I’d like to weigh in on two new releases today. One of them I got to play during my visit via Shaggy at Uberfriendship to Oddly studios the other night, where I met some especially cool people. We ended up playing Duke Nukem Forever for a bit — I probably had the controller in my hands all of a half hour before casting it off, adrift like an unwanted child of ancient myth — and I can’t help but feel like Gearbox and everyone involved had wasted millions of dollars.

Duke, I don’t know if you deserve better, but your audience certainly does. This was, as one of the folks at Oddly put it, “a 12 year old game”. It shows, and it’s not pretty. These are some of the stiffest controls I’ve ever had to deal with, and the constant shaking of the camera gave me a severe headache. Beyond that, the inability to pick up more than two weapons seems to describe a misunderstanding on the developer’s part about their audience. Yes, disposable weaponry has become a staple of the FPS genre. It does not belong in a Duke game.

Now, I realise what I’m asking of Gearbox and co. As someone who played the Duke games back in the day, I appreciate the little touches they’ve kept around, such as the voice clips (and the voice of John St. John), the brash, in-your-face attitude, etc. But there are some things about gameplay you also need to keep consistent. Loading Duke up with an absurd number of guns is one of them. Throwing in the use-and-chuck mechanism of the modern FPS seems like a grab at “hey, we’re modern!”, especially when they can’t even get the mouths to synch up with words properly, or the walk cycles of the Holsom Twins to look remotely human.

There are some games which stand the test of time, but this is not one of them. It feels incredibly like a clunky, poorly developed shooter for the same generation that gave us the PSOne and Saturn. Obviously it looks better, but all the fundamentals are archaic at best, and even poor given their antiquity. Sure, you can slap a new coat of paint on an old house, but if the foundation’s gone to hell, the house is still gonna sink.

I don’t know about you, but I got over the cheap thrills of polygon nipples and cries of “motherfucker” sometime around 16. Playing this game again, I could feel my inner 16-year-old well up, eager to enjoy what was before him. I promptly raised my hand with the palm inwards, cast a glance in that child’s direction, and shut him up proper.

There is absolutely no redeeming value in DNF. It’s a shitty game, and Duke apologists need to acknowledge that. The box it came in? Great. If you ordered the limited edition, then for sure you have a great little package in your hands. It comes with an artbook, a small bust of Duke, Nukem dice, a mini comic, and some other goodies. But the game is shite. There are worse games out there, but by no means does that imply an iota of forgiveness towards this smouldering pile.

And now for something completely different!

Child of Eden is perhaps one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I mean that, wholeheartedly, and without a wink of deceit. The Rez guys did an amazing job following up their previous work. Not only did they create a spiritual successor worthy of the title, but one that I feel wholly outdoes its elder kin. Child of Eden is remarkable in its visual, aural, and interactive design.

When a game can actually inflict joy upon your being, the developer has done something truly unique. There are parts of Rez which, even during my initial experience of the game, would drag on me. I feel no such sluggish design present in Child of Eden. Mind you, I haven’t tried it with the Kinect yet, but from all the reports I’ve read and heard, it actually gets better. That may actually be a danger to my mental health, as I’m not sure I can actually endure a state of unadulterated bliss.

The best part is that, in addition to just playing through the levels, you can also play a “free” mode, where you have nothing attacking you whatsoever. It’s a great way to visually and aurally unwind, and the synesthesia experienced is remarkable. I wholeheartedly congratulate the designers, because they have accomplished a real work of art with Child of Eden. Amazing.

As you may have seen me tweet earlier, Duke Nukem Forever is this day in gaming’s greatest failure. Child of Eden is this day in gaming’s greatest triumph. That’s all there really is to it. If you haven’t picked up Child of Eden, I urge you to do so immediately. If you bet on Duke instead… God help you.

With the Wii U looming on the horizon, I as a Wii owner and gamer have had some pretty big questions on my mind. Do I sell my Wii when I upgrade? How much does the Wii U cost? What kind of media can it play? DVDs perhaps? Is it wi-fi only, or is it also equipped with an ethernet port?

From what I can glean thus far, there are some concrete answers to a few of these, and some shakier ones for the rest. Going down the list, here’s what I think is going on:

1. Don’t sell your Wii. The Wii U isn’t backwards compatible with GameCube games, which means you’d either have to invest in a GameCube, or [potentially] re-buy your entire library via the Wii Shop. You already made your investment and it’s held up the previous generation, so why not keep it?

2. The Wii will be around $250 USD. The internet is bandying about some absurd rumour that the Wii will be in excess of $600 USD. That’s not only insane, it’s clearly intended to provoke controversy. Reggie Fils-Aime has put it out there already — it’s going to be under $300, and closer to $200. So let’s bank on $250 for now.

