The Portal

Skylanders is based on series of character tokens that enter and exit the world via a power portal. Game characters are sold as action figure tokens – the dragon in the image below.  To select a character in game, you simply drop a new token on the portal.  The switch is instant, negating the need to change classes or restart chapters.  Simply swap out your token and a different character appears on screen.

The characters come in eight different series – air, earth, fire, water, life, undead, tech, and magic.  Each series has, at present, four different character tokens, for a total of 32 different playable characters.

As your characters progress in the game, their stats, powers, and equipment are stored locally on the token.  Take your favorite token to a friend’s house, drop it on his portal, and play with all the same characteristics you had on your own.

More importantly, however, you can drop your token onto his portal regardless of whether you have the same game system.  You play Xbox but your friend plays PlayStation?  Doesn’t matter.  You can play head to head or cooperatively with your tokens on the other platform.

Why this Game is Important

There are several factors at play that mark this game as a critical marker in video game evolution.  For some time now, the concept of downloadable content has been seen as the great future of gaming.  The console would simply be a storage platform for games and future releases and expansion packs would be delivered via the Internet.  That model is flipped on its head by Skylanders, but it is also complemented by it.

The downloadable content model simply continues two inherent flaws in the console model.  The restrictive nature of consoles is such that you can only play with friends on the same console. I can’t play Call of Duty with my nephew because he has a PS3 while I prefer Xbox.

If we play split screen on his system, none of my achievements carry over to my own console.  Making my character portable, as Skylanders has done, divorces my game play from the console.

In addition, Skylanders has created expansion packs as tokens as well.  For instance, the Pirate Seas expansion (below) includes a pirate ship token that unlocks additional playable content.  Like the character tokens, those expansion worlds exist separately from the console.

If I take my token to a friends machine, we can play the expansion even if he hasn’t purchased it.  When I take it home, the expansion goes with me.

The folks at Activision have made great efforts toward solving the digital rights management issue by making your content token based.

The Big Problems With Gaming

The main flaws in the gaming experience today are the lack of console interoperability, the lack of character portability, and the means by which content creators can protect their product.  With Skylanders, Activision has addressed all three.

The ability to keep chatracters separate from the game, to unlock expansions with a token rather than the console, and to move both freely between platforms will be a model more game manufacturers adopt.

While making great strides in addressig these flaws, Activision has also created fairly attractive game collectibles.  As long as they maintain support for previous generations of character, as the develop additional Skylander games, these collectibles can become a lasting investment in the games you own.  I just wish my character from the the first Fable could have been carried forward into future Fable frachise games.

In addition, the tokens are relatively attractive figures in their own right, making your collection equally interesting as a long term collectible.

It’s not often that I am truly impressed by game innovation.  I find most experiments of this nature to be fairly uninspired.  In this case, however, I think Activision may have scored a big win.  I expect to see other games employing the same mechanics – likely in the very near future.

Why that Scares the Hell Out of Me

While I am very impressed with the game and the token system, I am also a bit nervous about it.

As I mentioned, there are 32 playable characters across the Skylanders universe, a handful of “special” character exclusives only available at some retailers, and two expansion packs.  Each character token costs about seven bucks.  Buy the game starter kit (with the portal, disk and three characters) and you’re out $60.  Many in-game items require accessing locked areas that can only be opened by characters from a particular series.  The minimum investment to have enough characters to open all areas is another 5 tokens or $35-40.  To collect all the characters, you would be north of $200.

That’s probably not a big deal when you consider the typical cycle of a game, the expansion packs, and other DLC.

A token scenario for a game like Call of Duty could look significantly less complex.  For instance, having a token that could carry a single custom loadout would allow you to port your best class to a friend’s console.  That could also allow you to carry the experience and weapons you gain back from that console to your own.  It would still allow Activision to sell additional classes as tokens, however.

If token based characters and content catch on, and I think they likely will, it could make gaming a more expensive proposition for the hardcore gamer or collector.

A la carte for video games! Why should I have to buy the storyline just to get the multiplayer?

Since then, it occurred to me that there is a larger point to be made from that idea.  Everyone agrees that a disk based video game industry is on the way out.  As next generation consoles include more drive capacity, broadband speeds continue to rise; and optical drives fall aside in favor of downloadable content, the idea of a straight download model makes sense.

As delivery changes, the options for sales grow.  Services like OnLive, Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade clearly illustrates that streaming or direct to drive game delivery are models that work.  Given the removal of physical constraints that accompany disks, there is little reason game companies couldn’t provide three versions of a game – multiplayer, storyline, and a combo pack.

