Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less
by Jamison DeLorenzo

This week marked a first for me in gaming. It wasn’t anything as groundbreaking as my first perfect song for Guitar Hero on Expert, completing a Mario game without dying, or roasting the CPU in a regulation hockey game by over 200 goals (thank you, NHL ‘94). This week marked the first time I participated in obtaining game-related material via digital download. I should point out that this is much more commonly known as DLC thanks to overwhelming pressure to cram every important idea in society into a three letter acronym (TLA, sorry).

While visiting a friend this past week we talked about all the usual stuff - work, women, socio-economic disparities across the heartland, clubbing baby seals - and inevitably our latest technological gadgets. I got to show off my new camera and he got to show off a brand new subwoofer so powerful it could easily be mistaken for a herd of charging rhinocerii. The second game used to showcase the beast was a download from the Playstation Store - Super Stardust HD.

For my first exposure to the store this was not a bad start. This game is over a year old, and I must say I’m disappointed in not having tried it sooner. If you enjoyed the game Asteroids you would like this one too. In fact, if you took Asteroids and poured a six pack of triple espressos down its throat you would get something quite similar. For $10 there a bunch of games like this you can get for a PC or console. If you can remember what games made the original GameBoy so popular (not to date you or make you feel old) that is today’s current Indy gaming market.

I never really thought about it before, but the fact that there is a ton of entertaining arcade games all over the Internet at a dirt cheap price is a good thing. This is a great alternative to the $60 console games and provides to our current crop of young people the sustenance they need to become a lifelong gamer. I realize that I am late to the party on this one (the invitation must have been lost in the mail) and that this is not some groundbreaking discovery. We can’t do that every week here in the Quagmire - that’d be far too predictable.

The other half of the online delivery system that we are integrating into the gaming community comes in the form of obtaining additional content for already released games. As much as I relished downloading GT Prologue that is hardly going to happen often. The most popular notion of adding content onto games comes in the form of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. This is a very welcome addition to anyone who has pined for certain songs to be in the game.

I have to admit that although there have been several great songs in GH3 and Rock Band there have been plenty of songs that I have been dying to get my hands on to play. Imagine my joy when the Still Alive and the Boston pack was released recently for Rock Band. It may sound strange, but one of my current favorite gaming moments of the year now includes cranking my stereo and playing lead on More Than a Feeling. While realizing admitting this makes me look like an even bigger dork, I felt the need to share this because I feel that this is a revolutionary step for the rhythm gaming market.

The only thing that makes me more excited about what the future might hold for these games. In a perfect world there is going to be a way to point a game towards a digitized master of a song and have the game translate it into a song that you can play. Considering the number of fans of current rock monsters (U2, Radiohead, Dave Matthews) and past monsters (Van Halen, Led Zeppelin) you cannot tell me there isn’t a gigantic market for this feature. Whoever gets this working first without requiring the utter destruction of a gamer’s bank account is going to cement themselves in gaming legend.

Long story short - I’ve only gotten my feet wet in the world of digital downloads for gaming and I really love what I see. I’ll be taking more steps into it this weekend and hopefully go for a swim (whether a lifeguard is on duty or not). If the industry as a whole starts to get in on this then not only will obtaining games be a whole lot easier, but Valve will undoubtedly be seen as the pioneer in this area for the more expensive segment of the gaming market.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go locate some more songs to download and get another late night gaming jam session going.

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