3. The Wii U will use 25GB proprietary discs. This puts them on about equal footing with Blu-Ray in terms of space. It’s unknown at this time if the Wii U will also play DVDs.

4. No Ethernet Port [Yet]. Although the model on the floor has no ethernet port visible, Reggie hasn’t ruled it out. Kotaku has been told as much.

5. The Wii U is not a portable system. The Wii U controller, gorgeous and groundbreaking as it may be, is still inherently limited in range because it has to stream games from the Wii U console itself to the controller for you to play.

6. The Wii U can use a hard drive. Via the four USB ports built into it, the Wii U will be able to hook up to both flash memory and hard disk drives. It’s unknown if they’ll only be Nintendo proprietary or generic models.

7. The Wii U is compatible with all Wii hardware and software. So yeah, your actual Wii library and all of its controllers can move straight over to the Wii U. I still stand by the fact that it has no GameCube support, however, and as such you’ll want to keep your Wii in storage at least.

8. The controller screen is single-touch. While multi-touch would have been neat, that generally drives up the price by a hefty hundred. The drawing demo using the stylus during the conference certainly showcased the idea that the single-touch response is detailed enough for most purposes, however. I’m personally waiting on a new Mario Paint to take advantage of it.

Everything else, at this point, is pretty mysterious or simple specs. We know some pretty smokin’ franchises are on their way, including Assassin’s Creed and Darksiders. We know the console is at least as powerful as an Xbox 360 or PS3. We know that the console has a strong relationship with the 3DS. As for the rest? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. I’m definitely a fan of this new direction Nintendo’s taken with the Wii U, and I can’t wait until the console’s launch day. It may be the technojoy in me speaking, but for the first time in a decade, I may very well buy a system on release day.

Between being a peripheral, a console in its own right, and a promising innovation in virtual space interactivity, the Wii U is pretty mind-blowing. At the start I was prepared to write it off as another bid to extend console life. After all, that was largely the purpose of Sony’s Move and Microsoft’s Kinect. Both have done respectably, but overall they haven’t changed the home experience in a meaningful way. Even the Wii’s original motion controls weren’t a huge leap, though they did open new doors in the console market.

The Wii U, if utilised correctly, will definitely provide a new set of experiences. With the short demo they showed after the conference, I’m convinced of that. The ability to interact with the TV screen and then outside of its scope, while maintaining a synchronous relation to it opens a whole new world of possibility.

With as simple a concept as looking left or right from the TV on the Wii U and seeing more of the game world not available in the TV frame, it’s easy to extrapolate just how extensive the ramifications can be. Altered reality games are one thing, and we’re sure to see plenty with the Wii U, but just giving players more of a game world to explore makes me salivate with delight.

Think of it: Instead of a control stick guiding your camera around in the latest Zelda, you can actually pick up the Wii U, turn left, turn right, and see the rest of Hyrule that isn’t up there on your TV. It’s a strange but fascinating thought to me, and I look forward to every minute of it.

Beyond that, I’m similarly excited for the Wii and 3DS having compatibility, largely via the next Smash Bros game. Being able to come with your 3DS and play via the Wii not only spells out more players, but also more accessibility in the public space. Instead of having to have Wii or GameCube controllers on a chain, stores can ask you to bring in your 3DS and experience the latest demo. If Nintendo takes advantage of that, it means a whole new way of marketing their products.

To say the least, Nintendo, I am excite. Reggie, please get yourself a sandwich, you, Iwata, Miyamoto, and others have certainly earned it.

1) Friend was visiting from out of town for the weekend. As a result, got no topic research done.

2) Discovered SpiralKnights. You should too. I’m on there as Hidoshi. If you play, give me a shout.

See ya’ll on Thursday with a new article.

Roleplaying is probably my favourite genre of gaming. Classically, the RPG has been based around “save the world” stories, sword-and-sorcery themes, and variations on turn-based combat. In addition, there have also been action-RPGs (where combat is in realtime), strategy-RPGs (where combat is a glorified game of chess), and dating sims (wherein combat is usually absent).

As time marches on, the RPG has become more and more poorly defined by its makeup. Developers have grown the genre out to such extremities that it’s really hard to pin down just what qualifies as an RPG. Many fans would argue that Zelda is an RPG series, while others peg it as an Adventure game. This kind of classic debate has brought up a lot of suggestions as to an RPG’s major foundations. Experience points, level building, focus on characterization, focus on plot, having numeric statistics, and so on. But in all of the arguments I’ve either made or seen made in the past, there’s always one major logical flaw that bothers me: The idea that RPGs have unique foundations.

