Archive for the 'Gaming' Category
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What do you do after you’ve designed some of the bestselling games of all time? If you’re Sims and Spore creator Will Wright (pictured), you quit your day job at blockbuster factory Electronic Arts to concentrate on a relatively tiny startup, the Stupid Fun Club.
Wright’s ambitious (and still nascent) plan: Make new kinds of entertainment experiences that combine robotics, videogames, TV shows and toys. A story predicting what we can expect from Stupid Fun Club appeared in the August issue of Wired magazine. Here’s an extended interview with Wright about his move.
Wired.com: Why’d you call the group the Stupid Fun Club?
Will Wright: I don’t have a good answer. We wanted something that evoked irreverent silliness.
Wired.com: You started the club years ago. How’d it come together?
Wright: I met [co-founder] Mike Winter when we were both doing Robot Wars. It was in Berkeley in a 4,000-square-foot warehouse with machine tools and computers and electronics. It was creative exploration with no set goal. At that point, we didn’t see this as something we had to monetize.
We had these weird robotic inventions, and we’d study the way they interacted with each other. We made short films as interstitials for NBC. One time, we had this robot waiting tables in a restaurant. We said it was a Stanford experiment, and asked people if they wanted to sit in the robot section. We learned a lot from that.
Wired.com: What happened to those films?
Wright: They never aired. They were very short one-minute movies, like interactive commercials.
Wired.com: Why the fascination with robots?
Wright: Robots and games are not all that dissimilar. In some sense, robots are just like simulations of models. Building robots is not that different than programming the Sims. On the other hand, the social interactions are very different — a robot may crash into you and hurt you.
Wired.com: How will you combine your work in robots and games into something new?
Wright: We’re mainly looking for ideas that have synergy across platforms — ideas that we can have a unique advantage in, ones that work as computer game, toy and television show, all at once.
Part of the challenge is getting literate in other formats, cross-media literate. We’re looking at the toy industry and television industry and seeing how they’re produced, what the economics are, what the creative language is. In some sense we’re inventing a new language for the way you think about entertainment. We’re making that our specialty.
Photo of Will Wright: Paul May
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After scientists created an “acoustic black hole” using Bose-Einstein condensates, our good friends over at Underwire pounded out a list of atrocious albums to throw into the sonic sucker.
We here at Game|Life have absolutely no idea what Bose-Einstein condensates are, and quite frankly would not even know it if we had some in the back of our sock drawer. However, we enjoyed Underwire’s list of five albums to throw into the black hole so much that everybody at Wired.com decided to get in on the action. Gadget Lab tossed annoying gear, Autopia banished bad cars and Wired Science ousted hideous scientific clichés.
Now it’s our turn. Here are the five game series we’d like to throw into a “videogame black hole,” which we suspect is probably located somewhere near 3D Realms. As a bonus, we’ve also named five games somebody already threw into a black hole that we’d like to get back. Read ‘em all, then vote or submit your own black hole games.
5. Katamari
The original Katamari Damacy was a brilliant game, a clever re-invention of Pac-Man for the 3-D age. Then erstwhile creator Keita Takahashi quit working on the series, and it’s all rolled downhill from there. The rolling-and-sticking gameplay that used to feel so new hasn’t matured at all, and new releases just recycle old levels. The soulless, broken iPhone rehash was the last straw. Let’s throw the Prince of All Cosmos back where he came from. — Chris Kohler
4. Leisure Suit Larry
It breaks my heart to say this, but maybe the best thing for this old dog is to put him down once and for all. Al Lowe’s comedy adventures about a hapless balding loser looking for love in a series of increasingly wrong places helped define the point-and-click genre, but all attempts to revive him have been mediocre collections of mini-games that are about as funny as reading the phone book. If Activision isn’t going to be serious about reviving Larry, let’s just dump him. — C.K.
