arne360

Although I now hold a minor grudge for spoiling a specific quest I might not ever get to in Oblivion, I recommend reading Nayan’s editorial on HDRLying about story in games and the use of the unreliable narrator. It was thought provoking enough that I even passed this around to a couple people at work today. For me, the missing example here that everyone could easily relate to would be using the somewhat obvious and darling-of-everybody game for interesting story and with a unreliable narrator: Portal. Although, this might be the most accessible of examples, there are some flaws with using Portal as a concise example. The reveal and impact–and subsequent questioning of one self and one’s surroundings–aren’t as compelling as the Oblivion example. In Portal, the unreliable narrator, GLaDOS, is revealed as such far too soon. At least too soon to grow some level of trust before you realize the diabolic nature of your unseen guide and narrator.

I mentioned this to Nayan, who unfortunately hasn’t had a chance to play Portal yet. Talking a bit more, lead to the following bit of exchange:

• me: max payne is another good one.
• Nayan: Is max an unreliable narrator? there’s a lot of doubt that you see in his dreams
• Nayan: like, in Max Payne 1, you kill yourself after you kill your own family…but i always thought that was a metaphor for essentially killing your family for being married to your job
• me: if only you take it far enough to question whether his dream sequences have affected his judgement in reality.

That was just the start of it. It was nice to read something last night that got me thinking a bit more about some of the games I’ve played with, ones that I especially hadn’t considered from a more critical point of view. Even better was that Nayan’s post generated discussion between me and a few other folks about storytelling in games.

E3 2008 came and went pretty quickly this year for me. I had no activities scheduled for the show, so there wasn’t much of a reason to hang around the improved, “it’s new to you” LACC-centered E3 for me. One of the only work-related commitments was attending the Sony press conference at the Shrine Auditorium (video of the full press conference here). This was my first E3 press conference ever — I was not able to attend the Microsoft ones back when I was working on their products — so it definitely had an air of excitement and anticipation for me. Color me impressed at the degree of production that was involved.

After the press conference I headed back to the LACC to do a spot of work and run into former colleagues, journalists and friends for a couple hours. At the appointed time, I made my way over to King Taco on West Pico Boulevard to the PlayStation.blog reader meet-up. It was nice to see Jeff again — the last time was at the Sierra Spring Event back when I was working at Vivendi Games — and I brought some fancy Naughty Dog items in tow with me: a signed copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a “>signed promotional poster for the game and a few of our new t-shirts. It was awesome to see all the folks that turned out, including regular gamers, some community press (including PS3 Fanboy’s Andrew Yoon and Platform Nation’s Steven Artlip and even a couple people from Wal-Mart’s Check Out blog, among others) and even a few people from other developers and publishers. Alas, I didn’t bring my PSP to participate in the Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 tournament.

I will echo the thanks that Jeff gave on the PlayStation.blog and thank everyone that made it out. It was great the see the turnout and kind words about the studio I now work for and it’s catalog of work.

After that, it was off to dinner and then meeting up with Howard from PopCultureShock and some other buddies for the Activision press conference. Looks like the soon to be Activision Blizzard has a nice line-up as well, based on what they showed. Afterwards, I spent some time socializing with some people I hadn’t run into earlier at the Convention Center and got a good-natured pop quiz from Forbes.com Scott Morris about how it feels like to go from publisher to developer, among a few other items, probably much to the amusement of his co-worker Mary Jane Irwin. I had to quickly make my escape (just kidding) and despite wanting to go to bed, went to the Bethesda party at the Saddle Ranch Chop House on Sunset. I’m kind of glad I did, as it seemed everybody and anybody I would want to see (since I wasn’t at E3 proper this week) was there. Fun times.

Although that was technically my only day at E3, the activities outside of it continue a little bit. I had dinner last night with Flynn and David from GayGamer.net (always a pleasure) and Honey from EA POGO at a nice little Japanese place in Little Tokyo — my first time there since coming to Los Angeles.

Tonight, I’ll be at the Joystiq reader meet-up at Mahalo in Santa Monica (with some more stuff from Naughty Dog). Feel free to drop by if you can!

We launched a new online ad campaign today and, let me tell you, it was cooked up by some extremely creative, enterprising people. Or maybe they just read NeoGAF far too much. We’ll never know. We do know that NeoGAF (kinda, sorta) still loves the cats. Several other sites, like Wii Fanboy and Go Nintendo like them too. Good show!

Grab your own Geometry Wars: Galaxies lolcats code at the GWG Cats site.

Image courtesy of John Harker (NeoGAF).

News circulated around the blogs today letting me know that Andrew “GamerDad” Bub, who ran the GamerDad and GameSanity blogs, had suffered two heart attacks over Labor Day weekend and ended up in surgery for a quadruple bypass. Ouch.