In many ways, RPGs form a bedrock for other genres. The venerable cutscene found its earliest and most prominant expression in RPGs. In fact, you usually can’t have a proper RPG without some kind of cutscene, because invariably developers use them to create concept and portray the drama at work. Now, FPS developers have done the same thing for franchises like Halo and Gears of War. RTS developers have done the same with games like Command and Conquer. And flight sims? Well, they’re still pretty safe from all that, but just you wait.

Okay folks, let’s talk about negativity today. Negativity, even in small portions, can utterly destroy the ability of a group to function. It erodes stability and, like an infection, spreads quickly. It’s why so many people have a hard time functioning at their jobs, and why many of us believe in apocalyptic scenarios. As creative, happy people of one stripe or another, we know how much negativity can do us in at the knees. It can be a bad day at work, a nasty comment by a friend or relative, or a conversation that went down an avenue you didn’t mean it to. Any of these can be a source of negativity, and it’s something we all have to deal with. Negativity breads paranoia, resentment, and a host of other problems.

Negativity is character-eroding, just like informed optimism can be character-building. Not just for individuals, but for groups. The problem with negativity is that, unlike optimism, it stacks. If one person becomes negative, it’s only a matter of time before the whole group takes on a little bit of their cynicism. It sounds like a slippery slope, but in this case, it’s often true.

So how do we tackle it? How can we fight negativity and restore our positive attitudes?

I’m not a psychological authority by any means, but in my exprience one of the best methods has been dealing with the problem directly. Get your guts up and approach the person, remembering to acclimate your approach to their disposition. If they deal badly with confrontation, make it a coffee date and a friendly chat. If they’re prone to anger, come prepared to talk them out of a temper, and don’t react to their tantrums. Often, two egos end up butting heads, and that’s something to absolutely avoid. In any case, talk it out with the person who seems to be the root of the problem. It may be that they don’t mean to cause negativity, but that something is going wrong in their personal lives. If possible, help them deal with that.

Sometimes though, the person does do it intentionally, or won’t reform their habits. Some people feel a need to create melodrama in their lives, if only to escape something else. Other people genuinely like causing distress for people they don’t actually respect. Still others don’t know that they’re being negative, and often won’t accept that they are.

By now, you may have heard that there has been some protest against the romantic options included in BioWare’s Dragon Age 2. There’s a sufficient amount of, shall we say, homosexually-oriented content involved. And “exotic” sexual content, whatever that means. So much so, that apparently some gamers feel like the “Straight Male Gamer” is being ignored. Others feel like the homosexual content is being misrepresented, and that it should have been pared back. While I can’t really speak for the game’s mechanics, I’d at least like us all to talk about how we as gamers explore sexual archetypes, and what it means to think outside the [sex]box.

Let’s dig in.

Since when does being straight, male, and a gamer preclude interest in how other relationships work? It’s not like we’re any more homogenous in our interests than any other demographic. And we should strive not to be. Why can’t we look at other relationships outside our regular spheres of experience and try to gain insight into their workings? I’m not just talking about the physical aspect, but also the psychological forces involved.

It’s a shame that homosexuality and other gender/sexuality issues still carry such stigmas for some gamers. Members of our culture who discriminate this way are increasingly a minority, but still extremely vocal about their likes and dislikes. They’re the ones who have made playing Halo online a brutal, dehumanizing experience.

Let’s talk about gamification for a moment.

Gamification is, simply put, the integration of certain game-like features into everyday tasks and chores. Gamification can be found in our culture today, and it’s quickly spreading.

The bright minds over at Extra Credits recently did a video on this concept, calling out to educators and scientists to speak with them and see what gamification can do for our society. It’s encouraging to know that, after posting the video, they received hundreds of e-mails from those educators and scientists.

Where is gamification found today? Well, for us up in Canada, it’s rudimentarily found at Tim Horton’s. Every year, Tim’s launches “Roll Up The Rim”, a game that requires you to buy a coffee, roll up the cup’s rim after you’re done, and possibly win a prize. The odds are usually one in six, with some pretty nice items at stake. Generally, you’ll roll up a huge number of duds, a few free coffees, and then call it a day. The event will end and you won’t look back. It was fun, and you were going into Tim’s anyway, right?

Probably not, actually. Although we as Canadians do love our Tim’s, statistics show that our visits become 30% more frequent during Roll Up season. It’s a solid investment for Tim Horton’s as well, because it means that the nominal prizes at the end are a very small price to pay for the vast returns on really cheap coffee. Let me be clear, by the way: I like their coffee. It’s cheap, but it’s good. I’m not slagging the coffee.

