Blizzard joins 21st century by offering its games (Starcraft and Warcraft 3, with Diablo 2 to come) for sale as online downloads:

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/52530

Miyu pointed this out in her LJ (a game line intended for females, including a baby-raising sim):

http://imagine.us.ubi.com/index.php

I think games made by females are more interesting:

http://tale-of-tales.com
http://hanakogames.com
http://amaranthia.com

(and probably lots more I don't know about)

(and sorry komera, I'd link to your site too, but you don't have Wingedmene on it; it still needs a website!)

I still wish I had invested more in Nintendo back when I did -- the $100 that I put into it in 2004 or so is now around $600. I kind of want to sell it now and be happy with a x6 return, but I think it'll go up even more over the next year as the Wii and DS continue to outsell Sony and Microsoft.

I showed my cousin Dofus (a cartoony Flash MMORPG made in France, with battles like Final Fantasy Tactics) today, she seemed to like it. If any of you plays it or tries it and likes it, let me know so we can team up.

I may buy a subscription again, I haven't played it in something like a year or more. A lot has changed, tons of new items for instance. It's weird that MMO games are like a living world, where if you leave and come back, things have changed; a bit like how I imagine leaving and returning to Narnia would be.

SNK Playmore was able to score a decent sized hit last its rather risqué Nintendo DS release, Doki Doki Majo Shinpan, a game where the player had to identify witches by touching them in inappropriate places using the stylus. Now the company behind the Metal Slug arcade games, as well as the King of Fighters titles, is back once again to serve up an even bigger does of dodgy gaming action with the game’s sequel.

Due for release on 31st July, 2008 in Japan, it appears that SNK is already well underway with its promotional work to garner even more interest in the title than before. According to the Akiba Blog, at both the Sofmap AM Branch and Main Branch in the Akihabara prefecture of Japan, there is a demonstration video of the sequel, “Doki Doki Majo Shinpan! 2 Duo”, which is on repeated play in the store windows so any passers-by can see the game in motion. As an instruction in the retailer’s window stated, the aim is to look for a witch by touching young girls with your “touch pen” in order to make them as excited as possible and thus get the right reaction out of them. The Sofmap AM Branch stated “Touch boobs and asses!” and was showing a demo called “Shaking Boobs, Shaking Butt.” The game is supposedly three times as erotic as before and will include more ‘close-up’ scenes with the girls. So sure is SNK that this will be an even bigger hit that it will be releasing a special limited edition pack as well. [source]

O_O

I like how they measure it. "Three times as erotic as before!"

I finished playing Persona 3 today. Took about 92-93 hours (not counting deaths and retries).

I don't want to talk about the story much due to spoilers (Harlock still plans to play it) but its story was my favorite of the series (although I feel the first Persona game had more interesting characters, that could just be nostalgia).

I like how, instead of a large world that you gradually explore, it kept you to only a few locations: your school, the mall, your dorm, one dungeon with 260+ floors, a shrine, and two train stations. You had access to all of those places from the beginning, and as the game went on and time passed, they changed along with the seasons (the mall getting Christmas decorations on Christmas and so on).

This game is already almost done:

I wrote a review of Space Barnacle here (I actually wrote it a month ago but Patrick Dugan put it up today) -- http://playthisthing.com/space-barnacle

(And don't worry Tim, I'm still writing for your site too of course, I see Play This Thing as a place to post more depthy-commentary type stuff, and indygamer as a place to post news and interesting game releases and interviews.)

More on Persona 3:

- It should limit the "Dark Hour" to an actual hour.

- I really like that it gave you a character, making you think he'd be a permanent character (because he had his own unique type of weapon and you had been finding weapons for him since the beginning), and then killed him off immediately (well, after a week or two, just as you were getting used to him) as an example of mortality, and didn't replace him with anyone who could use those weapons.

- I don't like the robot and the dog. The game was supposed to be about playing as normal high school students, so why can you also play as a robot (which doesn't fit the time era in any case) and a super-intelligent dog? I don't use either, I stick to the humans. The elementary school kid is also somewhat unwelcome, because the series has always been about high school kids, but he's not as bad as the dog and robot.

http://www.playonarcade.com/?c=a

That's an interesting business model -- it charges people one cent per minute to play a game (up to the game's full price of $19.99 or whatever it is -- which is like 34 hours?).

(persona 3 intro / trailer)

Still playing Persona 3. To add to my negative points about it in the previous entry, I don't like insta-deaths -- Persona 1 had them too -- it's when you enter battle, an enemy uses a spell that kills you in one hit, and it's game over.

Mike Gravel has joined the Libertarian party, I see. Maybe I'll vote for him if he gets their nomination (which isn't likely).

Something I said to Harlock about a year ago returns to me now; I don't think I fully realized until now how many ways it's true and how widely it can be applied: it went something like "to dislike one thing in the universe is to dislike everything in the universe." Judging and comparing and knowing what's what are good, and can best be done without disliking anything. And they're even contradictory, it's impossible to dislike something if you know its position in reality.

I've been thinking that enlightenment / liminality is not only analogous to waking up / sleep, but actually operates on the same physical principle. Sleep isn't a pure state, it's a wide continuum where different parts of the brains are less active, less aware of their surroundings, etc., (sleepiness is a word to describe this between-state) -- but it's a spectrum, and it can go in both ways, one can also be more awake than fully awake, more aware than fully aware. Just as sleep goes all the way down to total unconsciousness, enlightenment should theoretically go all the way up, at least as far as the brain's physical nature allows.

It's too bad raspberries (and so on) can't experience what it's like to exist as well as people do, I feel bad for them.

So far, Persona 3 is pretty great in every way except the following:

- Too addictive; over the last 30 hours I played it for about 15 of them, and slept only 4.