Even though Andrew and I had some friction from time to time in our professional relationship, he’s always been a great to work with. He’s a total stand-up guy and deserves — I say even commands — a whole lot of respect for what he has accomplished for gaming, gaming parents and families who play video games together.

Andrew’s wife posted a page with updates and asks for donations to help his undoubtedly mounting hospital bills — a much too unfortunate reality of this day and age. Help them out if you can, I’m sure any little bit helps.

I hope you feel better soon Andrew!

Over on GameSetWatch, Simon caught something interesting during what might be one of his many games of Boom Boom Rocket — a familiar building. In his post, Simon says that the building happens to be facsimile of the 30 St. Mary Axe building in London. He points out that the, according to the Wikipedia article he and I both linked to, this isn’t the first time the building was used in a video game, having made an appearance in The Getaway 2: Black Monday for the PlayStation 2.

The only thing missing from the post was a screenshot of the building in the rhythm game developed by Bizarre Creations, so, finding his post interesting, I decided to oblige. I got credited more than I should have — I really didn’t go beyond the call of duty, I just wanted to contribute to what I found to be an interesting article. At least with 30 St. Mary Axe and the genre Boom Boom Rocket resides in, Bizarre Creations doesn’t have to worry about answering to a higher power.

Call me crazy, but on Thursday, July 12, I trekked down to Santa Monica solely to attend the C3@E3 event that Microsoft was hosting for bloggers, community sites and community members. There were some people I had worked with in various ways over the past two years that were planning on attending the event and I knew I wouldn’t have another chance to see them anytime soon. This was underscored by the point that I would not be attending E3 this year either, so it just turned out to be a mandatory thing for me to do. Despite first thing in the morning flights and an overall lack of sleep on either end of the trip, it was more than well worth it. I was happy to run into everybody I have ever interacted with and all the Microsoft folks too. Somehow everybody managed to look conscious through the night.

It was very important for me to meet Shigeo Tatsumi, who was attending E3 and was at the community event. I have talked to Tatsumi-san on several occasions over the past two years, which is partly what led to our intermingling of foreign piñatas in our respective Viva Piñata gardens. Obviously this was the opportunity I would have to talk to him, but not really talk to him because I don’t speak Japanese and he doesn’t really speak English. Thanks to our great translator Jennifer we were able to speak briefly and I’d seriously like to learn Japanese so I could have a bit more of a conversation than we ended up having. I definitely look forward to talking to and meeting Tatsumi-san again in the future. Be sure to check out a video recap of the “C3@E3″ event as captured by Tatsumi-san and his videographer for their Xbox Japan community site.

After meeting with Tatsumi-san is where the whirlwind of meeting people and talking about anything and everything started. Another guy from Japan I was looking forward to meeting was CheapyD from CheapAssGamer. I laughed at his retelling of funny behind the scenes tidbits when he was doing on-air interviews with the BBC and Bloomberg. However, he hadn’t imported a bottle of Pepsi Ice Cucumber for me, so he unfortunately loses quite a few points right there. Spencer from Siliconera (and from Greenwich, where I grew up, go figure), Ben from Opposable Thumbs and I went over our thoughts about the press conferences earlier in the week. Let’s see, my memory is a bit fuzzy a week later, but I also said hello to Chris (the other Chris) from ShackNews, Charles from GamingNexus, Howard from Popcultureshock and Ron from Destructoid. I also ran into Flynn (Fruit Brute) and David (Tiny Dancer) from GayGamer.net, which recently celebrated the site’s first anniversary — you can read the recap of their first ever E3 here. I also ran into Cameron, who is a game designer at Krome and is working on the recently announced Viva Piñata Party Animals, which I was not able to check out due to a lack of ESA pass. James, community manager at Insomniac Games — speaking of whom you check out Major Nelson’s podcast for a great head-to-head between these two. Robert, community manager at Infinity Ward, was demoing the super hot Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but I didn’t get a chance to even check that out. The night wound down and most folks headed over to the Gamecock party down the street while I joined Flynn and David for one more stop before essentially not sleeping the remainder of the night before my flight.

I know I missed about a million people, so apologies for anybody I may have missed, but it was an amazing trip that was well worth it. I hope to see all of these folks and more at the next E3, wherever they decide to hold it.

Images courtesy of the “E3 - C3@E3 Community Party” Flickr photoset by Gamerscore blog.

First community summary for 2007 and it’s JULY. So awesome. - Ed.

• Microsoft Extends Warranty to Three Years for Xbox 360 Consoles Afflicted by Three Red Lights
• Circuit City Weekly Circular Reveals $100 Price Drop on PLAYSTATION 3

Microsoft Extends Warranty to Three Years for Xbox 360 Consoles Afflicted by Three Red Lights

Microsoft announced this week that they will be extending the warranty to three years for any Xbox 360 consoles afflicted with a general hardware failure, as indicated by the three red lights. In addition, the warranty would be offered retroactively to customers who have already had their consoles repaired by offering refunds for any out-of-warranty repairs that have been paid for. The announcement was accompanied by an open letter from Peter Moore and a posting on Gamerscore blog. An analyst conference call with Microsoft executives, transcribed by Joystiq, provided more detail as well. As part of the announcement, Microsoft also revealed that they would take a $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion pre-tax charge in fiscal fouth quarter as part of the warranty extension.

