Okay so, if you read my previous post on this issue, you will have seen that I wrote of Roger Ebert’s comment about video games never being able to be considered an art form. I’ll sum it up here again, though. Ebert stated that due to the players choices necessary in a video game, it could never be considered art in the same way film or literature can. Oh and instillation art doesn’t count as art, either, by that understanding, but anyway.

This really irritated many gamers, and, quite rightly, Ebert has been inundated with requests to reconsider his opinion. He hadn’t written on the topic since he wrote his original comment, until now! A game designer and producer, Kellee Santiago, gave a TED talk at USC recently, and referenced Mr Ebert’s comments. She then spoke of amazing games like Braid, Waco Resurrection, and Flower and basically showed how each of these games could be considered art based upon their individual style and impact. I’ve not actually played Waco Resurrection or Flower, but the latter is one that my SO really wants to play.

Ebert wrote a short essay as a rebuttal to Santiago and as a confirmation of his previous statement in response. This then lead IGN writer, Mike Tomsen to write a rebuttal to Ebert, and that’s where I started reading. I agree with so much of what Tomsen had to say in his piece titled, Dad is Dead: Rebutting Roger Ebert – poorly named in my opinion as it doesn’t make sense and Ebert is currently fighting cancer, but anyway.

It was so heartening to see not one but two cogent and intelligent arguments put forth about this topic. Ebert asked in his essay why gamers care that video games be considered art, and to that I had my own response. Because it’s tiring seeing a medium which can be so evocative, emotive, inspiring, and far reaching be diminished by such ridiculous claims by ignorant people. Ebert pans Braid, and the other two games with it, when he’s never even played them. I felt insensed by that, because when I played Braid, I found it a touching and thoughtful game that deviated greatly from the norm. It was intriguing and, quite honestly, beautiful. Want to know what Ebert had to say about the storyline of Braid, which was told between the levels? He said that it “exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie”.

I’m astounded that an actual critic would be so callous and dismissive. I found that particular line in his essay to be both grubby and snot-nosedly imperious all at the same time. But anyway, back to my original premise here.

In my opinion, the gaming world needs to stop looking to critics who’ve no idea of video games for validation. There are video games that do deserve validation, praise, and to be considered works of art, but if a critic doesn’t even understand how to play a video game, how is he ever going to be able to comprehend the full package? I think it would be great to see critics cross the boundaries of film and gaming, and I hope to see it in the near future, but I think Ebert is not that critic, and I think he’s just proven once again how ignorant of gaming he truly is. He’s got films down, but games? He’s just not there at all.

So the handsets are fine, except that they are running out of power because the base stopped working. Yep, the rather necessary base part which charges the hand set and does all the important stuff like actually being hooked up to my modem, well that part died on the weekend for no apparent reason, which is rather annoying. I’ll go and buy a new one, because I don’t want to wait the time it takes to send the phones back to the manufacturer, wait for them to get to them, then repair or replace them, then send them to me. I kind of need a phone now, and I’d already given my old one away.

So anyway, back to searching telephones online. I suppose this is the only downside with not going through a company like BT who’d supply me with one, but at least I get better rates on everything with my non-phone supplying company. I really do like my UK ISP as the rates are quite good compared to many ISPs in other countries. There’s lot of places for business broadband and ADSL lease lines these days, but I like the one I’ve got.

The digital dect cordless phones look alright, but I’ll be reading a lot of user reviews on tech sites before I choose, to find one that’s not going to break down.

I’m always very thankful at this point that at least if I have to shop for new phone, I can check out online reviews and such before I do go and buy one. I don’t mind shopping for tech in person, but it’s much better to go armed with information. I wonder if there’s poor reviews for the phones I bought or if they are merely an exception to the general quality of the phones, because I really thought they were alright…

Well right off the bat you’ve got the release of the Playstation 2 in 2000. This was a huge deal, sold really well, and made DVDs more accessible than ever before for your average household, as the price was better than pretty much any good DVD player out at the time. ‘01 saw the release of both the GameCubeand the Xbox, with Xbox Live launching a year later. In the next few years there were major buy-outs and take over bids, with Microsoft buying Rare, and EA trying to buy out Ubisoft.

