David Jaffe: Marvel games need story; I agree

Spider-man!

David Jaffe may not be a household name, but just so you know, he’s the genius designer behind the Twisted Metal series for the Playstation and is also known for God of War. On his blog over here, he was seen criticising the guys who make games for Marvel’s movies and their comics, too maybe. Now that he mentions it, who makes those games anyways?

Man speaks the truth as he opens his blog post with the following lines:

Please stop putting Spiderman games in big open sandbox environments where you swing around and do oh so slight variations on 4 pretty dull mission types (chase/race/collect/etc) and then once in a while toss in a boss fight and/or a somewhat unique mission.

I mean seriously, we get the point: we get to swing around and stuff, but please; more emphasis on the stuff and less on the goddamn swinging.

Jaffe demands that Marvel’s comics are ace, but the games are terrible and the biggest problem here is that they are “POWER-BASED” and not “STORY-BASED”. Marvel’s comics are known for their great stories and scripts, as he mentions the big man Stan himself. You’d wish the games would follow suit, but they have to be ridiculous affairs that throw you into this huge story with repititive missions and lack of any sort of direction whatsoever.

Check out the post!

Splashcast HotSpot

No this isn’t a new T-Mobile technology, it’s Splashcast silly! Splashcast is a company with its eyes set on building an interactive widget based multimedia service. It has been a while since they’ve released a new feature, but today is literally marks a new slate for Splashcast.

Not only did they introduce a new feature, they’ve completely redesigned their intuitive console. The console is where users create Channels, Shows, and upload their items. The new console layout makes Splashcast even easier to use. It is by far one of the most simple control schemes for any media service out there!

Splashcast’s new feature, HotSpots allows users to add a box within their media that can pop up an image or SWF file. On top of that the file can be linked to a third-party URL.

Video producers will be able to provide a new way for users to interact with their video. Additionally, advertisers will definitely get a kick out of the possibility for mega-product placement. In this world were no one has a definite answer to making BIG BUCKS in the online video realm, it’ll be very interesting to see how this affects Splashcast.

Currently Splashcast does not have an advertiser network of any kind for its video producers. So will it have to be up to video producers to find the advertisers and try to get them to place ads in their videos? How would that model exactly benefit Splashcast?

I’m still messing around with this HotSpot technology. Currently pictures from Facebook are not being recognized. Hopefully Splashcast will be able to fix this bug soon!

StuffWeLike uses Splashcast for its social network widgets: Facebook and MySpace. Click here for our previous coverage of Splashcast. You can see HotSpot in action below:

MGS Retrospective complete – Gametrailers.com

For those who have been keeping an eye on the backstory for Metal Gear Solid GameTrailers.com has updated their retrospective series. It includes now not only the older console titles but also the handheld titles and finally a total game summary including the stories from all the previous titles in one single retrospective part. While the download size is not small at 100mb each part one cannot pass up watching this video series if interested in Metal Gear.
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Youtube Uploads 1024 megabytes!!!

Youtube has increased the maximum upload capacity for videos from 100 megabytes to 1024 megabytes! This increase will allow for some major high resolution videos to be viewed on the mega-video site. Additionally video producers can upload multiple videos at once using an extra downloadable software pack.

Videos still have the 10 minute cap.

In other related news Youtube launched a new feature called Youtube Annotations.

[Update]

I’ve uploaded a 800 megabyte file onto YouTube:

Looks like crap. Click on the video and read its description for more information. I guess higher resolution videos won’t come from higher storage upload.

Youtube Annotations

Youtube has added a new feature called Annotations! This is awesome for video producers because it allows you to write notes on your video! Include popup text with links and you can have some major kick ass videos! Imagine you say a URL – now you can write it out in the video and provide a link to it for viewers to click on during the video!

This is fantastic thanks Youtube!

Here’s an example.

[Correction]

Currently links can only be to: YouTube Video, Channel, or Search result.
Also currently the text is only available on videos embedded on Youtube.

My How-To Annotate video:

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Lost Zombies: Zombie videos go Web 2.0

Unknown Zombie

Zombies. They’re everywhere. And even today, people think that they are merely monsters in horror movies and content matter for horror movie parodies. Fools. All of them. One day, the zombie apocalypse will take the lives of millions of humans from all over Earth. But a bold step has been taken to prevent this: Lost Zombies.

A fine cross between Zombie Awareness and Web 2.0, Lost Zombies encourages you to post any proof you have about zombies, in photos or videos. Hit the jump to know more about what you can do to save the world.

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