blueZhift Blog

There’s been no question that for the last few years the console gaming market has been growing in leaps and bounds rapidly eclipsing the PC gaming market with each generation. It has even lead many to believe that the PC is dead as a gaming platform. But there are still certain genres that are still better played on a PC. One of those is the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game or MMORPG. The primary reason for this advantage is the need of a keyboard (and by implication a stable surface for the keyboard) for efficient communication with other players. There’s no getting around the need of some method of easy free form communication. Mike Smith writes in his Virtual Worlds column that this keyboard issue is one of the things holding back the MMORPG on the console.

In the column, he writes that while voice chat is an option for player to player communication over services and games that support it, for more than a few players the ensuing bedlam would be totally unworkable. At least with text the player can see who is talking, when they are talking and what their relationship is to them via color coded text. Voice chat alone cannot do that, but what if we added voice recognition into the mix?

Voice recognition could be used to convert the player’s spoken words into text. Then all of the strengths of text communication would be available without the need of a keyboard. Something like this is described in the new .hack//AI Buster novel. The conversion would not even need to be perfect to get the message across in most cases. The next generation of consoles should have enough horsepower for the recognition task and if not, let the game servers do it. A good implementation of voice to text could be the killer feature in console MMORPGs. Ironically, I bet we’ll see this on the PC before it hits the consoles maybe as a hack or third party addon.

I’d laugh out loud if this were not so sad and true. An 85 year grandmother has filed a lawsuit against Rockstar Games because of the hidden sex minigame in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas which lead the ESRB to change the rating of the game from M for Mature, to AO for Adults Only. The grandmother originally purchased the game for her 14 year old grandson.

Uh, did I miss something here? The M rating clearly labels the game as for players 17 and older. So she’s suing over a game that she should never have purchased for a 14 year old in the first place. The icing on the cake of course is that the lawsuit is about a hidden, relatively hard to get to, sex game and not all of the gore and mayhem the player can engage in without very much effort. As the story is written, it appears that the game was only taken away from the kid after the stories about the sex game came out. Caps in asses, okay. But hard to get to sex, well that’s right out!

I’m not surprised that someone is suing, but as far as a class action suit goes, you really don’t want this granny as your poster child.

The ESRB has rerated Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as AO, Adults Only, due to the sex minigame recently discovered (not created!) by hackers. All along I’ve thought that the code was probably left in there locked away because it would be too much trouble to rip it out and fix any code dependencies and still ship on time. And heck, if it was discovered, so what? It’s just more sales, right? But after actually seeing a film clip of the Hot Coffee minigame, I think Rockstar must have been crazy to let this slide!

As crazy as it may seem, most of those gun-toting, Bible thumping, conservative Americans may actually have a point this time. The sex scene is definitely pornographic in the cinematic sense, i.e. it features everything you might see in a porn film. As soon as the girlfriend went down on him, it became X-rated and the other positions just slammed the ball out of the park (no bukkake though!), even though the guy keeps his clothes on the whole time. Generally, I prefer sex to violence, but in a strange twisted way many Americans have real problems with sex. Heck, a lot of Americans think most of the sexual positions in the Hot Coffee minigame are evil!

Now I don’t want the government to get involved in this, but clearly a major QA breakdown occured with GTA. Even locked away, you simply cannot take the chance that content like this is going to be found. If they want to make hentai games, fine, but don’t ship something like this in a game that you know a lot of kids are likely to be playing. Showing porn to kids is illegal in Illinois and probably other states as well under statutory rape provisions. So I guess Rockstar had better prepare for the inevitable lawsuits now.

Oh well, on the bright side, I guess that makes GTA: San Andreas a bit of a collector’s item now having been officially recalled now. But I don’t know how much collector’s value there is in something that has millions of copies out there already.

When I saw the news today that James Doohan, best known for his portrayal of Scotty on Star Trek, had passed away at 85, my first thought was, "Wow! He had a good long run!" I then emailed the story to my friend Mark who is also Trek fan. Later I began to think about how much Doohan’s portrayal of the always harried, miracle working engineer of the Enterprise had influenced the path I have taken in my life. I don’t have any stories about how Scotty saved my life (for me that would be Spock and Jesus), but the can-do, fix anything attitude that permeates much of my outlook on life probably has its origins in Scotty’s engine room. For that I raise a virtual bottle of scotch and drink a toast to the finest engineer in Starfleet! Thank you Mr. Doohan for bringing him to life for me.

Maybe it’s the heat, but someone over at CNN has got the idea the it’s cool to be uncool now. The article claims that dork pride is on the rise. Well without getting into the differences between geeks, nerds, and dorks, I would only agree that it is more acceptable these days to be a member of such groups. And indeed there has been a rise in the sales of geek wear, I guess. But being a skeptic and having suffered for my own geekiness, I would hardly believe that being a geek, nerd, or dork has become mainstream. But like being excited to see black people on tv growing up (a rarity then), and now Asians, at least they are talking about us! And nowhere in the article is the suggestion that they need medication!

