GameDaily
Frogger: Ancient Shadow
Sapo enfrenta perigos
- Console: Xbox 360
- Released: 08/14/2008
- Rating:
- Views: 7
Circus Circus - Frogger
Mike plays the original arcade classic, Frogger
- Console: Xbox 360
- Released: 08/14/2008
- Rating:
- Views: 11
The Death of Arcades
Back in the day, people left their homes to play video games. Play Value Episode “The Death of Arcades” Libi: When we talk about arcade games you have such awesome memories of like either going with your friends or just like that’s what kept your attention for hours and hours and hours when you were a kid. Jeff: Arcades were great because when you were a kid they were a fad for awhile, but looking back now it’s almost, what it’s almost like looking at a mulch shop in the fifties. It’s just not a thing we have anymore. Dan: You know in the early seventies Pong actually was a hit in bars right, but it wasn’t until the end of the seventies that games like Space Invaders came out, these huge money makers actually established a reason to have dedicated arcades. TJ: And here you have dedicated gaming centers for people to say lets put a center for kids to play games, and the games will come. And sure enough hot on the heels. Pac Man was on the hype. Josh: So Pac Man is in a lot of ways the first video game character. Before that there are a lot of spaceships, a lot of boxes ad triangle bleeping and blooping. But Pac Man is kind of like a person and you know you can put him on a Saturday morning cartoon. You can put him on the cover of Time, you can put him on kid’s lunch boxes, and he has a wife! Dan: That time period between 1978, and maybe 82, 83 was sort of the golden age of arcades. Every year you had new games that were pushing technology, making a heck of a lot more money. Josh: You got Donkey Kong, you got your Pole Position, and you got your Frogger. Dan: You know you had the Star Wars arcade game which was huge, centipede. They all used different control mechanism some were joysticks some were paddles. Others used the trackball. Josh: Video games eventually became so mainstream that there was a movie based on video games, Tron. And then in turn of course there is a video game Tron, of course based on the movie. TJ: So by the early eighties you have one and a half million arcade machines in the country together. People are playing about 2 million hours on these machines. That is a lot of time for them to stand going, up pa pup, pup, pup, like that. Josh: And we all just pulled together. Someone had to stop the centipede invasion, had to be us. Dan: The video game industry in that period from the late seventies to the eighties it was out of control. It was pulling in twenty billion dollars a year which was more than major league baseball basketball and football were pulling in combined. This is ridiculous. Christ I think that’s why Americans are pretty fat. TJ: Now this was a peak, but we new it couldn’t last forever. Dan: Every year the video game industry was just growing and it was growing in terms of the money it was bringing in. In terms of the people who were actually visiting the arcades. People who were involved in the industry didn’t really think there as any way for it to go but up. And it actually ended up peaking and not growing any further because the investment started to exceed how much you are actually going to play the games. Josh: When arcades started to fall the first places to feel it where places that should never had games in the first place. Places like grocery markets, restaurants, senior citizen homes, synagogues. Those all disappeared. After that the huge theme parks that were built around the idea that video games were just a never ending gross business. Those started to fall. By the end the only places that are left are in the middle. The medium sized arcades, little, dark, not as glamorous, but just reasonable enough to turn a profit. TJ: And then right around 86, 87 Nintendo. The Nintendo came out and became really popular and that revitalized the entire game industry but it moved the focus back into the living room. Josh: Arcade games because it was such a business made up of a hundred companies. They wouldn’t advertize on TV, where as Nintendo they are like, mom buy your son this! And then for the son they are like tell mom to buy me this. Birthdays, Christmas you can’t give an arcade game realistically, but you can give a Nintendo. Shandra: So actually the Nintendo systems and arcades could kind of peacefully coexist. The nail in the coffin for Nintendo games is when the Sega Genesis came out, in like 89, 90. Because it was arcade games that you could play at home. It was direct competition. TJ: Now Sega was making arcade games, but they decided to make the same version of games for their new console. Now why did they do that? It is not because they didn’t want to make money in arcades anymore, but they said we can do better if we start to sell these games directly to the consumer. You don’t have to go to Joe bob pizza shack anymore. We can just say hey, Mr. Consumer, watch this commercial on TV and go out and buy this game yourself. So Sega was cannibalizing their own arcade audience but they had seen the writing on the wall. They knew that home gaming was the way of the future. Dan: They were able to replicate the arcade experience pretty well. First and foremost, the fact that you could get Strider, Altered Beast, and Afterburner on your home systems when you bought your Genesis eliminated the need to go to the arcade. But then the other thing that started happening was playing these games at home people started to ask for longer more involved video game experiences than they had previously had. Josh: Arcade games are designed to kill you. They are designed to be frustrating; if you just sit there and play it for ever it would not be a profitable business. Where as home games work with you a little more, they are a little more fun, you can do things like explore, you can tell a story. Libi: Like the levels unto which you were stimulated were just completely changed and they were like more involved, you know like you were actually becoming the character. And you had to like think of where to go and what to collect and what to do. And like where to find things. Josh: The real