Sorry about the caps

Today we witnessed the deadliest shooting at a US school. I am now going to be horribly blunt.

The first thing that sprung to my mind was “Bloody hell, Jack is going to have a field day with this”. I was not to be dissapointed! For those not familiar with Jack Thompson, he is a lawer in the US set against blaming computer games for anything and everything - regardless.

So, not surprisingly, we see him on Fox news pulling more media stunts to preach his thoughts. It sickens me people like this can be put in such a position of power within the media. Within a few hours after a major incident he can come on millions of TVs and claim anything; even before the shooters are identified.

P.S. Some may get a little peeved I am posting anything about him (the more attention he gets… etc etc), but some of the people I know read here may not have heard of the guy, hence the post.

UPDATE (2007-04-17):

A comment left by Robert included another article on a similar subject, you can find it here. Thanks for the link.

Recently I took a trip to the Virgin Megastore on Buchannan Street, Glasgow. As always, I went to have a look at the games floor.

As soon as you step off the escalator, you find the small Xbox360 stand. It was surrounded by say 5 or 6 teenagers, all playing this driving game. It looked fantastic. The attention to detail was evident: from the small view movement on turns and bumps to the camera flashes in the crowd. Unfortunately I didn’t stay long enough to catch the name of the game - the PS3 stand beckoned!

Whilst I may have been programming on the console for months now (and now have an extra shiny 22″ HD display on my desk for it), I have never once played a game on it. So, when I turned to see a huge PS3 stand, seats included, I went to see what the lone player was playing.

Sonic the frakking Hedgehog.

Not only that, but a really bad looking Sonic. Every time the player jumped, the screen stuttered down to some 10-12 fps. It may as well have been 2D for how I saw it. Certainly not a very good first impression!

Doesn’t seem true, does it?

In the UK, major retailers such as Game and Gamestation pull a huge amount of profit from pre-owned games. The publishers get no money from these sales. With the huge leap in direct-download and all the DRM involved in that (which makes it impossible to resell your game, hence increasing publisher profit) you would have thought Sony would want to get up close and cosy with the idea.

What I am trying to say is, if they are not going to do away with retail, then the content model is going to change. Think episodic content. Think paying for extra stuff. The game you buy in retail spaces is only the base; they will make the money in selling you the extra content which you used to get anyway when buying a game.

This doesnt include the huge wads of cash people now pay for subscriptions to games like WoW now, though!

Valve have stated that the ‘its-done-when-its-done’ Team Fortress 2 has cross platform play over the xbox 360 and the PC.

Why?

I sure hope that this did not add to development time. Quake 3 on the dreamcast anyone?

When will people learn…

We have lots of rumours going about lately about asset stealing. I am not going to go into whether or not it really is stealing, rather, what should happen if the developers were indeed using unlicensed content within their game.

Coming from a MOD background, if a team was to use content from another game without permission, we would be shut down/sued. People have said ‘aww, it is just a few textures’ but if they are really did use these assets without permission I do hope they treat commercial companies the same as a bunch of individuals doing something they love.