Today’s entertainment in the living room is dominated by consoles, while the personal computers spend more time in first person shooters than they do in Word and Excel combined. Each year several thousands of new titles is made available for the many platforms of the gaming industry. Never before has so many people worked in the gaming industry either, from development, to sales and distribution. It is big business and it keeps on growing…

The question then becomes: What happened to the innovation?

In the beginning the industry wasn’t professional developers with a master degree in computer science and a bachelor degree in marketing and sales, but simply hobbyist having fun with extremely limited systems in their parents basement. There the basis for the current market was made – in the late hours of the night .. on development platforms most developers today wouldn’t be able to cope with. The demands for keeping the game within the small memory limits and the restricted processing power, combined with the long loading times meant that focus had to be present in order to make a good game. They couldn’t really focus as much on graphics as we do today. A nice title screen made up by large pixels and that was it for most titles. The sound side would hurt most ears today so the tunes had to be catchy. The focus then had be GAMEPLAY… The game often had to be simple, but fun and addictive to play!

These days it is difficult to imagine that one could be absolutely lost in the “virtual world” of Maniac Mansion, Pirates! or  Defender of the Crown on the Commodore 64.. or Civilization, Flashback, Monkey Island or Dune 2 on the Amiga.. but people really were! When Wolfenstein came out it was “like being there yourself”. Load the game today and you will feel a bit concerned by that because it looks crap and has an awful feel. However, back then it was a polished feel and a good gameplay. When Doom came out the world of FPS and with it the gaming scene was born, in my opinion. Playing Doom 2 multiplayer over null-modem with your friends was great fun and something else. To be able to compete on this virtual battlefield was intense and easy to pick up, even though skills would differ between individuals and therefore suddenly training mattered.

Now, if we take a look at what the gaming scene is producing today… with its top-professional studios, filled with highly competent and well-educated staff, led by professional story writers, coded by skillfull and professional developers, acting by professional actors and screen artist, sound and music made by professional musicians in top-class recording studios with complete orchestra, graphics done by visualization experts, 3D artists an professional sketch-artists… well, one question quickly pops up: What happened to innovation?

Now you got the means and the staff inside your studio, which is no longer your fathers creepy basement, and you come with this?! Take any title on the market and see how many titles you can find on the same recipe! It is troubling that such a large industry cannot innovate beyond what has already been done. They are simply waiting for new hardware, like the Wii-mote, and then adding a bit of titles for it, not at all concerned with doing the innovation themselves any longer – only the safe bets … which translates to: 90% FPS (like any other in essense with a 1% difference if we really look at it), a few strategy games within already known series, such as Command & Conquer, the same sportsgames in new wrappings without any real changes to gameplay and then the car/racing games… That’s pretty much it!

Now, try to think back to the last time you looked at a game and said: “Wauv, that’s something that has never been done before -this changes everything!”… Well, there were a few times in history worth noting, like with Civilization, Dune 2, UFO: Enemy Unknown, Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Guitar Hero, Counter-Strike, EverQuest… but not recently! It is not like I am living in the past… I simply can’t find the titles!

Well, if the industry can’t make up new genres or new types of gameplay how about combining already known genres in new ways like Savage and Natural Selection did with FPS and Strategy?

Some studios keep pressing the button still and they deserves respect, like BioWare with their ever-increasing innovation in roleplaying games from Baldur’s Gate to Knights of the Old Republic on to the latest edition of Mass Effect. Other studios deserves respect for focusing on excellent gameplay and extraordinary polish in their games, such as Blizzard from the days of WarCraft 2 to Diablo to StarCraft and onto the World of WarCraft. The rest that just fills a place in the gaming industry but doesn’t add innovation or excellent gameplay and just keep on pushing lousy half-finished sequels I can safely say: Perhaps it is time you took a small vacation back to your father’s basement for a few years and re-learned the secret about gameplay!

The series then became better and better over time – both graphically but also gameplay wise…. Then Bungie called it quits and what happened? Microsoft wasn’t about to let this great franchise go into history just yet… No, let’s make a spinoff with Halo 3 : ODST… That’s apparently not enough for Microsoft! Let’s make another spinoff with the genre we know doesn’t work on the console, RTS, and call it Halo Wars! Dear god… help them see the error of their ways?!