case in point is the Neo Geo. This is a system that was designed to be as good at home as it was on the arcade. The games were the same in both. And even though the price for one was abnormally high, the games were very boring. They weren’t the kind of games people wanted. TJ: Why do I want to spend, in this case $54 for a game that gives me three minute burst of fun. Nobody wants that, they want something deeper. Girl2: Gamers grew up and they wanted more variety, and the home console offered that. They wanted board games, adventure games, role playing games, sports games. I mean how do you play a sports game in the arcade, it’s like impossible. Josh: So when you go home you have this rich tapestry of genres you can play with, and that’s why arcades died. They have a very narrow set of fleeting experiences. And we just outgrew them. Dan: What was interesting is when you were in the arcade, your basically putting in quarters and trying to last as long as you can with a limited amount of money. And there is a real financial incentive, when you get Final Fight at home and you can just continue and you can play till you beat it. It totally sucks all the fun and you realize right away that those game suck. Josh: The dead, dead cat bounce of arcades, right when they bounce, and right before the final death cry is Street Fighter 2, and Mortal Kombat. TJ: These games are going to test your skill against complete strangers, people you don’t know. And you know complete bragging rights; people are always stepping up to the challenge trying to challenge them. Josh: That is something that is very important to the development of video games, it never went away. It is just now we do it online. And there is elaborate ranking systems so you know exactly how good the person you are playing is versus how good you are. TJ: So the last thing that the arcades had to hold onto was that social interaction and that competitiveness against strangers. Well you know what that even fizzled as soon as the internet came along. Shandra: I think there will always be arcade games around though just for like nostalgic purposes. Just like I don’t want to get rid of that Frogger game that’s been sitting in the back of the store because it has been part of history. You know it’s like its sad but it happened. TJ: So we grew up and the games grew up but the arcades they couldn’t grow up and change for us, so they died. But they died so we could have Oblivion and World of War Craft and really complex artistic games like that. Josh: Arcades had to die for the art to evolve. You know you can’t make an omelet without destroying a few businesses, that’s the bottom line.
- Console: Xbox 360
- Released: 04/22/2008
- Rating:
- Views: 134
Controversy!
Sex and violence in video games is a potent issue and has been for quite some time. Play Value Episode “Controversy” Josh: Any time any kind of new artistic medium emerges there is always controversy, people thought that radios were rotting kid's minds, then it was comic books, then it was TV, then movies. There are people that thought the jitterbug was going to be the downfall of society. Everything brings controversy with it and videogames are certainly no exception. TJ: There has always been controversy in games and it all starts in the 30s and 40s with pinball. The way that you play pinball was there were no pads like you play now, you put a ball in and shook it around until it went in the right pocket and it paid out. So pinball was essentially a game of chance, gambling. Libi: So in order to other words take a hit at the Mafia, pinball became illegal. And then the New York mayor at the time LaGuardia went so far as to take pinball machines down to the river, slash them within ax and then shove them into the water. Jeff: In 1976 New York decriminalized pinball and almost immediately after, literally months later the first controversial video game comes out. Dan: No sooner was pinball legalized then video games took their place, the torch was passed and they aware now public enemy number one. Parents up in arms, legislators angry as hell, why is that? It is a game called Death Race. TJ: And the object of Death Race was you are driving around and running over Gremlins, well running over Gremlins kind of looks like running over people in the 70s because graphics were really bad. Josh: All you can see is a pixelated head, a pixelated body, pixelated legs, and pixelated arms, which do anyone looks like a person. So parents started to object. Libi: The woman who is at the forefront of emerging protest was Ronnie Lamb, a housewife, PTA member, and she led protest marches, went on Phil Donahue, was really active in getting arcades banned from malls. Dan: It wasn't really the videogames themselves that where the problem most of the time. No parents thought that Frogger was going to corrupt their kids it was the environment they were playing these games in. It was dark sweaty rooms full of machines, and kids standing in front of them. The creepy old guy with the crotch mounted coin changer and the leer in his eye that was the real problem. Josh: Kids would skip school to hang out at arcades; parents just viewed the institution of an arcade as a public menace. Get rid of them. Jeff: What is interesting here is that Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari, sees this and that is what inspires him to open Chuck E. Cheese, a place with safe games where people can bring their kids and they will have a good time. Dan: They are well lit, they are well supervised, you can bring the kids there and the parents can be there. In fact Nolan Bushnell made more money with Chuck E. cheese than he ever did from Atari. Jeff: And if death race is the first videogame controversy than the first controversy at home on the consoles is Custer's Revenge. Where General Custer dodge's arrows to go rape an Indian woman, but apparently some people thought that that was not OK. Josh: This game was retarded, and it was a slap in the face against everybody pretty much, from the people to take it in the game, to women, to people playing a game. You now, it was not even classy porn, they deserved a protest and a protest is what they got. Dan: Now after the big videogame crash of 1983 the issue kind of went