The seventh generation of gaming consoles was birthed with the release of the Xbox 360 in ‘05 whilst the Wii and Playstation 3 launched about a year later. The next two years saw dominance by Wii over the gaming market, outselling their rival consoles, but it seems apparent to me that that’s largely due to the reduced price of console and games from Nintendo because of it’s lesser technology.

IGN had the view point that the 00’s made the gaming industry, but it really seems to me that that had already happened in the 90’s, a view which many gamers agree with. The consoles in this seventh generation all seemed to have big issues, whereas the previous generation of the 90’s seemed to have less issues in spite of their lesser capabilities.

So, wrapping up my review of gamer history… It’s amazing to think that we’ve got high definition, motion sensors, and online capabilities, when we came from code being developed on mainframes the size of a room and 8-bit cartridges. I think that gaming is slowly finding it’s footing with entertainment mediums like film and television, and will continue to do so. I’m also hoping that with the visuals of games becoming more and more advanced, so too with story lines and plots development. I think the only thing lacking in gaming is high quality writing on a consistent basis.

The 90’s is an era of growing up in my mind, as that was what I was doing throughout that decade, and so was gaming. At the dawn of the 90’s, gamers were still using 8-bit games with 16-bit pixels. Those graphics aren’t completely terrible, heck, I’d play Legend of Zelda right now if I could find an emulator that didn’t make a very annoying sound every time I moved Link. However the 90’s saw an amazing transition from the NES era of gaming through to the Nintendo 64, the Playstation, and SEGA’s Dreamcast. The 90’s ushered gamers from the cartridge era into the compact disc, and all the data that could be stored on it!

In ‘90 and ‘91 Super Mario Bros. 3 and Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past came out on the SNES respectively, two games which made the console what it was in my mind. Those are still games that I’d happily play today, though I may get bored after a short while and go play something else, but that’s largely because I’ve played both those games so much in the past.

‘95 saw the very first E3 in LA, which has helped enormously to establish gaming as a separate entity from ‘electronics’ at large. ‘95 was also the year which saw the Playstation hit North America, the very first gaming console to use CDs instead of cartridges. The next year the Nintendo 64 shipped with Super Mario 64, one of the best games of all time and a pure joy for gamers to try out with a brand new console. The Playstation was the first console to employ both the analogue and digital controls, however it’s widely acknowledged that Nintendo implemented it better with a more comfortable controller. I’m always amazed that Sony still uses the same damn controller, considering it’s not particularly comfortable.

In ‘98 Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time shipped, much to my happiness. That was a wonderful game, and also in the same year Half Life shipped for the PC, another fantastic game.

Whilst the debate still rages – mostly by idiots if you ask me – as to the validity of games as a worthy entertainment medium, and not something that will ‘make the children violent’ the 90’s was when this debate was most fierce. I think because there wasn’t the evidence that we have now that there’s no correlation, just a whole bunch of overreacting ninnies. However it was also the decade where gaming really did establish itself as more than ‘toys for children’, so it’s a very interesting decade in gaming.

Oh, and Superman 64 was the worst game of the entire decade.

The 80’s were a very mixed bag for the gaming industry. From the boom of the 70’s, the very beginning of the 80’s seemed set for gaming to remain a huge phenomenon. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong are remembered very fondly today, and were gaming sensations, and the very first time we saw Mario!

However, in ‘83 and ‘84 the gaming industry in the US blew itself to pieces, because there were so many poor quality games being put out for too many different consoles that gamers just gave in and stopped buying. This was before there were serious hardcore gamers like there are today, and also before there was the kind of information or access to information that we have today. There wasn’t a dozen sites on the net to tell you what to expect with a game, or three different magazines for each console and the PC waiting near the supermarket check out to give you that same info. No, this was when gamers had to figure it out for themselves, mostly.

