Over at Metafilter, they have a post with information about Randy Pausch's last ever lecture, explaining the sad yet touching final CMU talk from the Alice educational game engine co-creator and important game education figure.

Honestly, Metafilter's synopsis is so good and link-packed that I'll include a lot of it here: "Randy Pausch is a pioneer in virtual reality, a computer science professor, a Disney Imagineer, an innovative teacher, and the co-founder of the best video game school in the world."

Pausch was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and "...after a long and difficult fight he's been given just a few more months to live. This week he gave his powerful, funny, and life-affirming last lecture to a packed auditorium at Carnegie Mellon University, entitled "How to Live Your Childhood Dreams". The WSJ's summary, and a direct link to the complete video of the lecture [WMV link]." [Via Gewgaw.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

   

The November Nintendo Power arrived in my mailbox the other day, and as managing editor Scott Pelland writes in his opening letter, it's officially the last one that Nintendo of America is producing. As was widely reported elsewhere, after 20 years and 221 issues (only one of which Pelland himself isn't on the masthead for -- the very first one, July/August 1988), production of NP will be handled by Future, which has already been producing Nintendo: The Official Magazine in the UK for nearly two years now.

I think Scott's editorial letter is worth reading even if you don't read NP regularly, so I'll reproduce it here:

"For nearly 20 years I have had what many people would consider to be the best job in the world. (No argument there.) And the same thing could be said of my talented colleagues -- the writers, designers, editors, and incredible support staff that have weated the details every month to bring you the world's first and best official video game magazine. Nintendo has been our home, and our parent, too, supporting and guiding us as we have tried to tap into our passion for both the games and the print medium to inform and entertain our loyal readers.

In fact, although some masthead names will change, I am convinced that Future's new team is not only dedicated to carrying on with the traditions and quality you expect, but will deliver exciting new content and benefits, such as an annual holiday bonus issue. Subscribers will continue to receive NP monthly in the mail, and newsstand patrons will find NP in more locations than ever before. So please join me as I say welcome to the future, and to Future US."

So not a heck of a lot of information on what Future will do with the mag, other than the fact it'll be 13 issues a year just like every Future title. This issue of NP has a full preview of games covered in next month's edition, so I'm assuming we'll see the December issue right on schedule, though I don't know what the editorial lineup looks like yet.

Perhaps not all that much will change with the new publisher, but I still think it's a good occasion to look back on what Nintendo Power accomplished. At its peak, NP was the premier outlet through which gamers got their info and strategies. For a time from its inception to around 1995, having a game make the cover of NP was a major advertising coup for whatever third-party publisher managed the feat, because full coverage in the mag had a direct effect on sales of the sort that good reviews in Famitsu are purported to have over in Japan.

Its total circulation was in the millions until the N64 era proved harsh for Nintendo (and the Internet made traditional tips-n-strategy mags obsolete), and few game mags ever did more to define the tastes of a generation of console owners. Even now, the mag remains pretty unique in the marketplace, with a very singular approach to coverage, interviews and game-preview coverage you don't see anywhere else, and a general feeling of "fullness" (sorry to be vague here) even though it's the same number of pages as any other game mag these days.

Not bad, really, for what's supposed to be a glorified company newsletter. I hope that Future is able to keep the tradition of excellence going.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So just a couple of weeks ago, just after his (pictured) UT fundraiser, we ran a report here on GSW from the Korea Times, including "...some hilarious Richard Garriott gossip - claiming NCSoft will pay to fly Garriott into space."

The report said that Lord British's space shot would be to promote Tabula Rasa, and we scoffed: "While I guess Garriott could go eventually, a $30 million promotion for the game? Guessing not." Well, guess what? Just announced is RichardInSpace.com and a press release revealing "...famed game developer Richard Garriott, son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, has begun preparations for a “commercially active” mission to the International Space Station."

However, to be fair: "The first commercial research partner involved in Mr. Garriott’s mission is ExtremoZyme, Inc., a biotechnology company co-founded by Owen Garriott." So NCSoft isn't yet an official partner - although Richard does talk about them in his first blog on the site. But still, if we wore hats, we'd be eating them about now.

[While we're on the Korea Times and NCSoft, John Andersen points out a fascinating new article there called 'NCsoft CEO Stands at Crossroads', which includes incisive analysis of NCSoft's declining profits, why Tabula Rasa is vital for the company, and a few ladlings of gossip about NCSoft boss Kim Taek-jin - definitely worth checking out.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Now, they're a nice, polite bushbaby-like community that doesn't like being disturbed, so don't everyone go sign up, but Quarter To Three has a great thread on the 'Best Game Credits Ever?', which starts out with a real doozy - the credits for Lionhead's 'The Movies' [YouTube link] - pointed out by Cliffski, who, as a former coder at the developer, is actually in them, 'Sabotage'-style.

Off course, this then gets into a gigantic comparison thread, with Mutt noting: "Oh, please. Have we really come to this? I don't blame cliffski for reveling in his fame, but is this really gonna be a Top Ten list of credits? If so, then I'm gonna break out my Best Polygon of All Time thread on your asses."

