New appreciation of LA

First of all I definitely suck since I really had the best of intentions to post more often. Sometimes life just gets in the way.

So let's see what has been going on? I finally beat Devil May Cry 4 - yeah I know I suck for taking forever to beat that as well. Definitely not a bad game but I'm not sure if it's as good as DMC3. DMC3's combat system was able to sustain that whole game. While Nero is awesome I'm not really sure if I could have played all 20 missions with just him. Although Dante really added nothing new to the game he was a good break up. Playing the same enemies with both really highlighted the different playstyles with both. Nero controls space soooo differently from Dante (Trickster being the closest to playing as Nero) that they really feel like 2 different characters. I rarely used the guns with Nero and with Dante I use the guns nonstop. Aside from the game breaking down here and there (fuck a bunch of their routing) and having to play the bosses 3 times I really enjoyed it.

Next on my list is Conan. I remember playing the demo but I'm gong to give the whole game a chance. Something to kill some time with before GTA comes out I guess. I still haven't decided which system to buy it on. Knee jerk is to buy it on 360 and even though it's not - GTA really feels like a Playstation franchise to me. I hella doubt I ever finish the game so the idea of DLC doesn't really appeal to me and I'm still on the fence about GTA Multiplayer. Shrug - we'll see I guess.

On a personal level life has been really hectic here lately. 2 friends of mine from Nor Cal came down to LA to hang out. We all ended up going to a Korean booking club which is umm...interesting haha. It's sort of like the Korean version of speed dating. The girls get in for free where (these are normal girls, not some scandalous girls hired for the club) as the guys have to pay for a table. The table usually comes with a bottle of alcohol and some random food like fruit to eat. The table isn't cheap either (the amount of money paid that night was obscene). The guys sit down and tell the waiter what kind of girls they like - short hair, long hair, blah blah. Then the waiter goes and find the girls on the dance floor or whatever and brings them to your table. The girls usually stay for a few minutes - have a shot, talk about whatever then take off or stick around. Basically the guys and girls get to meet a lot of people in a short amount of time. I guess it's something you gotta experience.

My parents were in town not too long ago as well. We were supposed to visit Nor Cal but couldn't do to a lot of random reasons. Ended up going to Sea World in San Diego - I had never been there before. Not too bad at all. Visited a lot of new places in LA that I had never been before such as the Bergamont Station in Santa Monica, the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills where like EVERY movie is filmed. The list was ridiculous - blood will tell, ghostbusters, spiderman3, witches of eastwick, x-men, etc. Unfortunately you can't go inside the house but the grounds are pretty nice to walk around. Also visited the Will Rogers state park not to mention the LA Zoo.

I'll try my best to update more often these days.

I <3 Jason Rubin

As some of you may or may not know I travel a lot these days. Specifically I've been traveling to San Francisco once a week for work. As I was flying back to town the other day I looked into the seat back pocket and found an issue of Star Magazine. As everyone knows I'm a sucker for gossip so I got all sorts of excited and started thumbing through it when I found this:



"Just three days after confirming that she had split with her rocker fiance Benjie Madden, Sophie Monk was spotted having brunch with video game director Jason Rubin! The Aussie singer, 28, and Jason "looked like they were having a good time" while eating al fresco at Griddle Cafe in West Hollywood on Feb. 15, an eyewitness tells Star. "It looked like a date."

So it's official. Jason Rubin has won the war to be the first Video Game Designer to be in a gossip magazine. He even got an exclamation point after his name. I'm a little bit jealous, I won't lie. Oh well. I guess I dropped the ball on creating crazy websites like he did.

GoW: Chains of Olympus

Over the weekend I got to play this great little game called God of War: Chains of Olympus. This is the first God of War game that I have never worked on. Like...at all. haha. I liken it to watching your kids go off to kindergarten for the first time. Of course I have no idea what that is really like but you get the idea. As you can guess when I went to go play the game the battery on my PSP was dead so I had to recharge it.

