My faith in gaming has been rekindled. I think the last time I felt this sort of joy pleasure fun happy was...I don't know, Beyond Good & Evil or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time but this has surpassed them in various ways. Add it to the list of games that cause postcoinal depression. It's tempting to do some kind of critical theory analysis of the thing but...I won't, it would spoil it and be pretentious of me. Here's a link, play it yourself.
#10 - Discovering that Exodus was a computer.
#9 - Kicking the alien in the crotch, rolling and grabbing the gun and shooting him in Out of this World. (Closely followed by the sequence where you're running down the corridor, doors slamming behind you, which are then blown away by blaster fire.)
#8 - Realizing the shotgun damage was inversely proportional to distance in Doom, after which I started charging enemies like a madman to get the point blank shots.
#7 - The reveal in Bioshock.
#6 - Prince of Persia 2 (the original 2D one) - running and jumping and catching the boat as it pulled away on the first try. Apparently POP1 had the shift-key-grab burned into my muscle memory.
#5 - My base being invaded in X-Com.
#4 - The opening sequence from Half-Life.
#3 - Playing Diplomacy at a convention; they all had me figured for the weak player (which I was) but I surprised a bunch of them by cutting a support army in a key play and ended up coming in 3rd. "Who told him that move?" one of them asked. Came up with it myself, thank you.
#2 - A one-on-one Kohan game against a guy who usually won but always played skeleton hordes. The answer is priests.
#1 - Beating my dad for the first time in chess. "Today you are a man," he said.
What about you guys?
Bioshock has a Memorable Moment that I think is probably in my top 10 Gaming Memorable Moments. And I've got to say, it's nice after the Halos and CODs and Gears of Wars of the world to play a game where resources are somewhat scarce. I'm actually forced to conserve, which isn't always the kind of game I feel like playing but does make a nice change. And, the art direction! Wow! If you're looking for a dark underseas art deco experience, Bioshock is the place to come to!
[Which forces us to ask the question - are the masses looking for a dark underseas art deco experience? Or, are enough people looking to make Bioshock profitable, or is Bioshock like the Terry Gilliam movie - something I love but doesn't sell? It's sold .56 million according to vgchartz. Which puts it on track for selling over a million lifetime, but not much more. Assuming the publisher gets $10 a pop, that's $10m. Then, PC sales and sales over steam will add a chunk. Take 2 owns the IP, an asset in their portfolio worth...what? And how much did it cost? Although Irrational is very good at making a fairly small number of levels, enemies, and systems go a long, long way - and most of the story is told in (excellent) voice-over - there's a long list of credits and it was in development for a long time. $10M? $15M? So my back of the envelope puts it right on the edge of profitability - a place where most publishers don't really like to be - but Take 2 seems very pleased, so I've probably dropped a decimal place somewhere.]
And I could write a more in-depth essay, but instead I will indulge in the ultimate in lazy blogging:
First, a reference to an old article I wrote on System Shock 2.
Then. an IM conersation about Bioshock:
jdfristrom: I still haven't finished Bioshock
brett_douville: A compiler dependency seems to be busted in my .Net and it generates longer compiles than it should, which is super super super annoying
brett_douville: So I have some free time :)
brett_douville: How far are you now? I'm blogging in another mental thread about it
jdfristrom: How far am I from?
brett_douville: How far are you in BioShock?
brett_douville: (Though clearly you have your ship date on your mind...)
jdfristrom: (Yeah)
jdfristrom: I just saved the trees
brett_douville: Ah, right.
brett_douville: That might be the first time you see a normal human in the game, right?
jdfristrom: I'm wishing I bought the PC version - but gameflying the 360 version was free...
brett_douville: The plant lady?
brett_douville: I'd happily send you my copy -- but I Steamed it.
jdfristrom: I didn't know it was on steam. Cool.
brett_douville: I didn't even have to leave the house.
jdfristrom: Heck, I'll switch
jdfristrom: It won't take me that long to get back to where I was
brett_douville: Really? It seems like you're a good 8 hours in, if I remember correctly
brett_douville: That's roughly the halfway point, I think, though maybe it's more like 1/3rd
jdfristrom: It'll go faster the second time
brett_douville: Anyway, that's when I noticed that the faces on their people looked super strange -- it totally works for the Slicers, but for a "normal" person, it's pretty ghastly
jdfristrom: I didn't get to see her that close
brett_douville: Yeah, I used the physics to knock her around a bit
brett_douville: The ragdoll is pretty twitchy in that game -- in RC, we only had the memory and CPU budget for one ragdoll at a time, so we would turn them off once they came to rest, and I think more games should do that
jdfristrom: Their corpse ragdoll is broken - we had similar problems with Spider-Man 2 - but I guess they just left it in because who knows what's going on in a dead Splicer's nervous system
brett_douville: Bingo!