Quickly suggested are the credits to Star Control II [YouTube link], which I hadn't seen, and are indeed awesome, but there are lots more including Capcom's God Hand credits [YouTube link], which has deliciously cheesetastic music, and... can I just say that it's starting to get scary how much random video you can find on YouTube nowadays? Honestly...

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

So, it's time to run down some of the interesting original content we posted on big sister site Gamasutra (and elsewhere on the CMP Game Group) this week. There's actually some neat stuff in here, I might claim, including that dastardly Dyack, producers weighing in on game violence, and Curt Schilling's MMO company explored - headlines and rundowns to follow:

- Engaging Audiences: Denis Dyack Deconstructs The Industry
"...this 'wide-ranging interview' with Silicon Knights' Dyack (Eternal Darkness, Too Human) includes a whole bunch of interesting points, and we split two of them out into individual news stories - Dyack: Game Industry Should Shun Movie Biz 'Free Agency'", and Dyack: Will Wii Hold Public's Attention In Long-Term?."

- Violence In Video Games: The Producer's View
"Video game violence is, as ever, a hot topic, and Gamasutra and GameProducer.net asked former Thrill Kill and current Sony producer Harvard Bonin, Bizarre Creations' Peter O’Brien, Stainless Games' Ben Gunstone, and Gas Powered Games' Frank Rogan to discuss legislation, responsibility, and mature games."

- Ensemble's Shelley Explains 'Design By Playing'
"Is the best way to 'sculpt' and refine a game design through constant playing? Ensemble Studios and Microprose veteran Bruce Shelley thinks so, and in a recent lecture, he explained how the Age Of Empires franchise evolved from an intensive playtesting regime."

- Q&A: THX's Tuffy On God Of War II Audio, Neural THX Advances
"As console tech advances swiftly, HDTVs are joined by surround sound systems as important equipment for high-end gamers, and THX's Mark Tuffy talks to Gamasutra about the company's audio/video standards, its work on Warhawk and God Of War II and plans for 'a major publisher' to use its Neural THX tech next year."

- MIT/Stanford Event Reveals Dueling Brainwave Tech
"Last week, the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab presented a panel on 'The Post Wii World', and Gamasutra was there to see presentations from game tech companies including Emotiv and Emsense, both using brain activity as a game controller - and revealing an interesting fact about EEG activity in Gears Of War along the way."

- Q&A: Wendee Lee Talks Voice Acting In Games
"In this exclusive Q&A, Gamasutra spoke with prolific voice actress Wendee Lee (Soul Calibur II, Grandia III, EverQuest II) about the process and challenges of voice work in the game industry, the development of voice acting in games, and the epidemic of celebrity actors doing voices in video games to mixed results."

- Going Green With 38 Studios: RA Salvatore, Brett Close On The House Curt Schilling Built
Baseball legend and MMO fan Curt Schilling is behind the founding of Boston-based 38 "Studios, alongside Todd McFarlane and author R.A. Salvatore, and Gamasutra caught up with Salvatore and CEO Brett Close to discuss the company's 'broad media' aspirations and "standing on the shoulders" of World Of Warcraft."

- Avoiding The Crocodiles: Submission Pitfalls in Xbox 360 Certification
"Ever wanted to know what went into Xbox 360 game submission? At Microsoft's recent GameFest, the Quality Assurance and Certification track featured a presentation by Microsoft's Jay Blanton on guidelines and pitfalls in getting your game or game update officially approved."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, you may perhaps have seen the news that "Much-maligned filmmaker Uwe Boll ("Alone in the Dark," "Bloodrayne") is planning yet another video game adaptation - 'Zombie Massacre'" - and yep, we also got a press release about the momentous event.

As Dark Horizons notes: "1988 Games is bringing the shooter game exclusively to the Nintendo Wii shortly, and Boll will shoot the $6 million project in Vancouver in 2009. The goal of the game is to drive a fully-armed nuclear warhead (that's stowed in the trunk of their vintage 1950s convertible) into the center of a city overflowing with zombies. After depositing the weapon, players will then have to make it out of the city just as quickly as they entered it before the warhead detonates."

As it happens, 1988 Games' boss Benjamin Krotin has been in contact with GSW recently discussing other things, so we thought this was a perfect opportunity to ask the man - what makes a possibly sane Wii developer sign up to have their game turned into a movie from Uwe Boll? Or vice versa? Why would a game developer do that? He was kind enough to explain it to us.

Q: How did the pitching process work to Uwe? How did you contact him?

A: I got in touch with his production company, and from there I was put in touch directly with him. We spoke about our project in depth, and after a couple of days of reviewing materials, we mutually came to an agreement. It was rather streamlined, and I wish more things in life could go as smoothly!

Q: OK, seriously - why Uwe Boll? Do his merits in terms of publicity and possible funding outweigh the negatives in terms of his artistic reputation?

A: At the end of the day, you do have to acknowledge Uwe's notoriety and business savvy. With his involvement in the project, we will not only make a great movie, but we will also be able to shop it around without being turned down. Uwe is a very talented director who absolutely has more experience than anyone else in adapting videogames into movies. It is this unique combination of talents and abilities that make him our perfect choice. Of course, we are aware of the criticisms of some of his past works, but you have to also understand the material that he was working with. Regardless, we feel that with our direct involvement in the project in addition to the type of game that we have planned, we can pull off a really great movie. We know that Uwe shares this vision and even takes it further, and that is something that is truly great.

