“The Guy Game, The Gathering sued by nubile co-ed”
Originally published December 21, 2004

If you’re a 17 year old girl on Spring break, you probably shouldn’t take your shirt off for some sleezy looking guy roaming the streets with a professional-grade video camera. He might, you know, actually be using it to record you topless. It might show up somewhere, like a trashy video game.

A teenager from Austin, Texas has discovered that she appears - sans shirt - in unlockable prize form, in Topheavy/The Gathering’s for-males-only trivia title The Guy Game, and is suing the pants off of them. Which is totally hot.

The girl, who wasn’t named, is requesting that all copies featuring her be pulled from stores, a judge has granted a temporary restraining order prohibiting people from selling any of the games that used the girl’s image, voice and name, and, somewhere in America, the mere existence of this news story has sold at least one additional copy of The Guy Game.

“Master Chief attacks Hollywood lobbies and reception rooms, sent packing”
Originally published June 07, 2005

What if Master Chief burst into your office angrily waving some papers in your face, and demanded you give him ten million dollars, saying (icily, no doubt) “You have until 5 PM to comply”? You’d probably hand it over and get out of the way quick, before he sworded your face.

Pretty extreme, huh? But now, picture this:

How about if it was some underpaid bike messenger in a Master Chief costume, the papers he was waving around at you were a reportedly lackluster script for a Halo movie, and the ten million dollars was still the payment said costumed out of work actor was demanding in exchange for said weak bullshit script? Yeah you’d probably toss him out on his ass, and want nothing to do with him or his merry band.

Much to their disappointment, the latter situation (rather than the former) plagued Microsoft yesterday, as sizable chunks of Hollywood giggled and looked away in embarrassment at Redmond’s hype-filled ploy to artificially incite a one day bidding war for their Halo script. Penned for $1 million by screenwriter Alex Garland (writer of 28 Days Later and The Beach), Microsoft expected studios to fall over each other and then combust in a flamey pyre of cinematic haggling over their Halo 2 project, going so far as sending script-toting messengers dressed as Master Chief into most major studios, asking for $10 million right off the bat, and demanding an answer by 5 o’clock that night.

Speculating that all the costumed hype was done mostly to distract from, and keep people from reading the script (which is allegedly “not good”), film insider/gossip blog Defamer reported yesterday that things weren’t going as well as MS might have hoped, and this morning Gamespot has reported that while there is some interest (it is a Halo movie after all), New Line and DreamWorks have already passed on the project.

Not the smoothest start for something that is, by definition as a “video game movie,” already poised to flop before it even gets off the ground. In hopes of confirming people’s fears of yet another gold to garbage translation, Kotaku has dished out the rumor that Microsoft wants to rush the film version of their gaming division’s epic crown jewel into theaters as soon as possible, looking for production to be in full swing by September, with a theatrical release slated for next Summer! So, get ready for that.

“Moneygrubbing bankers to game publishers: Don’t be retarded this Christmas”
Originally published July 27, 2004

While that isn’t quite the point they intended to drive home, GameSpy has written a report based on a paper Banc of America released about the games they predict will sink and swim this holiday season and beyond. The report (download a full PDF here) combines B of A analysts with gaming news editors’ opinions and comes off sounding at least vaguely competent. So, um, who’s in their lineup of surefire winnars? The obvious: DOOM 3, Gran Turismo 4, GTA: San Andreas, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, MGS3: Snake Eater and Metroid Prime 2.

Okay, we knew that, but let’s say you’re a publisher and not a single one of those games is yours. What do you do? According to the financial minds at Banc of America, you should do the completely fucking obvious thing that no publisher seems to understand, and avoid Christmas. Again, yes they don’t just come out and say that, but the final page of the report (page 36), the "Suggestions" page, is nothing but a laundry list of games they think need to be pushed beyond the Christmas season to survive.

A word from the oft-burned: If you’re not one of the big boys, just hold your horses. Wait for Little Timmy to get through Return of the King and go shopping for himself with his leftover Christmas cash haul. He just might be excited by things his mom is not. Last year fans of originality wept as Ubisoft’s Beyond Good and Evil and Planet Moon’s Armed & Dangerous were completely destroyed by Christmas, thanks to Moms doing most of the shopping, and clearly passing over the original and less-marketed, instead focusing on the "Holiday Must-Haves" whose ads filled the walls of the store, and whose names filled the (albeit small) game sections of Time and Entertainment Weekly.