away, because they were not a lot video games around. Occasionally one would pop up, like there was Commando Libya, where at the end of the level all the bad guys that you beat you lined them up and shot them against the wall. Josh: And then there was NARC which came out in the late eighties, which you were NARCS killing drug dealers, and you're blowing them up and body parts are being strewn all over the screen. Needles are being injected and thrown into your leg, and other words it was awesome. The way that Midway got around the ultra violence in it was positioning it as an anti-drug game. Jeff: And it's really, really very funny to me that they were preaching an anti-drug message with extreme, extreme amounts of violence. Dan: But for the most part things were nice and calm. Nintendo prided itself on being very family friendly and the industry largely policed itself. TJ: Sega then decides to give consumers the things that Nintendo does not, you know a violent, dirty, gritty type games. Then Mortal Kombat comes out. Dan: Incredibly gory, incredibly violent, and of course incredibly successful, now both Sega and Nintendo wanted to take the game and put it on home systems. Josh: Mortal Kombat looked better on the Super Nintendo I would argue, but it did not have blood. It did not have the decapitating moves. The Genesis had the full thing. Jeff: It is all about the blood, that is the trademark and the fact that everyone knows that it is in the Genesis version makes the Genesis version outsell the super Nintendo one 4 to 1. Dan: So it may seem like a win for Sega, but of course it came back and get them on the ass, because whenever you do something that Mom does not like you end up in front of a congressional committee and that is where the videogame industry ended up, and front out of Joe Lieberman and all these other congressmen. Jeff: Society at this point is still kind of wrapping their head and around the idea that it is not just children playing video games. Today it was pretty accepted that games come out that are clearly for 18 and over but it was not always that way. Libi: Congress called Sega to task for their ultra violence version of Mortal Kombat and another game called Night Trap which is almost really a B-movie it has got vampires chasing co-eds in pyjamas around at a slumber party. Jeff: And it is really no worse than you would see on USA up all night, but just the fact that it was on a Genesis and not a VCR made all the difference. Sen. Byron Dorgan: About two months ago I saw the video game Night Trap for the first time; it is a sick disgusting video game in my judgment. Dan: And the ultimate outcome of all of this is that they created the ESRB a ratings board for video games. Kind of like the MPAA for movies, it is voluntary but all of the games have these ratings. Jeff: One of the genres that probably attracted the most controversy was the first person shooter, a lot of people look at them as almost murder simulators and of course it does not help when Columbine happens and it comes out that the kids were playing Doom and into Doom. TJ: And so now there is a link being developed between these school shootings, which now to start to happen more regularly. It seems like more and more school shootings are happening. Jeff: And then of course Doom is followed by games like Duke Nukem, and Quake and all of these games have to try the top each other in violence. TJ: And that is kind of brings us up to today, they has never really been a resolution. Every few years a study is done that say a games causes kids to kill, games do not cause kids to kill. So I think that that is an ongoing battle that will continue for the history of gaming. Jeff: After Columbine the controversies there, but nothing really comes of it ages kind of spirals around. Until, one of the Grand Theft Auto spin-offs, San Andreas, when it turned out that somewhere deep, deep in a game there was a sex scene that was never completed but left on the final disk. Dan: Some hidden footage somewhere in the game with some fully clothed 3-D characters hopping up against each other in a bed. It was not anything worse than you would see on Adult Swim but parents and congressmen and politicians were outraged. Jeff: Hillary Clinton makes a huge deal out of this, she is threatening to shut the game companies down, she is threatening to do things that she does not even have the right to do but she is making a big stink. Dan: How did the videogame industry solve this problem? Well they held a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's re-election campaign and mysteriously no further hearings were ever held. Hmm. TJ: And the one constant and all of this is that controversy in games means sales. Jeff: It is the same with films, and books and with music. It is just the best free publicity you can get. Libi: You know all the concerned parents and the governing boards might want to raise a fuss a little less often if they do not want their kids rushing to stores to buy these games. Jeff: The bottom line is that they can regulate and they can market these things all they want, but it is up to the parents to keep track of what their kids are playing. If parents did their job the government would not always have to step in.
- Console: Xbox 360
- Released: 04/22/2008
- Rating:
- Views: 1180
"Video Games Live" Concert Tour - Frogger Interactive
An extraordinary event that combines orchestrated versions of video game themes, a sound and light show, choreographed stage representations of the games and an interactive audience experience. Video Games Live premiered in 2005 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On October 29, it will begin touring the United States, captivating people with imagery, spectacles and stunningly performed versions of everybody's favorite game themes and soundtracks. Audiences are reminded of classic game titles that have left acoustic stamps in their minds as well as celebrating the most recent games that have left a mark in interactive entertainment. For tour dates and more info visit the official site
- Console: Xbox 360
- Released: 01/11/2006
- Rating:
- Views: 21
Frogger
- GenreArcade
- Release Date11/30/1999
- PublisherMicrosoft
- DeveloperDigital Eclipse
- ESRBE - Everyone