As a child I was a pretty avid reader, raised until the age of 13 without a TV in the house. I read the entire Lord of the Rings at eight, and most (though not all of Dune) by 10. The Tale of Genji was quick to follow, and then (oddly enough) Cosmos by Carl Sagan at 13. Tintin and Asterix were the rich, european comics in my life, and while I still read things like Spiderman and Green Lantern, American comics were more or less a sideline in my literary education. I liked larger narratives.

When I finally did get a gaming console, I immediately took to RPGs. It seemed a pretty natural fit, and I used to spend days transfixed by one digital adventure after another. My earliest experience with RPGs were Final Fantasy VI and Breath of Fire II for the SNES. Great games, and while I realize now that the stories aren’t complex by any measure, they’re nonetheless entertaining.

It’s been a long time since the 16-bit era. A looooong time. Games have become more complex, graphics more advanced, and stories… Well, some stories have improved. At the very least, the Playstation ushered in a really bright era for RPGs, with a ton of releases for franchises like Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy VII is pretty much why RPGs exploded, broadening the market by a wide margin. After that, VIII and IX were really well received (though not without some griping), and the even later FFX did for the Playstation 2 what VII had done for its predecessor.

The company behind it, Square-Enix (then known as Squaresoft) has been making games since the 1980′s, and Final Fantasy has been their flagship franchise. Faced with a colossal task — one-upping themselves with each instalment — Square-Enix has pretty much become the authority in cinematic gaming, with some of the best digital artists and talented minds the industry has to offer.

So, what happened with their latest instalment, Final Fantasy XIII? Why is the story less cohesive and the characters less tangible? In an era where millions of dollars are being poured into production, why is a franchise like Final Fantasy struggling to tell a good story?

But most of all: Why are we making excuses for it?

What follows here is by no means intended as authoritative, nor adamantly conclusive. But after much thought and experience with the subject, sidelining my own biases as best I can, and analyzing how I see the iPad being used, I think I can outline three major markets for the iPad.

1. Mobile Business Users – These are the professionals who have never, and will never need a full-blown computer to do their work. All they usually want is a handful of working programs: E-mail, spreadsheets, word processing, calendar, done. The Blackberry and other smartphones/PDAs have filled in for years, but inevitably they’ve had to pull out a laptop when it came to more industrial strength typing or task management. The iPad connects to a keyboard when needed, comes with its own virtual option on the go, and minimises the startup fuss to the mere click of a button. Plus, it’s cheaper than a laptop, eschewing the features and hassles these people never wanted, while maintaining an attractive design and a no-fuss interface.

2. Casual Computer Users – These actually exist, and they aren’t all old people. Believe it or not, many, many 20-somethings, teenagers, and tykes are casual computer users. I’m willing to bet more of them are casual than fully literate. They probably don’t care about BSD or how to allocate more resources via the task manager. They just want to share photos, talk on Facebook, and play solitaire. The iPad can give them that, without the bulk of a desktop, and without the price point of a laptop.

3. Tech-Savvy Geeks – These are the early adopters and usually the people who want to see what neat tricks they can get out of a tablet machine. They probably have a couple of laptops and at least one or two half-opened, cobbled-together desktops, but the iPad’s a brand new toy. They got it to see how they can make or break the thing. Plus it’s kind of cool to walk around feeling like you’re in Star Trek. Admit it, you’ve done it.

It’s no mystery then that the iPad has been a success. It’s the same reason the original all-in-one Mac and all the iMacs have been hits: Simplicity. It’s taking a formula that’s worked before and refining it down to its current ideal. People want an all-in-one machine that reduces their stress and stays out of their way, while simultaneously facilitating their computer needs. A desktop comes with all kinds of considerations and issues, and a laptop can be a cumbersome mess with its own problems. What’s more, these devices have a stigma attached to them, which is the idea that they’re hard to fix. The iPad also has its issues and its problems, but it has a different psychological profile. Got a problem? Take it to the Apple store, hand it over, and it’ll be fixed. That’s what Apple’s been trying to push for all its products, and the iPad fully fits the bill.

Now, this all applies to just about every competing tablet out there. A large chunk of what I’ve said can have a search-and-replace done on it, trading out iPad for Slate or whatever you prefer. I’m using the iPad because it’s the most popular model, and it’s the one I’m familiar with. Plus that last part — about Apple’s marketing — is pretty company-specific.

Just my thoughts. I’m not even sure you can really limit the iPad’s markets to these three above, but they’re the ones I’ve observed.