I must say that I think RAD did a really good job with the game. It has all the ingredients from a typical God of War game. It also has what might be the best subweapon that Kratos has ever had - the gauntlets. Me and eric argued a lot over hammer in God of War 2 - I'll say it straight out I think we dropped the ball by not having the soul at level 1. As a player you get this crazy new weapon but then your evade is taken away from you. The design goal for the hammer was to be a slow weapon but the souls were the setups to let you use the slow weapon. Enough of Gow2....

The art looks fantastic and they managed to stream everything in which I was really impressed with. The sounds are all spot on (it sounds like a gow game!) and the music is great as always. There is a mini-game at the end that has the potential to go down as another great example of interactive story telling.

Although not everything is perfect in this PSP world. Level design was kind of a low point for me along with a lot of the combat scenarios - I think there are more 'demon doors' in COO then GoW1 and 2 combined. Back to level design - I'm not really sure if it was a tad bit weaker then previous GoW games or if that I just didn't know where to go like I normally do. Hard to tell without bias thats for sure. Either way - weak level design in a GoW game is definitely better than the greatest level design in DMC4.

There are some things I would have done differently (like more health chests!) but it's a fun roller coaster ride on a system that hasn't had one in a really long time. If you own a PSP and are a fan of God of War you should definitely check it out.

Now that my PSP battery is charged up it is time to go check out the Jpnese demo of Echochrome.

P.S. Sorry El Jaffe but the story left me a tad bit confused this time around.

Mac Air or how Apple Cheats

So this very well may be Industrial Design 101 and if it is, my apology.

Apple decided to introduce the Mac Air here recently. The first thing they showed wasn't the computer itself but a common every day product that it resembled, the manila envelope. To me this has been one of the keys to Apple's success - having their products remind the user of items they are already used to. Same with Nintendo - it is no coincidence that the Wiimote looks like a TV remote. It's inviting and doesn't scare away anyone from using their products.

The Mac Air isn't the first product from Apple to look like an every day item either. Remember the 1st Shuffle that they released?

It resembles a pack of gum so much that there were plenty of images online to choose from to post:

Instead of posting a 100 more images just think about the new Ipod Nano and its shape - much like a post it note. Even the original Ipod resembles a pack of cards.

So what does this have to do with videogame design? There is definitely something to be said about being innovative but there is even more to be said about familiarity. I don't think it's a bad thing to give the player something immediately to attach to - be it the shape of the character, the weapon, color, controller commands, etc.

Captain obvious warning here, but: the opposite of familiar is unknown and most people fear the unknown...even in video games, that instant familiarity with the player or player's weapon, attack, etc breaks down that survival instinct to flee, so to speak.

Eric and myself always sort of had an unspoken rule - if we couldn't explain something to someone and give them a reference that they understood then the idea sucked. It was a good first step in self editing.

I'm sure the Mac Air won't be the last Apple product to be released that reminds everyone of a shape that has nothing to do with computers.

Mario Galaxy or how Nintendo Cheats

I finally got around to playing Mario Galaxy after the break. I wasn't allowed to buy it before xmas since it was on my list but then no one bought it for me...so I had to do the honorable thing and borrow it from someone who had already beaten it.

I'm 68 stars in and I'm not sure how much further I'm going to go. I feel like 70'ish is the sweet spot for the game. I feel like I've seen almost everything the game has to offer and after this I'll just be OCD and torturing myself to collect 100 purple coins within 2 minutes. Once I got 60 I went straight to the final boss which definitely could have been better. Instead of adding any new mechanics he's just more or less a homework test. You just do the same thing you did earlier in the game but multiple times in a row. Shrug.

My real problem with the game is I kind of feel like Nintendo cheated with this game. When you make a modern 3d action platformer game there are ALL these problems - camera, level design, level pacing, cohesion, blah blah. With Galaxies I feel like they said, 'ok - instead of trying to solve all these problems lets just remove as many as possible!'

Camera? Well - what are the problems with camera? Walls, collision, etc so lets just get rid of those problems by making the play space spherical! Anytime the world isn't spherical the camera breaks down SUPER fast. The bootleg go into first person mode to look around was a crutch that didn't even work 1/2 the time for me.

