A pretty orthodox (pockety-gamer style) review for a pretty orthodox game but I was pleased with the two word strap which, in a kinda mixed compliment, Pocketgamer/ Develop Editorial Director, Owain Bennallack, reckoned might be the best thing I’ve written this month…

You say ‘to-may-to’, I say ‘to-mah-to’, but in the case of World Snooker Challenge 2007 (or World Pool Challenge 2007, as it’s known to our American cousins) that’s certainly no reason to call the whole thing off.

Indeed, thanks to the massive popularity of pool in the US set alongside British passions forged in the crucible of snooker, Sega has decided to pack its latest cuesports simulator with fully formed and feature laden versions of both sports.

For snooker fans, this translates to being able to play as or against an astonishing 91 of the most popular and well-known snooker and pool stars in the world – from John Higgins, Ronnie ‘O Sullivan, and Steve Davis through to Earl Strickland and Efren Reyes. Ten officially endorsed tournaments including the World Snooker Championship and The Masters are available to play through, as well as a hugely generous array of quick play and more casual options, including trick shots, free snooker, free pool, and 8- and 9-ball games.

You can read the rest here

Last Friday Boing Boing linked to Chewing Pixels’ List of Four Star Halliwell’s films. The ensuing avalanche of visitors to this site was, for me, a bit like the owner of a local café waking up to find every single participant in the London and New York Marathons at the door wanting a drink.

I mean, if I’d known you were all coming I’d have tidied up, repainted, perhaps worked on a better metaphor or something. Anyway, if this is your first time here or, if you’re one of the ten thousand-odd first time visitors from the weekend returning to see if there’s anything else of worth posted here, then welcome. Please stay for a while and, yes, I’m sorry that none of the affiliate links to the four-star films take you to the US wing of Amazon too…

Boing Boing is one of the Internet’s brightest stars. Like many of the most useful websites it actually creates very little content: rather it’s an Internet aggregator and a gigantic filter. If you’ve never been there the site works like so: anybody can submit a link to something they’ve seen on the Internet that is interesting, quirky, beautiful or, as the site’s tag-line suggests: wonderful.

A team of editors then pick those items that they think will appeal to the readership. A number of these items are then posted throughout the day and, week by week, the site more fully embodies its vision to become a ‘directory of wonderful things’. The site’s success – it has one of the largest readership’s on the Internet dwarfing the likes of the Times Online, Forbes, Time Magazine, Reuters and Fox* – is largely down to the quality of its links which are always appealing and interesting.

Readers of the former editor of Wired, Chris Anderson’s astonishing book, The Long Tail will appreciate the prophetic genius of Boing Boing’s simple idea.

The Internet has made content, product and opinion ubiquitous. There’s not necessarily more content, product and opinion than there has been in previous times, but it’s now far more readily available and easily accessible. The web is an ever-expanding waterfall of digital substance that quickly overwhelms the human mind. As a result, we need filters to sift through all the content in order to reveal those elements that are particularly interesting to each of us individually.

Google is a semantic filter, allowing its users to specify a search term and then presenting what it thinks are the most useful links about that search term. Boing Boing, by comparison, is a wonder filter: it retrieves wonderful things not according to vocabulary but, rather, to their inherent, editorially-judged quality. It does this by allowing like-minded individuals to suggest stimulating content and then building a community around that content. By employing readers to provide the initial filtering, and then having a smaller editorial staff filter those recommendations the richest and most interesting Internet content is revealed.

Interestingly, the Four Star film list on this site is another filter: a list of films that a grumpy, now-deceased film critic thought were the very best films during his lifetime. Many people thought he was one of the best and most stringent filters and so, like the best and most stringent Internet filters, he is of interest and use to discerning people wanting to sift the dross.

Whether anything else on Chewing Pixels fulfils Boing Boing’s wonder criteria is up to you to judge once you’re here and if you fancy looking a bit further. I hope so but, if not, take care and have a cup of tea on the house.

P.S. I will do an update on the Halliwell’s list soon as, with each new iteration, John Walker’s editorship seems to alienate yet more fans. But more on that another time.

*Source: The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.

For all its pantomime – the bright lights, buzzing neon and showboating shoryukens – the rise and fall of the videogame arcade is a simple tale of supply and demand economics. Technological advance has never moved in tandem with stuttering five-year long console life cycles. For many years, no sooner had the brightest technology been squeezed into Nintendo or SEGA’s latest mass-market games machine than the boundaries of what was theoretically possible in videogame hardware had widened. So pioneering developers instead outplayed their latest and wildest interactive dreams in the arcade, where the possibility of bespoke hardware in cabinets of any desired shape and size encasing the latest possible technology available presented far fewer restrictions on the imagination.