When I got the latest issue of GamePro magazine in the mail today, I wasn’t really expecting a big ol’ centerfold of a buxom computer generated babe in the middle of the magazine. But that’s exactly what I got as the latest incarnation of video games as marketing vehicle left the garage (ugh). The centerfold is a promotional poster for the game Mojo Master which is a free game promoting the use of Axe products for men. In this game, the player, or playa, uses clever moves (ie lines), and Axe products to seduce women in various venues. With all of the furor over some hidden sex game code in GTA: San Andreas, I can only wonder what the prudes and grandstanding politicians are going to think of this game.

The game is actually pretty good for what it is and even compares favorably to games like Playboy: The Mansion and the most recent Leisure Suit Larry game. The graphics and sound is surprisingly good. I only played it for an hour, so I don’t really know yet what shape the "relationships" will take or how far they’ll go, but my guess is that there won’t be more than the flirting and corny lines I’ve seen so far, which is fine for a game that didn’t cost me any green. I guess the arrival of such games on the American scene means that the dating sim, a long time Japanese gaming staple, has taken up residence on these shores as well.

The game play is very simple. After picking a venue, the player equips his avatar with various clothing items and Axe product power-ups. Upon entering the venue, one or more women will be available to pick up. The player engages the "target" in what is essentially a trading card battle of moves. Winning the battle gets the player the woman’s phone number, new moves, and power-ups (ie Axe products). One thing I noticed was that you really can’t progress in the game without the Axe power-ups which makes me wonder if at some point in the future, actual product will be distributed with codes that can be used in the game. It’s a logical tie-in.

So why waste time on this game? Because it’s easy to pick up and good for a few laughs especially since it playfully pokes a finger in the eye of all of the neo-prudism that seems to be going around in the U.S. lately. The only bad thing I see here is that some poor awkward young guys out there are going to actually try to use some of the in game pick-up moves. Ladies beware!

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince comes out tomorrow, and I’m sure there will be the usual media coverage of the throngs of fans who want to be among the first to get the new book. I will not be one of them, however, I have agreed to pick up WillowBrow’s preordered copy at the Borders near my office. So I guess that makes me a Harry Potter Mule!

I’ve only read the first three books, so I’ve a way to go before I jump into the latest one. Perhaps I’ll pick up number 4 tonight.

After watching Dale Earnhardt Jr. win the NASCAR race this afternoon, I decided to watch Dateline to see a story about street racing activity in Oakland CA. The Dateline show was about what are called Side Shows which feature drivers doing donuts and other loud smoky maneuvers on city streets. Basically a crowd of people late at night will essentially take over an intersection and perform the automotive equivalent of break-dancing.

Naturally, the Oakland authorities are up in arms about this. Having only 29 officers to cover all of Oakland, they are severely outmanned. But what really bothered me was the fact that the government authorities (mostly white) completely dismissed the notion that one of the reasons that the young and mostly black crowds were doing the side shows was because there was nothing else to do at night in East Oakland. Their only solution to the problem was more cops, fines, and jail time for drivers and spectators. With all of the closed shops in Oakland would it be so hard to actually provide a safe venue for events like side shows to take place? Young people everwhere need something fun to do. Either our society will take steps to provide for this, or the young people will make their own fun without the benefit of mature guidance. The police already have enough excuses to arrest young black and latino people, do we need to give them any more?

I was just watching Battlestar Galactica on NBC or all things (an interesting surprise) when one of the creepiest Burger King ads I’ve ever seen came on. In the ad, a guy is driving his alone car late at night when he looks up in the mirror and seems that creepy plastic king’s face in the back seat! The creepy plastic king then gives him a whopper and all is cool…Yeah riiiiiight! Man, I absolutely detest those BK ads! The plastic king totally creeps me out, and I think the ads featuring the mean-spirited office workers are truly vile and evil. I don’t know who is doing Burger King’s ads these days, but they need to be fired because the ads are turning me off of their product. I’m just one guy, but I would guess that the ads are turning off others as well.

Once again California assemblyman Leland Yee is offering up some free publicity for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This time Yee is complaining about locked hidden sex scenes in the PC version of the game. He says that the game should have gotten an Adults Only AO rating rather than the Mature M rating. Now not to be confused by facts, but the scenes can only be accessed by downloading some files from someone other than publisher Rockstar and hacking the game! Children too young to play the game will most likely not be able to unlock the sexual content. So Yee’s efforts will in the end result in a few more sales for Rockstar. Way to go assemblyman!

Admittedly, I’m giving them some free publicity too, but at least I’m aware of it!