Q: Do you feel that having a movie tie-in will help you get the game published? What's your studio background and how far along in development are you thus far?

A: Having a movie tie-in won't necessarily help get the game published moreso than anything else that we do, but it also won't hurt either. It is definitely a challenge, no matter what your situation is, to walk into any publisher and present something that isn't WWII first-person shooter 12 or professional football 28. Fortunately for us, having such a great reception to our game (even in its early phase), in addition to the bonus of a movie tie-in will should help convince our publishing partners.

As for our background, we are a small and independent third-party design and development house, with a focus on the Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo DS. We have been around in one form or another for a little over two years now, but we have typically kept a discreet profile due to the nature of the projects that we were working on. You can definitely expect to hear more about 1988 Games though, now that Zombie Massacre has sort of blown our cover.

Q: What is your favorite Uwe Boll movie so far? Why did you like it?

A: Honestly, I'm looking forward to Postal. I definitely recognize that it is based on a very touchy subject, but from what I've seen so far it looks like it has the right level of comedy behind it.

Q: What do you attribute Uwe's success to?

A: You know, I think that Uwe's success comes from his intelligence. He noticed a void in movie business which he then filled. By taking on all sorts of videogame properties to be made into feature-length movies, Uwe has really set himself apart from other directors as THE guy for such tasks. Anytime someone can be brave and put themselves out there to fill a gap in the business world, they are always rewarded. Love him or hate him, you do know him, and that's at least worth something.

I guess that you could sort of compare it to what Nintendo is doing. They took the touch and motion genre, and ran with it... Now people are lining up all over the world just to experience what they have to offer. Of course, there are still many detractors, but just as I stated above, at least they've heard of the Wii.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You know what? A little reminding never hurt anyone, and the final deadline for the IGF Main Competition is this Monday, so let's crosspost this final, squawk-like call for crazy indies:

"Organizers are reminding entrants that submissions for the Main Competition of the historic 10th Annual Independent Games Festival, for which the awards will be handed out in February 2008 at Game Developers Conference, are due by 11.59pm PST on Monday, October 1st.

The 2008 IGF Main Competition will again be open to all independent developers to submit their games - whether it be on PC, console digital download, Web browser, or other more exotic formats. The prizes again total nearly $50,000, with a $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize, and the deadline to enter the Main Competition is this Monday.

The 2008 IGF Student Competition will once again award the best student games, and this year will also include student 'mods' to existing games. As a result, the number of Student Showcase winners has been increased to 12. The deadline to enter the Student Competition is Monday, October 15th, 2007.

Finally, the first-ever IGF Mobile competition, a sister competition run in association with founding sponsor Nvidia and awarding $20,000 in prizes to the best independent mobile phone, DS, PSP, and other mobile games, is still accepting submissions until Friday, October 26th.

Further information, including detailed rules, contact info, and specifics on previous winners, is available at the official Independent Games Festival website."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's difficult to get bored (at least, it's difficult for _me_ to get bored) of San Diego-based game comedy jackasses Mega64, and they've been celebrating the release of Halo 3 with a new skit.

As they note of their video, which appeared on SpikeTV's Halo 3 special earlier this week: "Frankly, we are SHOCKED at the inconsiderateness of Bungie to release their game on this date. They are overshadowing a MUCH BETTER TITLE and are hurting their image by going through with this. Email or call Microsoft today and get them to pull Halo 3 off the shelves before it's too late." The video includes facial hair - and lots of it.

But wait, there's more - the 'real' teaser trailer for Season 3 of Mega64, continuing the single game-related video 'thing' we dig the most at GSW. Also duly noted: "So, after watching the V3 trailer, some of you might be thirsty for a new Mega64 DVD, like, right now. Some of you claim that "Mega64 Time" just wasn't enough. Well, we MIGHT have some sort of consolation prize for you. We'd like formally announce here that Rocco Botte of Mega64 has been put in charge of filming and editing the PAX 2007 DVD!" Out soon, perhaps!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aha, time for more videos from this year's Independent Games Summit, which took place at Game Developers Conference 2007 last March as part of the Independent Games Festival - we're just starting to prep the next IGS, actually.

The seventh 2007 Independent Games Summit lecture is a key panel from the event - 'Innovation in Indie Games', featuring Kyle Gabler from the Experimental Gameplay Project (World Of Goo); Jenova Chen, ThatGameCompany (fl0w/fl0wer, pictured); Jon Mak, Queasy Games (Everyday Shooter); Jon Blow, Number-None (Braid); and moderator - Steve Swink, Flashbang Studios (IGS/IGF organizer).

It starts with a short and neat Powerpoint presentation from each panelist, and onward into some interesting discussions of whether 'innovation' actually matters, or whether it's gimmickry for gimmickry's sake. I think this was the Independent Games Summit talk that made me re-evaluate the most what I thought about video games as art - and reminded me that intoning 'innovation' all the time with regard to games, above all else, is a distinctly bad idea.