So, instead of letting Microsoft’s poor managers run around frustrated about getting the next idea for a Halo spinoff out in time let me help you here and now… How about “Halo Pinball”? Naturally you need the younger audience as well, so why not “Halo Pokemon” and naturally “LEGO Halo”. Of course to let Sega think they have a franchise remember to do “Sony does Halo” . In order to better the chances of a movie adaptation how about “Harry Potter and the Mysterious Rings” then?… And what about a personal trainer program with Master Chief called “Halo Fit”? … For the brutal minded you need a combat game and why not go for something people remember? How about “Mortal Kombat: Halo Vs. Sesame Street”? That way you ensure that you both get the young ones in on it and that the Halo team always wins! The last one for today is that you need a racing game in that little franchise of yours… How about “Project Gotham Racing: Halo Kart”?

Well, that should get you through this week of poor spinoff, Microsoft…. Call me next week when you need more ideas!

The best way to illustrate what you get with Apple is using the beach. When you buy a normal bambus PC you get a large, confusing beach, filled with occasional litter and you don’t really know when the Sun will shine. When you invite your friends onto your beach they often can find the way or take a long time getting there – arriving frustrated.

With Apple you get a sandbox filled with the most pretty, delicate sand. The Sun is always shining and there is no litter. Taking a trip to the beach for you becomes a breeze and an enjoyable experience. Then the problem starts. Your friends wants to visit you, but the only way they can get into your sandbox is to buy one themselves – then everything works perfectly.

The second problem comes when you want to buy a grill for bringing on your trip to the beach.  On the normal beach you can just go to any store and buy any grill you want, but not with your sandbox – only one grill is available… and it’s from the same guys who sold you the sandbox and the price is outright ridiculous. The same problem appears when you want to buy a ghettoblaster for playing music on your beach, a parasol for protecting against the sun and it continues making you pay more and more for products for which you have no alternative. No other ghettoblasters is allowed in your sandbox, sorry!

The third problem arrives when you start to get bored with your expensive ghettoblaster and your grill and you want to play something in your sandbox. You go to the Sandbox Store, but find little of the games your friends are playing on the beach. The games you can choose from are expensive, comes out years after the beach guys have enjoyed them for years and no one else are playing them anymore.

The fourth and final problem comes after a while. When you have seen anything there is to see in you little sandbox you want something bigger. You start poking around the corners and suddenly you realize that you are not on a beach, but rather on a small fenced-in pierce of sandbox with high walls around and a artificial sun hovering above. When you want to dig a small hole to build a sandcastle in your sandbox with your expensive sandbox(tm) shovel you can only dig down ten centimeters because the sandbox is no larger than that. Suddenly you realize that this is not a beach, but only a sandbox – and a very expensive one… and then you realize why I don’t go for Apple’s products

The lesson here is simple – Don’t fence me in!

Nintendo, however, in spite of their great sales is left with a major problem – attachment rate is extremely poor for the Wii… Only first-party titles sells okay – the rest is rubbish … Apart from one third-party developer, Ubisoft, who is apparently doing it right! Since the Wii is the best selling console one should think that developer studios would focus more on this platform, but this has not been the case – apart from a load of showelware… which doesn’t yield good sales for the publisher or a good console-reputation for Nintendo either!

To sum it up: Another formidable christmas season for Nintendo, though they still need third-party developers in the same class as Ubisoft to earn real money on their console over time. Microsoft is boosting their sales and are doing remarkably well. Sony is still crawling around in their low sales trying to spin a good story out of their poor-performing next-gen “wonder” of a console!

Elmo described some of the problems with the Wii and especially Nintendo here on his blog – all I can say is that: “Sorry,  Nintendo – My Wii is going Homebrew .. why? Because Monkey Island 1+ 2, Sam’n'Max : Hit the Road, Day of The Tentacle, Quake, etc. is actually quality titles – and I want quality titles on my Wii !”

Leave EA to claim that DRM is necessary, while its games are being copied more than ever and walk away. There is an excellent alternative to get your gaming fix, get a lot of value for your money and at the same time a perfect way to send the message to the game companies that DRM should be left in the dust… “Good old games” – Yes, classics for a small price on easy-to-figure-out digital download, guaranteed to work on XP/Vista, NO DRM, support, manuals and the ability to redownload whenever/whereever. This is exactly what the market needs. Now you have the chance to support the companies that are risking their titles on this, showing that this is how digital distribution of games should be like!