If they did, people like me would never buy the storyline again.  I simply don’t find the storyline game all that interesting.  Linear games are boring affairs and open-world can get just as tedious.  Multiplayer is infinitely variable depending on the opposition.  Campers (those cowardly rat bastards) aside, human players make a more interesting game.

If I could buy just the multiplayer for half the cost of the combo pack, I’d buy a lot more games.  My total contribution to the industry wouldn’t drop, but it would be spread out across a wider array of companies.  I suspect a lot of people would do the same.

The possibility of owning a larger library of games I would play (multiplayer) and keeping my drive from being all crudded  up with storyline crap, appeals to me.  I hope the game developers will realize the options available to them and consider breaking up the product.

That said, I’m not about to demand FCC acton to regulate game companies to make that happen.

It will be sold via the Xbox Live Marketplace for about $15.  They hadn’t given out a release date, but yesterday they said March 3rd.  So don’t call me that day, I’ll be shelling some krauts.

As with most topics I write about here, the subject of zombies has prompted some interesting discussions with friends and colleagues. In the case of World War Z, my only complaint about the book is its reliance on the slow moving, arms raised, schleppy zombie made famous by George Romero films. I, as a matter of preference, would much rather have seen the speedy, violent zombies of 28 Weeks Later / 28 Days Later or the Xbox 360 game Left 4 Dead.

I firmly believe that when the zombie apocalypse (ZA) finally comes, it will look more like the rage virus. Honestly, it would have to. The fact is a slow zombie is simply not that hard to defeat. They’re kind of like cows. You could hunt them with a dent mallet. Granted, if you were set upon by a pack, it may be harder to fight off. However, the spread of the contagion would either have to be immediate or a single mass event would have to hit most of the population at once.

In World War Z, the contagion is slow to spread. Brooks gives the impression that a year or two passes between the first outbreak and the pandemic. That’s simply too slow for a zombie virus to move unless the zombies themselves are so fast, and so hard to kill, that they can rapidly turn new zombies. Compare Brooks’ approach to that of 28 Days/Weeks Later or even the disaster of a film called Quarantine. (If you haven’t seen Quarantine, think of it as the Blair Witch Project of zombie movies – shaky handicam story telling that rapidly becomes painful to sit through.) The contagion in those movies spreads rapidly enough, and the zombies become fast and violent enough to quickly become a problem.

What has been interesting to me is the almost universal agreement on the topic of fast versus slow zombies. Just about everybody I have raised the issue with agrees that fast zombies are much scarier, much harder to kill, and much more likely when the ZA is upon us. I have to wonder, then, why franchises like Resident Evil or the remakes/knock-offs of Romero films generally portray the zombies as stupid and slow.

It seems to me that the future of zombie films has to lie with fast, violent zombies. Purists may disagree, but the only movies I can see remaining true to the schleppy zombies would be flicks like Shaun of the Dead that actually mock the speed.

On Sunday I’ll be speaking on a panel about gaming and advocacy. The purpose of the panel is two-fold.

First, we are looking to teach gamers how to advocate for or against policy issues that impact them. It seems not a week goes by that I don’t see an article about some misguided state legislator who has determined that video games are the root of all evil. They typically then go on to craft legislation that seriously impedes the rights of gamers. We hope gamers will begin to take these issues seriously and organize to become a significant political force.

The second purpose for the panel is to talk a bit about how political groups and causes are using games to convey policy messages. Following the Obama team’s use of paid advertising in an online racing game, the use of such tactics is getting pretty advanced. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing from my fellow panelists as well as the audience on that topic.

If I pick up nuggets of wisdom from the panel, I’ll be sure to pass them along via my blog as well as my Twitter feed. Follow me @MichaelTurk (if you aren’t already.)

Finally, it looks like 11 of my 20 readers have voted in the “How Would Gilligan’s Island Vote?” poll. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll weigh in. I’ll be posting the reply’s over the weekend.

Aaron is in a Chaotic Neutral mood.

For those who don’t get the reference, chaotic neutral refers to one of nine character “alignments” in Dungeons & Dragons. Think of them like a matrix. Lawfulness versus Chaos is essentially your adherence to the laws of society, whereas Good and Evil are your moral/ethical disposition.

Now here’s the problem, and the jumping off point for the discussion with Aaron. I contend that chaotic good and chaotic evil are false choices. Good and evil, just like law and lawlessness, lie on a continuum. That is, there is an order to them. There are degrees between them.