3. Dynasty Warriors
On paper, this series has always looked appealing — players fight massive battles in feudal Japan. Sadly, these games haven’t been on paper. They’re on discs, the contents of which mostly stink. But despite the ever-shaky execution, the Dynasty Warriors series has sold nearly 9 million copies. Probably because there have been about 9 million different editions of the game. Lets throw the series’ single fan down the hole and hope he takes every last incarnation with him. — Gus Mastrapa
2. Guitar Hero
Yeah, we know: If Guitar Hero isn’t the biggest gaming franchise on Earth by now, it will be soon. It’s big, big business. But is it necessary? Rock Band does everything Guitar Hero does, but better: Better note charts, better gameplay options, better downloadable content. As a game design, Guitar Hero is slavishly following in Rock Band’s wake, not pushing the form. It would be nice to see it start innovating — otherwise, it’s going down the hole. — C.K.
1. Sonic the Hedgehog
Listen, kid, you’re done: The fast gameplay and your too-cool-for-school ’90s attitude may have served the Genesis well, but every attempt to bring you into 3-D has been a failure. Seriously, turning into a werewolf? How about in your next game you just go ahead and jump a shark? You might be money in the bank for Sega, but they can’t beat a dead hedgehog for that much longer. Do us all a favor and spin dash into the hole. — C.K.
Retrieve These Games From the Videogame Black Hole
These are the five disappeared games we’d like back from whatever galactic force sucked them away in the first place.
5. Actraiser
Maybe this is asking for too much. Would it even be possible, in today’s environment, to create a combination city-building strategy game/side-scrolling action-platformer? Apparently you can do damn near anything on Nintendo DS, and it’s Square Enix’s main platform right now, so I think the company should pull this one-of-a-kind classic out of oblivion and give it another try. Playing the original over and over on Virtual Console is getting old. — C.K.
4. Carmageddon
There hasn’t been a truly awesome car combat game since last century, and if David Jaffe isn’t going to step up to the plate and take Twisted Metal for another lap, it’s up to Stainless Games to finish what it started. Carmageddon and Carmageddon II did what few other racing games dared — they made pedestrians fair play. Somewhere on the other side of a black hole, there’s a universe where the Carmageddon series has been bloodying cow catchers for the past 10 years. Let’s go there. — G.M.
3. Jet Set Radio
A gorgeous cel-shaded aesthetic with an urban graffiti twist. An achingly hip soundtrack. Enormous environments specially designed for grinding and stunt jumps, and every surface just begging to be tagged by your aerosol cans. This Dreamcast game and it’s Xbox sequel were critical darlings, but must not have sold well. Sigh. Kotaku says a pitch for a Wii update to the franchise was rejected by Sega. Double sigh. — Chris Baker
2. Oddworld
Microsoft offered Oddworld Inhabitants that now-infamous moneyhat to secure this series of puzzle-heavy action games with dark, grisly stories and groundbreaking cinematic scenes, then dumped it before the release of the final title, Stranger’s Wrath. This last entry in the series was the best, amping up the action and combat without losing a bit of the signature style. But it didn’t sell well, and the developer laid off most of its staff. Let’s hope the games come back one day. — C.B.
1. Chrono
This is easy. Chrono Trigger fans are so desperate for a new game that they keep trying to make their own, and Square Enix keeps siccing the hounds on them. When the company took the original game and unceremoniously plunked it onto a DS cartridge, fans lined up to pay $40 for the privilege of purchasing it. Maybe we can throw one of the vaporware Final Fantasy XIII sequels down the hole and pull this out in return. Do black holes work like that? I’d like to think they do. — C.K.
Vote Up to Throw Into Black Hole, Down to Spare
Let us know what you would add to the list, and vote for the worst offenders below.
Show games that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own entry
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While you can submit as many games to throw into a black hole as you want, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.
Image at top (original): NASA/CXC/A. Hobart
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Ben Heck’s latest portable Xbox 360 adds sleek white finish, Jasper motherboard
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