(cross-posted from thebbps.com)

In this episode we have a special guest with us, our very own Daniel Lloyd skyping in from his home state of Virginia! Dan L., Dan Z., Kevin and Ryan talk about what we’ve all been playing, what games those of us with PC’s bought during the yearly Steam Sale (and which ones we think we’ll actually EVER play). We talk about Microsoft’s recently announced “Game Room” and how someone finally figured out a way to monetize MAME. The conversation then shambles into familiar territory where Dan tells us again why he hates digital “spaces” and Ryan tries to tell him why he’s wrong. Also, the crew gets confused about Wii games and dance moves of the same name.

Download Bitcast 80 (.mp3) or Download Bitcast 80 (enhanced .m4a)

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Happy Holidays, freaks.

The guys from the BBPS and myself decided to dust off the microphones and get back to this podcasting thing. It’s been awhile, but we’re back now with Ye Olde BitCast, which will be going out every two weeks.

This week we talk about:

• Where the hell we’ve been
• What the hell we’ve been playing
• News… and stuff
• Yo, is there like a best game you’ve played this year? Maybe a “game of the year?”
• Games that dun got released this week

Download Episode 76

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I see the Digital Foundry section of Eurogamer has posted another of their bellows-like game comparisons. And what else could it be this week but Modern Warfare 2, the game that ate 2009.

If you’d like the exhaustive details, by all means click through. There’s lots of videos and pics, spread over 3 pages for their convenience. If you are anything like me you’ll watch what looks like 2 nearly-identical videos, then read the text about the Significant Differences. They never seem to match, the visuals and the words. But I suppose I have a peasant’s ocular sensitivity, because they’ve got graphs and shit, and I certainly can’t argue with that. The 360 one is sporting a fairly obvious Bloom Effect, circa 2004, while the PS3 version has better shadows but a less-scorching  framerate.

Anyways, I much preferred this comparison (courtesy chubigans) of the relative sociological differences baked into the 360 and PS3 versions. Shockingly the (Japanese!) console comes out with a higher score on the Palin Eagle-Chewing Grits-and-Gunrack Index of Don’t Fuckin’ Tread On Me Patriotism. Click to embiggen:

Alright kids, Modern Warfare 2 launches today and I’m sure you’re all very excited.

Just – try not to play it around grandparents, or any related veterans in your family, tomorrow. It’s Remembrance Day. You know, pondering the horrors of war and all that. It might be a little gauche to be popping off headshots and laughing maniacally at the carnage in MW2 on that date. Just sayin’. In fact, if you can possibly leave it in the box until Thursday…. that’s just a suggestion.

Whilst rummaging the GAF I came across this thread (via GamePolitics) about a new law just passed in Venezuela, which bans the sale of “any violent videogame”.

I couldn’t help but be struck by this quote:

Venezuela’s parliament has approved a law that lumps in toy weapons with videogames and bans the import, production or sale of both groups of items within the country.

The law was approved late last week and will go into effect within three months, reports Russian news agency Ria Novosti. The law features strict penalties of up to three to five years of incarceration for each offense. Previous reports also claimed that campaigns would be launched to warn about the dangers of videogames and that Venezuela’s consumer protection society would have full decision making abilities over what games to ban.

On BoingBoing, a 26-year old Venezuelan gamer named Guido Núñez-Mujica has penned an article detailing his distaste for the new law, even in the face of government harassment that could emerge from his public denouncement.

Some excerpts:

“This law makes selling video games to anybody actually worse than giving real guns or cigarettes to a minor, or even forcing him or her to work, as you get less jail time and lower fines if you do any of those things.”

“These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother’s chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.”

“But I’d rather go to jail than betray the gamer culture, partially responsible for making me the person I am today.”

Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it.

Guido Núñez-Mujica is absolutely right, of course. And further to the excellent points he made, I would add that a truly responsible approach to dealing with violence and the violent tendencies inherent in humans simply must address explorations of violence throughout history. You can’t just ignore it. There practically is no history without violence.

Sometimes I really do wonder what it will take to put the interactive entertainment industry on equal footing with the film industry, in terms of ratings and clout. The money’s there. Do they just need better lobbyists? The phrase “dangers of videogames” goes routinely unchallenged. I still have yet to see any research or study that is remotely compelling, much less proof and a fait-accompli assumption. Germany is the usual culprit in this regard.

Remember the snarling over Manhunt for Wii? These precious soccer moms didn’t want to see their colourfully bright Wii section corrupted with the likes of this. The stabbing and maiming with the Wii Remote, my god, what will it do to our kids?! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for children to play Manhunt. That shit’s fucked up. I’m specifically addressing the root argument which states that interacting with violent content is worse than simply watching it. A notion I completely reject, and seems unsupported by credible research. By the same argument, Michael C. Hall would be in mortal danger of becoming a socioopath for playing one in Dexter. All acting of “violent” characters would be far, far worse than even the (naturally bad) violent videogames. Because after all, you are really trying to get into the killer’s mindset there, doing all the motions… it’s obviously damaging to a healthy mind, is it not?

I wish Guido luck. What an infantilizing legislative move. He can take some comfort in the fact that it will be practically impossible to enforce.

Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve discovered some fascinating things about Demon’s Souls.

Perhaps you have read about the fabled harshness of this game. It is no joke. It is no exaggeration when I tell you that many potential players will walk away from this game in total disgust – in fact, after a fairly short exposure – and I don’t blame them one bit. In trying to search for a metaphor or example of the difficulty curve, I realized that the game represents itself; by which I mean, the game presents to the player a series of dark, foreboding, overwhelming dungeons, filled with tons of enemies and traps and simple falls that can kill you. The game is trying to be as hard as that might actually be. If you were doing it. You.