As a result, arcades have, year-on-year, signposted the future of home videogames: Space Invaders and Pac-Man laid down the twitch template, Street Fighter II micro-balanced competitive mechanics, Ridge Racer and Virtua Fighter the third dimension and Virtua Cop and Dance Dance Revolution new ways to interact with machines. At each stage the incessant consumer demand for ever-more incredible looking, sounding and feeling videogames was always best supplied by the flexible arcade medium.

However, home consoles have never been far behind each innovation, aping, refining and quickly surpassing the arcade scene’s best ideas and bringing them to the sofa-bound masses. Thanks to ever-cheaper microprocessors and broadband, consoles can now stream orchestras, allow a dragon punch inputted in Bristol to connect with a jaw in Osaka and demonstrate graphics that make Virtua Fighter 5 indistinguishable on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 or Lindbergh. Developers now struggle to fill home console hardware’s shoes rather than straining to burst free. In short, arcades have precious few software tricks left to one up the home systems that ably meet modern consumers’ demand for new and extraordinary play experiences.

You can read the rest here

Nintendo’s new console, the Wii, has a built-in software area in which you can build unique characters from a simple set of facial features and hairstyles. At first glance the range of possible creations seems fairly limited due to the handful of colours and a small stock of nose, eyebrow, eye and mouth types. However, each element can be enlarged, shrunk, rotated and placed with a plastic surgeon’s precision so that the range of potential characters you can make becomes near limitless.

The idea is that console owners can create and name caricatures, or Miis as Nintendo calls them, to represent themselves and their friends. These characters can then be traded between consoles and, more importantly, used in games to add a new dimension of personality and role-play.

In some games your Miis make guest appearances in the background while in others, such as Wii Sports, they’re fully playable representations of yourself on-screen. The appeal is obvious: why would you want to pick a generic character that a weary videogame artist concocted from a predictable, mass-appeal archetype when you can create your own unique and personal character roster?

It’s hardly surprising then, that 4 million creative minds, given such a toy set, would quickly turn their attention to recreating their favourite celebrities on the machine. Indeed it was only a few weeks after the Wii’s release that MiiPlaza sprung up, a site where anyone can submit a photograph of a famous Mii they have created for other users to comment on or replicate on their own console. But what surprised me is how addictive I have found making well-known faces.

Surprised because I dislike modern celebrity culture and how it has mutated into an all-consuming media monster in recent years. Fame has always favoured the remarkable – those with brilliant or deadly hearts, minds or faces – but Big Brother et al have shifted the rules of attraction in recent times and widened the definition of celebrity to seemingly allow anybody desperate enough in.

As such it feeds teens with identikit dreams more then it ever has before; it crushes young individuality and creativity instead doling out conformed and conforming aspirations, before spitting out disillusioned, broken twenty-somethings. Er, but anyway, I try not to talk about that because listening to people decry celebrity culture is almost as embarrassing as watching a friend suckle on the ever-engorged but never-satisfying teat of a new issue of Heat magazine.

The point is, despite all of that, celebrity Miis seem to make the face of celebrity culture acceptable to me. This weekend I happily sat down tweaking Jackie Chan’s nose until it was just right without a single stab of time-waster guilt. I’m not sure what does it: perhaps the fact that at Mii Plaza you’re just as likely to see design for a celebrity Socrates as you are a Paris Hilton and so there’s a wider and more appropriate spectrum of fame than Endemol et al usually present.

But more than that many celebrates have recognisable, iconic faces and, in caricature, all of the unattractive voyeur baggage is ditched. Now it’s less about how he slept with her, she wore that, and OMG they weren’t wearing underwear! and so celebrities are de-powered to just another recognisable face with a hint of backstory – the innocent likes of which might inspire me to choose Yoshi over Peach in a game of Super Mario Kart.

The beauty of having your created celebrity Miis inhabit your games is the incongruity of it all. Over last weekend, during a fraught game of baseball, at one point Jesus stepped up to the plate, bases loaded with my brother, George Bush and Betty Boo. Batman pitched a curveball, Jesus swung, missed and the ball smacked into the the alert glove of a crouching Ang Lee.

With Miis, celebrity culture becomes a game: you have fun with cultural icons, using their fame to enrich your experience and bring recognisable character and distinction to what would otherwise be a blander place. Videogames need iconic heroes and anti-heroes: why not use some real ones?

Which is pretty much the favoured apologetic of embarrassed but stubbornly defiant celebrity-magazine-reader friends. So, er, pass us Hello, maybe we’re not so different after all.

It took me two reads to get it (mostly) but now I want one.

In their words: “Bacterial Orchestra is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism. It consists of several audio cells. Every cell listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells.”

Every cell -consisting of microphone and a loudspeaker- listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells. Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole.

The piece was developed by Olle Cornéer, Christian Hörgren and Martin Lübcke.

