Wage Slaves: a look inside video game sweatshops
Wage Slaves: a look inside video game sweatshops. Low-paid workers “farm” gold and other trickets in virtual worlds and make their employers thousands of dollars a month.
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kottke.org posts about video games
A basketball fan couldn’t wait until next
A basketball fan couldn’t wait until next year, so he’s documenting 2005-6 Bulls season with NBA Live 2005. Looks like the Bulls lost their home opener.
Steven Johnson: “Imagine an alternate world identical
Steven Johnson: “Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books”. “Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying — which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements — books are simply a barren string of words on the page.”
Interview with Cory Archangel about his video game-related art
Interview with Cory Arcangel about his video game-related art.
Sports video games
Reading this Salon article on sports video games brought back a ton of memories from college. I never got into Madden properly, but I played a ton of Tecmo Bowl, Tecmo Super Bowl, and NHL ‘94, the latter of which is, in my estimation, the best sports video game of all time (with which Stewart would agree, I’m sure). A quote from the article:
[Bo] Jackson isn’t the only athlete to have achieved fame for his video game likeness. Then-Chicago Blackhawks forward Jeremy Roenick’s ability to fill the net and make Wayne Gretzky’s head bleed in the “NHLPA ‘93” game was immortalized in the 1996 cult film “Swingers.”
Roenick was good in ‘93, but with the much-improved gameplay in NHL ‘94, he was a monster. He was blazingly fast, had a quick stick, could stop on a dime, had the hardest shot in the game, and was easily capable of racking up 15-20 goals in three 5-minute periods. But he also had an unfair advantage over other players in the league because the Blackhawks were such a great team. Players like Steve Yzerman, Pavel Bure, Teemu Selanne, and Alexander Mogilny matched up well with Roenick skill-wise, but their teams just weren’t as dominant overall. Not to mention that you couldn’t taunt your opponents with new Roenick-related lyrics to Pearl Jam’s Jeremy (GarageBand karaoke version coming soon) as easily while piloting Bure or Selanne through the heart of their defense for a completely demoralizing goal. Oh, the sting of being taunted with ad-libbed Pearl Jam.
The article also links to an article by Bill Simmons for ESPN Magazine about video game football. Near the bottom of the piece, there’s a list of the top video game football players of all time, on which is Randall Cunningham at #3:
The best video game QB of all-time. You could roll him out to either side, scramble for first downs, throw 70 yards with him, avoid sacks…and he never self-destructed like he did in real life. Regardless of how his NFL career turned out, he’ll always have his video game career to fall back on.
Based upon my experience with Cunningham in Tecmo Super Bowl, I’d put him at #1. The Eagles, who were not a great team in the game, were unstoppable with a properly coached Cunningham at the helm, mainly because he was a double threat at all times. He had the arm of Dan Marino and the wheels of Bo Jackson. If all the receivers were covered, you could just take off running and get a first down every time.
My sophomore year in college, a group of friends and I played an entire Tecmo season and I luckily drew the Eagles out of the hat during the team selection process. With a near-guaranteed first down (or touchdown) every time I had the ball, I rampaged through the regular season with a perfect record and a ridiculous quarterback rating only to buckle under the pressure in the playoffs. In the next season we started (but never finished), the Eagles were not included in the hat. Go, Randall!
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