- There's a size imbalance between people and environments, the rooms are much too big for people a lot of the time. I mean, just in proportion. If a person stretches both arms left and right in the game, it's still not enough to cover the width of a normal door. Likewise, ceilings look like they're 20 feet tall. It's like all the architecture is twice the size it should be.

- The way they summon personas in battle has switched between yelling "Persona!" to putting a gun to their head and shooting (!). Meaning every time you cast a spell your character looks like he or she is suiciding. It's kind of creepy and a bit much to stand; I find myself unconsciously looking away or closing my eyes whenever they do that. But I suppose it's emotionally powerful and fits in with the theme of the game, so I'm not prepared to say it was a total mistake.

- The GUI menus are a slow to open and close, and loading times are pretty severe, even for a PS2 RPG (FFX and FFXII had much faster loading times).

The great parts of the game are too numerous to recount right now, I'll save them for when I finish the game. The writing and cutscene direction are as great as usual.

I got Persona 3 today. I haven't played it yet, but this is the first time I've actually been excited to get a new mainstream / non-independent game in probably three or four years (the last one was when Orchard-L sent me his copy of Fallout 2). I've heard a lot of good things about the game so I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Today hpapillon's game Fatal Hearts is on the Game Giveaway of the Day; it's a nice adventure game that at first glance looks like it's for 11 year old girls but actually has a pretty well-written story, alternate endings, etc., so go try it out if you like adventure games. 10 hours left.

Oh, womanonfire! You should consider putting The Graveyard on Game Giveaway of the Day! It'd be worth it just to see the comments everyone there would post about it.

I think the main developments in games have been technology-driven, and often took about fifteen years to mature after the technology first appeared. The years are estimates and represent the year it started and the year it reached its height, roughly.

1970->1985: Arcade - There were a lot of limitations here. Play time was limited by the desire for more profits (a good game is one that ate up a lot of quarters, which meant limiting an individual's play time). Arcade games reached their golden age about 15 years after they were first introduced, after that nothing substantially new appeared, with the possible exception of games which have special hardware (such as Dance Dance Revolution and games involving a gun or a car's steering wheel or other special equipment).

1980->1995: Home Consoles - Being able to play at home or "own the game" yourself allowed longer games, instead of the average playtime to see everything a game has to offer being less than 5 minutes, it was extended to about half an hour to an hour. This was still short, but this change was the difference between Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros., which was a big jump. It reached its maturity in the latter NES and early SNES era, with games like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Metroid, which were about 15 years after consoles with interchangeable game cartridges first appeared.

1985->2000: Battery-Backup Carts and Hard Drives - Being able to save your game allowed yet longer games that could take hours or days to complete rather than minutes, because you could leave and come back later. This led to RPGs, adventure games, and longish games of all sorts. Before this they had a similar thing with the "password" but that was pretty limited in the amount of data it could save (usually just starting level). This took about 10-15 years to mature after it appeared, and reached its height with the console RPGs of the SNES and PS1 with games like Chrono Trigger and Xenogears, and with PC RPGs like Fallout and Planescape: Torment. This also allowed games about building things, where you could build a city in Sim City and save it and see it again later.

1995->2010: 3D - As much as I dislike most 3D games, 3D allowed many new games to appear which would not work in the same way with 2D, especially games with a first person perspective, and horror games (which would not be scary in the same way in 2D -- you can do "creepy" in 2D, but not "frightening" in the way that Silent Hill is). Emotional expression through body language and facial expressions is also much better in 3D than 2D. I don't think 3D has yet reached maturity because it hasn't even really been 15 years since it started to be used in mainstream games, it's only been 13 years since the PS1. But it's getting there, Ico is probably indicative of what the golden age of 3D will be like when it arrives.

2000->2015: The Modern Internet - Being able to play with many others at once allowed persistent worlds. MMORPGs were the first to take advantage of it but I don't think they are really what it's about; games more like Second Life, which focus on social interactions and trade and economics will likely be where this is headed when it matures.

2005->2020: Non-Programming Environments - The next major jump in technology relevant to games is probably going to be the advent of "game making engines" which require no programming expertise to use, which will take games out of the hands of programmers and into the hands of artists. This is already beginning to happen to a small degree, but it's not until CPU processors improve enough to make interpreted languages run just as fast for most purposes as compiled ones, that we'll begin to see this mature. I expect this will lead to interesting things. Like doctors, programmers may eventually make themselves all but irrelevant and obsolete. In fifteen years I expect most game development teams will have zero programmers, and occasionally you might see a game with a programmer.

2010->2025: Increased Immersion Technologies - I don't mean full "virtual reality" in the sense of a holograms or 3D goggles or simulated pain and simulated smells which make you feel exactly like you're in the game, I mean just minor ways of making you feel like you're in the game, things beyond a monitor, mouse, keyboard, or joystick. The Wii's controller and the DS's touch screen are minor steps in that direction. I'm not exactly sure how this will be done, but I think it will be a middle area between monitor/mouse/keyboard/joystick and virtual reality, and that middle area will last for several decades and allow interesting games. Voice recognition and movement recognition via camera will definitely be a part of it.

2020->2035: Standardized Multiplayer Worlds - I expect that in ten or twenty years we'll begin to see multiplayer worlds which are not games with single owners or developers, but more like worlds, which have a huge array of unconnected developers creating content for it; kind of like a YouTube for multiplayer games. This may sound like Second Life, but I mean something much different, something where any player has their own domain, and within that domain they set the rules, and each player can travel to the domains of other players. The rules would be absolute and unlimited, they'd differ in visual styles, in physics, in what you can and can't do, everything.