Video Games: Star Wars: The Old Republic

Bioware released the first trailer for its upcoming MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic today.
All I can say is WOW. This looks better than Episodes I-III combined.
Many Bothans died to bring you this trailer ...



About the trailer from LucasArts:

The Sacking of Coruscant. It was the crowning achievement of the Sith Empire’s ambitious military strategy and the moment that changed the history of the Old Republic forever. You may have read about it before, but our first cinematic trailer captures this event with breathtaking action and beautiful detail.

Republic leaders have traveled to Alderaan to engage in promised peace talks with the Sith Empire. The most powerful Jedi have accompanied them to safeguard against an Imperial deception. The Empire’s real motive, however, was simply to lure the Republic’s strongest defenders away from Coruscant and set the stage for an audacious attack. Under the command of Lord Angral, the Sith fleet approaches the Republic’s capital planet for the first time in centuries. In advance of the fleet, the strongest Sith Warriors have flown a stolen Republic ship into Coruscant’s orbit. Their mission is critical – to destroy the planet’s defense grid mainframe hidden in the heart of the Jedi Temple.

Video Games: Summer Releases 2009

It's looking like a slow summer for PC gamers.
I guess that's not entirely bad news, since we could, you know, go outside, but I'm still kind of bummed that there's only a handful of games coming out that I could actually give a damn about.
Before you pop in your old copy of Oblivion, however, let's have a look at a few potential mid-year gems:

The Sims 3, June 2 - Can't manage your own life? No problem! Take control of a virtual family and prosper in the third iteration of the best selling PC franchise of all time.

Spore: Galactic Adventures, June 23 - Certain parties would have you believe Spore was EA's biggest letdown of 2008, but the execs certainly aren't viewing it that way. The game's moved more than 3 million copies since its debut and is shaping up to be Electronic Arts' next big serialized cash cow. Remind you of the early days of The Sims, anyone? Let the consumer milking begin!

Street Fighter IV, June 30 - Boasting relatively modest system requirements, the acclaimed console remake of the long established arcade series lets you take control of classic characters such as Ryu and Sakura from the ease of your PC. Online multiplayer will be enabled, but you'll probably have to buy a controller to keep up. Luckily, it appears they will bundle the game with one.

Bionic Commando, July 28 - Another summer CAPCOM release, Bionic Commando updates the classic arcade and NES platformer. It was released today for the Xbox 360 and is getting the so-so reviews thus far.

Wolfenstein, July 28- - Look ma! Another re-make! The sequel to 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein, "Wolfenstein" sends players into the heart of the Reich to investigate evidence of the Nazi's new, mysterious power. Groan. At least the music should be good, composer Bill Brown is working on it.

Tropico 3, August 2009 - Highly anticipated spin-off of the hugely popular politics and city building video game, Tropico. Creators say this rendition will return to the roots of the series, allowing players to take on the role of "El Presidente" and ruthlessly govern over a banana republic.

For more summer releases, bounce on over to IGN.com.

Video Games: Star Wars Mea Culpa on GLBT Filters

Well this is interesting. Seems the honchos over at Bioware are apologizing for their lockdown of a thread discussing homosexuality in their upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The company's original reasoning for locking the thread pretty much falls in line with what I said earlier today (trying to limit hate speech), but I'm happy they decided to re-open discussions on homosexuality on their forums. Cutting it off was just, well, stupid.

Writes Star Wars: The Old Republic community manager Sean Dahlberg:

I would like to personally apologize to "Elikal" and anyone I may have offended. My intention was not to demean anyone but simply to help promote a community that could discuss topics in a mature fashion. When I first built the word filter list, I added a variety of terms to the word filter that have been used numerous times in derogatory messaging. There were some words added to the filter that should not have been – we corrected this today.

I apologize for the confusion that this has created but I would like to be clear that there was never any intent to limit discussion. That said, I have overstepped my boundaries in my original statement and I sincerely apologize for doing so.

Kudos to Bioware for doing the right thing.

Video Games: No Gays in Star Wars

Kotaku reports that BioWare won't allow any LGBT characters in their upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic.
The stated reason: "these are terms that don't exist in Star Wars," according to Bioware's Community Manager Sean Dahlberg, who posted the response on the game's forum, before locking a thread discussing the issue.
Uh ... okay.
As Kotaku's Luke Plunkett writes -- they know that the people buying and playing the game don't actually exist in Star Wars either, right?
That being said, I can see Dahlberg's point of view (however much I may disagree with it).
Star Wars always prided itself on not making light of "controversial" social issues and was always gun shy about dragging out a token LGBT character just to appease the masses screaming for political correctness.
That's all well-and-good in a movie, I guess, but SWTOR isn't a movie. It's a MMO. Ideally, it should be open to reflecting the tastes and lifestyles of people in the real world, right? I mean it is an online community after all ...
Still, Star Wars likes it's squeaky clean image. Filtering out LBGT terms is nothing new for them. For years they've filtered out terms like "gay," "homosexual" and "lesbian" on their community boards.
Is that a little nuts? Well, yeah it is. But you have to look at the opposite side of the coin too. Words like "gay" and "homo" are pretty powerful and, unfortunately, that power can be used negatively. Just jump to any unmoderated forum on the net and it becomes clear in seconds how often these terms are brandished as weapons of hate.
So it's a sticky question of censorship/free speech that a family-oriented piece of media like Star Wars faces. From that perspective, I can kind of see where Dahlberg's coming from - why not just clamp down the whole thing and avoid the whole shitstorm altogether?
Plus -- as I think BioWare is acutely aware -- when SWTOR comes out it's not going to ignore the gay community. The users won't let it. (Remember the whole World of Warcraft gay pride parade in 2006?) Just let the users deal with the whole LGBT issue when the game comes out. Bioware is a company of designers, not social commentators. They are focused on making a game. Whatever people want to do with it from there is their own damn business.
And that's fine.