Here's a direct Google Video link for the lecture, plus a higher-res downloadable .MP4 version and an embedded version:

Here's the original session description: "Join the luminary creators of the Experimental Gameplay Project at CMU, IGF-winning Braid, and the brilliant Everyday Shooter as they dissect innovation in indie games. How do we generate Earth-shattering ideas that will change the face of gaming? Can small teams innovate? Is 'innovation' really what we want?"

(Other IGS 2007 videos posted so far are Matt Wegner on physics, alongside the Gastronaut founders on 'Small Arms' for XBLA, the Telltale folks on Sam & Max/episodic gaming, Gamelab's Eric Zimmerman on 'The Casual Cash Cow', and Braid's Jon Blow on indie prototyping, as well as Russell Carroll on 'indie marketing'.)

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats-- those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]

Last month, an article in the Wall Street Journal generated some considerable buzz. It was the story of a man whose marriage to his real-world wife was suffering in favor of his Second Life marriage. The virtual “marriage”, between a middle-aged biker guy and a woman he’s never actually met, cost the two of them hundreds of real-world dollars in gifts and in-world investments -- the couple owns a Second Life business selling lingerie, and have built a number of social and business relationships with other avatars. More significantly, though, it was costing them hours and hours of their real-world time, and for the man profiled in the article, it was seriously threatening his relationship with his flesh-and-blood wife.

"It's really devastating," the 58-year-old wife told the WSJ. "You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink, and they'll be having sex with a cartoon." She later joined a support group called EverQuest Widows, for women who’ve lost their husbands to an online game, and her children are trying to get their mother to move out.

She doesn’t want to leave, though. She told the WSJ her husband is a “good person” who’s just “fallen down a rabbit hole.” She can understand, she says, how her husband might want to re-live his life as a 25-year-old man, access experiences that he can’t in his mundane life, at his somewhat advanced age.

Sounds familiar – historically, our culture knows exactly what it means when a middle-aged man suddenly buys a sports car and starts “working late.” But there are innumerable reasons why our society is confounded when asked whether the EverQuest Widows are victims of adultery. Is it cheating?

Second Life is generally held up as the poster child for dysfunctional Internet relationships, but in this era where personalization, customization, Web 2.0 and social networking are the hot phrases, most MMOs and online games provide, at the very least, some method for game characters representative of real humans to connect. Add in the fact that most games now have their own virtual economies, and there’s real money to be spent on virtual trysts. Even if an MMO doesn’t provide a method by which to have visual, virtual sex between avatars, how would a man feel if he learned his wife had used the family money to buy an in-world friend some virtual accessories?

The MMO industry in Asia is much larger and much more firmly entrenched than it is on our shores – ahead of us in the micropayment model and in massive install bases, they’ve had a bit more time to refine the appeal of their games for their audience. And they’ve got love down to a science, with many, if not most, of these games providing a convention for in-world marriage, often tied in neatly with game objectives. Some require the purchase of a virtual item to seal the bond, and there’s often a ceremony involved, too, just as if it were real. Microtransactions are generally cheap – but is two bucks too much, if it’s spent by your spouse to “wed” a partner that isn’t you?

There are arguments to be made on either side of the aisle as to whether in-game love constitutes real-world cheating, but it’s clearly an issue that’s generating a lot of talk. On the heels of the Wall Street Journal piece, interactive marketing and tech agency Spunlogic released a survey gauging people’s reactions to a situation wherein a hypothetical individual said “I love you” or “I want to marry you” to someone other than that individual’s partner or spouse. The extenuating circumstances of the situation were presented across a spectrum that gradually placed degrees of separation between the supposed adulterers, with face-to-face interaction at one end, virtual world interaction at the other, and phone, written letters, emails and text messages in between.

“Infidelity, a behavior normally deemed unacceptable in human-human interaction, becomes more acceptable when interactions are mediated by various technologies," said Dr. Melissa Read, Spunlogic's director of behavioral research. "What other socially inappropriate behaviors might be perceived as acceptable when produced in technology-mediated interactions? And, more importantly, why?"

Why indeed? The divide created by digital media and gaming creates a world where the humanity of the participants is less real. It’s socially unacceptable, of course, to kill, steal, or cheat on your wife, but we do it in games, in our strange little worlds where the things we see often look like humans, but aren’t. In online games specifically, the digital figures we see and interact with are representative of humans, having actual people behind them that we can talk to – and yet, they’re still not exactly people in and of themselves.

This column has previously expressed the perspective that games provide interesting environments to test our reactions to various experiences, explore concepts of personal values, and experience circumstances and situations that are not available to us in our normative lives. Nonetheless, they’re still only games. It’s not necessarily indicative, in other words, of real-world violence, predation, amorality or heroism, if we take certain actions as a character in a game, on the closed world of a console or single-player campaign.

And the jilted wife from the Wall Street Journal – she allowed, didn’t she, that her husband was just exploring, having vicarious experiences? And yet, there was a "devastating" real-world impact on her life.

Online play throws a fat monkey wrench into our comfortable relationship with gaming. MMOs, virtual worlds and multiplayer games entitle players to that freedom to explore in the same fashion, within the framework of a fake world populated by avatars. But behind each avatar is another human explorer interested in the same suspended-reality situations as you – and is it okay to conduct that exploration when other feeling human beings are involved?

