Toronto Thumbs

The Star Wars Kid in Me is Happy, Sad

Used to be I’d buy a Nintendo system just because there was a must-have Star Wars game for it. Super Nintendo had Super Star Wars. N64 had Shadows of the Empire. GameCube had Rogue Leader.

Wii? It has Star Wars Lego. I already have that on the GameCube and the DS (worst game purchase decision ever, as it’s a buggy piece of crap).

Being a Star Wars nerd through and through, I was of course very excited about the Wii’s motion controls being used for an awesome Star Wars duelling game – and we’re getting that, sorta, with the upcoming Clone Wars game. But wait! Just a day before showing off that game at E3, Nintendo announced Wii MotionPlus, which is a little dongle for the Wii Remote which will allegedly give the controller true 1:1 motion controls.

Me? I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m still a little stung from… oh, every third party Wii game having faulty controls that work properly half the time. Luckily some games have given the option of other controller support or they would have been a total lost cause (Mortal Kombat Armageddon, I’m looking at you).

Now the whole downside to Wii MotionPlus is that it likely won’t be used for this upcoming Clone Wars game! But is it really that big of a deal when I can just play Jedi Academy multiplayer over and over again without the fear of breaking all the lamps in my house? I guess not.

I mean, how stupid would LucasArts have to be to NOT publish a 1:1 lightsabre-heavy Star Wars game?

Posted in Editorial | 4 Comments »

The CON/text
Plague Dogs, Paper Gods, and Game Blogs for Dialogue

Growing up with the intention of writing blighted me with a severe tunnel vision for many years.

Even while struggling against the traditional path, I subscribed to some part of it. The idea of furthering education, of developing a sense of voice and style, and of cultivating a self loathing to the question of what it was I planned to do with my life, all of this seemed necessary if I was going to create a great work of fiction.

Today’s minor dose of “Know Your Jamie” is where I detail that intention: I desired only to write fiction if there was a way to augment style and narrative to create a work that felt new, or at the very least presented new challenges. Which is a fancy way of saying, I certainly did not want to write the same story someone else wrote but with new character names.

And that’s a very hard thing to do. My best advice to the aspiring writer is to try to lean heavily on the slipstream. But since I’m not on the best-sellers list, feel free to ignore my advice altogether.

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The CON/text
Should We Miss Sega?

On March 16 2001, Sega Corporation Chairman Isao Okawa died of heart failure at a Tokyo hospital. Even for long-time gamers the name may not be familiar, but Okawa was the founder of CSK, the conglomerate that bought Sega in 1984 while the gaming industry sought to emerge from the American video game crash. Okawa was deeply committed to the success of Sega, the Dreamcast console becoming his personal crusade in the then-battle to take back market dominance from Sony’s Playstation. The massive finances Sega required to launch the Dreamcast not only came from CSK, but also nearly half came from Okawa himself. Even after the demise of the Dreamcast and during Sega’s switch from console manufacturer to third party developer, Okawa donated shares of the company back to Sega to help create the cushion for the transition.

Though the primary concern for men of business is exponential growth, under Okawa’s leadership Sega became, and remains in many gamers minds the most striking example of a company committed to the risks of innovation. The consensus today is that this very spirit of creativity is what would ultimately stretch the company too thin and cause later disasters, and yet for all the market failures there were just as many memorable successes. Sega was a company always moving toward the future at a heightened pace, with innovation seen as the key to overcoming their competition. The true lament of his death is the loss of a figure that could hold a company together through such upheaval while maintaining creativity in an industry where management teams threaten to outnumber designers and artists.

Following Okawa’s death, CSK quickly sought to sell Sega, romancing companies such as Namco, Bandai, Electronic Arts, and Microsoft. But it was Sammy Corp that purchased the majority shares, allowing Hajime Satomi to become CEO of the new Sega-Sammy Holdings in October of 2004. And that event led to the subsequent reorganization of the company that helped destroy one of the most creative environments the game industry has ever known.

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Posted in Editorial, The CON/text | 2 Comments »

I believe the hype
Coming to terms with my video game addiction

I always excited about video games being on sale. Heck, they often don’t even have to be on sale. They can just be for sale – regular priced. I just like looking at them in stores. Earlier today, I had no clue why. But I’ve been thinking about it for a few hours now, and like an episode of The X-Files, my conclusions only raise more questions. It’s interesting.

I’ve been gaming for as long as I could remember. And for as long as I could remember, I owned cartridge-based video game systems. These systems had high-priced games and this was normal. In fact, as a high school student with no job and no source of income save for a $10/week allowance, I somehow saved up enough to buy Killer Instinct for the Super Nintendo the day it was released.

At the time, the game was $100, not including taxes. The day I bought it is one I’ll never forget. Adam Russell (infrequent writer but stellar Thumbscaster) and I used to live on the same street with just few houses between ours. We’d hang out a lot and even spend much of our time at local arcades playing either Killer Instinct or Mortal Kombat 2. When Killer Instinct was making its console debut, Adam and I were ecstatic.

