video game spaces

In an effort to make my life more like Animal Crossing, today I planted flowers in the front yard!

It’s much more difficult to really plant flowers in my actual front yard than it is to plant them in Animal Crossing. It’s even much harder to water them! I have a watering can (blue, not gold), but it gets heavy when I fill it up, and I have to be careful not to spill the water when I’m carrying it around. It’s not very difficult, but it’s still more difficult than it is in Animal Crossing. Hopefully, these flowers will do well and then I’ll try growing more.

Also, behind this cut, there’s a picture of every animal that’s lived in my Animal Crossing: Wild World town. (more…)

Aether Volume 2, a special issue (which I edited) of a peer-reviewed, online journal of media geography, is out! I had a co-editor, but I was the primary guest editor and also did all of the organizational work. So I am pretty excited to see this project finally finished. It’s a really great collection of articles on the spaces of video gaming and 3-D interactive media. Check it out if you’re interested!

This week, I played a little bit of Secret of Mana, one of my favorite games. It was released in 1993, for the SNES. (more…)

We’ve rented Endless Ocean for the Wii. If you’re not familiar with this game, it’s a scuba diving game in which you explore a small ocean. It’s really open ended. Sometimes the game will suggest a particular location, but you can go somewhere else if you want.

I like that it’s open ended. It requires more involvement in order to enjoy, because you have to make choices and set your own goals, but I like it that way. However, it would be boring if you didn’t manage to involve yourself in the game. I think that it relies a lot on suspension of disbelief. For example, there’s no real danger of, say, being eaten by a huge shark or dying of some other cause. But, on the other hand, it’s still scary to dive deep into a dark hole and find a huge shark at the bottom. But if you didn’t have any suspension of disbelief, that would still be boring, because you wouldn’t find that stimulating, or scary, or cool, or whatever.

Some things like movies or books are also like that, because you also can’t really achieve goals with them, or at least, you have to set your own goals, and they aren’t interactive at all. But, Endless Ocean is still interactive, just not directed. Variety is nice, I guess.

Someone sent me a news article. I found it online in several places, but here’s how it starts.

Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.

That’s sad. Robots are supposed to be designed to be friendly! There have been enough imaginary evil robots already, that we can tell that’s a bad idea.

I’ve played more of Chibi Robo: Park Patrol, and it’s fun, but the controls are awkward. If I play for more than a short period at once, it makes my wrist hurt. This is because you have to hold the DS with you left hand, pressing the directional buttons and the shoulder button while also maintaining a good enough grip to use the stylus, which is also required constantly. It’s an awkward position, and I don’t have particularly large or small hands either. Anyway, I’d like to finish the game, but I refuse to injure my wrist doing it. They should have made it possible to either not use the left side buttons, or to play without the stylus.

Also, someone else I know tried Hotel Dusk: Room 215 that I played before, and also said that the text speed was way too slow (someone in addition to Metaly’s comment). I didn’t particularly mind the text speed (I like to imagine the voices as I read anyway), but I thought I would post that anyway, because it was kind of slow.

I have played a bit of Chibi Robo: Park Patrol. The dialogue and scenario sort of make it sound like it’s for small children, but I find it fun. At least, I enjoy the park simulator aspect of it — earning happy points, spending happy points on park improvements, that stuff. I don’t see why a game like this has combat, though. It would be fine as just a simulation adventure type game without enemies. If they wanted entropy they could have included disease, bad weather, many things that would fit in better with the rest of the game. Hopefully once you complete the main story, you can just finish your park without the enemies interfering.

I seem to have encountered a glitch in Animal Crossing: Wild World that causes the game to freeze when I try to give an animal a gift on their birthday. Then, I have to go through the ridiculous resetti scripts. I could just not give birthday gifts, or I could move on to another game, it has been a long time.

I tried Hotel Dusk: Room 215 recently. I might or might not ever actually finish it, but I did complete the first chapter. It’s fun so far, but it is a lot of text… it makes me wonder if it would be possible to have a non-linear detective game with less text. What does it add that reading a detective book doesn’t? I’m not sure, but maybe I’ll decide later. But, the game is interesting, and I did enjoy making the little girl cry.

I also tried out an iPod Shuffle. I was worried that it would sound really tinny, like the crap they play in grocery stores and places like that, but it actually sounds alright. The bass is clearly audible. It’s much better than I was expecting! But the main thing is that it’s very small and light. I have an iPod, and I use it a lot. I like the full iPod because I like to watch tv shows (typically The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) on the bus (or I did before the writer’s strike), and I often access particular playlists and songs. But, a lot of the time I just want to listen to my main playlist, and not use those other features. A Shuffle might be nice for that purpose, because it is much smaller than the iPod.