So, what happened to turn gaming ’round? NINTENDO!!! The Japanese company Nintendo took a chance in ‘85 and shipped the Nintendo Entertainment System – NES – to America with the first Super Mario Bros., and behold, the gaming industry took off again! Two years later saw the very first emergence of Link and Zelda, one of my all time favourite game series.

In ‘88 SEGA released the Master System, which whilst being pretty groovy and actually being more powerful than the NES, but even with a few really good games, it couldn’t compete with the runaway success of Nintendo’s console and handheld.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I’ve just read about Atari’s Swordquest contest, and I have to say, it would be pretty awesome to see something like that run today!

So, I’ll give a brief run down of what is in this news story here that I found via a link on the Penny Arcade news section. Basically, there was once a little drug dealer from America, who was arrested on dealing many types of drugs. This little drug dealer decided that, when the arrest warrant went out for him in 2007, he’d rather not go to court and maybe prison, so decided to skip the country.

This little drug dealer had had friends in his home town, somewhere in Howard County, and he had told them that he liked to play WoW. When the sheriff from that good ol’ county started asking those friends about the little drug dealer, they informed him of his predilection for that stupid game, well, they thought why not send a missive from the king – read, a subpoena – to the caretakers of the land of Warcraft. The sheriff waited and waited, for three or four months, before a wad of scrolls was sent back to him. A package of information about that little drug dealer, what his billing address was, his favourite server, and his character’s names. Funnily enough, he played as a Shaman, not terribly dissimilar from is apothecarish tendencies in real life.

Okay now I’ll drop that pathetically fractured story-teller style and deal with the rest of it. So, after they got all this information from Blizzard, sheriffs at the Howard County used the information to figure out that their quarry had gone to Canada and then enlisted the aid of the Canadian Mounted Police, who picked up the dealer and shipped him back to the states.

This is something that’s not been done before, but it’s very interesting. Personally, I think that everything that was done was completely above board, completely reasonable, and if some scum bag drug dealer get to go to prison as a result, then booyah!

Okay, okay, so the whole thing seems like a bit of a pie-in-the-sky pipe-dream, but it’s interesting as a future possibility. Basically, a company called Emotiv has created something called the EPOC, which is a headset with sensors that pick up facial movements, emotions, and thoughts, and allows you to control certain applications without the use of a keyboard or mouse. Pretty impressive, eh? They’ve got their own software to help you use the EPOC in lieu of a keyboard, by translating movements or thoughts into certain key-commands or combinations.

Basically, this seems like a very expensive, and largely useless, toy. It’s hard to imagine this being used for gaming, or even general computer use. Whilst it would be awesome to have certain abilities in games triggered by thought, eliminating issues like not enough hot-bar space – yes I’m referring to you, Dragon Age – this gadget seems to… how do I put this… be sold as a lot more than it really is.

During one of the demos, they show that emotion can effect colour and music… I’m sorry, but if I’m upset by my game, frustrated at a particularly difficult encounter for instance, the last bloody thing I want is my gamma brought so far down that not only am I fighting for my life, I’m fighting to see. Of course, this would make me angry, which would probably cause a grand crescendo in the music, just the thing a frustrated, gamma blinded, angry gamer needs! See my dripping sarcasm there? That’s inhibited by my choice to keep this blog profanity free; keep that in mind.

Another demo showed someone using blinks and smiles set up to turn a little side-module, a laser. What if you just wanted to blink, or something made you smile? This who apparatus seems fraught with issue after issue, and apart from a few neat tricks, seems completely useless, and most assuredly not worth the US$299 that it’s retailing at, though of course you have to buy online from the Emotiv sight, too.

I can’t remember exactly when I first became interested in cryptids, but I know I have been for some time. I love looking at the folklore stories, and how people still believe in these creatures today. Some of them seem more plausible than others, I’ll grant you that, and some are real unexplained phenomena, like the Bloop.