jdfristrom: funny, I was typing that before you started
brett_douville: great minds and all that
jdfristrom: I can totally see that bug lingering on the buglist for the life of the project
brett_douville: Yeah. Although, overall, I wasn't impressed with their ragdolls. Not that it matters all that much. But they seemed too springy.
jdfristrom: I can't be sure, but I think I liked SS2 more
jdfristrom: I don't think SS2 had the resurrection stations...if it did, there were fewer of them, or there was some bigger cost
brett_douville: I don't think they had them at all -- I think it was a reload situation if you died.
jdfristrom: It creates a weird economy - "I better not use my health kit, but that costs money! And resurrection is free, as long as the tube isn't too far away"
brett_douville: But SS2 could be so broken, which left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth -- I got very close to the end of that game and it was literally impossible for me to complete it.
brett_douville: Yeah, I tended to rely on the res stations for Big Daddy combats
jdfristrom: I imagine something like this happened
jdfristrom: "We need to make the game easier to bring in more casuals."
jdfristrom: "Let's have resurrection stations."
jdfristrom: "Hey, now the game is too easy."
jdfristrom: "Let's make killing a big daddy require an absolute crapload of health."
brett_douville: Yeah, I can see that exactly. But a casual user won't. He'll just be happy that he's not reloading.
jdfristrom: Ok, if you had trouble with the big daddies too, guess I'll stick it out with the xbox. I thought maybe it was because I didn't have mouse & keyboard
brett_douville: Well, it could be that I suck. But I prefer not to think that way.
brett_douville: I was going to buy an Xbox360 for it, but really, it just didn't make sense. Until Tim Schafer's game comes out for the 360 (assuming that to be the best sku for it), I probably don't need to buy a 360 at all.
jdfristrom: $300 to be able to play Schizoid is a bargain, mind you. But we'll probably port to the PC eventually also
brett_douville: But don't I really need someone else to play with to fully enjoy it?
jdfristrom: What am I, chopped liver?
brett_douville: Oh, we're going to play, with our 3 hour time difference?
jdfristrom: I'll finally have some free time...
brett_douville: I may have to give up sleep altogether. I play co-op every now and again with friends in California, but we start at 9. Their time.
jdfristrom: How old are Luc & Jordan again?
brett_douville: 9 and 7, respectively
jdfristrom: Luc'll play it with you.
brett_douville: They'd want to play together
jdfristrom: On a different note, I wonder how long it would take to kill a big daddy with just the wrench
brett_douville: Ugh. I can't imagine trying.
brett_douville: I can remember some great times in the original Doom (or perhaps Doom II) where you'd get the quad damage and invincibility and be punching out cacodemons and stuff
jdfristrom: Yeah, those "You're temporarily incredibly awesome" moments always work - the Scorpion in Halo was another good one
jdfristrom: the final level of Half-Life 2...
brett_douville: Yeah
brett_douville: You need to finish BioShock so I can discuss one thing they did with you
jdfristrom: It may take a while, because I've decided I'm going to only use the wrench
jdfristrom: j/k
brett_douville: Ha! That would invalidate what I was going to talk about anyway :)
jdfristrom: What was your preferred method for killing grunt-level enemies?
brett_douville: I tended to just pistol to the head
jdfristrom: how many shots did that take?
brett_douville: But I never felt too light on ammo in the game, so I didn't worry about it too much
brett_douville: Two
jdfristrom: did you play normal difficulty?
brett_douville: yes
jdfristrom: I can get off one headshot on an unsuspecting one but never the second one - and it seems like it takes about half-a-dozen body shots to take one down
brett_douville: The shock + wrench works very well
brett_douville: If you can shock before you shoot, that's usually pretty quick too
jdfristrom: I always feel strapped for ammo - I feel like ammo's for big daddies - yeah, I've been using shock + wrench + wrench jockey + stealth wrench
jdfristrom: But they always get one hit on me
brett_douville: I rarely felt strapped for ammo -- lots of weapons, you can buy more whenever you need to, etc.