Level Design? I could make some comment about how the small worlds keep the fun focused but in all honesty this game has pretty damn good Level Design. Especially the 2d'ish worlds with the gravity going all crazy.

Level Pacing? I think they did kick this one out for sure. Usually going from point A to point B requires keeping the trip fun for the player. Sometimes it's just having level 1 dudes to kill along the way. Mario Galaxy totally gets rids of this problem by jumping from one plane to the next via a star. The problem I have with this is most of the time I really don't know where I'm going - I just jump in because there is no where else to go. In some instances it's really hard to go backwards also - in case I didn't have enough star bits for the first section and needed to collect more.

Cohesion? This one is a double edged sword. I really do like this game since you are doing something new all the time. At the same time - this game is kind of exhausting because you are doing something new! Galaxy feels very much like Mario and Wario Ware combined. Maybe this design choice was more telling of how popular the DS is and how to make this game feel like a portable game? shrug. While I was excited to get the next star it was only really my curiosity that made me push on. I felt like I could have stopped almost anywhere in the game and not have regretted it. Maybe thats part of the charm? Not sure.

The biggest problem I have with the game is the overall lack of exploration. In mario64 you could enter a world and maybe have immediate access to 4 of the 6 stars. In Galaxy I felt like I deviated from what they wanted me to do maybe once...maybe twice. I'm no longer exploring the level that they have given me - I'm just along for the ride. I hella forget how Sunshine handled this to be honest.

After that it really bums me out that Nintendo can't figure out how to do swimming in 3d. The swimming were by far the worst fucking levels. That and 'spring' mario. The flowers - ice and fire sucked being on a timer also. There was really no need for it.

There are a couple of other nitpicking things I didn't like about the game - how long it takes after you get a star to get back to the same level to get the next star. Along with why are there even lives? I played once for about 4 hours straight and had 40'ish lives saved up. Saved the game for dinner and when I started back up I only had what is it? 4 or 5? Whatever you start off with. Thanks....

That being said I think they did a really good job of taking complex shapes in 3d space and really simplifying it and while still making it fun. I think the game is a definite must play but I wouldn't give it 10 out of 10.

Uncharted

Happy New Year everyone! Hopefully everyone reading this has played Uncharted or doesn't plan to play it at all because I'm going to spoil the hell out of the game. Read at your own peril! Haha...

During the PS2 years I treated Naughty Dog and Insomniac much like Pepsi and Coke. I am definitely a fan of Coke (Mexican Coke FTW) and Ratchet was my addiction. I fell in love with Ratchet and finished all of them - aside from that terrible Dead Locked one that should have never come out. I tried to play every Jak game and could only stomach them for an hour at the most. I don't know why - they just didn't grab me.

With the PS3 things have definitely changed. While I still <3 the Ratchet (absolute must play if you own a PS3) I couldn't stand Resistance what so ever. I played it long enough so that it became a modern shooter (health regeneration) but quit after that. A lot of people tell me it's a great game and they very well may be correct - but the game isn't for me and I'll probably never finish it. Uncharted on the other hand - is the first Naughty Dog game I've completed since umm...Way Of The Warrior I'm guessing? Uncharted offers everything I want in a videogame - good story, good acting, fun platforming, short game time, good feeling main character, etc.

BTW, avoid the demo of Uncharted that you can download on PSN. I downloaded the demo and never wanted to play the game after playing it for some reason. I was having lunch with 2 of the sound guys from GoW2 (Chuck and Todd) who had both played it and told me how good the game was - if it wasn't for that lunch I would have never played the game. In fact...almost all demo's I download off of PSN turn out to be not fun for some reason - Simpson's, motorstorm, etc.