Chaos, on the other hand, is completely random. There is no order at all. Therefore, a chaotic character would be just as likely to be good as evil. As Aaron said, everything becomes situational. A chaotic good character would always tend toward the good. If they are chaotic evil, they would always tend toward evil. By that logic, they have applied order to their own lives. They have chosen a path, and a path, by nature, is not chaotic.

It’s like Johnny Depp’s line from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest.

A truly chaotic person can always be counted on to be chaotic, and that means they’re just as lokely as not to swing toward good or evil. As Paul Rodriguez (@pjrodriguez) said, “[A] Chaotic Neutral person might hit you in the face one day and gave you a $100 bill the next and then borrow your car, use all the gas, but [leave] a TV in the back seat.”

That’s pretty much exactly it. In a fight against long odds, a chaotic person would be just as likely to stay with you and fight as they would be to stab you in the leg so they could outrun you in retreat. They’re chaotic, and chaos defies patterns. If they always tend toward good (or evil for that matter) you could always know what they would do within a certain range.

So do chaotic good and chaotic evil exist? I don’t believe they can, and therefore the whole D&D continuum is off. I think the continuum should look more like this:

Anything below neutrality in regard to morals (good and evil) and lawfulness would fall into a base category of Chaotic. You would have no idea what they would do or what their moral leanings would be. I think it would be a much better framework. Frankly, with people stabbing each other in the leg, I think it would make the game more interesting.

I got ready to tee off on the first hole, lined up and took a huge swing only to discover that the Wiimote really doesn’t want or allow you to swing away. The game is really looking for a finesse swing on a very short arc with little movement. Swing away and you overpower the ball with poor results. It’s not like the batting in baseball which actually awards you for vigor.

I’m also kind of irritated by the lack of club selection options. Driver, iron, wedge, and putter are poor choices.

So here’s my question… Are games like Tiger Woods 2008 or MLB 2k8 more accommodating for people who really want to get into the game? I’d really like a game that allows a full swing so I can practice my form. Does anyone have suggestions for a better golf game?

Now go out there and let John McCain, Mitt Romney, The Huckster, or Rudy serve up a hot plate of whoop ass on Obama, Richardson, Edwards or Clinton (technically Hill, but as you see in the screen grab below, just as in real life, she had to invoke the spirit of Bill to fight her battles for her).

By the way, apparently they were going to include Fred Thompson, but they realized “Fred Thompson doesn’t decide who lives and who dies; he just makes it so.“

Some if the winners are truly breathtaking. The fact that most are produced without paints or canvas, but purely through software, is remarkable. The picture to the left, from Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, was created using Adobe Photoshop. I’ve worked with Photoshop a lot, and consider myself fairly proficient, but would have no idea how to even begin something like this.

If you have some time, and want to be impressed by some electronic art, take a trip through the winners from years past. The 2007 winners be unveiled July 11.

I was still coming down from that rampage high when I heard the news about the Playstation 3. After months of online chatter about Sony’s plans, they had finally released details. Given the sticker shock and awe, I was disappointed.

[T]he PS3 will come in two flavors: a tricked out system for US$599 and one with fewer features for US$499 (Europeans will pay €599 and €499). Ouch.

The more expensive system will include a 2.5″ 60GB hard drive, 4 USB 2.0 ports, a memory card reader, built-in 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, support for HD displays up to 1080i and 1080p, one HDMI output, AV output, and digital optical output. That’s a nice bundle.

In contrast the cheaper system has a 20GB hard drive, loses the memory card reader, the WiFi support, and here’s the biggie, the HDMI output. So if you’re planning to rely on the PS3 to play Blu-ray movies, you may not have the experience you hoped for due to the lack of a protected output path on the lower-end model. Right now, the only two studios that have made a decision on the use of the Image Constraint Token on the next-gen optical formats have decided against using it for now. That may change, and there is no guarantee that all the movies you try watching on the cheaper PS3 won’t be downsampled.

In other words, the extra $100 is well worth it, but that puts the actual price tag for a decent system at $600. That’s a bit steep.

Sure, the controllers are cool, can detect the motion of the unit, and have no cord, but they lose the vibration, which I have grown used to. Game play would be completely different if I didn’t feel like I was fighting guerillas with a funky dildo.

I’m also not sure about the motion detection in the controller. I’ve watched amateur gamers play and they often flop around like fish – dodging imaginary bullets like some spastic-Matrix Neo. If the controller reacted to that, the character they direct would spend most of the day on their ass looking at sky.

Serious gamers may want to take this one home, but for me, the casual gamer, it’s too expensive, and not worth the commitment.