The 4 Habits of Auteurs That Made Hideo Kojima’s Video Game Masterpiece, Death Stranding

New vlog today! Here's the transcript below if you prefer to read, but this one in particular is a lot of action! The video game we talk about is gorgeous and words don't do it justice.

Games are violent. Really violent. Holy crap! Really, really violent, seriously. 

But do they really, really have to be that violent? 

This game doesn't think so. 

Today we're talking about "Death Stranding" One of my favorite games. It's so beautiful, it's super fun, and you don't have to kill a lot of people. 

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The adventure game lives!

Remember the good old pixelated days of yore? Action packed, story and puzzle-driven interactive fiction of the highest order? That's what Gabriel Knight was. I grew up playing these games. King's Quest. Police Quest. Space Quest. Day of the Tentacle. Indiana Jones. Sam and Max Hit the Road. 

Yet somewhere along the way, the great, cerebral, deep games that told a real story vanished. There are a few more recent examples -- the heart of this lineage lives on in new titles like LA Noire, Heavy Rain, Red Dead Redemption, and yes, even Grand Theft Auto 4. I look forward eagerly to the upcoming Max Payne. But once every few years is not enough. 

Well, maybe it is time for the return of the adventure game. And the creator of Gabriel Knight, Jane Jensen, is back on Kickstarter having just met her goal of $300K raised for her next great project, Moebius.

Contribute to Jane Jensen's Kickstarter. I just did. Let's bring back the adventure game!

Read more at The Verge

PS, I just read about this new Telltale Games adventure game called The Walking Dead. I will be checking it out shortly. 

Guitar Hero 5 is coming out. Artists are even now still skeptical?

via news.cnet.com
In the case of Arctic Monkeys, Riley explained, it took multiple visits with the band to show them demos and explain what the Guitar Hero franchise is all about to get permission.

This is pretty shocking. Some bands should be paying Neversoft to get placement into Guitar Hero 5, not nickel and diming and hemming and hawing over *allowing* Neversoft to use their music. Getting listed = guaranteed placement and listening by millions of music fans. These people love guitar rock-- love it enough to fill their living rooms with cheap plastic approximations of musical instruments. That's about as targeted as you can get.

It goes to show that in crazy media times like these, many people don't even really know which way the value chain flows. Maybe because now it flows both ways.

JamLegend becomes the web-enabled Rock Band / Guitar Hero that lets you upload and play ANY SONG.

This is phenomenal. My senior project at Stanford was a Dance Dance Revolution game that could take MP3's and turn them into playable DDR steps. But I have to say, it didn't work nearly as well as what the JamLegend guys have done. I just uploaded one of my favorite rap songs to JamLegend. They processed the file, extracted the beats and melodies of the song, and made a playable song based on it.

What's even cooler is you can now play JamLegend just like RockBand / Guitar Hero, with your real guitar. There are instructions on how to set this up for both Mac/PC for GH/Rock Band controllers for all platform controllers PS3, Wii and Xbox 360.

And you can duel your friends online (multiplayer) without ever even being in the same room.

OK, so lets review: JamLegend has created Guitar Hero that a) is super fun multiplayer Flash web game with no download, b) works with any guitar controller you may have lying around, and c) lets you upload any song you want and it will work awesome.

You should play jamlegend here.

Good lord. Steve Perlman just changed the world again today at GDC. Fully networked, cloud-based full-res 3D VIDEO GAMES!

OK, that's insane. Forget Playstation 3. Forget Xbox 360. Forget Wii. Forget PC gaming.

OnLive by Rearden Studios is bringing full no-latency video gaming as-if-native-on-your-desk -- only NONE of the hardware crunching the graphics is on your desk. Instead, your computer (even a $700 budget PC, or a super-cheap microconsole that probably will cost the same as a Wii or less) acts as a dumb-terminal that happens to have insanely fast video and no-latency input from your mouse / keyboard / gamepad. All the hardcore graphics hardware is in the cloud on OnLive servers.

For gamers -- no upgrades ever again. The cloud servers get upgraded, and your PC/Mac works even better. Instead of PC gaming with multi-DVD installs, hardware incompatibility and headaches -- it just works, even on cheap computers... or even just a cheap box that hooks up to your HDTV. 

For game publishers -- no piracy, and no multiplayer cheating.

I'm not sure how they can do this, but it's truly the most revolutionary thing I've seen coming out of the tech world in years.

Edit: They have signups for Beta users for this summer. I signed up for sure... can't wait to try it. Wow...

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