An interesting article popped up on Penny Arcade a couple of posts ago... an article about Playing to Win. At the risk of paraphrasing a summary, it's about how a truly great video game player will take advantage of any and all opportunities to win the game. The article uses Street Fighter as its visual aide, but the lessons here apply to just about any game, particularly multiplayer video and card games. Go read it for the full, true flavor.

Now. That guy is a dick.

His theory justifies everything that is wrong with the contemporary multiplayer gaming scene. In fact, taken one step further, his arguments would allow the use of cheat codes as long as all players have equal access to them. And you thought WarCraft 3 couldn't get any more fun. Let's start at his beginning.

It was the sanity effects that won me over.

Before I heard about those, Eternal Darkness wasn't even on my Maybe I'll Buy It list. The only screenshots I saw indicated some kind of Gladiator vs. Zombies thing, and the title: subtitle just cries of melodrama. Let me guess... ancient nameless evil seeks to enslave the world and you're the one guy that can stop it?

Sort of. The ancient evil has a name though. And there's three of them.

Eternal Darkness begins with Alexandra Roivas, who has just learned of her grandfather's murder. When the police have no answers, she vows to explore pappy's homestead herself in search of clues. What she finds instead is pages from an aged book made of skin and bone. These pages - supplemented by grandfather's research - tell the story of a growing evil and the efforts of humanity to stop it. When Alex finds a new page, the game turns the story into a level, with you taking over as the hapless person drafted into fighting the darkness. You'll control a Middle Eastern lothario, an Italian Renaissance architect, a WWI combat reporter, a 1990's firefigher, among others.

"A marketing ploy to turn humans into living adverts is proving a hit with thousands of people who have applied to change their name to a computer game character in exchange for 500 pounds." (entire article)

Acclaim UK will pick 5 people out of those thousands... they will legally change their names to "Turok" for a year, and they win a bunch of Xbox junk, plus the money. I'm not entirely impressed by this. Seriously, what possible marketing value does a first name have? If my waiter's first name happens to be "Kleenex," I'm not going to become magically enamored of Kleenex products. I'm certainly not going to assume that the person somehow embodies all the positive qualities of Kleenex brand tissues, or vice versa. Particularly considering that people can and will name their kids/themselves absolutely anything... I'd probably just figure he was some punk trying to make a statement about the artificialness of labels in today's society.

When it comes to sports video games, I'm woefully ignorant. I've never stepped into Madden or Tony Hawk, and I can't even name a baseball franchise for the triple. The only "real" sports title I follow is EA NHL, and that's because I see video game hockey as an arcade game. For me, the players are instead mobile cannons, and the sole ammunition available is a single floating bullet, which I must fire at the enemy's netted weak spot. And as my hockey-savvy friends can tell you, it's only been a recent development that I can be reliably trusted to stay inside the norms of hockey... and not go offside right away or make insane power shots from across the rink.

Only one other sport graces my video game library, tennis. Represented by Wimbledon Championship Tennis on Genesis and Mario Tennis on N64, tennis is another sport I can actively understand in arcade terms. Smack ball so that the enemy can't smack it back.

As far I'm concerned, the official Year in Gaming 2002 begins this weekend.

...because this weekend is the last weekend in my entire life that I will not personally know the glory of Super Mario Sunshine. That makes this weekend perhaps the longest weekend ever, although I intend to whet it down with a quickie purchase of Duke Nukem Advance. (My wife persists in rumors of some kind of "fabulous warehouse sale" this Saturday, which I know from experience involves a great deal of me standing in a long, long line while she continues to shop. Friend Duke will come in extremely handy.)

I went into this last weekend fully expecting to cuddle up to Apple's newest operating system release, Mac OS X 10.2. My wife and I planned on getting massive amounts of work done for our wedding reception / website / etc, but I justified any investment in 10.2 as time well spent. So I was jazzed about the whole thing.

The problem: I never actually bought it. Let me explain.

Saturday, we're working in our office. I'm in Photoshop scanning in pictures and working on web graphics. My wife, waiting for her turn at the Mac, looks over at me and says "This would go a lot faster if I had my own machine."

Ever since I debuted this version of fourhman.com (the "red" version), I've been stymied by the division of sections. In previous iterations, I had bounced from having no sections to tons of sections, and I never liked either. Having a list of links seems like an obvious separate page, even if the concept of a link page is so overdone that you couldn't even order it at the worst steakhouse in Montana. That leaves me with card games and video games, which are the only two broad categories that I wanted this site to concentrate on (aside from this opening weblog.)

Unfortunately, I still don't particularly like either's layout. My big problem with card games is that there's very little reason for regular updating, so it always seems old to me. I've been trying to add some more Doomtown content, but that is sporadic at best. Video games is a different story; new content is generally not a problem. But the design was. Plus, it was all hand-coded, which made updating a chore.