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Posted in Editorial | 2 Comments »

Labelling the Toronto Gamer

What does it mean to be a Canadian gamer, let alone a Toronto gamer?

When Shaun asked me to write for Toronto Thumbs, I started thinking on what I could possibly write about. Sure, I live here and I have fancy electronic toys, but what identifies me to the Toronto gaming niche other than those facts?

When I think of what it means to be classified a “gamer,” I think about “indoor” gaming with buddies at my house, with pops in the fridge and fresh pizza crumbs waiting to pounce on my stainless new controllers. I think about spending months waiting for new maps for my favourite MMORPG, and a week of exploration with a familiar party before it has become old news again. I think about long summers and nights spent after work playing the latest Zelda game.

“Just one more dungeon!” was the line, but the writers were just too good for me. Their stories were always so intriguing, the characters too real, that if I went to bed, the princess might be in another castle. Maybe for some people gaming can be classified as an addiction, but for me, I think it’s the empathy I have towards stories, friendly rivalry and new levels of creativity that have made me into a gamer. Aren’t these scenarios most gamers can relate to, regardless of whether they are Canadian or not?

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Posted in Canada, Editorial, News | 3 Comments »

Bust the Casual and Hardcore Myth
The Words Don’t Mean What You Think

Ever since the Wii made its debut in November 2006, a great artificial divide between gamers was brought to the forefront of game media. On one side of the fence, we had a camp called “Hardcore” or even “Core” gamers. The people on the other side were labelled “Casual” gamers.

But what does that even mean? It’s been cause for much debate and brouhaha. And for what? So snobs (aka the hardcore camp) can feel good about themselves while putting down the “Casual” audience, of course! Every form of entertainment has its fans who are snobs, and gaming is no exception.

What’s interesting (read: lame) about the Hardcore versus Casual split is that there’s no real, universally-accepted definition of what constitutes each side. In fact, it’s just a bunch of bullshit. Despite the lack of a concrete definition of the two sides, I’ve observed that a vague one seems to exist for each. They are:

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Want to be a Jedi? Play Force Mod

I’ve always been a huge fan of Star Wars and by default, Star Wars games. Although they haven’t always been the most enjoyable, there was always just a certain something about playing a new Star Wars game that excited me. I even played through the horrendously bad Yoda Stories on my Game Boy Color back in the day.

Yesterday we recorded a new Thumbscast which will be posted online shortly. Without getting into the details of what we discussed too much, one of the topics touched upon was the LucasArts layoffs and what that meant for Star Wars video games.

Right now, there’s isn’t much on the horizon for the franchise in terms of its exploitation via the medium of video games. Yes, there is The Force Unleashed. And yes, it has fanboys the world over crossing their legs and crapping their pants in anticipation. Recently revealed screenshots of even the under-powered Wii version look great. Everyone seems to be excited about the prospect of using the Wii Remote to dole out Force punishment and participate in lightsabre battles.

Hrm. Sounds familiar to me. Yes, I think it’s coming back to me now. Wasn’t there already a game just like this, whose multiplayer mode was indeed a balls-out Jedi vs Jedi vs Sith vs Sith assault? Yeah, there was. It was called Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, which was available on Windows, Mac, and Xbox. There was a trivial single-player mission where you learn about Jedi-like stuff but really I couldn’t care less for that. It was all about multiplayer mode.

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Posted in Editorial, PC | 1 Comment »

Activision to Sponsor Consumer IQ Test This June

I generally prefer to write about games I’m excited over, but with the launch date approaching I couldn’t let this one slip by. Activision’s newest entry into the Guitar Hero franchise, Guitar Hero On Tour is set to ship in late June with its four fret adaptor for your Game Boy Advance slot and a guitar pick stylus that promises to separate fans of Rock Band versus Guitar Hero even further.

A helpful “How-To” video has surfaced to walk gamers through the intricacies of strapping the DS to their left hand while strumming the touch screen with their right. While the two player battle mode made sense and worked with the DS the entire concept still left me feeling like the protagonist in a Philip K. Dick story. You know, the one where the guy sees the dead body hanging in the street but everyone else ignores it? The Hanging Stranger! It’s seriously a great read. You could easily get through it on a bus ride while the guy next to you tries to play this game before his hand suffers a horrible hand cramp that leaves him a disfigured outcast.

Regardless of which camp you fall into, it’s impossible to ignore the idea that the entire concept for this genre was in creating a genuine rock experience via the instruments. So it’s hard to see this release as anything other than yet another publisher attempting to cash in on Nintendo’s hardware sales with software less designed around what the DS could achieve as much as cramming a popular franchise into a handheld already plagued by shovelware.

Posted in DS, Editorial | No Comments »