Blake Recommends: Winter Edition

It's been a while since I've done a round of recommendations for stuff I'm consuming. Let's fix that!

Stuff I love:

-Last.fm: If you use Pandora, switch to Last.fm now. They've really developed their ad-supported streaming radio service, and it's pretty solid. It's great for being exposed to new artists without falling into the Pandora trap of super-specialized stations that play the same 5 awesome songs over and over. My favorite feature is the presence of international music, so I have stations for J-pop artists like m-flo and Crazy Ken Band that play new tracks from them and their musical cousins. It's also a new feature on the Xbox 360, and I'm pretty sure I have it on non-stop while I'm studying at home. I've especially fallen in love with...

-Crystal Kay: Japanese-born, halfie, bilingual R&B. All the catchiness of Japanese pop music with some seriously solid vocals on top. Lots of fun to listen to, even if you don't speak Japanese.

-DJ Hero: I understand the complaints about DJ Hero. But I don't care. Even if what I'm doing in this game isn't actually what DJs do, it's a fun enough facsimile. There are enough tracks that completely kick ass to make up for the weak ones. And I really don't care about the reportedly blah multiplayer modes. I just want to do cool DJ things, and I get to do that. The art direction is cool and the game is good. DJ Hero is, honestly, what I've wanted ever since Guitar Hero came about. I wanted a game built around an instrument I care about more than guitar, and I got that. I paid the stupidly high price for this game and don't regret it. It's pretty rare that I enjoy a game that isn't critically acclaimed, at least outside the presence of diamond-in-the-rough-seeker John Martone, but this is one such rare moment. I'm going to revel in it, even if no one else does.

-Left 4 Dead 2: I have a little clique of Left 4 Dead playing buddies, and we've really enjoyed the last 6 or so months playing together. We had mixed feelings on whether L4D2 would mess that up, but after a week with the game we're all on the same page. And it's the page I wrote a few months back: It's more Left 4 Dead. How can this be a bad thing?

Stuff I just can't bring it upon myself recommend:

-Modern Warfare 2: It unfortunately fit with the trend in Infinity Ward games: an amazing, innovative, emotionally investing game gets followed up with a solid, but relatively not boundary-pushing, sequel. See: Call of Duty 1&2, Modern Warfare 1&2. 

Warning: spoilers. Skip down to Mos Def to avoid.
Clearly IW was trying to break the pattern with the infamous airport scene, but this was a hugely blown opportunity. The setup was this: you're an undercover agent sent in to root out an evil, evil former Soviet dude. So you're supposed to fall in with him, build his trust, and eventually bring down his whole empire. All of that should have been playable, in-game narrative instead of dropping you in this story's climax at the start of level fucking two. What the player gets instead is a paper-thin context from a load-screen briefing and a command: open fire on these innocent people, and go on a terroristic rampage. And when it's done, you get shot in the head and die. You play as a specific character for one level and then you're capped in the face. How much more disposable can your own in-game avatar be?

Compare that to the heaviest moment in the first Modern Warfare: halfway through the game, after you've followed this American soldier through to a climax in the Middle East, you die. You die. It was the biggest moment in gaming in 2007, and the biggest moment in 2009 is the bungled result of a very difficult development schedule dropped on IW. There wasn't time to make the player gain the trust of the evil Soviet guy, but IW couldn't spare the game this seriously heavy moment. Thanks for the mix-up, Activision. Now when anyone wants to explore the 24-esque theme of "doing horrible things to save more people," gamers will have this disappointing precedent to look back to. When will the core game publishers realize that short-term schedules impact the long-run quality of their product and their industry?

-Mos Def, The Ecstatic: I admit, I haven't given it an honest listen yet, but it's every bit as odd as other Mos Def albums. Maybe a little too out there.

-John Mayer, Battle Studies: Mayer's at his best when he's singing about things other people don't think about or can't put into words easily. His first and third albums were great for this reason, not because they were good music. So now he's adopted the most common theme of all, love, and done an entire album around it. It just seems like a waste of talent. At least two songs borrow their structures from tracks from Continuum. And what is Taylor Swift doing in my John Mayer?

