Working to finish an article today, I made the mistake of clicking through to SourceForce's list of Turn-Based Strategy projects. Homebrew, freeware cross-platform game projects in progress. Fabulous! Fascinating. Fun!

I tried Tyrant which added some pretty little graphics on top of NetHack-type play.

I looked at MegaMek, an old-school BattleTech hex-gaming clone. But it wasn't as drop-in-and-play friendly as Tyrant, so I could put that off.

Mostly, I'm just delighted to see that there's 814 projects in development there. A lot to check out! And that's just turn-based strategy -

(Thanks to Evil Avatar for digging this up.)

Every year around E3 gaming journos like to ponder the question of the booth babe. While research informs us that these women are hardly being exploited, there's always a certain uneasiness around the idea of using beautiful women to sell products that honestly have little to do with beautiful women. Booth babes are a ploy held over from back when videogames were just a boys' club.

Now while some of us ponder whether the booth babe will sunset as the game industry population diversifies, others have different ideas. E3girls.com, a website devoted to E3 booth babes year-round, has released a DVD of nothing but video footage of E3 2004 booth babes. The Home LAN Federation & Alliance has a review. The footage is amateurish at best, and honestly I can't imagine why anybody would think this would be worth $24-plus-shipping, but then I've never really been one for booth babes.

E3girls.com's obligatory tagline, "It's not about the games," begs the question, "So what is it about then?" I know a lot of people who sort of shake their heads at E3, but feel obligated to go. The most positive assessment I've heard from devs is that it gives us one last big weekend of parties before coming back to crunch for the holiday releases; something like a midwinter's feast. So I put it to you as Charlie Brown once famously asked Linus VanPelt: What is the true meaning of E3?

For the last few years during midsummer, Electronic Arts has hosted its own little gaming media event, Camp EA (or as it was renamed this year for whatever reason, Hot Summer Nights). Basically, every game that EA is developing or publishing during the coming fall and winter gets trotted out to show media people how things have been going since E3. A handy side effect of this is that people who actually work at EA also get a chance to try out all the other games we're making, which also gives the assorted marketing groups a few chances to dry run their schpiels before they go live.

Many people might not realize just how isolated EA's dev teams are from each other's products. Walking onto the floor of our gymnasium, all decked out with gaming kiosks for the show, there was a certain kind of giddy enthusiasm that electrified the air. A couple hundred of my game-loving coworkers were crowded inside with all the energy you might expect from a gym of gamers eager to try out demos of unreleased games, but this was further injected with the energy of people feeling gratified watching others enjoy the games they were working so hard on. I can honestly say that there's some stuff coming out of here that I'm really looking forward to playing after it ships.

Now this really wouldn't qualify as gaming website coverage of a gaming expo without an exclusive scoop of some sort, and, even though this really isn't the sort of thing you normally see on GGA, I would hate to disappoint. Your official insiders-only scoop: the development studio at EA's corporate headquarters goes through approximately 25 pounds of coffee each workday. You heard it here first.

Nerdcore hip-hoppers rejoice, Yosumi Records has put forth two complete albums of videogame beats and breaks. The records, entitled Video Game Breaks & Sound Effects Volumes 1 & 2, are rife with samples from games ranging from the original Donkey Kong to the first Shenmue. Thankfully, the producers saw fit to not simply include popular games from throughout history, but also those that simply had awesome soundtracks; my elation at hearing the unmistakable theme from Moon Patrol cannot be understated. The most recent games appearing on the albums seem to be Dreamcast games, which makes sense, considering that the Dreamcast was the harbinger of the current generation of game consoles, where videogame soundtracks really began to move away from synthesizers.

The albums as a whole are a fairly mixed bag. I don't think there would have been much of a way for Yosumi to avoid this, though, just due to the volume of samples on these disks. Any DJ or producer who checks them out is sure to find a few gems, but one of the problems I encountered was that most of the tracks contain samples and effects from many different games, which may cause problems for rapid access unless you mark your records with stickers. Another issue that may bother some is that occasionally the game music samples are taken while somebody actually plays the game, the resultant embedded sound effects may mess with the beat enough to render attempts at juggling it useless. Finally, a few of the themes (most aggrivatingly the overworld theme from the original Zelda) are provided in only about 4/5 of their entirety, so if you really want those, you're going to have to record off an emulator or a TV.

The albums also include a few premade remixes. These are good for scratching over, mixing, or what-have-you. Unfortunately, the remix of Super Mario Bros. is the only place any of the classic SMB Theme can be found. A clean version would have been nice. Thankfully, Castlevania is better represented, with a remixed version, and clean versions of several rocking themes.

The part of these records that I've given the most use is, surprisingly, the vocal samples from Mortal Kombat. Scratching "You weak, pathetic fool" over Blockhead's Insomniac Olympics is just too much fun.

If you're curious, you can find RealAudio needle drops of both these albums about 5/6 of the way down this page, and near the top are drops from the venerable 8-Bit Construction Set.

Video games come from the heart of machines. They bend us over plastic and make us obey their rules. Game characters are mostly power fantasies: action heroes offering easy escapes from the mundanity of humanity. Game companies push these characters at us on trading cards, comic books, and fast food wrappers. It's not a pretty sight for eyes searching for signs of intelligent life in cyberspace.

But games are the best hope for the future of communication! They encourage us to grab ahold of what we see on-screen and twist it and make it ours. Literally, to play with it - to understand media, situations, all of life as something fun, to experiment with. We cast ourselves into another world, try, fail, try and succeed, and we emerge unscathed - entertained, inspired, awake and aware, prepared for technology and citizenship.

How can we see that our culture of video games stays true to this spirit of innovation? This spirit of failure and play? To keep games from being training for passivity, to ensure games remain the domain of hard-rocking innovators hell bent on making their own stories?

It may already be too late -

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The cleverly named Everquest Daily Grind is a blog that collects the stories of those who live with Everquest addicts. Interestingly, sitemaster "J" eschews the sensationalistic stories of cheating partners and criminal activity for the simple day-to-day drama that comes with addiction. The result is a collection of sometimes-touching-sometimes-disturbing tales emailed from across the English-speaking world.

"I've tried tricking myself into letting my own baggage about the game go, for instance by pretending to myself that he's a Ph.D. candidate, say, or a medical student who needs to study all the time and thus cannot fairly be expected to do his share of cooking, shopping, or cleaning. I find myself hoping against hope that I'm not simply being used (allowing myself to be used), and that our friendship is in fact one-sided and wonderfully convenient for him."

I am of the opinion that there are basically two things worth doing in life, cultivating joy and cultivating hope, and this belief has lead me to my current occupation as a game designer at Electronic Arts. Indeed, I tend to marginalize reports of negative effects of gaming as being the result of ignorant mass-media and politicians. Perhaps that is what makes these stories as powerful as they are: pedestrian accounts of ordinary people presented plainly and anonymously. As much as I (and GGA in general) tend to focus on the best parts of gamer culture, it is worth occasionally reminding oneself that sometimes even good things can lead to bad ends.