Anyway, after beating Uncharted and barely just starting Assassin's Creed I must fully admit that 'next-generation' character interaction is upon us. These 2 games have completely raised the bar on how a character interacts with the environment. And I'm not even talking about super technical things like how Uncharted has IK on the feet and AC's doesn't - just the small things that really help sell the world. Drake walks down the German boat and blends from his normal navigation to putting out his hand and stepping over something in the way then going back to his normal nav. All the while I never let go of pushing nothing more then 'forward' on the controller. Knowing how much work is needed to get all of this to work I was definitely impressed. (Animation, level design, collision, detection, blending, etc)

Not all is perfect with Uncharted - thats for sure. After playing this game and Resident Evil 4 I'm pretty convinced that Jet Ski's should be banned from all videogames. Including Wave Racer. There is this great chase scene where the chick drives the jeep and you get to shoot fools nonstop. It's all fun and exciting and you wanna do it again when you finish. Then you get on a jet ski and Drake is all, 'I'll drive!' The problem is that you control Drake for driving and the chick for shooting. So you have to come to a complete stop to shoot then drive some more. Rinse, Wash, Repeat. Not to mention going up the waterfalls and what not. Definitely the lowest point in the game.

I'm slowly starting to get sick of achievements - especially in 'real' games. My friend Nate says they should be removed from all games except for arcade games or maybe just in multiplayer. As I'm playing Uncharted and blowing dude's heads off it rewards me by saying, '20 kills with the handgun' or whatever it says. Even though I like the handgun now I start feeling the need to get 20 kills with all the guns that are in the game. Which *may* have been OK if all the guns were drastically different or classed out but it felt like there was a lot of overlap. I couldn't really tell the difference between the AK and the M16. At one point I stopped the game and thought to myself, 'man - I'm just playing the game of kill X dudes with certain guns and not playing Unchrated.' At that point I just finished the game with the guns that *I* liked.

The melee definitely feels tacked on as well. They try a few mechanics such as if the enemy is killed with a special combo (square, triangle, square) then they drop twice the normal amount of ammo. This combo feels messy to say the least and I could never tell when to push the next button or if I had really performed it correctly.

The kills on the other hand are really well animated and feel rewarding. I like the leg tackle and some of the other ones. However I think I went through the whole game and used melee maybe less then 10 times total.

While I had a lot of fun with the story - there were too many bad guys. They could have easily cut one or combined 2 of them into one to clean things up. Speaking of bad guys, the final battle definitely could have used some lovin'. To the ND guys - I'm not hating - I worked on a game with Hades and Ares so I fully understand how these things happen.

All in all though - everyone should check out Uncharted as it is definitely in my top 5 favorite games of 2007.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to try to blog more. So this is an attempt. Hopefully it was somewhat entertaining.

Thanksgiving and SF Trip

Over Thanksgiving I got to catch up on a lot of vidoegames that I had been wanting to play. I got to sit down and finish Ratchet and Clank: Future Tools of Destruction! Great game like many have said for sure. No stupid racing that requires me to get 1st, no spherical planets that make me feel nauseous and no giant clank levels that aren't all that fun to control when it's all said and done. Just straight up Ratchet stripped to the core with fun weapons, fun platforming and humor to keep the action all tied together.

That being said - I think the game is about an hour or 2 longer than it should have been. Many times I felt like I was at the last level when it turned out I wasn't. The camera feels like it's a little bit worse than before but maybe I'm just remembering the previous ratchets with rose colored glasses as they say. I don't remember the crates having physics before but this time they do which made them feel really ghetto to me. Too many times they fall off ledges, collide with one another, do that 'video games physics shake', etc. The story - while it made me laugh confused me really bad. I never knew Ratchet was a Lombax so it took me like half the game to realize they were talking about him. The level design is top notch as usual although maybe I have a bad memory. For some reason I remember the levels looping back on themselves more - a lot of times I just got to the end of the road and a teleporter had to take me back to the beginning.

The first level is totally fantastic though. The ratchet team definitely inspired us on GoW and I would like to think that we inspired them with this game in particular. I unfortunately don't know anyone from the team so I have no way of confirming this but thats how it feels. The first level and the Dinosaur level are amazing. I love in games where you think to yourself, 'oh my god - I hope I can do this....' then you actually find out that you can. Thats how I felt when I figured out that I could climb up on the dinosaurs.