jdfristrom: Which is okay, since the resurrection tubes make health practically free, but I'd rather spend 2 bullets
brett_douville: I wonder if they are balanced differently PC vs 360 -- you'd think they'd have to be
jdfristrom: 360 easier, to account for tougher controls, or 360 harder, because audience more hardcore?
brett_douville: Late in the game I was always leaving ammo behind
brett_douville: Um, I'd say 360 easier, because 360 less hardcore?
jdfristrom: Or, yeah, could be that
brett_douville: I'm sure the game sold more copies to mainstream players on the 360
jdfristrom: Which means I extra suck
brett_douville: No, no, no, no, no. Well, yes.
brett_douville: I wonder -- I'd love to know what they did for difficulty. I always preferred the simplest possible solution (i.e. you do more damage in easy, less in hard).
jdfristrom: if I were them I'd have a mode - maybe uber-hard - where the tubes are turned off completely
jdfristrom: other than that, yeah
brett_douville: Wow, yeah, that'd be pretty nuts
jdfristrom: eh, you could still beat it with quicksaving
jdfristrom: and, if you're good enough to kill someone with 2 or 3 bullets, you'll never run out of resources
brett_douville: I think I would mostly die not because I was out of health packs (which are really cheap), but because I wasn't paying attention to my health meter
jdfristrom: does it pop up the reminder on the PC version?
brett_douville: Yeah, actually, but sometimes I would be so focused on the gunplay that I would ignore it
brett_douville: Which is a sign of good gunplay
jdfristrom: it pops up a little late, so two quick hits will kill me
jdfristrom: often I press the button just out of reflex and then say, "I should have saved my packs, there was a tube right there"
brett_douville: I tended to mostly get killed by the daddies -- I'd be so focused on dodging their rush attacks that I'd miss the health warning and then miss a dodge at some point
jdfristrom: they haven't been rushing me lately. they take me out with their rivet guns
brett_douville: Ah yeah, the Rosies. I tended not to die from those -- just the chargers.
jdfristrom: how much health would a Rosie suck you down?
brett_douville: Probably 4 or 5 bars.
jdfristrom: That's $60-$75...yeah, that's worth it, a lot cheaper than the ammo
brett_douville: Yeah, health is super cheap
brett_douville: All wrench for you now :)
jdfristrom: It just occurred to me - I've been playing kind of quake-like, trying to circle & dodge while firing - but since health is cheap & ammo's expensive, it might be better to just suck up the damage and make absolutely sure my shots hit
brett_douville: Ah. Yeah, well, I've never been much of a quake player. I definitely played the game more like a tank.
jdfristrom: Can I just cut-and-paste the bioshock parts of this conversation into my blog? I was going to do a "Notes on Bioshock" but I think we already covered everything in here
brett_douville: Sure, have at it. I've been blogging during compiles today with my own BioShock stuff, should be ready to go by tomorrow. :)
brett_douville: You won't be able to read it though.
jdfristrom: Oh, spoiler?
brett_douville: Yeah; I've decided not to worry about spoilers any more. I'm just going to go ahead and write whatever. I may add "caveat lector" to the stuff at the top.
Actually, one more thing. And this is a bit of a spoiler:
There's a bit in Bioshock where you lose control of your powers - you can no longer choose which power you have armed - the game picks it randomly for you and changes on a regular basis. This is awesome, and genius, and great fun. Because all the spells are powered by the same resource, I (and most people, I'm sure) quickly settle on a favorite and don't even experience the other powers in the game, but this bit forces you to. I didn't want this segment to end - it suddenly became a game of "How can I make this power that I'm stuck with work for me?" I'd love to see a whole game built around this...the amateur magician who can't control which spell he's casting...
This post has been a long time coming.
Just one of the many reasons games are important is supposedly education and training. But games almost never correctly train you in what they ostensibly are supposed to: SimCity doesn't prepare you for a career of urban planning, Civilization doesn't prepare you for a career of world leader, Guitar Hero doesn't prepare you to be a rock guitarist. I heard the term "negative training" from a Full Spectrum Warrior guy - meaning a lot of games actually teach you bad habits. A lot of first person shooters, for example, teach you to run around your enemy in circles, jumping, while you wildly shoot at them. Probably not great practice for a soldier in the field.
