iDallas!

I play video games and I have fun doing it, but I want them to be better.  I find myself getting bored of most games far before I get anywhere near completing them.  I see people talk about games having “a great story”, but I’ve never found any game’s story to be even as interesting as a mediocre movie, let alone a great movie or book.  The story has never been good enough to motivate me to churn through the tedium that every game inevitably throws at you to fill itself out.  I think that’s done by game developers because gamers always complain when a game is too short.  I’ve never found that to be a problem, though… I don’t finish any games, so in my opinion most of them are far too long!

Another problem with games today is ‘sequel-itis’.  Game makers are worse than the worst filmmakers about milking a successful ‘franchise’.  I loved Guitar Hero and played it for hours on end, and then I loved Guitar Hero 2 even more.. but I found myself playing Guitar Hero 3 mostly just to unlock all the songs.  I think Guitar Hero 3 is a superior game to its two predecessors, but the concept is already feeling tired to me.  Rock Band was so popular mostly because it took the next step and added an extra layer of group fun, and the ability to play drums and guitar is definitely pretty great.  Despite that, though, I found myself tiring of the game pretty quickly.  They keep releasing new for-pay songs you can download which should keep the game fresh, but I just find that I never really play it any more.  Rock Band IS a great party game, and playing it with a big group of people is some of the most fun I’ve ever had in front of a television, but it just doesn’t have the same appeal when I’m playing on my own.  The newness is gone, and without that there’s just not enough left to keep me interested.  Grand Theft Auto IV had the same problem for me.  It looked pretty, but I felt like I was just pretty much playing the same game I had burned myself out on several years earlier with Grand Theft Auto III.  Give me something new!

Here’s what I think would make games more fun for me…  Game studios should bring in the same level of writing talent as they do programming, design, voice, and graphics talent, and they should release games in smaller, lower-cost (both for them and for us), episode-like chunks.  The very best game developers should still be making full-length games of very high quality, but most game developers do not fall into that category.  Most game developers are really making TV-quality content while they’re trying to convince us it’s high-class film-quality content.  Game studios should also stop killing their best ideas by sequeling them to death.  That probably makes more money in the short-term but it’s just turning off many would-be gamers and ultimately restricting the development of the audience for the game industry.

I know I’m not the only one thinking this, and I think there’s already a movement towards my suggestions (as if anyone in the game industry really cares what I think, haha) so hope is not lost!  The smaller, cheaper, downloadable games on the Xbox Live Arcade, the Playstation 3, and more recently the Wii are breathing new life into gaming.  The games are not all great (few of them are, actually), but they’re small enough in scope that a lot of new ideas are being put into them and some of them are worth paying for just for that.  The episodic concept is being put to the test with games like the Penny Arcade one, too.  I still didn’t finish that one, but I think I got probably 3/4 the way through it, which is something for me!

I bet the people making the games don’t really care too much about what I have to think, but I feel better to have that off my chest anyway.

I want a personal audio cloud so I can have music surrounding me all the time.  People within 3 feet of me would also hear the music so we could listen together.  It wouldn’t emanate from me, but would just be around me in this cloud so my companions would hear it as the same volume as I do.  People farther away would not hear it at all so it wouldn’t bother them.  It would also have an option to let other people relay the cloud so anyone within 3 feet of them would also hear it.  That way a larger group of people could all hear the same music.  This would be awesome for things like bike riding in the city where you don’t want to wear headphones that obstruct your hearing.  It would also be awesome for hiking.

My wife has a baby on the way and we’ve been attending some baby related classes to prepare ourselves a little bit mentally. The class we are in now is about the birthing process and we have heard about a number of techniques, both medical and otherwise, to make the experience more comfortable for the woman. The thing that keeps striking me as so curious is how most of the most up to date “best practices” essentially equate to just letting nature take its course and doing things the way people have done them for hundreds of years. The really curious part is that these are generally cutting edge or progressive ideas about childbirth among the U.S. medical community and are not even widely practiced yet.  How did things get so turned around such that doing things naturally is somehow progressive?

Since we last spoke I’ve spent about 4 weeks on a jury, among other things.  The jury was a great experience, even if it was tedious at times (man, the wheels of justice do turn slowly, don’t they?), and I wish people wouldn’t try so hard to get out of jury duty.  You just don’t get experiences like that every day.

I also got a new camera to play with… a Canon G9.  The official reason for the new camera is to take lots of obligatory pictures of the new baby when he arrives, but in the meantime it’s just a new toy.  The picture above is my favorite one so far.  It’s the “look I got a new camera and I went into my garden” type of picture you see all over but I like it anyway.