Who knows how accurate these guys really are–nobody can truly predict the future, especially in the games industry–but hopefully somebody is paying attention. I’m sick of brilliantly excellent titles getting trampled because someone in Sales decided it would be a "sure thing" during the huge holiday season, only to see said "sure thing" falter at the hands of EA Franchise Game 2004, and subsequently watch that same boneheaded Sales person get themselves off the hook by blaming the failure not on themselves, but on the game they were paid for six months to promote and make a success, and cancel all plans for the sequel.

“‘I got some bad ideas in my head.’ - Or - ‘I Was a 70’s Film License,’ coming to a console near you!”
Originally published February 25, 2005

Forget “the street,” forget your misguided use of “rap/metal fusion,” forget your “stupid cool Hip Hop style with his little hat and his Doc Martens.” Yes forget it all, it’s old news. The VP’s and Producers of the games industry are rapidly discovering that their latest “urban” titles (Read: Games about black people… Omigosh what did I just say?!) just aren’t impressing their other VP and Producer friends like they used to.

What’s that? You got some up and coming b-grade rapper to voice your main character? Bzzt! Old shit, move along! That’s right, if you want to be anybody who’s anybody in the games world today, you’ve gotta have a Scorsese, Coppola, or Clint Eastwood property under your belt. Preferably two.

As we probably all know, in an attempt to compete with Take2/Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, EA announced that they’d be producing a monstrous game based on Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Godfather films. Okay, a bit weird, but you can see where they’re coming from. The thing is, in this lemmings-meet-circle-jerk atmosphere we have going currently in the games industry, it seems everyone is now maniacally intent on jumping aboard what EA’s up to, and licensing the shit out of the 1970’s!

Not only is Warner Bros Interactive working with Clint Eastwood to develop a Dirty Harry game (or is that franchise?), but eager-to-follow Majesco is now rumored to be working on a game based around Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver! Hip-hop? Out. Turning character driven drama and intrigue/borderline art films into derivite Crazy Taxi ripoffs? Clearly the new shit. Who’s willing to take bets on how many more of these we see announced at E3?

Personally, I’m holding out for Michel Ancel’s The Conversation, possibly Apocalypse Now: Source, or Konami’s Saturday Night Fever Stayin’ Alive MAX 3rd Mix. You heard it here first folks, maybe.

“Science world nods head in approval at documented cases of PlayStation Thumb”
Originally published June 24, 2005

13 year old Safura Abdool Karim was recently granted access to the vaulted halls of Science, when her study on the existence of “PlayStation Thumb” (the blistering and tingling of the thumb after excessive gaming) was published by the South Africa Medical Journal. Though she doesn’t own a PlayStation herself (they are a “waste of time” she says), 45 out of 120 friends and classmates she surveyed regularly play games, and presumably some of them got “PlayStation Thumb.”

The effects of Nintendo Thumb, believed to be an earlier strain of PlayStation Thumb, are well documented, but this may be the first research into thumb blistering on the current generation of game consoles — not to mention the current generation of gamers themselves.

In their time, Nintendo Thumb and its partner in crime, the unnamed Sega-related disease where the waterfalls and parallax scrolling in Sonic games “make your eyes go weird,” were two potent excuse-weapons frequently deployed by moms to get their children away from the TV and out into the sun.

The effectiveness of PlayStation Thumb as a fear-inducing threat to get the kids to go play outside remains undocumented.

“Thieving hoodlums thieve hoodlum game”
Originally published October 21, 2004

Developers: Has your unreleased game been stolen yet? If not, you’re clearly not trying hard enough. A pre-release copy of GTA: San Andreas was stolen and put on the Internet in the last couple days, fueling the fires of what is quickly becoming an unintentional but crucial facet in the industry hype game: highly publicized game theft. With mega-hits Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, and San Andreas all being the victims of high profile cyber-crime, other publishers are sure to follow suit. Or not.

“Downloading, possession and distribution of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, including making the game available on the internet, is theft,” said Rockstar Games in a statement. “Reading about (the theft of) our upcoming title on the business pages of your local paper, however, is more than welcome,” they continued in their heads.