It’s fun to punch out rude old ladies on GTA; nobody’s actually getting hurt. And when another player takes you out in, say, Halo 3, you can try again. But if that other player were to call you a “fag” (scratch that, when that other player does) or mock your skills, don’t you feel slightly annoyed? If you get a suggestive PM in an MMORPG, are you immune to arousal?

Games always have, and always will cause us annoyance and arousal alternately. That’s a given. But does it make a difference when it’s caused not by the game, but by another person’s actions, another person’s words – whether or not they’re filtered through a game?

[Leigh Alexander is the editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Destructoid, Paste, Gamasutra and her blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Aha - so John H's second in Gamasutra's 'Game Design Essentials' series, following '20 Difficult Games', looks at the roots and design lessons of 'open world games' - titles in which the player "is left to his own devices to explore a large world" - from Adventure through Metroid to Grand Theft Auto.

Here's something from his intro, helping to define the tricksy term: "When we discuss "open world games" in this article, or sometimes "exploration games," we mean those games where generally the player is left to his own devices to explore a large world. What all of these games share is the seeking of new, interesting regions at whatever time the player deems fit. No force forces the player's motion into new areas. There's no auto-scroll, and there are no artificial level barriers."

The whole article is a little retro game-focused, sure, but as Harris says, design mechanics are often much more clearly delineated or oddly exposed in those earlier titles - and I like his discussion of the classic Adventure on the Atari 2600: "Adventure's fun comes from the way all of its simple objects interact to produce complex behavior... carrying the sword, the bat might brush it across a dragon on his flight, killing it. This is possible because all of the objects in the game function automatically, which they have to be anyway since The Button is devoted to dropping stuff. A lot of the fun in Adventure comes from the unintended consequences of the player's actions." Chaos can be fun!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Well, yet again, I managed to collect a decent amount of links over the weekend, but not get around to posting them until midweek, thanks to rampant levels of Gamasutra/Game Developer work. Still, since we don't do a lot of breaking news on GameSetWatch, so you guys will survive, no doubt:

- Nathan Smart, who has been known to run The Game Rag, recently started a new blog called Pre-Order Pushers with Kyle Orland and others, and it's got an interesting mandate: "Pre-order Pushers is dedicated to exposing all sorts of lies from game store employees, not just ones involving pre-orders." It's sorta Consumerist just for game stores?

- The Italian 'Hobby Media' blog has been discussing the game geek Vocaloid phenomenon in Japan, as follows: "Vocaloid is a technology and application software developed by Yamaha that enables users to synthesize authentic-sounding singing by just typing in the melody and the lyrics of a song... Vocaloid 2 singer, just released by Crypton, features the voice of Atsune Miku: a 16 years old virtual Singer." Thus, a character-based interactive anime music idol? V. Japan!

- The IEEE's Sandbox game blog has a good post from Harry Teasley on evaluating game artist showreels and resumes at his game development studio: "Put your best stuff at the beginning of the reel, don't choose crazy music to accompany it, and don't pad your reel with weak work if you feel it is too short. It's not too short: when it's long and filled with weak work interspersed with good work, I'll wonder about your judgment."

- Left over from the AM2 arcade show in Japan, Arcade Renaissance takes a look at IGS' Oriental Legends 2: "The traditional 2D side scrolling brawler stood out a bit on the show floor (in a good way), despite only a small number of machines dedicated to the game... the game is set for release on a new IGS created PGM-based hardware known as the PGM2." 2D brawlers in arcades will never expire, at least in Asia, apparently.

- Presuming most people saw it, but here's the teaser trailer for ThatGameCompany's fl0wer for PlayStation 3's PSN - and is about as cryptic as you're going to get. The only sensible YouTube comment: "Pretty neat, looks like a tech demo to me." On this front (and I'm not claiming this is necessarily the case for this title), why do most Sony first-party PSN titles have to include 'only technically possible with PS3!' claims lurking around them? In most cases, this seems like a bit of a bolt-on.

- GameDaily's second half of the 'Courting Controversy' article on the biggest game writing scandals, or "...those bits of game writing that just rub some people the wrong way", if you prefer. And yes, #1 is New Games Journalism, and this quote is amusingly grumpy: "Indeed, "new games journalism" has become a bit akin to the music industry's "hipster," in that no one knows exactly what it means but everyone has this vague idea that they don't want to be associated with it."

Finishing up with some GameSetMicroLinks, as follows:

- Russell Carroll asks: 'Is 1% Conversion Rate A Problem?' for casual games?
- The Brainy Gamer points out Tetsuya Mizuguchi's virtual Al Gore animation kicking off Live Earth's Japanese concert - didn't know it was by him!
- Jonathan Blow has been discussing landmarks in games, to good effect.
- Jarkko Laine has interviewed Petri Purho about his 'game per month' project.
- XBLArcade.com interviewed the creators of Screwjumper! about their interesting upcoming XBLA title.
- Talking of XBLA, Eurogamer has a useful round-up of the XBLA titles shown at Tokyo Game Show, including shooters galore.
- Videoludica remembers Gunpei Yokoi, close to the 10th anniversary of his sad passing.
- Gamezebo talks to Steven Zhao of Blue Tea Games about going from quirky to hidden object, with success.
- Fun-Motion points to Walaber’s Jello Car WIP - it's a... jello car!
- NCSX has a brief run-down of R-Type Tactics, now it's available in stores in Japan and still weird.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You see, GSW appreciates Wired News' Chris Kohler because he takes some time to look around Tokyo Game Show and finding things off the beaten track, and we particularly dug his look at the Japanese student games being exhibited at the show this year.

