I had an interesting conversation with a colleague (who I won't mention out of respect) this evening about game reviews and how much a reviewer has to play what they perceive as a bad game before they throw in the towel and write a review. To my way of thinking you should try, to the best of your ability, to play that game as far as you can, barring a show stopping bug or design flaw that prevents you from continuing.

So if a game is awful, are reviewers allowed to say at some point "hey I wouldn't play this game anymore than I have to and you shouldn't either" or should they do the heavy lifting and play it to the end? My thought on doing that is that it is wrong and it makes it difficult for an editor to know whether that person was truly playing an awful game or was just being lazy.

As much as I loathe playing crappy games, I take the responsibility of reviewing any game very seriously. After all, times are hard right now and wasting your money on anything sucks, let alone on some middling, crappy piece of software. On the other hand, there are men and women that pour their hearts and souls into developing these games and we have an obligation to  give them a fair and honest critique of their work.

I know where I stand, but what do you think as a fellow reviewer or as a consumer?

Image Credit: pbase.com

Playfish is not the only company working diligently to make a name for itself on social networking scenes like Facebook, MySpace and Beebo, but it is certainly one of the best at providing graphically rich game experiences in that space. We'll be posting an interview with the company very soon, but I just wanted to talk about one game that has kept me busy this week: Crazy Planets.

If you haven't tried this Facebook game out, it is basically a turn-based strategy game similar to Worms in which little soldiers wearing the masks of your Facebook friends battle killer robots on planets for resources, experience points and medals. One thing I really like about the game is the fact that you can bring anyone into the game that is a friend on Facebook. So if you wanted to bring your mom along on a mission and she's connected to you on Facebook, you can drag her along and make her face her worst fear: killer robots..

One thing you cannot do is level up your friends characters; you'll have to rely on them to play the game if you want them to get better, get improved weaponry and more hit points. The other part of the game that is fascinating is the way resource management and research is tied to the social networking aspects of Facebook. The more friends you can get to join the game, the more resources you can get for yourself. You can only collect resources once a day from your Facebook pals, but if you have lots of friends then you'll get a leg up on someone that only has a handful. These resources, along with some separate resources collected from missions, are used to research upgrades. But again, the whole social networking aspect comes into play - the more friends you have playing the game, the quicker your research will go. In other words, 15 friends will turn a real world 24 hour research cycle into a mere 7 hours.

It is these little things that make the game enjoyable to play at lower levels, but Playfish needs to balance out the rest of the game so that when you are at the end it feels less like a grindfest than it is. Of course, the game is still in beta, and in our upcoming interview the company explains some of what it has in store.

I'm at level 16 if anyone is interested in having access to a strong character. I hope Gus Mastrapa will level up his character soon; I'm tired of him being the first guy to die on my team. On the plus side, it's hard to say no to a guy who enjoys eating a pickle shaped cookie while fighting off insane robots.

Fat Princess just launched last week; you can read my review of the latest PSN game here. Elsewhere on the interwebs, complaints have been floating about the connectivity issues plaguing people who are trying to play Titan Studios’ maiden effort. If it feels like déjà vu, it’s because much the same thing happened with Battlefield 1943 just last month. Sure, the bugs for each game are already fixed or will be eliminated soon, but will launches like these just be the reality of digitally distributed games?

More...

Man, am I bummed about the death of Arturo Gatti. The talent in that guy...gone too soon.

Along with Crispy-ites Scott Jones and Steve Kent, I'm a big boxing fan. So when I was the game critic for The Village Voice, I got a call one day asking if I wanted to go to a demo of Fight Night Round 3. I had a deadline (always do), so ole grumbleass hesitated ... until they told me I could play Arturo Gatti at the game. 

I'm not the best gamer (by far). But when it comes to fighting games, I'm pretty damn good. If you don't believe me, ask Kent. Anyway, it was the middle of winter and I hauled my skinny ass over to some midtown hotel. I was grumpy because I hate midtown, especially in slushy February.

I'd watched an old Arturo Gatti/Mickey Ward throwdown to get in the mood, and, like this article says, I was nervous. Gatti was a total cool guy who said, "Don't worry. I didn't play the game until this morning."

It was no comfort since I hadn't played the game at all. I feared a knockdown, or worse, a knockout.