The weapons are fun as usual even though nothing really stood out to me as amazing this time. I almost wish the game only had one currency instead of the 3 that it has but at least I never felt like I was short on bolts. A much better job of juggling the economy compared to the first one. The Six Axis implementation starts off really good - but at the end of the game I was tired of that Electric Ball minigame. The Pirate Dance game totally felt Rhythm Tengoku which made me smile. I think there's something similar in FF7 if I remember right.

Even with all the hiccups the game is totally worth playing and I suggest everyone checks it out.

I also played a ton more of Rock Band. Going through solo mode with the drums on both Easy, Medium and some of Hard. I absolutely fucking hate World Band Tour mode though. Me and my girl were trying to go through it and she is playing Bass on Easy and I'm playing Drums on Medium and we simply can't get enough fans to go further. Everyone that I talk to about this game say the same things, 'terrible fucking menus and WBT could have been better'. A good 1st start that either can be fixed with some upgrade loving for part 2.

I went to SF for the past week for work and got to meet up with a lot of old friends. Granted certain people suck and were at the Montreal Games Festival but I had a ton of fun seeing everyone that was there. Got to meet up with not only the usual suspects - Choi, Seth, Peter, Sirlin, etc but also the amazing 1up crew. Had dinner and drinks with Jason, Cesar, Kathleen, Patrick, Mark and celebrated Shane and Alice's bday for a minute. Even got to play some rock band with Cesar, Hannah, and Garnet even though we couldn't hear anything in the bar. It was good to see everyone and look forward to next time - either in LA or in SF.

Still trying to make my way through Zelda on DS. I just got the hookshot but I'm soooo dreading going back to that damn dungeon. In fact every time I stop is when I have to go back there. Oh well - amazing game though. I love watching Link's face when he slides on the ice and what not. The art style they went to for WW and PH is a 100 times better when compared to Ocarina and Twilight Princess. The cell shaded style really makes me feel like it's Link in an adventure where as the grown up Link seems very out of place.

Oh yeah! A lot of things happened while I was out of town. The craziness that is Jeff Gerstman and Harvey smith. I haven't read up enough on the Gamespot thing but if it's true it seems like the whole editorial staff almost has to quit. The reason why I say it has to be this extreme is because it really does open up the door for many many worse things to happen.

The Harvey Smith thing kinda disappoints me. I've never met Harvey but he's been in this industry long enough to know when to stop babbling. On the other hand - Kohler and the rest of the Wired staff should have also known better and not ran such a sensationalist article. From my understanding what Harvey said was mentioned at the end of the interview and it sucks that someone lost their job over the whole thing. Area 51 never really looked like a "Harvey" game from the beginning so maybe it's best for everyone involved so we'll see. Speaking of Area 51 whats up with Midway banking their whole company on such big titles like this and Stranglehold? Maybe it will payoff but seems like a scary business tactic from an outsider looking in.

The main reason why it disappoints me though is because this is the 2nd time someone has said something at a conference and been fired for it - the first being Chris Hecker and his comment about the Wii being nothing more than 2 Gamecube's duct taped together. Developers definitely have more to say than just the games they work on and there isn't a good avenue of expressing anything beyond what the PR department will allow. It sucks that as developers we can't even talk about the games we did work on let alone start talking about other games. This week has shown us that game reviewers allegedly can't openly speak about how they feel nor can developers.

Sorry for babbling so long.

Ninja Edit: While digging up some handy URL's to attach to this post I found this - a story where the 1up walked over to CNET to show their support for Gerstman. Makes me love the people I know from the Ziff Davis family even more.

I've seen a million faces - and I've rocked them all!

Been playing a lot of Rock Band for the past couple of days. The UI and Menu Flow are some of the worst I have ever seen which makes me think that Harmonix did the 'game' part but EA or someone else did the shell. I could be wrong but I've played a lot of Harmonix games (not just guitar hero) and I don't remember any of their games being this odd. To put into perspective - me and James Chen who both have played a ton of DDR, Beatmania, Pump It Up, Guitar Freaks, Drum Mania, Guitar Hero, etc and we were struggling for like 30 minutes to figure out what was going on.

