Ryan Davis Associate Producer

Now Playing: Deadwood, Entourage, Scrubs, Lost

When Games Go on Vacation

Just as you can predict the end of the regular school year, the arrival of Jerry Bruckheimer movies, county fairs, illegal firecrackers, and the beginning of summer school, it has come to be expected that video game releases during the summertime come to a standstill. But I'm not here to bellyache about how foolhardy this is and how everyone's on vacation and whatever NPD sales data I can drag up about Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Companies release all of their games at the end of the year because they have massive research evidence to back up the idea that, even in the horribly overcrowded holiday season, games sell better than they do in the summer, regardless of their quality. End of discussion. But the practical question remains, "Just what the hell are you supposed to do with all your video game systems during the dry summer months?"

He may look smaller, but Swearengen is still a mean SOB on my PSP.

You could replay those games you've already finished. (I've got a short stack of games that I wouldn't mind playing through a second time, including Alien Hominid, Mercenaries, and Psychonauts.) And, of course, then there are those games that I never got around to finishing in the first place--a list longer than I'd care to admit, and definitely longer than I'll commit to in this column. But even with these stacks of unplayed and highly replayable games staring me down, I've been more interested in flexing some of their secondary skills.

Take my PSP, for example. Ever since I found my ceiling in Lumines (which I am loathe to admit is a shamefully pathetic 98,000 points) and my copy of Tiger Woods PGA Tour mysteriously stopped working, there's been a distinct shortage of interesting games. Coupled with the fact that UMD movies are still ridiculously costly (I mean, seriously, how can Miramax justify charging $30 for Kill Bill on UMD when I can pick up the DVD for $15? The whole thing whiffs of MiniDisc.), the primary job of my PSP has gone from game machine to portable VCR. Through the machinations of my home Wi-Fi network, TiVoToGo, my 1GB Memory Stick Duo Pro, and a little personal-computing black magic, my bus rides to and from work have been made infinitely more tolerable now that I can watch last night's episode of Entourage or catch up on my backlog of Deadwood episodes. The process of getting TV shows from my TiVo onto my PSP is an arduous one--requiring a ramshackle suite of funky third-party and home-brewed software and more than a little bit of trial and error--but the point is that it works.

Similarly, I recently messed around with a PSP that someone had gotten the original Doom running on. Doom has been popping up on all manner of unexpected platforms ever since id Software started giving away the source code some years ago, so I wasn't surprised to see a jerry-rigged version of it running on the PSP--though, I will admit that it made me wonder how long it would be until someone constructed a Doom 3 WAD for the original Doom engine. Getting Doom to load onto a PSP requires two Memory Sticks and the nerve to swap out one for the other in the middle of the loading process. This is not for the faint of heart, and I have yet to roll the dice and take this risk with my own PSP.

What's most interesting to me is that all this gray-area use of console hardware is being incorporated into the infrastructure of the next-gen consoles. Hackers have been using mod chips to stream video and music from their PCs to their Xboxes for a while now, and this very functionality is one of the more highly touted secondary capabilities of the Xbox 360. Console hardware emulators have long been the bane of old video game copyright holders. Emulation of the NES, SNES, and even the N64 runs rampant on a wide variety of platforms, so Nintendo has decided that rather than sit by and watch pirates play their games for free, they'll let you emulate those games on the Revolution--for a modest fee, of course.

At this point, I'm more interested in the Xbox 360 for its capacities as a multimedia device.

I guess I'm a little surprised, and maybe even impressed, that these massive corporations are taking some of their plays from pirates and hackers--the kinds of folks that they've been openly vilifying for years now. But by doing so, video game manufacturers are closer than they've ever been to capturing the dream of an all-in-one set-top box, a dream that people have been chasing since Trip Hawkins frothed at the mouth while preaching the revolutionary wonders of the 3DO. This is all very exciting for the evolution of the console video game business. But frankly, I'd probably be happier if they just learned to put out more games during the summer.