Excel is a fun tool. First, I took the data that Darius Kazemi (google him, you cur) scraped from GameRankings in the range of 1997-2010 and posted. And now I present (from that data) a way to map the skewed 75%-is-average critic rating to a 0%-100% scale. Certainly someone has done this before, but it took me ten minutes so what-the-hay.

First, the full range. Take a critic score on the x-axis, follow it up to the line and the y-coordinate will be the converted rating. The second image below is a zoom in on the “sweet spot” from a critic rating of 70% to 100%. Look at how vertical it gets in the 80% range! This means the reviews bunch up in this range. A perfectly flatly distributed group would be a simple diagonal line from 0%, 0% to 100%, 100%.

Here, we zoom in on the meat of the data: the 70%-100% critic range:

And for those who like tables:

Since Darius only pulls games with 20 reviews or more, he misses my critical failure Superman Returns which currently would fall below 0%.

- Whirlwind tour here, folks.Two years ago when I moved into a house in Florida I said “God damn it, I’m never moving again.” Then I moved to New York City and said “Moving is for suckers, good thing I’m in this Great City.” Well, I’m moving again, this time to a cheaper city to contemplate my options. And it is just a stressful as it always is.

Unemployment this time around has left me a bit crestfallen and unmotivated. I know that this situation is entirely not my fault, but I’m still left feeling inadequate. I’m trying to distract myself by writing. My writing has significant problems but I suppose all writers feel that way about drafts. I’ve got some board games in embryonic form and one that I am submitting to publishers.

In a self-promoting turn, I’m quoted in the debut issue of Handshake Magazine about violence in gaming. The magazine is free and full of great articles with eye-pleasing layout, so check it out.

- I have had time to play a few games. I’m utterly torn by Deadly Premonition. It is wholly awful, but it exudes this sort of creative artistry that shows someone cared for it. I read the postmortem in GameDeveloper and wanted to chuck it across the room when I read how long they spent making real event cycles for the townsfolk and other behind-the-scenes stuff. Maybe they could have spent some time on making the controls not stiff and unresponsive? Or maybe they could have hired someone who has at least written a short story to do the dialogue. In the way of a lot of Japanese-derived voice acting they take thirty second pauses between lines, so when there is literally a four minute scene where the characters introduce themselves to each other and no action or development happens at all, I want to get the source code and just comment out the whole scene.

Other than that, it has some interesting themes going on. You can pick it up for like fifteen bucks now. But be prepared for some gristle.

If you were a fan of Dead Rising then the demo-slash-prequel Dead Rising Two: Case Zero is probably for you. (Dead Rising hit a two run walk-off in the bottom of the ninth to beat Case Zero, if you are looking for the box score.) Here’s another instance where I am torn by the writing. In the opening scene, there is a very tense revelation of backstory as you find out that the child was infected by her own mother and that the father has sacrificed for her. Yay for characters with motivation!

Then you get into the game proper and it just lacks any sense of subtlety. There’s the pair of, ahem, ladies, on a bachelorette party complaining about how “omigod, not hot” it is that they are stuck in a bowling alley with some zombies. Uh, what? The auteur side of me wants to say that this is (as was Dawn of the Dead that the series is based off of) a commentary on the shallowness of popular American culture. There’s evidence to support this. Zombies still stand at the slot machines in the casino compelled even post-mortem (ha! Used that in two different ways this post. Achievement unlocked). There are a pair of “extreme” athlete fans that stay put fighting packs of zombies because it’s “awesome”. If I was working on this, I’d have put a zombie on a computer in the police station with a little image of Farmville on the monitor. But then I look at the lack of subtlety thrown in across the board (sure, there are motorbike forks sitting in this locked shed, why not) and just want to assume they are being silly because it’s their damn canvas and they can use whatever paints they wish.

But here’s an honest question: how does a town with ten buildings have a thousand zombies wondering on the street? Where did those people live? Where did they come from? Who are they? Why do they congregate on the streets? The Willamette shopping mall thing made sense – these folks come from the various burbs. Here it just looks like they were using the copy-paste tool to make it scary.

Here’s another question: why does a hunting supply store have a display of broadswords?

Here’s another question: how was Zombrex named, packaged, manufactured and distributed in a few days/weeks?

Here’s another question: How does Chuck attach nails to a propane tank without rupturing the tank?

Here’s another question: Ah, screw it. I’m thinking too much.