I love this news piece posted on their site from last November as the micro-musical Frankenstein stirred:

“After tweaking the last bits and pieces the Bacterial Orchestra is now alive! From listening to it and playing around with it for just a few hours, we can tell you that this thing really has a life of its own.

Sometimes it clicks and sparkles really quietly, and beautifully we must say. At times it roars with distorted feedback making all the cells scream together. (We haven’t got a clue where the feedback comes from…)

At one point it even played the two first notes in a major chord. That was so scary Olle got tangled up in a loudspeaker and crashed it to the floor.”

We Make Money Not Art have a brief interview with the creators here.

For 99.95 euro you can adopt your own cell. |Sadly, as yet there seems to be no recording.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, is a homebrew RPG in which players take on the roles and actions of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two killers in America’s most deadly school shooting.

I interviewed the game’s creator, Danny LeDonne, and Ian Bogost, assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a vocal supporter of the game, to discuss the issues that this bedroom-coded 16-bit styled RPG has flung centre stage at the start of 2007. Part one can be read here.

German politicians have recently been discussing introducing a law that could see crimes against videogame entities punishable in the real world. Such acts might be easier to pinpoint in a mindlessly violent game but in SCMRPG one player might play with a view to learning about the killers, their motivations and the circumstances that led up to their actions; Another might then play the game simply to role-play killing some teenagers in a school canteen for kicks. These two scenarios would be near impossible to distinguish in a court of law. Eurogamer asked LeDonne if he thought the opportunity for misuse of interactive media was a valid case for banning it?

“Well, I think the idea of ‘banning’ a game, a poem, or a dance is deeply worrisome. What you speak about really asks us to consider the role that parents and others take in the developmental process of young people. I think that anyone who would kill others after playing a video game is a deeply disturbed individual and would find any media available to further such a demented personal ethic.

“Would we have school shootings even without videogames? Yes. We would even have school shootings without guns; they would be worse, I predict, because the ingredients to make propane bombs (like Eric and Dylan’s) can be purchased at a hardware store and could potentially kill hundreds of people at once.

So the real issue for understanding violence has nothing to do with whether one has read Catcher in the Rye (as John Lennon’s assassin did) or listening to The Beatles (as Charles Manson did). I think these kinds of reactionary gestures may satisfy a nervous public in the short-run but really they only provide false comfort as the real causes remain unaddressed – one of the overarching themes in SCMRPG.”

You can read the rest here

Yes, it’s essentially just the videogame censorship debate but rarely has it been writ so large, angry and polarising. I find Super Columbine Massacre interesting because it’s one of the few games that gamers don’t instantly know what to think of. With Bully we say: ‘The tabloids never played it. It’s handled sensitively. Besides, it’s not for children.” with the Hot Coffee mod we say: “Why are we so happy for maiming acts of pixel violence but when it comes to romance and sexuality we freak out? Besides, again, it’s not for children ‘.

But here, where we’re asked to take on the roles of murderous, dysfunctional teenagers and re-enact the massacre of actual school children the stock apologetics don’t flow so freely. We actually have to engage with freedom of speech, censorship and whether we believe there’s any kind of ineffability in art. In short it’s an actual uncomfortable videogame with real uncomfortable subject matter and, for all the incendiary headlines and hot-aired, political wrangling surrounding most violent videogames, truly difficult games like this come along very rarely. We should talk about these issues – so here I try to. Thanks to Eurogamer for running the piece and getting it in front of readers who would never usually see this kind of content.

Squeeze the R-trigger and you peer around the seat in front. On either side of a sweet-wrapper strewn gangway passengers yawn at in-flight movies or snore from beneath grey blankets. Stewardesses giggle huddled and preoccupied ten metres behind you. Tick tock and Carpe Diem: the moment has arrived. You tap A and the seat belt and adrenaline unclasp.

Easing the analogue stick forward inconspicuously inches you towards the cockpit. Select brings up a mundane but deadly inventory. Bic razor equipped you slip through the door, mash the X-button to slit the pilot’s throat then hit B to praise Allah for an ideological multiplier. Lock the door and L-click to engage the flight controls. The camera switches to a 3rd person view following the plane, lens-flared HUD as sparse as your character’s emotion. New York’s twin towers stand 25 minutes and 100 achievement points away.

Before the Daily Mail staff enjoys a collective brain haemorrhage from outrage/delight, as yet there is no such videogame: to many people the idea of any interactive media that allows you to role-play as a real-life ‘villain’ recreating historical atrocities is simply taboo. United 93, a film which hired actors to act out the type of roles described above in order to help viewers dissect the events of 9/11 might receive worldwide critical praise and accolade but with videogames think of the children! How on earth could a ‘toy’ meaningfully comment on or communicate about the darker side of humanity’s behaviour?