As Kohler explains: "In the outer hall of Tokyo Game Show, Japan's many game-design specialty schools recruited potential students by showing off games that current students had produced. Some of them were pretty fantastic -- especially the students at Japan Electronics College, who'd made some pretty fantastic posters for their games."

Further down, it's noted: "TGS 2007 also featured the return of an old favorite: BloWind, a GameCube game developed by students at Digital Entertainment Academy. We actually covered this here on Game|Life not long after the blog began, and it's in much better shape now. The graphics look really nice, actually. They could totally ship this for Wii if they added motion controls for the fan..." We need to hear more about Japanese student games in the West, really.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, as we reported on Gamasutra, it's the 10th anniversary of Ultima Online, the big bad voodoo daddy of graphical MMOs, and they're advertising "...a new amnesty program that invites former players back to try out the major game update, Ultima Online Kingdom Reborn, for free" - which is awesome, cos it sounds like one of those campaigns where you have to hand in guns and grenades at the police station!

And this Ultima-related celebration is good timing for The Artful Gamer's interview with Stephen Emond, who has written 'Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide', and is planning to release the book in the near future - thus far "...only three copies exist (mine, a copy I presented to Richard [Garriott] and the one auctioned off at the [recent Austin GDC] fundraiser)."

Judging by Stephen's rather amazing collection, it's going to be an essential tome for Ultima geeks, though, and as Emond notes, the Ultima series is well worth collecting: "Most game collectors would agree that Origin consistently went above and beyond when it came to packaging and contents, particularly with the Ultima series. Beautifully detailed booklets, cloth maps, and meaningful ‘trinkets’ from Ankhs to Moonstones were the norm. With most games (then and now) you’d be lucky to find that in a special collector’s edition."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

["Beyond Tetris" is a no-longer-dormant column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment examines the high-budget puzzle collections The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour.]

It's been a while since I wrote one of these; a lot's happened in the past few months. Most importantly I've moved, with my fiancee, into the heart of Hollywood. (Not for any particular hey-let's-break-into-films reason, just because it's a nice neighborhood.) As I've been settling down to live my everyday life in an area that's idealized and vilified from around the world, I've had a lot of time to think about style and substance, puzzle and presentation. So I think it's appropriate that I restart this column with the blockbuster popcorn movie of computer puzzle games, The 7th Guest.

Guest Hosts

In 1990, Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros, two employees of Virgin Games, were thinking about Laura Palmer, viz. who killed her. They were also thinking about the board game Clue (the rights to which Virgin had acquired). But most importantly, they were thinking about CD-ROMs. Music CDs had taken over vinyl, and console manufacturers were just starting to release systems like the FM Towns Marty and the TurboGrafx CD that used CD-ROMs to hold game information. But on the PC, the CD-ROM was still mostly used for massive data storage for programs like the Microsoft Bookshelf. Landeros and Devine wanted to get ahead of the PC-gaming curve and use the power of the CD-ROM to give gamers a mystery to equal David Lynch's bizzarro serial.

Though inspired by the promise of multimedia, the pair were also keenly aware of its limitations; they didn't want to promise more than they could deliver. Landeros explained, "People get disappointed when they can't do something. Because it seems that you're saying there are endless possiblities, yet you're so restricted. So we wanted to restrict things—restrict the environment from the start." So instead of offering a wide-open puzzle space, they decided to focus on small discrete puzzles which would serve as the backbone for a mystery shown in video, music and animation. In the design spec for Guest, Devine and Landeros described a game with a structure similar to Cliff Johnson's The Fool's Errand, but with a plot that was "very strong, intricate, and full of dramatic content."

Devine and Landeros were amicably "fired" from Virgin to form their own company, Trilobyte, which would develop the game for Virgin to publish. It became The 7th Guest—and a major success. It sold more than two million copies and is credited with helping to push sales of CD-ROM drives for PCs. Today, it's hard to watch the videos without cringing at both the acting and the blocky video. But while the acting is probably the same as it ever was, the video and the 3-D pictures and animation were state-of-the-art in the early '90s. And what the game lacked in thespianism, it made up in grotesque imagery. The mansion of the demented toymaker Stauf was a playground of interactive horror. Even jaded techies wanted the game, if only to show off the Super VGA visuals.

But so far I've only talked about the "Hollywood" side of the game—the video, special effects, sales. What about the puzzles?

This Old (Haunted) House

Though Devine and Landeros used the The Fool's Errand as a source of structure, their game lacked the creativity of Johnson's idiosyncratic puzzles. Instead, Trilobyte implemented puzzles that had mostly been around for quite a while. I've already mentioned that the crypt puzzle was based on Merlin, a predecessor of Lights Out. But other puzzles are much older. One of the first puzzles in the game, seen through the telescope in the library, is copied from Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia. The "eight queens" problem, familiar to computer programmers and chess players alike, appears in the game room. In fact, Google puzzlesmith Wei-Hwa Huang once claimed that he had documented prior versions of all of 7th Guest's puzzles except for two.