Not Kratos, not Link, not some fucking Chosen One. I mean if you personally showed up at a dungeon while schlepping flute armour and big heavy swords and all the rest – and sure, we’ll give you a spell – and tried to do your level best against demons the size of cottages. You’re just gonna die. Over and over. That’s what it represents: a huge, overwhelming challenge. Normally, or at least typically, the setup would include some nugget of plot to let you know why you might succeed where so many others have failed. A bunch of guys went in to The Bad Place and no one came out. But maybe… one will (camera pans meaningfully to our hero as he steels himself). I’m sorry to say, you, Dear Reader, will be personally supplying the army of bodies that makes the myth possible.

It is a game for people who want a mountain to climb. The very fact that it sends other less-brave (i.e. well-adjusted) players diving for the eject button is what earns Demon’s Souls it’s cred in the first place. It’s the Ninja Gaiden of action-RPGs.

(more…)

Let me paint you a picture:

Sony wants Dreamcast games for PSN…
the PSP has already been shown running a DC emulator (albeit a slow one, but this was homebrew)…
most recent PSPs have built-in microphones…

So naturally… the first obvious application would be to run Seaman.

Portable disturbing digital pocketfish. For those important questions that arise in life, you could have access to this level of oracular weird on-the-go.

It got damn cold in Toronto last week. People wonder why Canadians are so into electronic entertainment; it’s because the weather turns semi-lethal for six months of the year.

Here’s what caught my eye last week:

Microsoft is blocking 3rd-party memory units in the latest Dashboard update [Joystiq]. They are determined to keep an iron grip on that sweet sweet peripheral cash, even though both the Japanese platform holders have moved on to non-proprietary memory cards and attachments. Any time you buy an “unsupported” 3rd-party peripheral you do run the risk of something like this happening, but it kind of sucks for those who wanted to save a few bucks and have been denied use of their memory unit after buying it.

Peter Moore of Electronic Arts made some interesting comments recently [NeoGAF], referring to disc-based platforms as “burning” (as in, we are on a burning boat). This is probably the beginning of a much longer effort to start transitioning their publishing empire to more digital-only services. It’s inevitable really, although I’m sure this will be a bumpy period for the next few years. Everybody screamed about Steam when it first rolled out, and now look at it – it’s practically mandatory for PC gaming.

A rumour is making the rounds that we’ll see a “PSP2″ in 2010 [thesixthaxis]. The details on the graphics chip are credible; the timeline is not. Fascinating to see the shift in focus to mobile game chips. It used to be all about how much power you could cram into your triple-fanned liquid-cooled dual-slot PC card, and now the likes of ATI and nVidia are being asked to do the same thing in the size of a dime. Anyways, I can’t see the possibility of a PSP2 unveiling until at least 2011.

Mass Effect 2 will ship on January 26 in North America [gamasutra]. That will mark the beginning of second Christmas for the wave of Q1 games.

There’s an interesting article about the perception and portrayal of sex in videogames here [PopMatters]. It details a scene in Heavy Rain where the player, as the female protagonist, is forced to strip for a slimy mob boss. Of course in this situation, it is the player that is being demeaned, rather than watching a non-player-character go through the same thing. A really fascinating bit of turnabout. I admire David Cage’s willingness to specifically inflict discomfort on his audience. This is where truly “adult” games need to go, to explore themes that go beyond the usual amusement-park mentality.

I picked up Demon’s Souls late last week.

I’m going to be blogging about the ongoing experience of playing this game as it’s obvious that it’s an unusually… meaty title. So let me set the stage for you, and why I chose to write about it in parts instead of the usual one-off post.

Up here in Canada (and probably also down south in the country I like to refer to as Canada’s Thong) we have these crazy people who self-identify as Polar Bears. A Polar Bear is a human who likes to dive into nearly-frozen water in the middle of winter and swim around for a bit with a bunch of other equally crazy humans. This is clearly an uncomfortable activity, potentially lethal, and highly dubious in value. And yet they love it.

There aren’t very many Polar Bears though. It’s what you could call a niche audience. These people are not engaged in a past-time that would normally be called “fun”. However you could never get any of them to admit that, and truly, they seem to actually enjoy themselves. Part of it is the spectacle, the good story. Part of it is the insane experience of it – hypothermia can kill you right quick. Most people just stand on the shore and shake their heads at these lunatics, and wonder why they do it.

Demon’s Souls is one of these Japanese-developed takes on Western fantasy. It has guys that will kill you with one spear hit. Every encounter is like a mini-boss. When you die, you lose all your accumulated soul power, and you return as a spirit form, with half your original hitpoints. Also, dying makes the world worse. There’s a thing called World Tendency that acts as a kind of “alignment” for the entire game, so when you die, enemies get tougher. It constantly autosaves so there’s no going back. It’s laden with RPG statistics like how much weight you can carry, how much ammo you have, how much fatigue you have, and the condition of your weapons, all of which deteriorate. There are no checkpoints – you crawl an entire dungeon, kill the attendant throngs, and slay a demon, or you start over again with less stuff and tougher adversaries. And you can’t pause it. Ever.

There’s a guy who will steal your levels. When he hits you. Your levels. He steals them.

It’s the game equivalent of ice swimming. It’s masochistic. Like equal parts Oblivion, Soul Reaver and Bushido Blade.

I’m definitely going to play more. Stay tuned.