Here at the Thumb we don’t advocate piracy of any sort, but we equally discourage brandishing it about for media attention. Rockstar is hoping the gaming community will pass on any information regarding the theft of their title to piracy@rockstargames.com, and in return for any helpful information will gladly charge you $55 for their PS2 exclusive title. “Buy the hype, buy the game, it will probably be good.”

(Bonus note: One day after I wrote this, I was proven correct!)

“Burn the house down, piss out the flames, revel like mad, then wake up, sweaty and crying.
Or: What you kind of suspected all along, only worded well, and from the actual mouths of your favorite games industry folks.”
Originally published March 11, 2005

At the end of this year’s Game Developer Conference, a handful of well known guys and gals of the “Video Game Industry Professional” persuasion were asked to just completely rant like madmen about whatever really chapped their asses regarding the Games Industry. For the packed event, noted GDC celebs Warren Spector, Greg Costikyan, Jason Della Rocca, Brenda Laurel, and Chris Hecker threw their shit-filled, flaming hats into the ring, and the event was MC’d by everyone’s favorite Eric Zimmerman, Eric Zimmerman!

This is a panel I didn’t end up attending this week at GDC, and for that I am a tremendous fool. Fortunately the Internet exists, and offers many a transcript. Here is a very nice one.

Here are some random quotations, for the link-averse:

Greg Costikyan:
My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can’t afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it’s ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of redwood city! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation’s time there are still games to love. You can start today. [standing ovation]

Warren Spector:
We’re the only medium that lacks an alternate distribution system. All we have is boxed games sold at retail. This is changing a little. But think about our competition for your entertainment dollar. First run, broadcast, reruns, DVDs.. you name it. hardback, paperback, e-book. Theatre release, pay-per-view, video, DVD. We put our thing on the shelf at Wal-Mart, it sells or it doesn’t, and OMG you just blew 10m dollars. The publishers not respecting developers, this is not the problem. We have a flawed distribution model. There are very few ways of getting a game done these days. Developers.. why should we get a huge return? We’re taking some of the risk, but the $10m, the marketing space, the retail space all belong to someone else. We have winner-take-all business that carries a lot of risk. So .. we have to find alternative sources of funding. Chris Crawford used to rant about how we need patrons.. I don’t care if it’s wealthy patrons, I don’t care what it IS, but it’s critical that we divorce funding from distribution.

Jason Della Rocca:
We don’t’ care about anything outside of the game industry. There is so much knowledge, research, business models, management practices out there. We don’t pay attention to anything else outside, and that hurts us in many ways! Software development pros tells us we’re fools – there are tons of systems, processes and tools out there that you could use. This pro, he doesn’t make games.. and you all shake your head and say he doesn’t make games, what does he know, but you know – medical applications are pretty unique! If your machine crashes, someone might die. So yeah, we’re unique, but so are they – and there is decades of research and knowledge that proves that these processes have return, this management stuff is in my brain right now, it’s one of millions of examples of how we as an industry don’t pay attention to other stuff just because it’s not called games. This fear of formal processes. We’re creative cowboys - well it holds back the industry. We had several panels throughout the weeks, the academics, the brainiacs are willing to do this stuff for free. Give them a challenge! Give them a problem – some PhD students could research shipping practices or something.

Journalists and the media side is also broken. I don’t want to point a finger, but they perpetuate a lot of myths about what gamers want, and want counts in the industry. So to sum – open up. Don’t be closed minded to all this stuff out there. Maybe we’re all working too hard to take notice, but I guess that’s an issue we’re working on too.

Brenda Laurel:
Games keep essential social myths in place. So we have tropes in our business. Criminals are cool. The commercial game business is a non-consensual relationship between middle aged men and young boys. It’s worse than the catholic church. These are guys who have really big tyres on their trucks … and we all know why! [laughter] So the fantasies of these guys position these boys as tiny little clones: so they force you to take your genius to create this .. this .. we can’t have that fellas. Oh by the way there was a crowd in the ladies bathroom today. w00t!

GTA. I talked to 22 little boys in LA, all of them wanted to see that game. With only one exception, the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren’t interested in stealing cars. Or the criminals. Or the back-story. They weren’t interested in that, they wanted the simulation of driving by the house.