Instead of paying 50$ for the mediocre Spore, filled with DRM and waiting to claim our money again and again for small expansions you could go to Good Old Games and for example get this instead :

Fallout 1

Fallout 2

Freespace + Expansion

Freespace 2

Stonekeep

Sacriface

Giants : Citizen Kabuto

Descent

Descent 2

… And you still save 2$

That’s a lot of hours of good gameplay that has endured over time!

My respect goes out to Interplay and Codemasters … Now just get the Monkey Island and UFO : Enemy Unknown series up there

Media Players – There is no real reason to use Windows Media Player and get locked in to its insecure handling of plugins and codecs or starting to use WMV/WMA. Instead take a look at VideoLan client which is a media player that plays almost every movie codec imaginable, while staying open source, free and fast (not a memory hog like WMP). Furthermore it supports unique streaming features that you are likely to find quite interesting if you have a media server in your home. If you are gunning for a more advanced product take a look at the Democracy Player, which is the perfect choice for the Internet generation. It supports the many features of VLC but also subscribing and handling the many options on the Internet, like YouTube and Video- and TV-broadcasting. It is open source, free and a brilliant pierce of software. If you are looking at a replacement player for your music files the obvious choice for most is WinAmp, which is a good program and has been my choice for a decade. Lately, though, I have uninstalled my WinAmp and are currently only using musikCube, which is the best player I have ever tried. It is the AmaroK player of Windows, lightweight, fast, flexible and stable! Believe me, WinAmp is not coming back now!

Utillities – There are a many small and useful free utillities that should be installed on every Windows computer in this galaxy. A couple of them are the following… FileZilla! and FileZilla! Server is an intuitive FTP-client and server. Fast, easy to use, supports SSL, open source, free and even cross-platform. FreeCommander is the free to use alternative to Total Commander, which is the popular implementation of Norton Commander for Windows. It is easy to use and getting better version by version. Personally I prefer Directory Opus, which I learned to use in my Amiga days, but this cost money, so if you do not want to pay, use FreeCommander. Miranda Instant Messenger is the true king of messaging programs. It is small, fast, free, agile and easy to configure and customize. It supports every protocol out there and does what it is suppose to do in little memory space, which is just what I want in my messaging client. If you use Windows you know what a complete reinstall is… Everyone hates a messy system, but also hates to reinstall and setup everything once again. nLite is the solution! Automate your Windows installation and have this program install windows updates, service packs, useful programs and setup the system with drivers and all by inserting a CD/DVD.. easy, free and will save you a lot of time! Everyone needs a small notepad program, and frankly the one that comes with Windows needs to be kicked back into hell… Notepad++ is the perfect alternative! Customizable, FAST, open source, fully featured and a nice tool for the casual programmer as well… This program is a must have on every Windows machine out there – There is no excuse! Naturally you would want an office suite on your machine. I personally received a version of Microsoft Office 2003 Pro through my job, but never use it. I hate Microsoft’s closed formats and therefore have switched entirely to OpenOffice.org. Yes, it is a bit slower at times, but it is getting better month by month. It has many nice features, like PDF-output and support for SVG and especially support for ODF, which is my document format of choice! For most people this office-suite will suit them nicely and it is open source and completely free of charge. Do you own an USB-drive? I do .. and I use it in many places, keeping my most important documents on it. Lately though I have found its use being improved highly, as I have found PortableApps. This is a brilliant program that allows you to install portable apps on your USB-drive and run them directly from the USB-drive. Easy, fast and free. I can now use my own personal and preferred programs on my documents when I visit friends. Occasionally I have to do some DTP for friends and organizations and as I can no longer find my long time friend, Adobe PageMaker, I have found a great alternative, Scribus. Support for SVG, open source and free with many professional options, like CMYK-colors and much more, this is a brilliant application in its own right. The last pierce of utility that people should own is the offspring of the Mozilla Project, The Internet browser: Mozilla FireFox + The Mail client: Mozilla Thunderbird. These two applications are the best in their class, no question about it. I could write page after page about them, but why waste my time and your time.. Go download’em now!

