Noah Balmer

Example of Penny Arcade Comic Strip

Penny Arcade Article from Wired

I can remember when Penny Arcade began. I was handing out this great new underground software called 'napster' on floppy disks around my highschool. I never was really into Penny Arcade. I would look at it in class in highschool or when i was really bored at home, but never for a week straight. After reading this article in Wired last month I realized how large the gaming population has become.

---"The term geek has acquired a patina," says Holkins, a writer prone to ornate verbiage and renowned for his witty blog posts that accompany each strip. He's right — the word is being reclaimed as a badge of pride. But the creators of Penny Arcade aren't among these geek-come-latelies. They're unreconstructed geeks of the old-school variety — which is to say, of the high school variety.----

I was a geek in high school but I was also in the weight lifting class. I rode in the cusp between being a complete nerd playing Mario on my TI-86 (yeah I had the 86, I paid extra so i didnt get the 82plus so that I could play better games) and between the joks with muscle cars (I drove a pimped out 69 Cadillac I bought with money I earned in a lucrative but grimy way on the internet). I feel like i was one of the first nerd/cool hybrids.

The point is that it is amazing to think that a comic strip that is so specific can have such a huge following. I wouldn't be surprised if this strip was in the Sunday comics in the San Francisco newspaper a few years from now.

There is a lot of advertising in the new XBOX360 game Skate. It is more realistic and I do enjoy that I can skate with the actual skateboard I own. I also am pissed off by it too. With all the advertising I wonder if they made a profit on the game before anyone even bought it. Another more intriguing aspect of having your choice in skate garb is that since Skate connects to the EA database every time you start the game EA can record your every hypothetical purchase. Having this database of millions of peoples preference in skate brands could be sold for millions of dollars. There is no better way to research this market than that. My guess is EA planned for this to happen. If not their as stupid as hardcore videogame fans think.

My Skateboard (Real vs. In Game)

T-Moble Billboard

Adidas Store

Neckface Grafitti (real world grafitti artist in virtual world)

Video Clip of Rob Dydrek's Sponsors

A Force More Powerful is a game that must have a novel concept in order for it to be a success. Sadly, it takes me back to the days when if you didn't have America Online then you were missing out on about half the internet. I plugged my headphones in to get the full experincae of the game only to unplug them in ten minutes. The only sound is the sound of cars driving and the same car horn honk every 20 seconds. I guess I just thought that a game like this one would have a wav file or too. Maybe some dialog. Character development. This game would be just as rewarding as a flash game.
I have been studying interface design for a bit because of the lack of industrial design jobs and the influx of interface design positions. This game is a good model of what NOT to do. The text is hand written which was super low revolution and hard to see. It was a san serif type face which makes reading slower. You never know what you can and cant click on because only some of the buttons become highlighted when you roll over them. The actual theme of the interface looks like what an interface sketch model looks like. lined paper and post it notes. its as if they got a firm to draw up what interface they should have and they just used their shitty brainstorming sketches.
If the game was created by Will Wright it still would have touble being a success but that would make this game a little more plausable. The fact that its made by International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) and not a video game company is a probably the reason it is so out of touch with what the user wants. FAILURE.

I thought that it was relevant when Aarseth was discussing the difference between the cybertext reader and the book reader. My parents never believed how much i was reading when playing game s like Final Fantasy. They are "book chauvinists." This generation is much harder to talk into reading a normal book because they would rather be the main character then a passive listener to a story. A lot of new game also have a cinema quality to them. In other words, people will actually watch another person play a game for the story. My roommate watched me play a lot of Half-Life 2. Moving forward it would be great to get to see more games which have a more elegant storyline, better vocabulary, and stronger messages. However, there has been a shift from text in games to audio voice overs. The facial technology can make characters move their lips when they are talking. I believe that the cybertext types of games are dying out.
Having said that I do love Zelda. I beat the Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 64. There is a lot of text in that game and i read it all. The new Zelda game for the Wii still has a lot of text rather than voice in it as well. The Wii is still last place in graphics though and this is the reason for the text. Its graphics are even worse then the PS2 or original XBOX.

