On a gamer forum, a vigorous discussion about whether it’s fair for employers to discriminate against World of Warcraft players when hiring, on the grounds that WoW players are never fully out of the game. A surprising number of players agree with this proposition.
I met with a recruiter recently (online media industry) and in conversation I happened to mention I’d spent way too much time in the early 2000s playing online games, which I described as “the ones before World of Warcraft” (I went nuts for EQ1, SWG and the start of WoW, but since 2006 I have only put a handful of days into MMOG playing - as opposed to discussing them - I’ve obsessed over bicycles and cycling instead).
He replied that employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players. He said there is a belief that WoW players cannot give 100% because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not great, etc. I mentioned that some people have written about MMOG leadership experience as a career positive or a way to learn project management skills, and he shook his head. He has been specifically asked to avoid WoW players.
Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon gets nostalgic (as did I) after looking at scans of the 1983 Sears Wish Book catalog pages of videogame systems. “What fun life was: the 1983 Sears Wish Book’s game wares”
Today on Offworld, as Nintendo released its 100+ game list of DS and Wii titles expected through Spring of next year, we whittled it down to the essential 11 Offworld-ian titles to be excited for.
We also discovered that area/code’s Chain Factor (one of our top web games of 2007) had been ported to the iPhone as snap7, listened to Merry Pixmas, a fantastic new chiptune Xmas album, and read Jim Rossignol’s latest Ragdoll Metaphysics column on the Ten Things That Made Him Glad To Be A Gamer In 2008.
Elsewhere, we saw that Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill were also coming to the iPhone, heard another good holiday song with The Doyouinverts’ Gears of War parody ‘A Happy New Gear’, saw a slightly slurred Burt Reynolds in the movies, flipped wistfully through the 1983 Sears Wishbook again, saw Spore’s DRM debacle coming to half a close, at least, and heard reports that certain job recruiters have been told not to hire World of Warcraft players.
Here’s a fascinating analysis of the mechanics of Swoop, an online auction game (they call it “entertainment shopping”) (!) that’s designed to be a Skinner box for separating you from your money while confounding your judgement:
First I will lay out for you how the site works. It is a ‘auction’ site…sort of. Swoopo sells bids for $1. Each time you use a bid on an item the price is increased by $0.15 for that item. So here is an example:
Person A buys 5 bids from Swoopo for $5 total. Person A sees an auction for $1000 and places the first bid. The auction is now at $0.15. Person A now has a sunk cost of $1 (the cost of the bid they used). There is no way to get that dollar back, win or lose. If Person A wins they must pay the $0.15.
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Sony Moves To Stop “PS3 Is Crap.” Rumours.
Sony has moved to quickly deny an article on dutch website Gamed.nl who claimed that the 40GB PS3 was suffering with a 40% failure rate. A press release from David Reevves, President, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, stated in no uncertain terms that “We are very proud of the quality and reliability of PLAYSTATION 3 and are disappointed that such extremely sloppy journalism has resulted in this totally inaccurate story,” said David Reeves, President, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. “Since launching the 40GB PS3, we have experienced a fantastic jump in sales and the failure rates have remained at the very low level that we not only strive for, but have been achieving since the launch of PS3.” So that settles that then, I believe everything Sony say! Still it must have driven lots of traffic to that website, hmm… I am such a synic.
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Get Your Hands Off Our Lara!
In very welcome news, Edios owners SCi have beaten off all perspective suitors who have been circling around the last major British based games publisher. Rumours had been that Warner Bros. Interactive, who had already owned a stake in the company, were pushing for a take over. This had prompted other companies to also sniff around in-case SCi had decided to sell. The company now have thankfully now decided to go alone and should be set for another big Christmas this year with news that Tomb Raider: Underworld is now done for a quarter 4 release.
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Don King Wins A Prize
A few sketchy details of a new boxing game
have began to filter into the G4A office this week. Loudmouth, comet-haired loony and boxing promoter Don King has his very own game coming this spring. Don King Presents: Prize Fighter is a new game from Rocky developers Venom games. So far it is only down for release on 360, Wii and DS, whether or not it will also be coming to PS3 remains to be seen. This is shaping up to be a real gem and as Rocky was a firm favourite of ours we are excited about the prospect of this game. Will it be able to take Fight Night Round 3’s world title? Only time will tell but looking at this screen shot you wouldn’t bet against it. More on this as we get it.
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Since the Burnout series of racing games crashed onto the scene on the last generation of consoles it has always been the King of the arcade racer. With this latest addition, the first built entirely for the new consoles from the ground up will it retain its arcade racer crown?
Criterion have always tried to evolve the series with each game playing markedly different from its predecessor, although retaining the series ethos of high speed thrills and massive crashes. This in turn though has lost and gained fans of the series with each iteration (this is the 5th) I for one though have owned a copy of every version of the series on various formats and have loved every one of them. So does Burnout Paradise live up to its heritage? Let’s find out.
