Kotaku has an interesting feature on racism and bigotry, an issue you may have personal experience with in online multiplayer games. Of particular interest are the comments from a psychologist, who offers up some advice on how to deal with those personalities when they rear their ignorant head.
November 2008
Today, Rockstar announced the first downloadable expansion for Grand Theft Auto IV, titled “The Lost and Damned.” The new content will be available worldwide on February 17th via Xbox Live. Instead of picking up where Niko left off in the original game, players will now take on the role of Johnny Klebitz, a member of the biker gang called The Lost. Also expect new multiplayer modes, weapons, vehicles, and music.
Bill, Louis, Francis and Zoey are four civilians who must help each other survive a trek through a simple, normally tame locale in order to reach an evacuation point in order to avoid turning into zombies. The first sign that Left 4 Dead is not a game made for its story or plot is the fact that these same four people are in trouble in various spots and are introduced through a movie poster. In one campaign, they must reach a hospital and be evacuated by helicopter–in another, they must reach a farmhouse and be rescued by the military.
Left 4 Dead will appeal to anyone who likes to have a good time with friends. Single player is fun for a while, but the computer-controlled companions start to feel strange–sometimes they are stupid, but their aim is often flawless, never missing zombies and never hitting teammates.
But in multiplayer co-op campaigns, which is the game’s raison d’etre, the friendly fire mechanism brings tension and meaning, because there can be literally 50 zombies, all who cannot be outrun, all of which will sometimes swarm only one or two players, and knowing when to stop shooting in such circumstances requires precision. To further complicate matters, there are special zombies that almost always need two players to be taken and down and boss zombies that almost always need four; this further forces teams to work well together.
Every single zombie is randomly placed before and during each campaign session, giving Left 4 Dead a sense of chaos and replayability–the well-designed levels are memorized quickly, but if a map starts with say, two or three hundred pre-placed zombies, thirty could be in the last room, first hallway, or neither. Anywhere that appears to lead somewhere, even if it doesn’t, can be a source of a wave, and it doesn’t matter whether it is the side, front, back, or any combination of these at once: your problems and tight spots will almost always vary in location, if not nature.
In versus, you get to be all but one of the special zombies; you have a creator’s vision of the map and can see all your enemies through walls (teammates can see each other that way as well) and can choose to spawn anywhere you want as long as it’s not too close or in plain sight. The other players play the campaign in the exact same way as they would in a co-op campaign against the computer, only with player-controlled special zombies.
Left 4 Dead is traditional zombie shooting with revolutionary gameplay design; one part MMO for its required social teamwork, one part Geometry Wars for its insane, unpredicable chaos, and three parts highly solid and safe FPS mechanics with grenades, molotovs, shotguns, pistols, and automatic weapons give Left 4 Dead the ability to show us how comfortable and standardized the FPS format has become. Left 4 Dead cannot be missed.
In an interview with Forbes, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime says third-party publishers still don’t know how to take advantage of the Wii’s success.
“I will be able to say our licensees ‘get it’ when their very best content is on our platform,” he said. “And with very few exceptions today, that’s not the case.”
Fils-Aime told Forbes that while third-party publishers are taking advantage of the Wii’s motion controls in their games, they aren’t making games that satisfy the Wii’s diverse audience. He said Wii players want the same games that are popular on other consoles, but publishers haven’t been bringing them to the Nintendo system.
In the interview, Fils-Aime also said he expects production of Wii consoles will have a “good shot” of meeting demand, while admitting that Wii Fit units will likely sell out. He hinted at future plans for community features on Nintendo systems, as well. “The issue is that we define community differently than our competitors,” he said. “Our consumers do want a sense of community and we’re going to deliver that, but in a way that is unique to Nintendo.”
Last week everyone was talking about the comments made by Epic Games president Mike Capps. In all the discussion I missed one heck of a piece by fellow Texas resident Bill Harris. Bill puts aside the fact that some of these companies are pushing the envelope in terms of mistreating their own customers and digs into the economic relationship between the new game market and the used/rental game market.
He has some great points and it’s probably the most solid piece on the topic that I can point to when arguing that these coming changes are bad for the industry as a whole. You can read Bill’s article here.