Music: Daft Punk in Little Big Planet ...

Well, sort of. The Internet's mad geniuses are have officially taken LBP videos to the next level, pumping out this fantastically well done mock up of several Daft Punk hits.

Prediction: While I still don't think any LBP music video can top this classic World of Warcraft vid, LBP videos are probably gonna be the next big thing on YouTube, just sayin'.

Video Games: Mass Effect

I'm hopelessly behind on my video games, so it was with some trepidation that I decided to report how I just got around to finishing Mass Effect (for the PC) this weekend. I know, I know ... I suck.
Anyway, I thought it was a fantastic game. The story was extremely compelling (thanks to Drew Karpyshyn) and I loved the versatility of the combat system.
Fighting in space? Check. Vaporize robots with irradiated buckshot? Check. I mean really, what else do you need?
Personally, I think Mass Effect was the best RPG I've played since Knights of the Old Republic. It had a great story, some outstanding gameplay and the graphics looked spectacular to boot.
One more thing -- the music was phenomenal. It's hard to describe, but I'd say it fell somewhere between 80s synth and freak-out space rock (yeah, I don't know what that means either, but it sounds kickass). The soundtrack is available on iTunes for a measly $9.99 and features over 35 songs.
The theme for Saren and the ending song by the Faunts were my favs.
So I jumped on the Mass Effect wagon pretty late in the game, but if nothing else that should shorten the downtime I have to suffer through until Mass Effect 2 is released in early 2010. Word has it they are planning a trilogy (or perhaps more), so yay!
Check out the recently released Mass Effect 2 trailer below. Enjoy.

INTERNETZ: Confessions of a SWG CSR

This article about some of the odd memories of a Star Wars Galaxies Game Master pretty much speaks for itself, but here are some highlights:

Benny, Are You There? - Shortly after I started, the company started outsourcing to India. Initially the outsourced reps were not allowed to go in game, and were supposed to just escalate those issues to us. But as customer tickets rose, we eventually had to teach them how to handle in game issues. One of their first tasks was to send each other direct in-game messages. This seemed to be going well until the forums lit up like a Christmas tree. Players kept asking “who is benny?” and “Did I unlock my Jedi, my name is Benny!” Unfortunately one of the Indian reps had sent a message to the entire server while trying to send a direct PM. So basically thousands of players saw “Benny, are you there?” flash across their screen. Not a bad first day in-game!

The Key Master Incident - This particular event happened in the Everquest area, before my time. Dealing with irate customers is no picnic, and can send a lot of people over the edge. Long story short, a GM who will go unnamed was at his wits end, and one day he snapped. Going bat shit insane, he grabbed his car keys and started jabbing himself with them in a complete nerd rage. This guy was let go but his story will live on forever. Up until this day, you will see keys taped to a select few monitors in the building. Bad joke, but funny in a dark way.

And my favorite ...

Fight Clubs - Once the Jedi system went live, it caused more than a few issues. Jedi who killed Master Bounty Hunters would gain force rank. This lead to shit loads of Jedi exploiting the Force Rank system to make their Jedi almost untouchable. A group of them would sit on top of a large private building, and take turns killing their Bounty Hunter friends. A doctor would revive the bounty hunter, and the next Jedi would kill him. This pissed me off, but we were told NOT to interfere - it was developments problem, not ours. I didn’t like the idea that this shit was happening right under my nose, so I pretty much tried to slaughter the fight clubs whenever I saw them. First I would surround the building with Dark Jedi Masters, and one by one, I would teleport the exploiters out of the building. Players were smart though. They knew what hours I worked and my days off, and within a week, the servers started to see the highest ranking Jedi, ever.

AMERICA: 20 Most Rabidly Patriotic Games

Linear story lines, killing terrorists, NYC firefighters, guns, liberty, killing JFK, 18 wheels of freedom, killing terrorists, 50 cent ... did we mention killing terrorists?

Check out Gamesradar's list of the 20 most freedom-loving video games in AMERICAN history.

Oh, and @$&% you Osama.

VIDEO GAMES: What goes into writing a good script?

Surprisingly, it's not as easy as you might think.

According to this article, video game writing is an entirely different breed of screenplay -- writers must take into account design limitations, players who simply don't care about story and the inherent problems with linear scripting in an environment controlled entirely by a third party.

Still, as gamers age and demographics shift, the desire for a good story has been a recurring compliant major multimedia corporations such as 2K Games have been forced to stare down.

"Ken Levine, the creative director for Bioshock, said in an interview with MTV, 'Most video game people have read one book and seen one movie in their life, which is Lord of the Rings and Aliens or variations of that. There’s great things in that, but you need some variety.' Unfortunately, the combination of getting the game down on paper and the stereotypical love of pulp science fiction has led to many games telling stories that follow a similar, easily graphed structure. That can work great for simple, by-the-numbers fantasy stories, but it can be tough to get much more depth than that when all you know is science fiction."

Check out this essay from the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) for more fascinating information on how the writer fits into the creative process of game design.