Graphic software – I do a lot of personal work on graphics, editing pictures, drawing, sketching and painting. Therefore I have used a lot of different graphical software and trust me there is hardly any reason to use that pirated version of Adobe Photoshop that almost every computer has. First I will mention ArtRage, which is the perfect digital version of painting in real life. The user interface is a masterpierce and shows how agile a program can be made if it focuses on the task it needs to perform. This is a must have for persons with a tablet pen, like me. However, if you do not like the user interface you can take a look at ArtWeaver, which is a more “normal windows-like” application that does mostly the same, which is making great paintings digital. Most people in the Linux-world keeps applauding the GIMP. However, in my experience the GIMP is a horrid pierce of powerful software. It has many features that you would only find in professional programs, but I simply cannot work efficiently with that user interface. The alternative, if you want the power of the GIMP, is the black sheep, GIMPShop, which is a modified version of the GIMP that changes its UI to look more like that of Photostop, which most people can fathom. However, there are good alternatives to this. Paint.Net is a powerful graphic software, that could be described as a free, lightweight version of Photoshop. It does not have the power of the GIMP, but is slowly getting there – and making your own plugins, if you know a bit of programming, is easy and painless. It is getting better fast and should be on a standard Windows machine, instead of Paint. If you want a more powerful pierce of software for doing graphics, but not pay as much as Photoshop costs, a good alternative is Pixel. It has enough power to support most of the editing and image-creating task of normal users. Of course if you want to do vector graphics you can also find alternatives to the popular Adobe Illustrator, which is a brilliant program. A capable and powerful alternative, that has already gone a long way towards becoming a full replacement, is Inkscape, which has full SVG support and long range of other features. Coupled with the power of Scribus you can make the best-looking magazines a non-professional user can make.

Development – For those guys out there that are also developers in their spare time I will mention a few of the applications I myself use in my sparetime programming. SharpDevelop is a fully-featured C# integrated development suite, that is fast, open source, agile and extremely suitable for developers that use unit tests, ant, coverage test and write proper documentation. Coupled with Mono it becomes an easy task to develop cross-platform C#-applications. If you swear by Visual Studio you should take a look at some of the free tools available to help you develop better code (NUnit, NCover, NDoc). Of course any good development proces starts by making a good design and for this you need StarUML, which is a free UML-modeller that simply works far better than Visio in my opinion!

Games – Normally I pay for my games. I already have a lot of games for my PC and have started building up a small selection for my Wii up as well. But there are a lot of free stuff out there that can give you a good time for no money at all. If you remember the Amiga days you most certainly know the name Alien Breed, and if you want to relive that time try out Alien Breed : Obliteration, which is a perfect remake of Alien Breed ‘92, with additional levels. If you want strategy you should take a look at Battle for Wesnoth or Dark Oberon. Especially Battle for Wesnoth is quite challenging and provides hours of fun gameplay – especially against your friends! If you have been with computers long enough you are certain to remember Masters of Orion, which has now become alive again with this excellent remake and improvment, FreeOrion. Perhaps one of the best simulations out there, and one that has taken soo many days of out my schedule, is Transport Tycoon Delux. Now there is a remake, that does it perfectly, and improves much of what was needed in the game, for example better game resolutions and network play. OpenTTD is one of the best games out there and it continues to become better day by day. If you are not looking for remakes you could instead download the entire game of Savage : Battle for Newerth that was once a commercial AAA title, that is now free. Microsoft also freed Allegiance and this can be downloaded for free, and is also being improved upon regulary in the FreeAllegiance project. Have you ever watched Babylon 5? Well, if you want to enjoy good gameplay in that world take a look at Babylon 5 : I’ve Found Her, which is a professional game, free for download and will keep you busy for many days on end. There is also a lot of free content if you already own a couple of the games, that come with a modifiable engine. If you own the original Half-Life be sure to check out Natural Selection. If you own Half-Life 2 be sure to check out Eternal Silence and Black Mesa. If you own Unreal Tournament 2004 be sure to check out Alien Swarm. There are a lot more, but those are my personal favorites

Well, that’s it… That should keep you occupied for a day or two! Remember that most of this free stuff is linked to from my blog! Enjoy…

Meanwhile it seems that I will be getting less spare time shortly, as the first expansion to Oblivion appears to be on its way