PS: The cover of Crossroads is seriously lame. If Mayer is a young Eric Clapton in terms of guitar virtuosity, why isn't he showing it off here?

Will work for debt reduction

It's come to my attention that out of my incoming graduate class, I'm probably on the high end of debt incurred, thanks to 
a) out-of-state tuition
b) little funding from UCSD

I'm going to start working ASAP to remedy this situation, or else I'll be repaying loans until I'm 36. Expect Blake to be very very busy sometime soon.

Still, that won't be all that bad. I signed up for this gig partially to be busy. Life as a writer in Texas was too slow to be sustainable. And now that I'm here, I've eased into having less of a life. Upon my arrival, going out three nights a week was the norm. Now, some four months later, I got back from hitching a ride across town for the sake of a free Chipotle burrito. I really don't feel that bad about the decline in activity, which makes it OK for me to marginally become a little bit more of a loser by working anywhere between 5-20 hours a week.

These days, I get my gaming once a week via CO-OP. It's the only game-related show I watch religiously, and that's saying a lot. It's six guys getting really deep about the games they review, and they're consistent about it. They'll cover everything, from AAA releases during release week to indie games and iPhone stuff. And there's some little sketches and banter, too, which keeps you from being overwhelmed with Gaming Information and lets you 'get to know the guys' in the same sense that Top Gear fans know about the hosts of that show. Give it a whirl; it's better than the rest of Youtube's Top-Gear-Wannabe gaming flotsam, and a thousand times more interesting than hearing pro bloggers mouth-breathe into a Skype call for an hour. (Unless you're Robert Ashley - if you're him, you can talk in your awesome stoner voice all day.)

Really, are there no gamers at Google?

Why has there not been a single "20-percent time" project at Google resulting in anything even vaguely beneficial to gamers? 

 

Google is now The Big Dog in IT, if the price on Nasdaq is any indication. IT is inexorably tied with gaming. Ordinary office workers kill time with fantasy football or style blogs; IT guys always killed it with Quake.

It was called "Google's experiment with gaming" when it launched an abortive Second Life clone and shut it down a few weeks later. Not only was that a horrendous misnomer - that nonsense wasn't a game in the slightest - but the press sounded as if they permanently shut a door on Google's entry into an ever-growing market. Google stuck its toes in the water, the water was filled with piranhas, Google will never go near the water again. In truth, the Goog ignored the possibilities entirely, and its lack of gaming projects has left them excluded from a marketing sector.

If I had been a Google employee in the last 10 years, I would've done some stuff that gamers have wanted ever since I was just sinking my teeth into Quake III a decade ago. Stuff like:

Stats and Web integration across games
Quake III was barely on store shelves, and a stats company had emerged to track in-game performance and relay that back out to a bracket website. Basically, it automated pro gaming tournaments, gave fans the scores and numbers they wanted, and was viewable to both tournament attendees and fans spread around the world. Modern pro tournament organizers are still doing a lot of this stuff by hand, and that's shameful given the technology that was needed to give birth to pro gaming. It's just a tee-tiny baby step to bring this stuff back. 

And thankfully, someone is bringing it back. Bungie integrated basic online stats lookups in Halo 2, and really unleashed its potential with Halo 3. Players are getting a kick out of following their numbers (like accuracy, favorite weapons, best-performing maps, most likely areas to die) as much as simple stuff like Achievements. A few strategy-game makers are following suit, and Blizzard is sure to make a big feature out of it in StarCraft II. Valve also keeps detailed stats on its games for balancing and anti-cheating purposes, but its keeps all its data to itself.

Now imagine that this fun stuff wasn't limited to one AAA game every three years. Had Google thought to offer its quantitative expertise to gaming, gamers might have taken advantage by forming clans around the best-performing players, or speeding up the balance-tweaking cycle. It might have even given rise to some cool products, like Fantasy StarCraft for Korean fans. At the very least, Google would have had its name slapped on every game that had decided to open up to a sort of Google Games API.

