/dev/null/kevin

Male nerds, geeks and gamers have the stereotypical reputation of being absolutely clueless when it comes to women.  Conan O'Brien and his writers love to poke fun at nerds this way.  Of course, this isn't true, but it just might be true in the case of the geeks who wrote Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07.

We rented this game for our Wii.  My 4 year old daughter's favorite part of the Wii is the Mii editor.  She had lots of fun making herself and all of her friends.  So while she wasn't into playing Tiger Woods' gold game (that was for Daddy), she did want to use the game's character builder.

The in-game "Game Face" character builder is much more complicated than the Mii generator.  The characters are much more realistic than the Miis.  We built Daddy first, and it looked pretty close to me (a very athletic version of me).  We then tried to make my daughter.  The process first asks some quesions:

• Gender.  Female.  At least the have that option.
  
• Age.  She's almost 5, but 8 was the smallest value we could choose.  Fine, eight years old it is.
• Height.  The smallest value was 5' 0" (152 cm).  While that is short, I know some adults who are shorter than that.  Hmmm.
• Face.  No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get this girl to look younger than 20, let alone 8.  Did that parameter mean anything?
• Body.  Here's where it gets good.  I now needed to select how big to make this "8" year old's boobs.  Hello!

Like the other attributes that wouldn't scale to the 8 year old level (let alone 5), the choice for breast size ranged from a B cup to D cup.  I don't know what they were thinking, but my first reaction was "stupid horny engineers!"

Yes, this game probably isn't for little kids, but it could be.  Michelle Wie started playing golf at age 4 and turned pro at 15.  If you're going to make age a parameter, and let me select age 8, then you'd better actually support it.  Don't just make all of the female avatars be your virtual fantasy girl.

BTW, if anyone knows of any good Wii games that let the Mii characters play together, let me know.

Gamers are fighting mad about the termination of a game reviewer who gave a low score to a game promoted heavily on his site.

Gamespot reviewer Jeff Gerstmann gave a score or 6/10 to Kane and Lynch.  Publisher Eidos, who paid big ad bucks on Gamestop, wasn't happy, and Gerstmann was fired.  Read all about it here: 1 2 3

But gamers are getting the last laugh.  Upset at such blatant interference, they are giving the game scores of 1/10 and writing their own bad reviews using Gamespot's own user feedback section.  As such, the game's average user score is at 2.8/10.  Web 2.0 is a two-edged sword.

So, let this be a lesson to other companies.  You do more harm than good throwing your weight around.  Perhaps all of this negative attention will also boost sales, but I sure hope not.

Update: There are also reports that he left after his written review was edited.  CNET's daily news podcast, Buzz Out Loud, was told not to comment today (CNET own's Gamespot) so perhaps they will have something to say on Monday.

I really don't haven't anything against CNET, but their sloppy reporting once again forces my blogging hand.

This time it's CNET's list of the 10 Most Important Games of All Time.   The list itself is pretty good (and it is subjective, so I can't fault them there), but the #3 entry for Zork says this:

Well, that is just wrong.  Anyone who knows anything about text-based adventure games, knows that they all came from a game called adventure!  a.k.a. "Colossal Caves" or ADVENT.

I checked the Wikipedia entries for Zork, ADVENT and adventure game, and none of them make that claim.  In fact, they all say that ADVENT was the first adventure game.  Yes, Wikipedia entries change, but I checked the history for the Zork entry and as far back as 2001 (just weeks after the entry was created) it states that Zork was influenced by, and came after, ADVENT. 

It took me two minutes to make those checks.  For people who pretend to be reporters, they should try harder.  This isn't to say that Zork wasn't important and shouldn't be on the list, but they should get their facts straight.

Read hear more about ADVENT.

Tags: cnet | zork | advent | adventure games | games

I blogged about this last week, and now there is a site devoted to destruction caused by the Nintendo Wii.  Who knew such damage was common place?  In spite of the dangers, I'll probably still get one.  Penny Arcade has also taken notice of the trend and Nintendo has released a warning.

Tags: wii, games, nintendo
 

Someone in China (Hawkpeng79) created a pretty cool puzzle game.  Arrange the mirrors and prisms to redirect colored lasers to colored targets.  To quote the Google-translated page, "How strong is your logic?"

Oh yeah, there is also a sequel.

Stuck?  Here are my answers, but it's much more satisfying to get them yourself.

I've started the sequel (25 - 50).  I will post the answers as I get them.  Thanks to Dave Tong for some hints and some alternate solutions.  It took both of us to solve #32.