In at least one case, the puzzle poach wasn't just conceptual, it was code-related as well! Among all the solitaire puzzles of the mansion, there's one two-player game that must be played against Stauf. Looking under a microscope in the laboratory, you find a game called "Show of Infection." This game uses the same rules as the strategy game Ataxx. For the AI, Trilobyte used the same code that Devine had used for the 7up-branded Ataxx clone Spot.

But while the slick presentation of puzzle chestnuts were generally enough to capture the attention of the hardcore puzzlers, there were some problems. One puzzle in the game, "Flipping Out" in the doll room, is randomly generated in such a way that the puzzle may be impossible. Prima's Official Strategy Guide seems to know about the problem, but not really understand how it works. It cautions, "It appears to be impossible to solve this puzzle if only 1 square is incorrect." So what do you do with an impossible setup? You reset the puzzle until you get a setup that you hope is good. As Scott Purdy said in a proposed rec.puzzles walkthrough, "The problem is that this puzzle, depending upon the starting position, is either trivial or impossible."

[Spinal Tap Cliché Redacted]

There was so much anticipation for The 7th Guest that production for its sequel, The 11th Hour, began before the first game was finished. But internal struggles over creative direction and the technical implementation of that direction (a shot of a flashlight prompted a last-minute shift from 8-bit to 16-bit color) caused the game to ship over a year late. And by the winter of 1995, the relaxed exploration of Myst had found a wider audience than The 7th Guest. What's more, while the game was delayed, Microsoft launched Windows 95, and many of the fans who picked up the game when it premiered were unable to get its MS-DOS based programming to work with their new OS.

Puzzle-wise the sequel features much of the same fare as the original: chess, sliding blocks, anagrams, etc. But The 11th Hour introduces two new aspects of the game. For one, you must play various puzzle-like strategy games against an AI Stauf. In addition to a hexagonal variant of Ataxx from the first game, The 11th Hour features Pente, Connect Four, and Y. The AI remains strong throughout the games, though the player often gains a great advantage with the first move.

The 11th Guest also featured a "scavenger hunt." To progress to the puzzle and game set pieces, you had to first solve a clue. These clues generally followed the style of the clues found in cryptic or "puns and anagrams" crosswords. Once you unraveled the clue, you had to locate the item somewhere in the house. While it was an admirable attempt at bringing this kind of word puzzle to a wider audience, its implementation was definitely flawed. Take, for example, this clue: "22233642-736846873". First, you needed to decode it using the letters on your telephone to get "Academic penthouse." Then, you have to realize that the decoded clue refers to the phrase "ivory tower." And then, you have to realize that the phrase referred to by the decoded clue actually means you need to find the white rook on the chessboard in the game room. Many gamers felt the pain wasn't worth the reward.

Fossilization

The 11th Guest sold well enough for a PC game, but it fell short of the expected sales for a blockbuster sequel. Devine and Landeros were starting to pull Trilobyte apart, and the company's next two games reflected the schism. Clandestiny was another puzzle game, this time aimed for kids and featuring cartoony cel animation instead of horrific full-motion video. Tender Loving Care dropped the puzzles and focused on the media. Starring John Hurt, it was a psychosexual thriller punctuated by invasive psychological questions that shaped the outcome of the story. (The screenshot to the left is from TLC; calling the Aberrant Gamer!) By 1996, the company was floundering. To help increase funds, the company self-published Uncle Henry's Playhouse, a plotless showcase of the puzzles from The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour, and Clandestiny. It sold 127 copies worldwide.

In 1999 Trilobyte was no more. The self-destruction of the company is told in harrowing detail in "Haunted Glory," a feature by Geoff Keighley for Gamespot. In an e-mail sent to the remaining Trilobyte employees, Graeme Devine lamented, "In the end, I never outran the shadow of The 7th Guest. . . . Trilobyte will always be remembered for those games and none other." And despite a DVD release for Tender Loving Care, he's pretty much right. Still, they are remembered well for those two games. So much so that the rumor of a third Stauf game seems to be ubiquitous. Legend Entertainment created a prototype of a real-time 3-D game called "The 13th Soul" in 1998, but the project was scrapped. In 2003, Rob Landeros was developing The Collector, but the announcements later disappeared without a trace. Now a group of fans hopes to take up the mantle with The 13th Doll.

And if the puzzles were really so forgettable, why the such fond memories? Well, sometimes the multimedia is the message. With a few unfortunate exceptions, the 7th Guest games repackaged the best of the classic puzzles. And unlike many others who have done the same, Devine and Landeros brought these brainteasers to life in a way that most players couldn't imagine at the time. The 3-D imagery may have been superfluous to the puzzle, but for millions of gamers, it was just the right amount of sugar to help the medicine go down. A few months ago, I was ready to slam these games as derivative, unoriginal and needlessly overbuget. But I'm part of Hollywood now—I pass by the Capitol Records building on my way to the pharmacy, and I tramp down the Walk of Fame to get to the library. And sometimes, secretly, I like a bit of pageantry with my puzzles.

[Tony Delgado is a member of the National Puzzlers' League, and a solver and creater of puzzles of all sorts. He may also have a new videogame blog soon.]