Gatti, in his modesty, chose to play fists of stone Roberto Duran. I chose to play as Ray Robinson. Gatti began to brawl, and I was getting pummeled like Joey GIlbert in the recent fight with Jesse Brinkley. But I found the block button and, allow me to quote "got Duran with a series of rights. Duran appeared dazed. And then, Gatti as Duran fell, knocked down hard by Robinson. Gatti stood up and tried to use body English to get Duran off the mat. In the game, there's a way to revive a knocked down fighter before the 10-count. But Arturo wasn't able to move two dots into the center of the screen using the controller sticks. Duran stayed down. I had bested the great Arturo Gatti.

"At first, there was disbelief on Gatti's face, then a flash of anger, at which point I wanted to run down Fifth Avenue as quickly as I could. Moments later, there was good natured respect. 'Congratulations,' he said. Even in loss, Arturo Gatti was a class act." 

Arturo should never have died this young, at 37. I think we should all pick up Fight Night Round 3 and play as Gatti. In memorium, yo.

One day, GDC might not have an Anti-Censorship roundtable. One day, it might not need one.

For now, game writer and anti-censorship activist Daniel Greeberg made his annual pilgrimage to the conference to talk about what’s new in the world of people that want games to sit down and shut up.

What’s the latest? It seems that while the mood is pretty good, with games having gained a lot in terms of their reputation to provide family-friendly fare, there’s still on ongoing effort to vilify “those violent games” as a particular kind of digital children we inject into our children.

Greenberg waved a pile of pending court cases in the US hinged on suppressing certain kinds of games and talked about the real possibility of German banning all violent games in the wake of their recent shooting rampage.

My take? The “games are hurting our children “argument is getting old, even for the mainstream. But the conversation about games is just getting started.

The clamor over Resident Evil5 shows that gamers and (ahem) the gaming press is more than willing to tackle content issues in gaming. If the fans and  he journalist can take on the issue of racism in a popular game, hopefully the developers themselves will start to think twice about what they make.

I’m a hardcore freedom of speech guy. But the less time I have to spend defending junk that I think is offensive or just plain bad, the better.  Freedom of speech protects your right to make junky, evil games. But that doesn’t mean it’s a blank check to crack out crap.

**

Want to keep track of issues related to censorship

Gamecensorship.com and gamepolitics.com track game legislation and related issues. 

I am still digesting all of the discussions that went on at GamesBeat today, but it was a relatively entertaining and informative affair. Honestly, a lot of the fun stuff going on was out in the halls, meeting people (I met Kyle Orland, David Thomas, and Susan Lusty for the first time today), eating our lunches on the run because of a fire drill, and hanging out with the Crispy Crew.

I was very disappointed that Jenova Chen from thatgamecompany didn't get to finish his presentation during the good Mr. Narcisse's panel on "Visualizing the future of games in ten years." What he was proposing would have been the glue to what Raph Koster, Michel Tombroff and Elan Lee were saying.  It was the best discussion of the day.

There was also an interesting panel on "How are gaming principles stimulating innovation in the non-gaming world" that was brought down by some absolutely jarring hot mic moments that made the crowd cringe.

 There was a lot of talk about platform agnostic gaming, the end of packaged goods as we know them. Certainly some interesting stuff that I am going to dive into a bit later..

Oh and it was nice to hear someone scream out "OMG It's Crispy Gamer!" I will admit it was more than a little jarring and I did not know what to say.

Unlike our friend Dave Thomas, I didn't make it to today's GamesBeat conference until the early afternoon (I blame the jet lag). There, I spent a good portion of the day listening to interesting but generally loooong presentations by some of the best thinkers in the industry. Here's some of the best and most interesting one-liners I heard from the panelists.

"Ten million people is a lot of people to have not paying you..."
-The New York Times' Matt Richtel, to 42 Entertainment's Susan Bonds, leading up to a question about how to make money from popular alternate reality games.