I guess you want to know if it is fun. It is! I played it through twice and cannot wait for the full game. I’d give my pinky finger to design on a Dead Rising game. I love ‘em.

- I should write more on here, but when I think about games I start getting pensive and sad, so I’ve been avoiding it. I will rectify the situation.

Power Planets is a great example of theme matching dynamics and a rare example of a Facebook game worth your time. You control a one-dimensional planet with limited resources and attempt to build up a civilization hopefully without fouling up the environment. You do this by unlocking tech in a nicely sized tech-tree and placing buildings and power plants in tactical locations.

The reason Power Planets works so well where loads of civ building games have failed is simply because it has a theme that is strong, but isn’t heavy-handed. You are free to muck up the world in the pursuit of luchre and the game makes little moral objection to the choice with the exception of animation of coughing and dying residents. It doesn’t lead you down a path of eco-righteousness – it lets you decide what that is through the mechanics.

For instance, I wanted to research to get Universities because they provide a lot of points per hour. But to do so, I needed a good chunk of money. So I built some fume-spewing Upgraded Factories powered by cheap, abundant and dirty as sin coal power. Completely within the so-called “Magic Circle”, I justified this – yeah, it is dirty and all, but it’s for the greater good. I need the Universities.

Renewable resources are hopelessly underpowered until you get the research to unlock more futuristic technologies. But the only way to unlock those technologies is to have a lot of money and the only way to have a lot of money is to essentially build a lot of polluting buildings. The parallel lessons to real situations, while neccessarily simplistic, are striking.

But the clever twist in Power Planets that makes it unlike every other building sim out there is that you hand off your planet to someone else every two days and receive a stranger’s. How many times in polluting will you look at your coal reserves, see 40 hours of coal remaining and know that it is someone else’s problem, plunging ahead not worrying about the future?

One building you can create is a Monument that houses your Facebook picture. Future caretakers of that world cannot remove or move the monument and it takes up a valuable space on the planet. Putting it on a useful resource or in a valuable power plant’s range is the ultimate in narcissism, but the game makes no value judgment on its own.

In a genre full of contrived mechanics (Why can I only click my cow every six hours? “Well, because we want you to come back” doesn’t fit any theme but manipulation), Power Planets strives as simple, fun and full of meaning.

Extra Lives’ subtitle is “Why Video Games Matter”, which is sort of inappropriate because the text itself does a fairly poor job of making any kind of argument. The book is at its best in the early chapters, particularly the one about Resident Evil, exercising what is awkwardly called “The New Games Journalism”. Bissell unfortunately plays up to the stereotypes of gamers: underachievement, mixing real and artificial relationships and addiction (the tepid Grand Theft Auto IV chapter also details his addiction to cocaine).

The book is essentially a collection of essays, one of which was published in The New Yorker and which I complained about last year upon reading it for being too gee-whiz. His chapter on Braid falls for the same sort of fetishism, but the Far Cry 2 chapter which interviews Clint Hocking is surprisingly adroit at addressing what was unique about the underrated title.

If the thesis of the book is “Why Games Matter”, then it is only touched upon in a very meta way. Indeed, the quality of the prose in the book is vivid. If game reviews read like this, I’d be more apt to actually read them. A better subtitle might have been, “Why Games Are Trying to Matter”, because the pathetic swings at trying to rationalize his addiction leaves a sorry-feeling miasma over the whole book. But I don’t think the book was for me. It was for non-gamers. So perhaps I am unqualified to take his book as a softcore polemic towards the Eberts of the world.

I’m being hard on it.The book is entertaining at times and I found myself highlighting all over the early chapters for its more general insights.

Here, on my arch-nemesis, tutorials:

It would be hard to imagine a formal convention more inherently bizarre than the video-game tutorial. Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of how one goes about reading a book.

On Resident Evil and utterly stupid stories:

[It] helped to create an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation and characterization [...] But most gamers do not care because they have been trained by game designers not to care.

On quantity of detail not being the definition of story:

For many gamers [...] and game designers, story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more explanation there is, the thought appears to go, the more story has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art, but it has hobbled the otherwise creative achievement of any number of games.

When the author tries to dig deeper and find some interconnecting bonds, he fails. Perhaps the author is too ashamed of his addiction that he is desperately trying to attach meaning to it in oblique ways. Overall, the work is entertaining despite not really addressing a core thesis in a meaningful way.