So if games aren't great at teaching specifics, what's the point?
The point is, let's call it meta-learning: learning how to learn. Training in the process of learning. I have only anecdotal evidence for this belief, but I think that people raised on a diet of videogames are better at picking up new skills than those who weren't. All of those skills I learned to amateur level...typing, writing, guitar playing, surfing, coding (oh, hey, that one I went pro)...all stem back to playing Defender on the Atari 2600.
Recently read George Leonard's *Mastery* which is all about the process of getting good at something. Gamers learn a lot of what he preaches, in the field:
- Practice, practice, practice. People who play videogames know that what looks like an impossible challenge today (the expert level on Guitar Hero?) will be doable months down the road.
- Various kinds of mentoring: read the FAQ, ask your friends, get a teacher. I'm a "read the FAQ" type, mostly, myself. Although some consider hintbooking cheating I usually find when I need to consult a FAQ it's not my fault, it's the game's. I have two books on surfing, speaking of skills you can't learn from books. They did help, a little.
- Breaking out of a local minima - getting off a plateau - means you might get worse for a while as you change your approach. (Switching from all downstrokes to up-down - another Guitar Hero example.)
Something that's occuring to me just now, another thing games teach:
- Keep score. Measure your progress. Leaderboards are useful not only because you're competing with everyone else but also because you're competing with yourself, the old you.
This is something I might not have really put into words before, but I knew it on some level, because even with surfing I'd count the number of waves I'd caught in a day.
But one thing Leonard's book talks about that videogames didn't prepare me for:
- Love the plateau.
Leonard describes the "hack" - the guy who gets good enough at something to get by, hits a plateau, and then gets bored and looks for something else to learn. Hm. Sounds familiar. Could videogames be to blame, here? I think so - though some of the videogames of my youth may teach patience (you have to play the whole game over to get to the level you're having trouble with - talk about practice, practice, practice - if the game doesn't get slowly burned into muscle memory that way, I don't know what'll do it), the videogames of today are engineered to give you the illusion of progress whether or not you're actually getting better. And there's more than enough games out there - if I get stuck, and gamefaqs isn't any help, I can just turn to a different game.
So there's the quote for the anti-gamers to take out of context. Despite that one wart on games-as-training-trainers, I'll stick to my guns and say, on the whole, a Good Thing. In fact, one thing that games have going for them that other media don't - even a bad game will teach these sorts of lessons. Even a bad game usually has a way of keeping score; a bad game will usually have strategies that are tougher to learn but allow you to reach new levels of skill; a bad game will act as a reminder that practice and patience will see you through. So there's some value in even playing bad games. (Though no reason to play a bad game when there's so many good ones out there.) But watch a bad movie...you've just wasted your time.
I've never worked on an FPS and I've worked on many games with third-person melee combat (Die By The Sword, Draconus, Spider-Man 1 & 2). Maybe it's just grass-is-greener syndrome, but I have the feeling that making a fun FPS is just easier. Consider some of the differences:
Skill game: suppose you take away all the trappings from an FPS - you have one gun with unlimited ammo and you never get to change. Still, at its core, you've got an aiming game, something which a player can become skilled at. You take away all the different moves and blocks from a fighting game, and you've got a button masher - who can hit the button the fastest?
Easier to make terrain matter in an FPS: cover's important in an FPS. It's hard to make terrain matter in melee combat. Usually terrain is just annoying, and brawlers tend to place the action in open arenas free from obstructions.
Ammo: once you do bring the multiple weapons into an FPS, they typically have ammo. With the exception of Deus Ex 2, where they made the risky move of giving you universal ammo, and games where they just leave too much ammo lying around, this automatically forces the player to try all the weapons, whether they're correctly balanced with each other or not. Compare with the moves from a fighting game - players very quickly find a favorite move, and tend not to try new moves, even though they may be bottom feeding (they could do a lot more damage against particular enemy X if they'd just experiment).
These problems are solvable and maybe the visceral thrill of melee combat, that being-in-somebody's-face-and-hitting-them-with-something-heavy, make it worth it, but I do wonder if a game in the God of War camp will ever be able to really compete with a game in the Halo camp.
Been playing fairly geeky boardgames with Cathy lately. An old favorite - Search For The Emperor's Treasure [originally published in Dragon magazine way back when] - which we played for a while before we were married (and on our honeymoon) recently made a comeback, and heard good things about Battlelore lately and Cathy grudgingly agreed to play that with me as a sort of Father's Day present.