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Having spent the whole of the festive period in the G4A drunk tank playing games rather than writing about them. Myself and Drew thought we would provide you with a belated mini review round up of the games we were given as presents over the now gone festive period. Some of these games have been out for absolutely yonks so this is why we are only doing mini reviews. First up is -:
Project Gotham Racing 4 -Xbox 360 - Bizarre Creations
After having been a little underwhelmed by Project Gotham 3 I really was not expecting a lot from the latest installment in the Gotham series. How wrong could I have been? The addition of bikes and more variable weather has reinvigorated the game no end. Trying to stay on you super bike surrounded by cars whilst hurtling full throttle around snow strewn icy tracks is a major thrill.
The career mode has also been given a much needed revamp and to an extent it works but sadly the mind-numbing cone challenges are still an ever present. The online side has stayed largely the same but the addition of the bikes and the return of lower powered cars like the Mini has seen the re-injection of much needed fun. 
There are also more team modes added for the racing clans and you can still post your photo’s and video’s for others to see and vote on with the PGR On Demand option.
Graphically the game has few rivals in the racing genre and even surpasses the visuals from Gotham 3 by quite a margin. The sound of the cars and bikes is second-to-none and although the soundtrack is very hit and miss there is enough musical genres to keep everybody happy. Special mention should go to the achievements too which are generally well thought out especially the “Back to the Future” inspired puzzle achievement.
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More Mass Please
In news that has got me more excited tha
t an ADHD kid on speed and plugged into the mains, Bioware have announced the first downloadable expansion to G4A’s RPG of the year Mass Effect. “Bring Down the Sky” will see Commander Shepard and co battling it out in a new system with a new race called Batarians. (See image.) A Batarian extremist group has hijacked a mobile asteroid station in the Asgard system, setting it on a collision course with the nearby colony world of Terra Nova and surprise surprise its up to you to stop it.
“Bring Down the Sky” is the first of hopefully many expansions for Mass Effect and will be available on Xbox Live from Monday 10th March for a mere 400MS points.
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So we really are in the middle of slow news time and we at G4A have been scratching around trying to find other ways to ammuse ourselves. But there really is only so much of that you can do. After all it is hard to hold a joypad with hairy palms.
So we have been scouring the net for any articles or bits and bobs that are game related. Here is a selectio of what we have found. Some are funny, some are interesting and some are crap you decide:
A video game cartoon from www.explosm.net
Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net
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So news may have been thin on the ground recently but now the Game Developers Conference has finished there has been some interesting if not entirely suprising announcements. We will break down the biggest ones into consoles:
XBOX 360:
Gears Of War 2:Microsoft have some reasons to be cheerful after GDC with some BIG annoucements that culminated in the news that Gears of War 2 will be with us by the end of the year. Whilst everyone else had it slated for a 2009 release G4A said all along we expected it this year!! As we said in our games to watch in 2008 feature. The game will feature a much more involved game world and a much deeper experience. Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer for Epic Games said.“To our team the original game was just a tease, the appetizer to the ‘Gears of War’ characters and new style of gameplay. We were so amped to get to the next chapter, and dig deeper into the universe of this franchise,” It is good to know that we all paid £50 for a trailer! Anyway he went on, “‘Gears of War 2’ is an even bigger, better, and more badass experience than the first game, and we can’t wait to get it in the hands of eager gamers this November.” Ok so we are a little excited about this new, just a little.
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Tiger Uppercut!!
In perhaps one of the shrewdest marketing moves in gaming history, those clever sticks at EA have turned a potential disaster into a stroke of genius.
After previous reports circled the web regarding a serious glitch in Tiger Woods 09 that allowed you to play the ball from a water hazard by simply walking on the water, there response?? Well see for yourself!
Fantastic!
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There is so much to learn from the implementations of design concepts in games that can be applied to non-gaming.
Almost everyone working on Aviary is an obsessive gamer. Besides for offering us a convenient (and violent) way to deflate, we also find a lot of inspiration in the underlying design. That’s how I justify it to my wife, anyway.
Valve Software
Two games we are currently obsessed with are Team Fortress 2 and Portal, both created by Valve Software (most famous for its Half-Life series).
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Gaming consoles need an external drive, which is formatted to the FAT32 file system. You can drive almost any currently on the market, as FAT32 disks can support up to 2 terabytes in size. However, the limitation of
FAT32 is that they can not keep individual files larger than 4 GB in size. Even Windows 2000 and XP can not create or format partitions larger than 32GB.
Windows 98 users can only create partitions and disks with up to 127GB in size. Also, a FAT32 partition, and format it on the 32GB or 127GB restrictions, you will need a utility like Partition Magic or another disk / partition utility. I recommend CompuApps Swiss Knife, which can be downloaded free at download.com for PC users.
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If you have a gaming console, with a small hard disk or none at all, then adding an external drive is a fairly quick and easy solution. Sure, you can replace the original disks, you entered in the system with a larger, but the laptop hard drives can be quite expensive, especially in the larger capacity. An external hard when you have more space at a much lower price and you can control the content. In a system such as an Xbox 360, you can not add content to the built-in hard disk download, unless it is of Xbox Live or ripped from a CD. With an external drive, you have full control over your content, and can easily upload new content, or without much trouble.
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