Wii/Game Cube

(This will all seem a little anecdotal for a blog post for H&A4 but bare with me)

Yesterday i went to buy a controller for the Wii to play game cube games, specifically Resident Evil: Code Veronica as i am told it will help me reshape my view on the series of games (the first 2 where good, the rest weren't worth the discs they are burnt to). I trawled the shops and thought i needed to make a decision between

1. A second hand Game Cube controller (for authenticity)
2. A Wii classic controller (to fit the all white, clean lines of the consoles aesthetic)
3. A 3rd party Game Cube controller (because i'm cheap)

I chose 2 and went back to play the game - Classic Controllers don't work.

I also looked for some new games, I ended up buying Dead Raising:Chop Till You Drop but i almost made picked up a copy of Pikmin but I was posed with the problem, should i buy the wii re-release or the Game Cube original? With the Game Cube version being a pre-owned copy it was more than £20 cheaper. What are the "New Play Controls" going to offer and why are they so important, is the original flawed because it doesn't have them?

The specifics of the of the story are not important though, what is important to me is the feeling i woke up with this morning. What does all of this mean for the Wii?

These are a few questions that it raises for me that you might have an opinion on

• Does this mean that there was something fundamentally missing from the games released for the Game Cube that means that they need to be re-visited with a new interface. The Wiimote will enhance the game and therefore it was worth re-releasing?
• It is an easy way to make money for Nintendo?
• Has Nintendo missed the fact that the Game Cube failed to make much of an impact so we don't own the controllers to play the games but they are digging out games that we missed because the Game Cube was essentially a flop? (Maybe this is why they haven't released a wii'o'fied version of the Game Cube controller)

There is something that isn't sitting quite right with me about Nintendo's latest batch of (re)releases and the Wii's relationship with it's outcast cousin (The Game Cube). What does this mean for the Wii and how are we supposed to view the old versions and the re-releases of these titles?

I'm confused...

Reading (Week 4)

This weeks reading is...

Ernest, A. W. (2001) Will Computer Games Ever Be A Legitimate Art Form? Game Developers Conference.

Which can also be found in a more formal and extended essay in the book

Clarke, A. & Mitchell, G. eds. (2007) Videogames and Art, Intellect Ltd.

Psychophysiological Analysis

Quo Vadis 2008: Focus on your players - Interaction and Psychophysiology Talk

View more presentations from Lennart Nacke. (tags: usability interaction)

PA2

This is a link to your PA2 form, there were some last minuite changes made to your PA2 which were incorrect. This is the final version, there was a confusion over dates which resulted in a mistake on the printed copies.

http://www.alanhook.co.uk/CVG_HA4/pa2_ha4_0809.pdf

Gamespotting Blog

Hey people

Just a quick note to people, I have started my own gaming blog like Chris and just wanted to see what people think

Its called Gamespotting and its at the following URL

Any comments will be great

http://chooselifechoosegaming.blogspot.com/

Cheers People

Reading (Week 3) Revised

This weeks reading is...

Montola, M. (2005) Exploring the Edge of the Magic Circle. Defining Pervasive Games. DAC 2005 conference, December 1.-3. IT University of Copenhagen. Available at: http://users.tkk.fi/~mmontola/exploringtheedge.pdf [Accessed February 03, 2009].

as a further reading...

Nieuwdorp, E. (2005). The Pervasive Interface; Tracing the Magic Circle. DiGRA 2005, June 16-20. Vancouver Available at: http://www.digra.org/dl/ [Accessed February 01, 2009].
(sorry i posted this as the reading by mistake)

Researching Games

I thought it best to put down in writing the two research techniques that i shared with you in the session on Thursday. One is the use of Digiplay...

(This is an image from the search terms "video game research")

The Digiplay Initiative - The Digiplay games research bibliography is the largest database of academic and research articles on game freely available on the web. On digiplay you can create an account, or just browse content. It has been having difficulties because the site database grows exponentially as more and more people publish work on Games and Gaming Culture. It is a searchable database of articles, it supplies links to the resources and abstracts. Quite a lot of the resources you might need to log into as they are online journals, guidance on this can be found on the Salford University Library site.

Zotero - is a plugin for the firefox web browser, sites that link into zotero include Amazon and Digiplay. It works as a way to tag and organise your research, sites that subscribe to zotero will provide a one click save option that will supply you with all of the bibliographic information you need and zotero means you can export a bibliography for an essay in just a few clicks (but be warned there are different versions of the Harvard referencing system so you might need to tweak the layout). Zotero also has a plugin for word downloadable from thier site.



WorldCat - Worldcat is the database that zotero draws all of its information from, it is a searchable catalogue of books/dvds etc. that is a good place to start searching for broad topics, it also has catalogued sections of peoples PhD thesis.