The Bloop is one of my current favourite cryptids, because there is actual evidence backing it up. We’ve got the ‘what’ in this case, but not the ‘how’ or ‘who’. You see, The Bloop is the name given to a sound picked up a few times by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who use equipment that was originally designed to keep tabs on that part of the ocean in case of Soviet Subs. They aren’t listening for subs, anymore, and are instead using the equipment to evaluate marine health, oceanic weather, and general atmospheric conditions out there.

They’ve often picked up strange and – in my opinion – ominous sounds, most of which can be explained by ocean currents, volcanic activity , or the movement of Antarctic ice, but The Bloop doesn’t conform to any of these. It’s the odd sound out.

The Bloop’s sound profile suggests that it comes from a living organism. The sound was heard on multiple underwater listening devices, called hydrophones, about 5,000kms apart. Even a Blue Whale can’t manage that, the creature creating The Bloop would have to be much, much bigger.

Some people have speculated that a Giant Squid could be behind the sound, however that’s extremely unlikely because, according to Phil Lobel, a marine biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, US they don’t have the giant gas filled sac that would be necessary for such a noise. He says it’s impossible to be certain at this point, because no Giant Squid has ever been caught alive, though Whales have been seen with tentacle ring marks on their bodies, but he believes it’s not the sound of the giant cephalopod.

Anyway, that’s a mystery I hope to see solved one day.

Today I went out food shopping, a very annoying task, I assure you. Wandering through the super market aimlessly is not my style, so it’s really annoying to be stuck halfway down an aisle behind just such a shopper. I calmly went about doing my thing, hoping this lady in front of me would hurry up, but no, it was like she was trying to win a race for being as slow as possible whilst still moving…

Anyway, by the time I got home, I was in such a foul mood, that I knew something must be done. But I didn’t know what… then I found that my SO had just run me a bath, with bubbles and the whirlpool jets going already, too. I was enormously thankful, and went into the lusciously steamy bathroom and sat in the nice hot bath. When I’m doing this my SO likes to sit and hang out and talk to me, it takes the experience from really good to oh I really love, love, love, this!

It’s amazing to me how something so very simple can really turn your mood around, to go from frustrated and surly to calm and pleasant in the span of half an hour is quite remarkable. When that bath is soon followed up by an extremely lovely slow-cooked stew with crusty bread, well, then I’m positively joyful.

I’m now full, warm, and pretty much ready to sleep. What a great feeling! I’m not the best sleeper, to be honest, so when I actually feel sleepy its a very pleasant experience… now to just slowly wander about locking up and turning off all the lights and I’m off to bed for a good ol’ sleep. Ahhh, the good things in life!

It’s been really busy in the past few weeks, my SO has still been suffering with that back pain – and being really strong and soldering on, in spite of what is agony almost every morning for her – so we’ve been getting very little or disjointed sleep. She’s been able to manage about five to six hours most nights, and we’ve taken to napping in the afternoons a lot of the time, too. We know what’s going on, and it’s just a matter of her strengthening her back, at this stage, but apart from that, there’s not much to be done. Hot showers and a back massage seem to help a little, relaxing those muscles. It’s just a pity that she’s better at massages than me.

Work has been hectic, but being able to work from home has been a Godsend with my SO so under the weather. I can make sure that she’s well taken care of, and still get all my work done, no matter what time I’m awake or asleep. I’m really enjoying working from home, and no longer having to commute to work has been fantastic! I’ve gotten an hour or two extra in every day!

All my financial interests have largely been put on hold. I’m still keeping watch on all those investments and offshore financial services, which seem to have some alright rates at the moment, but I think I’ve decided against investing in international real estate. I just don’t want the trouble that could come of it, I mean, invest in Panama real estate, for example… Nah, not for me. I would hardly ever see the place!

Anyway, that’s an odds and ends post there, now hopefully they can be a little better put together!