It’s attitudes like this ¬– the kind that reveal the disparity between freedom of expression in videogames to that in books and movies ¬– that resurfaced last week when the Slamdance Independent film festival announced it was removing one of the most controversial games from its Guerrilla Gamemaker prize short-list. The cutesy 16-bit Final Fantasy style graphics of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, mask its macabre and challenging content: you play as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two ostracised teenagers who visited their school, Columbine High, on Tuesday, April 20, 1999 and shot and killed twelve students and a teacher before committing suicide in America’s most deadly school shooting.

The festival organisers blamed the decision on fear that a public backlash against the game’s inclusion (it had already attracted acres of negative column space before being shortlisted) could scare off sponsors and throw the festival’s future into uncertainty.

But the Columbine massacre has been the subject of much creative investigation: Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, films which respectively dissect and recreate the day’s events, were awarded the Palme d’Or in consecutive years, not to mention the countless books published on the subject. So what is it that makes a Columbine-based videogame so unpalatable to the media? Does the interactive element of videogames change the parameters of what is and isn’t permissible in art? Or is it simply that games are seen as being for children and should leave tough subject matter to the elder mediums?

You can read the rest here

Finally, because I want to link you to something, there’s also so synergy between this issue and the current Jade/ Big Brother racism scandal. Read Mark Lawson’s Guardian column (The Monster You Can’t See) – just about the only useful comment that has been written on the subject – and I’m sure you’ll pick up the same issues as they echo through a different medium.

Jefferson Han’s touch screen interface is old-ish Internet news but here’s a new video created specially for an interview feature with Fast Company in next month’s issue, and the things it shows have lost none of their marvellous appeal since last year.

Bespoke, giant, DS-style, touchscreen-based consoles are the future.

This week Jason Wen photographed fourteen discarded Christmas trees around central London. All the trees were photographed as he found them and weren’t posed or arranged in any way.

You can see a slide show of his work at Flickr here.

With each new announcement, Second Life shows itself to be at the leading edge of MMORPG evolution. I don’t mean in the sense of increasingly fancy graphics or nifty, wide-ranging game features but rather how the developer treats the wider implications of its ever-more functional and reality-interfacing virtual dimension.

Yesterday’s announcement that Second Life’s creators Linden Labs are releasing its client source code under the GPL free software license sets of an avalanche of socio-political conundrums. Essentially, the decision moves Second Life residents one step closer towards becoming actual citizens instead of mere customers.

The implications of the release are clearly wide-ranging and need some explanation. As an MMO the game is distinct from its competitors in that it allows players to create their own objects in game and then sell, give away or license those objects under Creative Commons. The majority of Second Life’s competitors require that all creative/ IP copyright be assigned to the game’s corporate owners at point of creation – in other words, if you come up with and record a new song in the game world then that song’s copyright/ publishing is owned by the game publisher (although an example like that has ever been tested or contested in court).

This is fine in traditional videogames (after all, few of them facilitate much creative output in the first place – games like Viva Piñata simply offer the illusion of creativity; all you are actually doing is piece-by-piece revealing a game world that is already fully present on the disc – it’s simply the fullness of visibility that needs ‘creating’ via your progression).

However, in MMOs where people get together and create unique IP (which can then be sold to amass in-game wealth e.g. creating a new type of coat, opening a store and making huge profits when it becomes that season’s must have fashion) that IP becomes mostly meaningless. What good is your Second Life real-estate, architecture, gadgets and wardrobe if Linden Labs can throw you out at any time?*

Anyway, by opening up the source code for Second Life, Linden Labs is inviting a competitive marketplace for Second Life hosters – moving the world from a videogame type dimension to an Internet-type dimension (i.e. in the way that the Internet consists of a single Web with millions of servers/ hosters that are all linked together by their users).

The switch is intensely singnificant and, to my knowledge, it’s the first time a videogame (at least of this success and magnitude) has done something like this. In a sense, Linden are looking to turn Second Life into a new type of internet – with consistent avatars but just as many money-making opportunities. Linden wealth so becomes real-world wealth and Second Life residents are moved closer to becoming real citizens instead of customers.

The story is only just beginning to unfold and, over the next 24 months I’d expect hundreds of thousands of words to be printed as the implications dawn on/ filter down to everybody from the Financial Times to the Daily Mail. Let’s hope somebody somewhere is thinking about where this is headed and, even more than that, whether we want to go there at all. Surely it won’t be long before there are in-game elections, host-specific laws, uprisings and revolts as Second Life ever more closely fulfils and then exceeds its titular brief.

You can read the full text of yesterday’s announcement here.

*Arguably, if you view Linden labs as the government/ police force of Second Life (governing creator god might be more accurate) then, this situation is permissible. You only lose access to your IP and earning potential if you violate the laws of the country, are caught and kicked out.