"Frankly I think there are too many games out there. The world doesn't need another crappy game."
-Graham Hopper, of Disney Interactive, publishers of That's So Raven

"What are people willing to pay for? They're willing to pay for convenience and that's what [the iPhone and other mobile platforms] bring."
-Nickelodeon's David Williams on what's behind the growing appeal of mobile gaming

"The media treated it like finding the lost city of gold... a jock who plays games!"
-Former Red Sox Pitcher Curt Schilling, on the general reaction when he "came out of the closet" as an Everquest player

"Sure, you can do all this stuff... but it'll come out in 2025 and cost 400 to 500 million dollars."
-Schilling on how the development team at 38 Studios, which he founded, typically reacts to his gameplay ideas

"It's the only opportunity for Microsoft to get into a business that the justice department won't care a bit about."
- Kleiner Perkins' Bing Gordon, recalling a comment he made to VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi after they attended the unveiling of the Xbox

"The people who don't think in games are all gonna die, and they're gonna die soon... so for all of you who are worried about the non-gaming Luddites, don't, because they are going to lose."
-Gordon, on how gaming is quickly becoming the default paradigm through which people see the world

"All gaming will be multiplayer, all gaming will be social, all gaming will be a service."
-Metaplace's Raph Koster, extrapolating from trends in the present to predict what gaming will be like ten years in the future

 "I think the future of games is, without a doubt, real-time, GPS-based, real-world Frogger, played out on the highway."
-Elan Lee, on the future of games. He quickly added that he was just kidding.

"I think 'fun' is a very small portion of the emotional  experience a person can have."
-Jenova Chen, thatgamecompany, on why he thinks current games are constraining themselves by focusing primarily on the fun factor

Thump thump thump.

(Is this thing on?)

Greetings from GamesBeat 2009!

Games what?

During a week that the focus of the industry is dominated by the Game Developers Conference, a few hundred brave souls gathered on the San Francisco University campus to attend a new event put on by the folks at tech blog VentureBeat.

Led by superstar game journalist Dean Takahashi, the GamesBeat idea was to take an executive-level view of the games business, and deliver a one-day conference that lets the suits talk about making money off of games.

And despite the burgeoning recession, the GamesBeat idea appears to have a pulse.

Chris Taylor, Gas Powered Games set the stage during some opening remarks when he pointed out that games sales are up January and February this year, despite the economic decline.

“And that’s so damn cool”

The first GamesBeat panel sat down a group of venture capitalists and drilled them on the market. The consensus? The checkbooks are out for the entrepreneur with the right ideas.

So what do you need to, say, bum a couple million bucks from your friendly VC?

The bad news first:

The money people aren’t interested in your great idea for your World of Warcraft with a scifi twist. No matter how hot a new idea is, VC doesn’t want to invest in a one hit wonders. Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed Ventures pointed out investing in hot concepts is like putting money into a restaurant or nightclub idea when he wants to invest in the next Disneyland. Think the difference between flash in the pan and a global franchise. Big money isn’t just looking for big ideas, they are looking for big returns on their money. And that means long-term properties that dispense money like an ATM.

Boring? To the average gamer only interested in what Gears of War 3 might look like, sure. But understanding how the money flows behind the scenes tells you a lot about where the industry is heading.

So where’s money sniffing around? The panel dropped hints as to the kinds of innovations that have them reaching into their big bags of cash, including:

* New distribution models. Think the iPhone. If you can match customers with content, you have a golden ticket.

* Defensible markets. Why is WoW so big? Because it’s WoW and you’re not. They innovated in the MMO world and now they have a license to print money. Define a product line that lets you control a massive customer base over time and you’ll get VC interest.

* Something social. No one can look at the explosive growth of social networking sites like Facebook and not wonder how to leverage that in games.

* Payment schemes. Back to the iPhone, everyone seems obsessed with how easy it is it to buy stuff from Apple. Making it easy to buy virtual goods and full games opens the gates to customers. 

* New angles for monetization. This is biz-speak for figuring out ways to get people to pay for stuff that they haven’t paid for in the past.

* New demographics. Women, families, kids. Anyone who isn’t playing Grand Theft Auto today is a potential customer. 

* New markets. The feeling is, the hardcore market is tapped out. Or, at least, it’s dominated by the traditional players. So, what’s left? Health games, games in business and the application of game technology to new areas may not be sexy, but it sounds profitable.

This all might sound terribly dull to people who want to have fun rather than just make money. But don’t despair. Even those cold hearted bottom line folks still love games. They’re just practical about it takes to keep the fun going.

“It starts with a one great game. But doesn’t stop with one great game,” summed Liew.