Digital Cream

My son Dylan urged me to play Portal, a new game contained in Valve’s “Orange Box“ product. I already had good reasons to check it out– an amazing design riff; a Cinderella story of birth as a student project at DigiPen; and I heard bizarre rumors that it exhibited a real sense of humor. However, watching Dylan fall through an infinite chain of portals while flipping the gravitational axis made me fearfully recall a childhood viewing of The Man With The Golden Gun which put me off the hall of mirrors for years. Dylan assured me that it was not nearly as confusing as it looked, but as he gleefully recounted to his friend Harry yesterday, I once got lost in a single room in BioShock. (I crept around a bloody lab table, came upon the door through which I entered the room, exited through it thinking it was a new door, and then wandered in confusion wondering why everything looked vaguely familiar.) In any case, I screwed up my courage and gave Portal a go. I was delighted in all the ways that the game’s many fans have already extolled, but I want to especially point a prophetic finger at a feature of the game which I predict will soon be commonplace, and the game world made all the better for it: Portal has optional commentary by the game creators, much like a DVD commentary track. This is very cool and I am bursting to tell you why. (continued »)

See this article at PCWorld about how the game “Manhunt” was given an AO (Adults Only) rating by the ESRB.

As a game developer and parent, I’m prepared to support the AO rating given to Manhunt 2 by the ESRB. (My support is contingent on my better understanding of the game’s content and the definition of AO.)

I don’t accept the argument that because certain retail stores don’t carry AO games, and no console maker at this point allows the publication of AO games, the game should not get AO “because that makes it effectively censored”. This is what the free market is all about, and allows the USA to have a better way of dealing with this game than UK and Australia and others. (continued »)

Bono is in a business venture that has invested in Pandemic, a games company with a Brisbane office. Pandemic developed a game that caught his attention.

This is due to the HotCoffee fiasco which I presume everyone already knows about.

I think the action by the ESRB forcing an AO rating onto GTA:SA is justified. Rockstar needs to be spanked in order to bolster confidence in the ESRB rating system, which is (at least for now) protecting our industry from heavy-handed governmental regulation.

The political grandstanding about this is, as usual, both amusing and revolting. But that’s to be expected. Rockstar were idiots to allow this to happen and I want to personally slap those responsible.

I’m more willing than anyone to see an AO game be made and sold to enormous profit… but it must be clearly rated as such. Rockstar has set things back considerably.

Asheron’s Call (on which I was lead producer while at Microsoft Games Studios) got onto the GameSpy list for 50 most memorable games of all time! Thanks Cam for the heads up!