Chris Hecker:
I’m going to rant about How Sony And Microsoft Are About To Screw Your Game Design. Look, how are we going to get where gameplay, graphics and physics are all evenly well balanced? At the moment we’re the 120lb weakling, except nowadays his right arm here, graphics, is enormous.

So, as you know, graphics and physics grind on large homogenous floating point data structures in a very straight-line structured way. Then we have AI and gameplay code. Lots of exceptions, tunable parameters, indirections and often messy. We hate this code, it’s a mess, but this is the code that makes the game DIFFERENT. Here is the terrifying realization about the next generation consoles: I’m about to break a ton of NDAs here, oh well, haha, I never signed them anyway.

Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, which is there to make crappy code run fast. This was really good for the industry when it happened, although it annoyed many assembly language wizards in Sweden. Xenon and Cell are both in-order chips. What does this mean? It’s cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of cores. One out-of-order core is about four times [did I catch that right?Alice] the size of an in-order core. What does this do to our code? It’s great for grinding on floating point, but for anything else it totally sucks. Rumours from people actually working on these chips – straight-line runs 1/3 to 1/10th the performance at the same clock speed. This sucks.

So yeah check that out. Since I didn’t go to the panel, I’m not sure how accurate/complete that transcription is, but what’s there is pretty interesting. If for some reason those are only half of their rants, or lost whole sentences or paragraphs or something, please drop a better link in the comments.

But for now, bask in that craziness for a bit, and then go cry into your pillow for a while. Also, preferably, if you’re a completionist, do it with a printout of any gaming site’s writeup on Spore wedged very firmly up your ass.

That’s it for now. Hope there weren’t too many this time, and sorry for using up all the news posts with pictures in Part One! Posting anything to this blog is quite a treat for me.

“Preview of Quake 4 preview has Internet in a tizzy”
Originally published September 09, 2004

Gamers pay attention: Hot off the presses is the news that sometime in the near future, some news will come hot off the presses. That’s right, the staff of the US version of PC Gamer magazine have let some people know (who aren’t Thumbs) that the upcoming November issue will feature a giant preview of Raven Software’s Quake 4. The Internet is really excited, and fortunately for us, it has already collectively offered its opinions on the preview of the preview (and apparently of the finished game itself as well as the finished version of Half Life 2):

• “Looks quite blatently ’shopped to me. Jaggies on ‘Quake IV’, and also on the header/footer”

• “I bet there won’t be a flashlight at all.”
• “Looks like another SOF 2 clone…”
• “Um, is this the Quake game that runs slow as bitch and we face 1-3 monsters at a time? No thanks, just give me Source, an engine that is perfect is almost every way!”

More updates on Quake 4 will be posted across the entire Internet as the story develops. We’ll probably keep you posted, too. Also, if you want a larger copy of the cover so you can get excited, obsess over it, or speculate whether or not it’s a fake (it’s real), it’s right here.

“Rockstar gets their guy up to six stars, attracts feds”
Originally published July 26, 2005

The eyes of an ever-increasing number of government agencies are turning to Rockstar Games as the ridiculous "Hot Coffee" scandal (sure to be named "Hotgate" or something equally inane by the 2008 presidential election) continues to escalate. Though they first tried to run away (by lying to the press, maybe), the self-branded "controversial publisher" eventually fessed up, admitting to including some uninspiring interactive sex scenes in their recent release, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas — scenes which could only be viewed by users who deliberately modified their copies of the game with the now world-renowned "Hot Coffee Mod" — leading to the ESRB upgrading the game to an "AO" (Adults Only) rating on the parental terror alert scale.

Beware: The US Government and various pundits for some reason think this is hot. They also think it was lied about. But we don’t care about that part.

Now that everything is out in the open, now that most retailers have pulled offending "Hot Coffeable" versions from shelves, and now that Rockstar has publicly stated that they are dealing with it by removing all traces of the already-locked-out, not-tantalizing and maybe-clothed sex minigame from future releases of the disc, the US House of Representitives have decided it’s time to take action. The action taken: at 7 p.m. last night, the House voted 355-21 to advance "House Resolution 376," a resolution urging support for a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

What does that mean? On the surface, surprisingly little. As outspoken ass Jack Thompson told it to Gamespot News, "the resolution does not have the binding effect of law; it simply expresses the overwhelming sentiment of the House of Representatives that the Federal Trade Commission should investigate the matter fully." It gets trickier though, because Thompson continued talking: "I have spoken with leaders on the Hill on all this, and you can look for Congressional hearings on this in the fall."

