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There’s this piece over on Gamasutra, a good one. It’s an interview with Chris Crawford where the first thing he really says is:

Well basically, new ideas don’t go anywhere. So the industry is just rehashing the same stuff over and over. During the 80s there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of new ideas being tried (many of them really bad) but there was at least experimentation. Now we don’t see any experimentation whatsoever.

At first, I thought “right on, Chris! Give ‘em hell!” because after all, what is EA but The Place That Madden Made? They built a massive company on releasing roster updates for fifty bucks a shot every year. The more I read the interview, though, it sounded more and more like a crotchety old man shouting at the kids to get off his damned lawn.

Trust me, it’s hard to disagree with the man who made Eastern Front, but when he says that Nintendo is “…just sort of reshuffling the existing set of ideas” and then goes on to say that his company is doing “interactive storytelling.”

Well that’s just breaking all sorts of new ground there, Chris, isn’t it? “You’re the hero…and you let the story go” applies to quite a few things out there, not the least of which is Oblivion. Going forward, it’s even more odd because, well…it sounds like he’s just building a MUD. When asked if players would be creating their own content in his system, which he refers to by the groundbreaking name of “Storyworld,” he replies:

We can’t let the player create his own verbs because the verbs are the heart of the game. And in a sense they are the rules. However, we can have… I differentiate between designers (who we call Storybuilders) and players. The designers create the rules within the systems, and then the players get the palette of verbs to play with.

Sounds a whole hell of a lot like a MUD to me. Worse, it sounds like a man who’s going that we as modern gamers can’t appreciate what came before. He used to program in Assembly, folks. On stumps. They didn’t even have fingers back then.

Dang-nabbit.

It’s a red-letter day for consoles.

First off we have Phil Harrison spouting off at German mag Der Spiegel with the following statements:

We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other computer functions. The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC … In a certain way, I understand why people would say such things [about the similarity of the PS3 controller to the Wii's], but it is stupid, if you’ll forgive me saying so. We have already worked on it a long time, and Nintendo almost certainly has done likewise with something similar. It is perfectly naturally for two companies to work on identical devices. It’s like that with technology.

Shits and giggles all around in the Sony camp I figure. There’s got to be something in the water there for them to think that not only is the PS3 priced accurately for what it’s worth, but that it’s probably too cheap for what we’d get. After all, we should be thankful that they’re even allowing us to have the opportunity to buy the PS3, because they have hordes of loyal customers waiting to buy them all out.

This on top of the rush job these guys had to do after Sony sprang the “new” Dualshake controller on them, which some have referred to as having merely tacked the ability onto their old controllers.

On the other side of the next-generation camp, Microsoft VP of Gaming Peter Moore told Kikizo games that nobody gives a crap about backwards compatibility on the 360.

Nobody is concerned anymore about backwards compatibility. We under promised and over delivered on that. It’s a very complicated thing… very complex work. I’m just stunned that we have hundreds of games that are backwards compatible … more are coming, but at some point, you just go, there’s enough, let’s move on, or people aren’t as worried about a game being backwards compatible – and I like to think we’ve upheld our end of the bargain in making at least two or maybe three hundred games backwards compatible.

Here’s the list. Notably missing are Project Gotham 2, Blitz: The League, The Warriors or any of the 2K Sports series except World Series 2K3. On the bright side, all of the die-hard gamers that were clamoring for Barbie™ Horse Adventures™ Wild Horse Rescue™ have been satisfied.

We should all be more thankful that the console companies know us much better than we do.