I have recently read a book by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman entitled 'On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society' He has pretty in depth evidence that violence in video games and other media have made everyone less resistant to killing. I can safely say that by 16 I was able to load and unload most handguns and rifles without ever holding one. If someone handed me a gun I would know how to use it. Maybe it is because of the brainwashing but I feel safer knowing that if I had to i could use a gun.
I am not sure whether or not militaristic games have an impact on recruitment. Having played a lot of Counterstrike I always realize that if I only had one chance at the game I wouldn't last very long. In an hour session of playing people die about 20 times. Realizing this fact only makes me think that fighting with guns is a pretty bad idea.
If people really want the excitement of fighting with weapons now they can do it online or with paintballs. Why would you decide to do it with bullets?

(Opening Cinematic) - Looks very much like the intro to a film

(cinematic sequence) - Flashback!
This game is about an average guy who has to solve an at times disturbing murder mystery that he himself committed. However, you also play two NYPD cops who only know that this guy killed someone and they have to bring him to justice. You're helping two sides that are both intentionally and unintentionally working against each other. Unique Huh? This game has one of the deepest stories I have seen in a game for the past few years. Most video games have story lines that are almost as bad as pornography. The way you move around in the world is unique but more mundane than in most new games. There is no technique besides the 'Simon Says' parts. In many other games there is actual skill involved with the interface. For example, aiming precisely, or jumping at the exact right time. Anyone who has played games in the past 10 years can easily do the Simon Says parts first try. This tweaky gameplay is not missed in this game however because the choices you make are paramount. Its like saying the wrong thing to a girl the first time you talk.
Although the story is great (for a game) I would not want to just watch this story because the stories plot is based on you making the decisions. It is more like a choose your own adventure book (except you can't cheat as easily).
The menus and tutorial show the cinema theme of this game. I thought it was interesting that they did this but i feel like they didn't really need it. It is a bad movie, but a great adventure game. I would rather watch a movie with real actors then sub par graphics. I feel like they are shooting themselves in the foot by having it seem like a movie. Their inspiration could be cinema but they should have left it on their inspirational image boards and sketches and not in the final product.

Sell your stocks in Sony!
Why?
NO backwards compatibility
NO good games
NO developers wanting to create games for it
TOO expensive
NOT a large enough leap into better graphics
Same controller ergonomics since PS1? I don't have tiny Asian hands!
NO rumble? didn't the Nintendo64 have that!?

I have been watching the videogame console wars and now the new HD wars and I believe that Sony is going to lose. Buying a ps3 is a bad idea because it just got nerfed. They just got rid of all backward compatibility. This means that you can't play all of your playstation one and ps2 games on your new ridiculously expensive console. This might be a half-valid idea if there were ANY good games for the PS3 but there arn't. It needs is equivalent to Halo. Ps2 is still the top selling game system even though the next generation is out. There are hundreds of good games for the PS2. People thinking about buying a PS3 now have even less of a reason to. ]
Supposedly Blu-Ray is winning the HD war. This will not matter once the price goes down enough. This happened with burnable CD's when they came out too. Burners were either CD+R or CD-R. You only could use the media that your burner could use. Sound familiar. Then, they started coming out with CD+or-R discs and burners and since then no one gives a care about it. Most people dont even know it happened. This is exactly what will happen with HD and Blu-Ray. LG already has a dual format player and is launching another http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/01/07/lgs-bh100-hybrid-blu-ray-and-hd-dvd-player-1-199/
Everyone is watching torrented movies on their computer now anyway. Who wants any kind of disc. They just take up space. Wii proved that gameplay wins over graphics.
About graphics, they arn't good because the XBOX360 is bringing it down. Developers can create a game that plays on the xbox360, pc, and ps3 in one try. The problem is it has to go to the lowest common denominator which is the xbox360. The graphics are the same on the ps3 as the xbox360 except for game made only for the ps3 which there are only a few.
RIP PS3.