We also joked that there should be an option when you turn the game on: Are you busy? or Do you have a job or a girlfriend? If you pick yes then all the songs are automatically unlocked. The one company who I thought would never change finally has - Namco with Tekken. Even they realized unlocking characters is boring and just give the player the option to play everyone right away (at least with Tekken for PS3). I understand the need for single player to have a 'game' where you unlock songs but don't punish me when playing multiplayer. I hear there is an unlock all code but that feels like too much work also.

It's definitely a fun experience when it all comes together - no doubt. The only part I'm not a huge fan of is the guitar itself. While it definitely doesn't look like a 'toy' guitar like the Guitar Hero one does - the GH3 Les Paul is a hundred times better.

There are some interesting design choices for sure though - World Band Tour being offline only is absolutely terrible. Not to mention the concept of the, 'leader' which people everywhere are complaining about. While online - the microphone can be used but everyone else hears the original vocal track for the song that is being played. At first I thought this was a bad idea but in general I think American's are shy when it comes to singing (as opposed to Asia where Karaoke is a religion) so it sort of works.

It's thanksgiving break so I'm going to try to finish Ratchet and hopefully start on either Mario Galaxies or Assassin's Creed. Have a good holiday everyone.

Return from Shanghai

I just returned from my 2 week trip to Shanghai. I've been to Tokyo a few times, Seoul once and now Shanghai - I feel like I have Asia pretty much covered at this point.

Tokyo is very much a 'boys' city - ninjas, robots, porn, etc where as Shanghai is pretty much a 'girls' city. Lots of shopping, eating, shopping, more shopping and more eating. In fact I'd say the girls over there run that city more than any other city I have been to. From seeing guys holding the girls purse to watching all the guys getting yelled at by their women nonstop. All the guys looked very tamed to say the least. My girl - her uncle, he told his wife that she cooked food too slowly and she hasn't cooked since. That was 20 years ago. He asked me if I knew that the nickname for Shanghai girls is cows? I'm all...you think they are fat? He said no, 'they are tough like cows'. I told him it hella doesn't mean the same thing in English.

The city definitely has a lot of energy though. I always describe LA as being one suburb stamped over and over and over to make up the city. If thats the case then Shanghai is definitely a downtown stamped over and over and over. The city just stretches out in every direction as far as I could see. Although there are a lot of foreigners over there (and I do mean a lot - they have a section called, 'California Town' with strip malls and stuff) I still got asked by random people if they could take their picture with me. That and I got approached by a lot of younger kids wanting to speak English with me. Yeah, I don't know why either.

As far as gaming goes in Shanghai - I'm afraid I didn't get to see a whole lot. I only saw one arcade which had no fighting games - just Initial D for miles. I only saw one dedicated store that was a videogame store which sold almost nothing but hardware. You could buy GBA Micro bundled with a flash cart. I saw a few other random stores selling mostly DS and PSP's though. Pretty sure that Nintendo makes money on every DS sold so I guess it works out for them over there. Saw a ton of bootleg GBA / DS carts with 50+ games on each cart. Pirated games were more common to see than real games, thats definitely for sure. I only saw one PC Cafe (I don't read chinese so maybe there were a ton more?) which was packed with kids playing the standards - counter strike, wow, etc. The trains, subways, etc are advanced enough where people can still talk on their cell phones so instead of seeing people playing Tetris on their phone like in Tokyo or something - people just continued to talk on their phones. I'm sure there are a ton of people playing videogames in shanghai but I didn't really see a whole lot to be honest.

My girl's cousin is a professional flute player for the shanghai orchestra or something like that. She entertained us one night after dinner by playing the flute and the last song she played was the SMB theme so the kids definitely know some history of videogames. I just couldn't get a good grasp of how much more they knew.

