42Bytes

It was a normal day, the 24th of February, 2008. People were watching Will It Blend? and Leeroy Jenkins on their favourite video site YouTube. That all came to an end at 6:45pm UTC when the Pakistani Government ordered the blocking of the site and managed to take the rest of the world with them.

It all started when the Pakistan Government issued an order to block YouTube because of “offensive content”. The offensive content they were referring to was that of a video of cartoons that made fun of Muhammad from a Danish born cartoonist. Once the order had been isssued, for some unknown reason, a Pakistan Telecom went further and globally broadcast instructions claiming to be the destination for anyone trying to reach YouTube’s various Internet addresses. The flaw was that routers worldwide followed these instructions and directed someone looking for the Numa Numa Guy to an error page. The people who provide the Pakistan Telecom’s Internet connection, Chinese-based PCCW, did not bother to filter the broadcast and allowed it to be sent worldwide.

And just like that, forty-five seconds pass and YouTube is gone for most of the world. People who expected to see funny cats, were left disappointed. YouTube responded fiercely as it fought back trying to overrule the false broadcast with one of their own. Over two long hours, it worked with the number of network providers slowly dropping the false route and returning web-surfers to their beloved site.

All of this may have been an honest mistake, then again, it could’ve been Pakistan getting revenge for the disrespect of their religious figure. We can’t tell exactly what happened but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did plan it. It would be within the operations of the current Pakistani government to do such a thing with riots continuing even after “fair” elections. The Pakistani population, being comprised of mainly Muslims, would find this offensive and be able to justify the blocking of YouTube. In my eyes, I would call it anti-democratic - restricting the freedom speech for all people.

With YouTube back online and serving millions of videos a day to it’s users, the crisis sends a clear message. We need find these flaws and fix the Internet…because I don’t how long I will last not seeing the Crazy German Kid on my screen again.

Remember the days of your old Gameboy Pocket and Nintendo 64? I do. And boy, those were the days. Games were simply fun and had reached a point where they had great gameplay and good enough graphics. Ten years on, you don’t call games like Crysis or Call of Duty 4 fun…you say they are awesome or crazy. So where has all the fun gone in these new hit titles?

In the beginning, there was no fancy graphics, just the gameplay. So this is what designers focused on, making games as fun as possible. I went back and played my Gameboy Pocket recently and had so much fun playing Kirby’s Dreamland and Tennis. The graphics in these games were great because they didn’t steal focus of the game itself. Kirby’s Dreamland was a legendary game, flying along, sucking in the evils of the world and launching them back at the enemy. The graphics in it were great enough to allow the player to imagine the world in reality and had a gameplay that kept me and my friends amused for over an hour. It was the gameplay that was key to the games of that era.

But now, in a game like Call of Duty 4 though it is an awesome and epic game, I don’t play it because it is fun. I play it because it has an surreal, blood-pumping experience. The game has almost realistic graphics but your gameplay is nearly the same as every other FPS, run around tactically shooting people. The graphics have become the major selling point for most games and this leaves the true gamer disappointed as we are always looking for innovation. Innovation in graphics is great but innovation in gameplay is even better.

And before anyone jumps on me and eats my head off, I know there is more to a game then just gameplay and graphics. There is soundtrack, storyline, concept, etc, but these are like the graphics. They are meant to compliment the gameplay itself. Not a single person in this world could successfully argue that gameplay is not important to a game for the simple fact that, that’s why they are called games.

Very few hit games now offer just plain and simple fun gameplay that a true gamer yearns for. But this plain and simple fun is what Nintendo has always been good at. And with the release of the Wii over a year ago, the Wii reminded everyone why we still play video games…for fun. Games like Wii Sports used the old concepts that everyone can relate to and innovated with it’s motion technology.

Though the new hit games are epic and awesome they don’t compare to the hours of fun we all get from playing Tetris or Kirby’s Dreamland. Sony and Microsoft offer us surrealism and epic storylines but Nintendo offer us fun. And sure, surrealism is great but I wish that games could get a balance.

Just recently I blogged about how I had been waiting years to see the epic game that will be Spore. Just over 48 hours later, Will Wright heard my prayer and has announced the release date of the game that will revolutionise the simulation genre, September 7, 2008. A small teaser trailer (Which can be viewed here) was released through the game’s first newsletter…which I signed up to two years ago.

The game is an open-ended Simulation and what looks to be a dash of RTS as well. The player is immersed in galaxy in which you will start with a tiny single-celled organism and grow them to conquer the galaxy. And by galaxy, I literally mean, galaxy. In 2005 Will Wright said a hundred thousand planets and then he mentioned millions of planets. After that he even said billions of planets! As you grow your single-celled organism you can attach various body parts and colour them in anyway. For once in a game you can make the creature literally anyway you want it to look. And that isn’t the best part, this humongous gigantic galactic proportional open-ended simulation is not the only awesome thing that makes this game look so damn good, it’s the fact that everything you see in your galaxy was created by another human.

The online feature is known as Asynchronous Sharing. I like to call it Massively Single-player Online Game. Everything that you create is uploaded to a master server and then shared to everyone else who has the game. This means that you could be invading the planet of a race created by your next door neighbour or someone in Antarctica! Though if you don’t have an Internet connection you can still play the game, you just get to fiddle with the developer’s content.

Now, we sit and wait seven long months for the awesome game that will be Spore. More information can be found at Spore’s Official Website.