These games actually have a fair amount in common:
Short session length: both these games can be played in under two hours. Good for short attention span adults like ourselves. I've also noticed something about my own gaming habits - I can play several sessions of a short session game for hours and hours (I'll play three games of Catan back-to-back, no problem) but will get bored to death by a one-session game of the same length.
Rolling lots of dice: for all I know, Tom Wham may have invented the whole roll-lots-of-dice -and-x-is-a-hit system - it was in his games that I first saw it. Just watching my daughter reminds me how fun it is to play with lots of dice; even though she's only two and a half she likes to play with my dice.
High variance: I've mentioned that I tend to lean against variance in my tastes. Richard Garfield, on the other hand, is a huge fan - he wrote a whole article for Game Developer on why it's Good, which I can't find a link to. It definitely has its applications - one of which is it draws Cathy in. She really likes to win, tell you what. With a high variance game, you are spared the painful knowledge of where you actually stand - you can always say, "I rolled really badly that game." (In fact, it's quite possible she's the good player and I'm the crappy one. She wins the majority of our Emperor's Treasure games and we're split fairly evenly on Battlelore.) Cathy seems to have grown fairly fond of Battlelore - at first, she would say, "I'll play Battlelore with you if you fold the laundry," and lately it's been, "I'll play Battlelore with you if you get the mail."
Despite the fact that both these games are clearly accessible enough to bring my wife in, they could be even more accessible. In Emperor's Treasure, you draw a counter, and then have to look up what the counter does in the rules. In Battlelore, there's a symbol and color on your miniature, which you then have to look up on a set of cheat-sheet cards arrayed before you. Since usually the question you're asking is "How many dice do I get to roll?" it seems like that information could have been printed on the miniature itself.
And, in some ways, these games are very different. Emperor's Treasure is cute and nonthreatening - my wife was immediately willing to try it just because of the cartoony art, only to discover that a fairly complex D&D-lite was under the hood. Battlelore looks like a grognard game with its armies of miniatures, hexes, cryptic dice and playing cards, so getting her to just try it required negotiation.
Emperor's Treasure is low budget, entirely composed of cardboard and paper. Bring Your Own Dice. Battlelore is a high budget extravaganza where the cost of goods must have been very significant. One of the first and most obvious ways to differentiate products is Budget and Gourmet; Metagames in the eightes and James Earnest's Cheapass Games lately are quintessential examples of the budget game. ("We were able to bring you cheaper games because they take less shelf space." "We were able to bring you cheaper games because we're not including any actual components.") Then, on the other end of the spectrum, we have games like Battlelore where you get All This Stuff, and the price of the game is sending a message: "At this price, it's got to be good!"
So...what if? You could do a high budget Emperor's Treasure where the map hexes are interchangeable or even lock together, you have miniatures for the heroes, lavish playing cards for the monsters, a "Lost City" model, and special dice marked with shields and swords and fairy dust. Add a marketing budget to match and maybe I wouldn't be the only one I know who remembers the game.
And a low budget Battlelore with just one map, printed on paper, cardboard counters for your units, perforated sheets of paper for your playing cards, and you have to bring your own dice and just remember that 1 = retreat, 2 = magic, 5 & 6 = a hit. You could possibly even make it cheap enough to print in a magazine. Would it still be as succesful? (I don't actually know how succesful it is...seems to get a fair amount of word-of-mouth, but where do you look up board game sales?)
The next step would be to apply these thoughts to digital, and make the videogame that I can play with Cathy...
I'm totally addicted to Puzzle Quest. I have a lot of trouble resisting the urge to pick up the DS and play another session. I ask myself why that is. "I could be playing God of War II right now," I say to myself. "It's really just Bejewelled. Why am I playing Bejewelled?" I ask myself. "The production values aren't even as high as Bejewelled," I say. "They traded scope for quality." And yet I keep playing.
I don't like Bejewelled. It doesn't engage me anywhere near the level of say, a Tetris or Minesweeper. The beauty of Puzzle Quest is it adds a layer on top of Bejewelled that makes it interesting, illustrating Sid Meier's whole thing of small mechanics layered on top of small mechanics. Because those jewels you collect become mana which then power spells that give you special abilities and/or do direct damage to your opponent, and because your opponent is taking turns on the same Match 3 board that you are, it suddenly becomes interesting. Then, add to that the macro game, where you're deciding what spells and items to bring into a session, and the leveling up and economy of an RPG...it works!
