Gaming My Way Blog Carnival, May 2010
Welcome to the May 2010 edition of the Gaming My Way Blog Carnival. Here are this month’s contributions.
Jimmy Lofton begins the carnival this month with The evolution of the DS at Phantasy Gaming. He briefly goes over the long history of the Nintendo DS and all of it’s iterations, and also has a few comments on Nintendo’s choice to release so many versions of their handheld so quickly. An interesting read, so head on over and check it out.
Eric Gargiulo comments on the current console war between the PS3 and 360 in his piece Console Wars: Playstation 3 Vs. Xbox 360 at CamelClutchBlog.com. For a piece comparing the PS3 and 360, he does have a lot to say about the Wii. Most of which I must respectfully disagree with, as I quite enjoy the Wii and the motion controlled gaming. I simply ignore shovelware and play the good games, just like I would on any console. However, after the Wii bashing, he gets into an extensive comparison between the PS3 and 360, covering a large area of console features in coming to his conclusion for his favorite for this year. Read his piece to find out which console he thinks will come out on top.
Shaun Hudley tells how all of his family enjoyed playing video games on the Wii in his post The Family Gets Together at What Nintendo Did For The Hudley’s, asking, “What can Nintendo do for your family?” Well depends on the family, but if they’re anything like Shaun’s (and many more families than traditional consoles will reach), then likely Nintendo can get that family into gaming to give them something else they can do together.
Meg details her experience playing the alpha version of Fantasy University over at Simpson’s Paradox. It sounds a lot like Kingdom of Loathing for Facebook, but with it’s own original twists that justify it being it’s own game. It also sounds like it’s not going to suffer the pitfalls most Facebook wannabe games suffer from. Indeed, from what Meg has said, FU sounds like it’s shaping up to be a real game without any spamtastic tendencies. If this turns out to be the case in the final version, Facebook games will have a lot of good lessons to learn here.
Z. W. Van Kleeck has two pieces for us today over at Hit, Crit, or Miss: Gaming Insights. First up, he tells us that there’s more to RPGs than XP and items in RPGs Are Not Just Games Where You Equip Items And Use Magic. While he makes some interesting points, I think it’s safe to call games such as Final Fantasy RPGs. This isn’t because they provide choice, but because they picked they’re genre from their source material, and the original Final Fantasy played a lot like computerized Dungeons and Dragons. Now, I would never try to argue that games such as this are an RPG in the sense World of Darkness or Dungeons and Dragons is, but terms do evolve with time, and RPG is one that now has multiple meanings. However, he makes some good points about this, and they are all worth taking into consideration when evaluating if a game is an RPG, or a true RPG. I do, however, agree with him that it’s ridiculous to call anything with some RPG elements an RPG, I just happen to think the line is a bit fuzzy.
His second piece is Used Games v.s. Pirated Games: Which Is Worse For The Developers? Now, I try to by new whenever possible, which is basically anytime the game is still available new. For five extra dollars, I can afford to support the developers of games I like and who provide a quality product. However, I also support the right of anyone to sell the physical media they purchased as well. Yeah, I know you technically license the game, but by selling the physical media, you also sell the rights to your license, so still no problem. It’s the same thing as selling off your used TV set when you don’t want it anymore. However, this is something that should always be in the back of gamers’ minds when making decisions about purchases, since supporting the developers is what will get us more games in the future. Some good points in here that should get you thinking. I still say inconvenient DRM for any reason is bad though.
That concludes this edition of the Gaming My Way Blog Carnival. You can use the carnival submission form to submit posts for next month’s carnival, to be hosted on June 24, 2010. Be sure to check out some of the posts of other submitters and perhaps leave a friendly comment or two if you like their work.
