61 Frames Per Second

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• Watch Out, Kids! Video Games Can Hurt You

  San Diego's CBS 8 News ran a story this week about a woman who claims her five year-old Michael's "Nintendo" gave him a panic attack. While I don't doubt that this actually happened, it's hard not to hate on the story's presentation. For one, they never tell you what game freaked the kid out. The game shown in the clip is Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, arguably the most intense, violent, and bloody game released on the DS in the past quarter, but the kid playing that has had no such problems and is clearly there just to show you what a violent DS game looks like (they also never confirm that Michael was playing a DS, only that he "ended up having a panic attack after playing Nintendo for just a half-hour"). Second, their resident expert Dr. Grisolia references an infamous episode of the Pokémon cartoon that induced seizures in hundreds of Japanese children, which would be all well and good if we were dispelling the evils of watching television, but we're supposed to be villifying video games here, right? Read More... Posted Jan 14 2009, 02:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: nintendo, nintendo ds, derrick sanskrit, fear, journalism, books

• F.E.A.R. 2 and Crafting the Bigger Sequel That’s Actually Better

  It was F.E.A.R. that pulled me, for the first time in twenty years of gaming, into first-person shooters. Like everyone else, I played my fair share of id’s shooters throughout the ‘90s. But being a console gamer, my time with turn-of-the-century FPSs, games that saw the genre evolve into a serious creative force and not just “Doom clones”, was always second-hand. I downloaded the demo for F.E.A.R. off of Xbox Live just looking for something to play and was entranced. The scares weren’t exactly gripping. Spooky little girl walks down the hall and *GASP* disappears! Walk into a room that’s covered in bloooOOOoood and then *WHOA* it’s not! The action, though, was unlike anything else I’d played up until 2006 thanks to the game’s still-impressive enemy AI. Walking down a hallway with the barrel of a shotgun jutting from the base of the screen was something I was used to. Bad guys jumping through windows to avoid exploding grenades and cursing at me wasn’t. Every single encounter was dangerous and forced you to consider how you moved through the mundane office cubicles and hallways that made up the bulk of the game’s setting. Unfortunately, F.E.A.R. was a classic example of how a game needs to have more than just an excellent set of fundamental rules to be great. Despite the incredible programming that made the baddies so interesting, there wasn’t much else to F.E.A.R. Every environment was the same, the story too vague to ever really hook you. After nine hours of wandering through identical hallways and realizing I was only three-quarters of the way through the game, I shelved it, opting to watch the ending on YouTube rather than finish it myself. If the demo of F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin I played today is indicative of the entire game, I think I’ll be finishing the whole thing this time out. Read More... Posted Nov 10 2008, 08:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, half-life, fps, fear, monolith, project origin, fear 2, warner bros

• Aliens and Games and TV, Oh My: The Jace Hall Show

  Videogames, they’re played on televisions. Well, they’re played on computer monitors too, but those have all but turned into televisions in recent years, right? Right. Of course, 61 Frames Per Second has been pondering and expounding on the relative merits of televised programming based on and about videogames of late. As our very own Amber Ahlborn made the point the other day, videogame television aimed at avid players is typically schlock ridden garbage, marred by a need to come off as both cool enough for the cool kids and geekily informed enough to appeal to the really cool kids. Amber’s spot-on in saying that the best game television is on the internet. When it comes to quality, the comedic characters created by Yahtzee and the Angry Video Game Nerd are joined by the first truly successful preview/review show, The 1up Show. Ryan O’Donnell and Jane Pinckard found the winning formula of scripted dialogue, personality and informed journalism lacking in every other attempt at the form, and O’Donnell has kept it strong for three years running. The golden rule of entertainment is that when you make something that works, someone is going to imitate you on the quick. Read More... Posted Aug 28 2008, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, 1up, yahtzee, angry video game nerd, fear, monolith, aliens, gearbox, television, condemned, borderlands

• The Art of Gore in Project Origin

  There are many, many first-person shooting games. Doom was the ship that launched a fleet of thousands fifteen years ago and, since its release, a lot has changed in the genre. Engrossing narratives (Bioshock), ever evolving team play (Team Fortress, Counterstrike, etc.), the capacity for sociopolitical commentary (Call of Duty 4). But, as the old folks say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. First-person shooters are still about shooting and, like their ancestor Doom, are very pre-occupied with blood. Loathe as I am to admit it, I’m still pretty engaged by it myself. I find bombastic, gory violence deeply satisfying in my entertainment, often as much as a perfectly portrayed human relationship or an honest, unsentimental depiction of emotion. Like anything else in fantasy, it’s the heady experience of the unreal that satiates. Blood’s just another type of icing. Mark Wood, developer Monolith’s FX artist extraordinaire, has written up a short essay on the process of creating blood effects for Project Origin and it's a fascinating read. Read More... Posted May 22 2008, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, fps, doom, counterstrike, fear, monolith, project origin, team fortress