The announcement was far and away the discussion with the highest volume among the community this week both because of the nature of the warranty and, subsequently, the implications of the pre-tax charge Microsoft will take. Initial reactions from bloggers and the community were mostly positive at Microsoft’s move to reassure their existing customer base, exemplified by comments such as “Classy show, Microsoft. Real classy. Let’s hope this move is coupled with hardware revisions to keep your customers — and shareholders — happy.” from Joystiq. However many did say that they felt it was about time for Microsoft to address the growing discussion and media attention the console was garnering in recent months as pointed out by Chris Kohler over at Game|Life where he states that it looks “like this issue finally caught up to Microsoft. With a renewed interest in the problem and E3 coming up, they couldn’t just continue to deny that it exists.”

Community members on forums also felt the apology and warranty was an unprecedented move by Microsoft in support of their customer base and that, given the consistent denials of any issues present in the console in the face of media inquiries for the past year or more. Over on the massive NeoGAF thread, posters were initially happy about the news (”Wow, didn’t expect this. Even an apology. Pretty good! Clever that they did this before E3.”) and felt that they could “game without fear” now. One poster did some “napkin” math and using the (obviously flawed) calculation of dividing the $1 billion charge by $400 for each console, theorized that Microsoft expected upwards of 2.5 million consoles rendered inoperable by the three red lights. Curiously this figure was later cited on at least one mainstream news story. Later on, discussion turned more cynical on how Microsoft either had to have been aware of the issue for a significantly longer period than they had let on and that the warranty was only now extended because the bottom line and increasing customer dissent had forced Microsoft’s hand — in addition to some speculating that this move could pre-empt any class action lawsuits that may have been pending. As time passed since the announcement many, such as Xbox 360 Fanboy, began to wonder if this move was enough to instill confidence in those who have been disheartened by or even dissuaded from the Xbox 360 console due to the reports of hardware issues.

It’s clear that regardless of where the discussion lay or what the nature of the discussion was, a large majority of the community felt very passionate on their views and what they felt they deserved out of both the console itself and from Microsoft given the announcement of the warranty extension. Writing on Aeropause, George Walker summarized the dissenting views among the community in a post titled “Microsoft Warranty Fallout (not the good kind)” by stating

What makes the mistake into a full-blown failure is when you strive to cover it up, pretend like nothing is happening, and then after months and months of ignoring the issue, then you finally decide to do something about it, only after it becomes obvious that it’s hurting your bottom line. See, if you were smart, Microsoft, you would’ve realized a LONG time ago that it could’ve been addressed for much cheaper than $1 billion if you had done so a YEAR AGO.

That’s what you get for trying to screw over your customers. Thanks for playing.

The announcement was picked up widely across the blogosphere this week by blogs such as Joystiq, Kotaku, Destructoid, Evil Avatar, Engadget, Gizmodo, Xbox 360 Fanboy, Aeropause, Game|Life, Ars Technica, Siliconera, GayGamer.net and Cathode Tan.

Back to Top

Circuit City Weekly Circular Reveals $100 Price Drop on PLAYSTATION 3

A reliable forum member of the Cheap Ass Gamer (and DVDTalk) forums posted information from an upcoming Circuit City weekly circular which revealed that the chain would be selling the 60 GB model of the PLAYSTATION 3 at the reduced price of $499 on July 12, down from the $599 price point the console was released at in November 2006.

The circular and the subsequent scan of the circular (as posted by Kotaku) grabbed a significant amount of attention as many bloggers and community members have long griped about the high-price of the PLAYSTATION 3 console. Many have also felt that the exceptionally low monthly sales for the console as reported by the NPD Group is a clear result of the high price point. As a result, the price cut elicited an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the community as they felt Sony was beginning to understand what would make them be more competitive against two lower priced consoles in the marketplace. Many feel that this will help sales for the console a little, but at $499, the PS3, as one member on NeoGAF states, “will have a really nice price for what it offers. Still probably won’t be cheap enough for the masses to bite, well, en masse.”

The price cut was confirmed late Sunday night via a Sony press release which also announced a new, albeit limited edition, variant featuring a larger hard drive (80 GB) and Motorstorm bundled into a $599 package.

News of the circular was picked up widely by blogs such as Joystiq, Kotaku, Destructoid, Evil Avatar, Engadget, Gizmodo, PS3 Fanboy, Game|Life and GayGamer.net.

Back to Top