a premium over acting guild rates.  He just wants a piece of that huge GTA pie.  But who bought GTA IV because of this no name actor?  Even a big name actor wouldn’t pull me into a video game I didn’t want to play anyway.   Hollick had every right when negotiating his contract to ask for royalties and GTA maker Rockstar had every right to throw him out and hire someone cheaper.  And it’s hard to believe Hollick didn’t know GTA IV would make hundreds of millions of dollars when negotiating.

The media industry has evolved itself into a corner with royalties turning into an entitlement for actors and writers rather than entertainment’s form of profit sharing.  Some companies give employees stock options to give them incentive to make the company more money.  Actors and writers argue royalties are their way of getting a fair share of the millions media companies make off their hard work, but who said business is fair?  Royalties are

I do see royalties serving a purpose with big name actors.  Major movie stars do attract large audiences and are often worth their expensive salaries.  These stars then promote their movies on talk shows and at press events, work they do months after filming finished.  With royalties the actors are encouraged to promote the film because the bigger the box office the bigger the paycheck.

But what promotion did Hollick do?  Does anyone think he did a half-assed job because he wasn’t getting royalties?  Was $1,000 a day not enough?  Or is Hollick just doing this as a publicity stunt (probably)?  Hollick was willing to do the work for $100,000 and that means the job was worth $100,000 then and now.  Hopefully the experience would net Hollick a bigger paycheck for his next job, but after this publicity stunt, video game companies might stop calling.