Shareable video recordings of games
10 years ago, there were "demos," which were the term for saved replays of games. Entire matches were recorded and then could be replayed from any number of perspectives. This never really went away in PC strategy games, but they were once a standard-issue in FPS games, disappeared, and then reappeared as "replays" a couple years ago in Halo 3. These are distinct from the highlight videos you see on YouTube because "demos" or replays use game-specific data to be replayed inside the game itself. Instead of a 30-minute match weighing 500MB of compressed video, it's a 2MB game-readable data file. That's great if you own the game, but not so great if you usually play at your friend's house or just want to show off a quick move to a friend. 

As soon as the cloud took shape, the computing horsepower at Google should have tied game replays and YouTube together. Upload a 2MB demo, and in 5 minutes you have a YouTube link to your amazing come-from-behind victory for all to see. Now, Bungie is experimenting with selling this service with Halo 3 replays - but why sell a service specific to one game when Google could sell YouTube video overlay ads that are actually decently targeted to viewers for once?

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Hopefully those two examples show just how much impact Google could have on gaming, depending on what resources the company put to use. Whatever happened to using 20 percent time to innovate (Maps, Docs, Voice) instead of trying to replicate social networking services (the Second Life knockoff, Latitude, Wave, the list will probably go on)?

C'mon, Google. Ask around. There has to be a gamer or two in that GooglePlex of yours somewhere. Let 'em make a contribution - it could be really valuable.

I go to gaming school

It's remarkable how much career-oriented progress I'm making after just a couple of days of real-deal school. I needed an answer to the extremely frequent question "what's your career goal?" and the answer of "video games" just became habit. 

Everything else is just falling into line. I'm exploring game-related work for next summer and letting it shape the work I'm doing here, from research to topics for Japanese assignments.

I was so busy doing all that that I missed the real-world culmination of what I wanna do: the Tokyo Game Show, or Japan's E3. I went back and caught up on the news this morning, and I have a few observations:

-Final Fantasy 13 will be fantastic, following the theory that every FF game on a new platform is a classic: 4, 7, 10. Wow. If you just keep counting by 3s, you get the original Final Fantasy (unarguably a classic, look what it spawned) and, of course, 13. Maybe we should update the theory.

-Hideo Kojima is Japan's best export. Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker will be fantastic. See for yourself:

-Microsoft Natal came to Japan! People are playing Katamari Damacy with it, by kinda doing this retarded swimming motion, and now I understand the skeptics. Buuuuuuut...

-Natal could have some really broad implications. MS had another fantastic showing in Tokyo this year, and they had a panel where a trio of famous Japanese designers just started tossing around ideas for what you could do with the technology. Kojima was on the panel, and while he of course stated that he has some fantastic ideas for games that recognize your appearance and interact with you that way, his thoughts on the device itself were more telling: Medical imaging, or security cameras, could benefit from the tech.

That's huge. Suppose the technology works well enough to identify you from a relative distance away, say 15 feet. Tie that into the cloud, or Facebook, and you've instantly established a working surveillance society.

In short, TGS has had some really fantastic timing in terms of my life here. Professors, who I'm meeting for the first time, ask what I want to do, and now I can point a finger to this show and say "this." By which I mean "games industry + business development + exciting new technologies + big companies like MS + Japan." They may not get it themselves, but the important thing is that I'm able to answer the question.

For posterity's sake

In the last couple of years, I've grown more accustomed to the idea of selling games back to stores or just renting them through GameFly (like Netflix for games) and never owning them in the first place. Occasionally, though, a game will be such a classic that it has to stay in my possession, and I have no problem shelling out the additional cash to buy a game for keeps.

It's not that I necessarily plan on replaying the game - going back to a game is something I very rarely do - but it's more like I'm keeping it in the family. I still have all my old video game systems, like my NES and Super NES, sitting in a closet, too. In the same way my mom has amassed a library that's too broad for a house full of bookshelves, I'm building a video game library for my family's posterity.

You laugh now, but I'll be the super-cool dad with the super-cool kid who's raised on the original Super Mario Bros. sometime around 2020 or 2025.

In the last year or so I've really only played two games that I intend to make part of the library. But beyond that, there's tons of great games that I hope to play with my eventual family, like pretty much any Mario or Zelda game, Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger (man, what a fantastic game, even today), Mario Kart, Metal Gear Solid, and a whole stack of PC games that won't be playable 10 or 15 years from now.

So, gamers, what's in your library for your kids?