Videogames highlights - July 2010, Underdogs Edition
After the previous month’s feast of mainly “triple-A” games, this new round of videogaming highlights focuses for the large part on minor titles, original games and games anyway without great advertising campaigns so far. After all interactive entertainment has never been directly tied to the money spent by developers and publishers for its packaging in finished products. On the contrary: the more the gaming business becomes an “industry”, the less an eclectic and old-time player like me tends to care about just the big titles on the limelight. Big titles already receive all the attentions by everybody so it’s useless to state the obvious.
Videogames highlights - June 2010, E3 special
In the days between the 14th and 17th of June Los Angeles hosted the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the most important yearly exhibition of interactive entertainment where big names and small publishers showed an almost endless cornucopia of video games coming for the next months (and years). The E3 2010 edition was marked by publishers optimism for a market that suffers the economic crisis but hopes to return soon to make the same money they were used to. Many, too many sequels were showed, while the final result suggests a noticeable revival compared to the past editions. What follows is a personal survey of the stuff appeared during and around the video gaming show, where highly appealing games and underdogs with no big names behind them alternate as usual.
Videogames highlights - February-May 2010
I could continue to speak ill of the never too much abused downloadable contents (DLC) and video games digital delivery with my own words, but this time I will leave to Sony management official statements the task to chill the continuous, boring, stupid and annoying hype about an exclusively downloadable gaming future and other crap of this kind: 1) “I want it on the disc, that way when they buy it, they get it” - Rob Dyer, SCEA vice-president while commenting on the state of the DLC market; 2) The gloomy and failing UMD-free PSPGo “was introduced in a mature lifecycle to learn more about what the consumer wanted and we’ve definitely learnt a lot. Is that measured by success in sales? I don’t think it is” - words of Andrew House, SCEE president.
PC gaming? It’s in better shape than you think
The PC video gaming market is dying, states a certain common thought expressed by publishers and embraced by users unaware of the real facts. The numbers are actually talking about a view that is completely opposed to the one about the perpetual falling of personal computer as a gaming platform worth of the name, an always-evolving platform that continues to grow in revenue and represents a non-secondary part of the entertainment market overall value - estimated in 57 billion dollars in 2009 according to research firm DFC Intelligence.
Videogames highlights - January 2010
I know, it has nearly become a kind of obsession yet I can’t help but talk about it: is the video games future within digital delivery? Bullshit. And so claims Sony after the disastrous “UMD-free” experiment of the awful PSP Go, hence this has to mean something. On the other hand console games (in this case PS3, but things aren’t any better on PC and Xbox 360) take up space, so much space, and downloading tens of Gigabytes before starting your game isn’t a practical thing and I don’t think it will be so soon. Meanwhile marketers and large dedicated chains say hello to the tiny weight of digital market. And I am with them 
Videogames highlights - September-December 2009
Welcome to a new installment in the Videogames Highlights series. It is, considering the long period of time passed since the August one, a “remedial” post covering no less than the last four months of year 2009. These were intense months, from a video gaming standpoint, still the following contents collection is personal and variously assorted as usual. And seeing that there is so much to talk about I cut short with the intro and just report, after Stardock’s CEO opinion of the last time, the statements from UK accountable people for the three main gaming consoles (Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo) regarding the misleading theory according to which digital downloads should replace optical disks during the upcoming years.
New proactive test by AV-Comparatives: are false positives really that important?
The AV-Comparatives Austrian labs have just released their antivirus test for November. Following the usual practice of alternating (during the year) the analysis of the known malware detection rates and that on the antivirus software proactive capabilities, report n.24 follows the previous one related to the malware test-bed collected between January and August 2009 but, contrariwise to this last one, compares the same products to more than 23,000 new samples gathered within the week following the antivirus signatures update.
When Punto Informatico loses its pillars…
This clearly is a shock period for me, because after the bad, bad event of the dead hard disk I also have to deal with the leaving (already of public domain since) of De Andreis brothers from the lead of Punto Informatico, that is the news site I daily write some nonsense for and what’s more being paid for the service The site has changed ownership since October 2008 going from De Andreis Editore to Edizioni Master, but at least for a while things have been the same as usual - ie every day there was a mail from Paolo (De Andreis) to wait for me with the indication of things to do inside.
Videogames highlights - August 2009
Likewise the improbable perspective to witness the extinction of joypads, mice & keyboards in the forthcoming (and faraway too) future I talked about the past month, the other pointless and ballyhooed media hype going strong these days is the one about ubiquitous digital delivery, ie the idea that sooner or later physical supports will be outclassed or replaced by on-line downloads on consoles and PC, it doesn’t mind if users have to deal with 50 Gigabytes or a few Megabytes sized games. It’s a complete nonsense, as Stardock CEO correctly points out in an interview with Shacknews.