Since I was gone for 2 weeks I missed a lot of the random news that happened. I saw that EA Chicago is closing - that really sucks and I hope everyone makes it through this rough point in their life. I saw that Cory left the GoW franchise. I need to go pick up Mario since that came out while I was gone I guess. I still need to finish Phantom Hourglass. I brought in on the plane with me but to be honest I really didn't feel like playing a new experience - I wanted something where I could turn my brain off and just zone out. So I beat Symphony of the Night 2 times total (once on the way there, once on the way back). God damn I love that game, still. I noticed that this is the 10 year anniversary for it coming out. Maybe I'll try to write something about why it's so great. I tried to play Rondo and maybe I'll lose my cool kid card but I just couldn't get into it. It's not that it's hard it's that I just don't feel any reward for doing anything in the game. I never played it when it came out and maybe I've just played too many of the 'Metroidvania' series to go back at this point. I still go back and play Castlevania 1 from time to time though, shrug.

My Uncharted demo just finished downloading (btw - gone for 2 weeks and come home and have to update all my fucking consoles - god damn I hate turning on my ps3 sometimes) so I'm going to go check that out. Can't wait til that last sentence gets used out of context.

Random Update

After I left the god of war team me and my friend Eric were talking about who they should hire to replace me. We joked around that every one who is capable of doing the job we already have on our aim list. It was around the time of the 'fake' E3 that me and Eric came to the same conclusion oddly enough - the people were actually on our aim list. Jason De Heras and Jason Cole were both hired shortly afterwards. Both have a ton of industry experience and understand games on a very technical level. I won't go about listing all of their videogame accomplishments but lets say it runs deep - Evo Championships, etc.

Jason De Heras has written a really good article about one of my favorite games of all time, "Mike Tyson's Punch Out". In fact secretly some of the bosses in the God of War universe were designed around some of the mechanics found in that game. Even after leaving the GoW team I've even referenced this game in many meetings haha. I go back and play this game maybe once a year or so. 007-373-5963 has been etched into my memory since I was a kid. I thought about downloading the Wii version but I can't betray my boy Mike and play against some random white guy that they threw in. I digress - go check out Jason's article about one of the greatest games of all time.

There has been a lot of interesting videogame news here lately - particularly Free Radical's decision to pay their employees overtime. All I can say is about fucking time. There are a billion problems with this industry and this is definitely one of them. So many young kids get into the industry and are so happy to have a shot at doing what they love that they will do anything - including working 90+ hours a week. When I first got into the industry I almost thought it was 'cool' that I worked 20 hours in one day to get a ton of things done. Then I realized I was stupid and barely got anything accomplished for the rest of the week. Not only that but I missed a lot of social events such as friend's bday's just so I could get some bug finished that could have been fixed the next day.

It's also a sign of holding producer's more responsible for their job which I think is a good thing. If an artist says it will take 5 days to do something and they don't get it done in 5 days then they are usually yelled at, etc. If a producer says the game will be done in X months/years and if the game can't be done on time then they should get yelled at. The solution shouldn't be one of just working more hours which is what has been forever. Plus working that much just burns everyone out - something that I don't think enough people talk about.

While not directly related but on a very similar note the rumors about Bungie and Microsoft are very exciting. As of today with nothing being announced officially - the unofficial rumor is that bungie/ms are breaking the bonds from one another with bungie being more independent but ms still publishes their games. This is somewhat similar to the plan that Jaffe set up with Eat, Sleep, Play.

This doesn't surprise me at all - Halo3 comes out and makes $170 million in just one day! I don't enough about their situation but I know after God of War 1 and 2 - I still can't afford to buy a house. I have an apartment in the fucking valley for crying out loud. Is it all about $? Most definitely not but I bet Sam Raimi had no problems buying a house after Spiderman 1 let alone 2 and 3. Good luck to everyone at Bungie and I hope you guys get what you deserve.

Hopefully these 2 things are a sign of the industry as a whole growing up and will be a better place for everyone to work. I hear EA is a much better place after the whole EA Spouse thing. Sometimes all the crazy muckraking leads to something good.