Whoa. Do Jack Thompson and the feds know something we don’t? What greasy, bulging, unruptured secrets lie in the heart of Rockstar, begging for a federal subpoena? What sort of itchy filth could the Most Scandalous Video Game Publisher In The World have laying about in their Outlook Archive folders, waiting to be leaked?

And how many "Hot Coffees" are there, really? Do the inner halls of Rockstar HQ hold undiscovered Hot Coffee Mods dating back from a pixely Hot Coffee Lemmings all the way up to an in-development Hot Coffee Mod for the oh-so-tantalizing British schoolchildren of Bully? These are the sorts of things that keep Thompson up at night (with a bottle of hand lotion at arm’s reach).

Could these images be indicative of an as-of-yet undiscovered vehicular Hot Coffee Mod hidden within Rockstar’s 2000 release Smuggler’s Run?

As the situation stands now, though, things are more ridiculous than they are perilous, and despite whining, the game continues to be readily available for purchase, thanks to the Internet being vast and full of perverts eager to foist jerky polygonal sex on the fresh, pink youth of America.

“California youth malevolence, plastic gun waggling curbed thanks to ‘ultra-violent’ game restriction”
Originally published May 8, 2005

After years of debate on the subject, California has finally decided to legally limit access to "ultra-violent" video games for kids under 17 years old. Specifically, if you’re 16 years or younger, any game that depicts "serious injury to human beings in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel" is now legally off limits until you ask your mom for it while wandering Toys R Us, or have your older brother buy it for you while you’re standing there at the counter handing him your allowance money.

Aside from the obvious reason that "ultra-violent" games, by default, transform children into murderous raping hate-droids, Jim Steyer, Founder of Common Sense Media, adds that "the health threat involved with kids playing such games is equivalent to smoking cigarettes." Clearly time for legal intervention. Not enough? California Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Leland Yee also wants to remind parents that violent games actively promote "assassinating President Kennedy."

Fortunately, for parents still in the dark, the California State Assembly has provided a picture of a typical, violent game-addled youth. Beware:

That kid will fucking shoot you, due to his training as a player of ultra-violent video games. No bike helmet can withstand the fury he is about to unleash. No amount of glaring sun in the eyes will delay his game-induced malice.

“Nintendo DS able to do 8 billion things”
Originally published October 07, 2004

Apparently in the eyes of Nintendo, two screens, a touch censor and pen, a microphone and voice over IP does not a full feature set make. At a press conference today, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata elaborated on the wireless features of the DS, sneaking in some stuff people hadn’t really heard about before.

Unlike the recent lame wireless adapter for the GBA which — despite hopes of freeing the world of link cables — in fact does nothing, it appears the wireless capabilities of the DS do, well, everything.

“The DS’s wireless connection isn’t just a substitute for the link cable that was used on the Game Boy. The DS has wireless download capability, which allows it to receive a program and to execute it. With it, people can play games together using only one cartridge,”said Iwata. According to Gamespot, my sole source for this news update, Iwata cited Mario64 DS’s ability to handle 4 player wireless play from just one cart as a predictable, but awesome, example.

The good bit is this bit: “Although this won’t be available at launch, we’re thinking of using the wireless download function to change the way in which people try out upcoming games at retail outlets,” said the Iwata, “We’re thinking of a system where people can download a demo program, with a time or a usage limit, to their own DS. We hope that this system will allow new potential hits to be recognized by everyone, and that it will help to buck the trend where only sequels are hitting the sales charts.”

For the purposes of differing my report from Gamespot’s, I’m also going to claim that Iwata then demonstrated some sort of crazy pneumatic robot arm attachment for the DS, enabling public breakdancing functionality.

“Next-Gen Madden to feature hideous, rubber masks”
Originally published April 18, 2005

Holy fucking shit. Hide your children!

Since apparently I can’t resist, I’ll be dumping more of this on both of you guys in the next couple days. Get ready! Context, the passage of time, and perceived lack of interest even on my own part be damned.