Add to that the short session length - it's actually deceptive - a single session can take fifteen minutes or more if you're being careful - but I trick myself into thinking I can do another combat in just five minutes. And then another. And another.
Got into an argument yesterday with a friend who thought Grand Theft Auto should be banned. Unfortunately, his argument had some compelling points that I don't really have a good answer for. And he's something of a gamer himself; he played a fair amount of GTA before actually passing judgment.
The argument goes something like this:
Anti-gamer: "Suppose we had a perfectly realistic murder simulator, that people enjoyed using. Nobody actually gets killed, but the simulation is perfect - holodeck-like. Would it be okay to ban that?"
Gamer: "No - just because you enjoy killing someone in simulation doesn't mean you enjoy killing them in real life!"
Anti-gamer: "So you're saying as long as nobody gets hurt it's okay."
Gamer: "Yep."
Anti-gamer: "Did you know there was a case in the UK recently where people were making fake child porn? No actual underage models are used; nobody's getting hurt. Is that okay?"
Gamer: "... I guess not ..."
Anti-gamer: "That's what the UK decided. So why is it not okay to have fake child porn but okay to have fake murder?"
Gamer: "Because the people who read fake child porn are creeps?"
Anti-gamer: "Why? They would never actually have sex with a child in real life. They only do it in simulation."
So now I feel trapped. Where do I go from here?
Maybe I can say, "Okay, enjoying simulated murder is wrong. Grand Theft Auto is okay because the simulation is so poor nobody would confuse it for the real thing. And besides, Grand Theft Auto is a really brilliant game; it's not just about gratuitous violence." But that opens us up to the slippery slope - I'm drawing the line on one side of GTA but now you have to ask - "What about God of War? What about Manhunt? What about the future when the violence is going to be even more realistic?" And if we're drawing lines, nothing stops my friend from drawing the line on the other side of GTA.
Or maybe I can say, "All right, people can have their fake child porn. I don't want to hang out with those people, I hope I never meet those people, but I'm not going to take away their right to enjoy something revolting that doesn't actually hurt anybody." But...that's just icky.
Or maybe I can say, "Sex is just different from violence. If you enjoy fake child porn, you clearly want the real thing. But you can enjoy fake murder all you want with no interest in the real stuff." Which seems like a typical American "sex is worse than violence" attitude - am I saying a simulation of murdering children would be less offensive than a simulation of having sex with them?
I need an answer but I don't really have one.
Manifesto Games (www.manifestogames.com) has been up and running for a while now.
If you're reading my blog, you probably read Greg Costikyan's blog too, so you probably already know about it and have been there.
But for the few of you who haven't - go there.
Enjoy.
It's a candy store.
One game that I discovered, thanks to the good folks at Manifesto, is *Lugaru* - sort of *Watership Down* meets *Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon*.
Ben Cousins once studied a bunch of succesful games and decided that the optimum time for a jump in a videogame is half a second. I, personally, enjoy games with big, delicious jumps. *Galleon*; our very own *Spider-Man 2*; *Hulk Ultimate Destruction*. You can add *Lugaru* to the list. The knowledge that there are people out there that consider big, delicious jumps "incorrect" adds to the sweetness for me.
There's more to *Lugaru* than that and you should really just try it out rather than listen to me talk about it.
But this post is about *Manifesto Games* - I really hope they succeed, but I worry. Greg Costikyan hopes that Manifesto is going to survive by earning revenue from the "long tail" (Google it if you don't know what he's talking about.) This is the same thing MP3.com hoped to make money off of; but because they didn't have any big names to draw people to the site, they floundered. Not that I care if Manifesto has a "Half-Life 2" or "Prey" for me - I'll go to Manifesto anyway.
If only I had more time, so I could play more of their games!
I just want to make sure enough other people go to make it profitable and keep it around, so when I do find some time it'll still be there.
The story is this: there used to be an Edinburgh Game Festival. SCEE didn't want to support them, because they don't want the Playstation to be associated with "Games" -Playstations are for "interactive entertainment" - so now it's the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival.
There wasn't much of a Sony presence at Gamecity for the same reason, allegedly.
My blood boils.
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