PAX 2009, Ron Gilbert’s keynote
Ron Gilbert’s DeathSpank was already discussed in a previous post, but considering the personality (figurative) weight I think it’s adequate to complete the discussion by embedding the keynote’s videos (even if they aren’t so pretty to see) with which the legendary designer opened this year Penny Arcade Expo. Ron Gilbert is one of the noble fathers of modern games, so listening to what he says is simply an obligation for who would like to call himself a “videogamer”.
DeathSpank @PAX 2009, videogaming humour with style
A year after the official presentation during Penny Arcade Expo, Canadian developer Hothead Games and Monkey Island designer Ron Gilbert have took the occasion of the new PAX edition to show the work done on their new title: DeathSpank, the legitimate but grumpy child of adventure and action RPG genres, leaves behind the mere shadows of the first trailers to put his face and his deeds in front of gamers.
BlizzCon 2009, Diablo III gets the new Monk class
As it always did in the past few years, on August 21 and 22 developer Blizzard gathered players and reporters around BlizzCon, the event held at the Anaheim Convention Center during which the lucky attenders have had the opportunity to see in action (and try with their hands) the novelties from the three major franchises of the company. Regarding Diablo III, the new and long awaited chapter of the hack’n slash saga par excellence, Blizzard showed the forth of the five character classes available to the player, the Monk.
Finally the upgrade to Firefox 3(.5.2)
Good things need time, I wrote in July 2008. For the upgrade of my Firefox installation to the last version available it took more than a year, hence instead of release 3.0 now I have a shiny Firefox 3.5.2 on the screen, no remorse for the switch, some little lack of intimacy with the minimal behavioural differences of the browser UI and so much relief for the end of an installation, test and refining operation that stole me an entire weekend and this past Monday morning.
Videogames highlights - July 2009
In this period there is a lot of talking about the new ways of interaction with entertainment devices and about the fact that things like Microsoft’s Project Natal would be destined, on the long run, to replace traditional controllers be they joypads, keyboards or mice. To me this seems more of an advertising nonsense than any other thing, the mouse lasted 40 years and there surely will be a valid reason to justify such a longevity. Of course, we’re all open to the future and tech evolution, but seeing myself playing to a remote descendant of one of the titles included in this videogaming compilation without a physical controller in my hands seems an unlikely perspective to say the least.
From the past to the future, the new bootkits menace
As security experts have already highlighted in this months and years, the trend of the most sophisticated malicious code is to be able to reach the lowest levels of the machine to infect, putting out of the game all the security mechanisms and gaining full control of the PC and the operating system. This trend embraces more and more the term “bootkit”, literally a bootable rootkit, on which the attentions of researchers and Assembly code enthusiasts have recently focused uncovering new, potential threats with an ancient heart and dangerous security flaws sold as malware-proof security measures.
Videogames highlights - June 2009
This is a recession period and the videogaming industry suffers too, with a sales drop of 23% during May (for USA), a thump unseen since 2007. And yet the executives from the major companies in the field talk about sustained growth for a business that, in 2012, will be 55 billion dollars worth overall. Meanwhile market researches describe a “new golden age for entertainment software” and videogames permanently reside in two third of the American households. That’s an ideal condition, I say, to gather some relevant contents in what should be the last installment of videogames highlights’ old cycle before the new, more minimalistic setup.
Videogames highlights - May 2009
Ok I admit it, I’m a certified liar because if my personal review of old classics goes on tirelessly the amount of time required for a post of the series Videogames highlights is always the same, nay it’s getting worse. That’s the reason why I’ll change formula here, and instead of a monstrous and rebellious blob (at least for me writing it) containing any sort of thing I return to a less rich but more selected collection of videogaming stuff of the past month. Hoping that the June post won’t be on-line on September :-/
The hotud.org admin: “Home of the Underdogs is still alive”
Lord Pall, administrator of the spiritual heir of abandonware site Home of the Underdogs, sent me an e-mail in the past days letting me know that works for pushing forward the almost-dead project of Sarinee Achavanuntakul continue at full pace. “We’re still alive with most of the games listed, a semblance of a community, and a nice chunk of user added listings and reviews“, Lord Pall writes, saying that there is still a lot of work to do but the site development goes on as expected.
DOSBox 0.73, interview with the developers
On the occasion of SourceForge.net’s project of the month award granted to DOSBox, I asked the crew behind the best PC/DOS emulator out there to reply to some questions about the project. The developers were busy with the last works on the new version of the emulator, thus the interview was changed to include some DOSBox 0.73 related features and finally in the past days the crew was kind enough to send me back the replies I was seeking for. There is no Big Scoop (tm) here nor I was asking for one, but I hope the conversation is an interesting reading anyway.
I have a banana in my pants. And a monkey over my head
Guybrush Threepwood wanted to be a pirate, but probably he would have never predicted that 20 years after his unsuccessful efforts to scrape up a decent crew, his many holes in the ground with no chest on the bottom and his merciless tendency to tell the same story about some ghost pirates again and again and again he would have always been in the same place, namely at about 3 meters under the ocean level or otherwise in some improbable swordfights where the tongue hurts, literally, much more than the sword.
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