Posted by tablesaw at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Our very own Kevin 'Magweasel' Gifford already checked out Game Informer's October issue in his column at the weekend, but I wanted to highlight the two-page feature they have on multi-IGF prize winner Everyday Shooter, because there's a couple of points in it that are think are important for the indie scene.

The article (which is illustrated by Jon Mak holding a PC Engine controller up to a fire hydrant!) comments: "Everyday Shooter first appeared publicly at the 2006 Game Developers Conference in the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. The game garnered significant buzz and by December of that year it was nominated for the Independent Games Festival Awards and accepted as a finalist at the Slamdance festival..."

It continues: "'I went to the Independent Games Festival there [since I] always make a point of swinging by and checking out the games', recalls John Hight, director of external development at Sony Computer Entertainment America and a primary decision maker on what makes it onto the PlayStation Network. Hight tried the first stage and was struck by the artistic style of the game and the way gameplay interlaced with the music."

Negotiations ensued and, lo and behold, Everyday Shooter is a flagship PlayStation Network title now. This is important (to my mind, as IGF Chairman) because there's been plenty of indie titles identified with the IGF and other indie game festivals - but rarely is there such direct causation in the game world between a public showing of an unreleased game, and a bigger publisher/distribution mechanism picking it up. Hopefully there will be more and more indie fests where this happens.

[In other v.interesting indie news, elsewhere in the piece (and let's not forget the reach of this article - Game Informer has a rate base of 2.3 million readers nowadays), Hight reveals that 120,000 people have bought ThatGameCompany's art-game fl0w on PlayStation 3 so far - not bad for a title that's as abstract as anything sold on a console thus far.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We just got sent a honest-to-gosh paper copy of this book, so it's good timing that Jesper Juul has also pointed out that "...Space Time Play is a new anthology on video games edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz and Matthias Böttger" - and out this month.

Now, it does have to be said that the overview on the official site is highly 'academikwak' (and yes, that's an official term): "The richly illustrated texts in "Space Time Play" cover a wide range of gamespaces: from milestone video and computer games to virtual metropolises to digitally-overlaid physical spaces. As a comprehensive and interdisciplinary compendium, "Space Time Play" explores the architectural history of computer games and the future of ludic space."

But looking through 'Space Time Play', it's a bit more interesting than that implies - with a near-infinite amount of contributors debuting short but sometimes perceptive analyses of titles from Rogue through Kirby: Canvas Curse through Silent Hill through Elite and beyond, plus art-games and ARGs also notably featured in other vignettes. It all gets a bit weird when it lapses into "architecture and urban planning" much later in the book, but you can always rip that bit out if you want!

(Also, there's an endearingly brief essay on physics in games which has precisely two references - for Newton's 'Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica' and, uhh, George Lucas' Star Wars. That's the charm and insanity of the academic gaming scene, all in once!)

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You thought you were going to get away without GameSetWatch rounding up our Tokyo Game Show coverage from Gamasutra & friends, didn't you? Well, no such luck, despite vague promises not to do it, since there's a few unique write-ups I wanted to point out from last week's extravaganza in Tokyo, as follows:

- Christian Nutt's analysis of the Tokyo Game Show show floor - and, by inference, the show itself - for Gamasutra was pretty interesting, I thought: "Still, it seems like the industry is, in some sense, holding its breath at this TGS, with the PS3 still struggling to find an array of compelling software -- particularly that which will appeal to its Japanese domestic userbase... few major titles were announced, and many are still far off. The 360 is in a holding pattern in Japan. The Wii is gaining little in the way of breadth of titles, if this show is any indication. Still, the array of games here points to publishers willing to try different things to capture a fragmenting and maturing game audience."

- He's in Texas, not Tokyo, but I got Danny Cowan to super-compile the actual, honest-to-god Tokyo Game Show game announcements, since "...this year's TGS boasted relatively few game announcements of its own, as most of the convention's featured titles had previously been detailed in Famitsu and in recent press releases." He picked off some interesting stuff, from Metal Slug 7 through Populous DS and Flower (Fl0wer?) - and it was handy, at least for my addled mind, to see it all listed together.

- The subtle shading of Kaz Hirai's Sony keynote kicking off TGS was, we claim, missed by many. The real story wasn't the delay of Home, or the Dual Shock for PlayStation 3, but the fact that Hirai "...staked out a policy of improving Sony's relationship with its development and user bases, as well as stating definitively that the PS3 should be perceived first and foremost as a gaming platform." This is, after all, quite different from Ken Kutaragi's keynote at TGS 2006, which emphasized much more abstract, slightly cuckoo things.

- While we're at it, some brief interview excerpts from our TGS correspondents - Marvelous Interactive (Harvest Moon) suggesting they'll open a U.S. branch within the next two years, Factor 5's Julian Eggebrecht discussing Turrican remakes for XBLA/PSN, theoretically, and Phil Harrison suggesting there may be more custom game controllers along the lines of the Buzz and EyeToy peripherals coming to the PS2.

- Finally on the Gamasutra front, since both of the folks we sent to Japan (Brandon Sheffield and Christian Nutt) speak Japanese pretty well, I hear we have some good personal-style interviews coming up with folks like Masaya Matsuura, Tomonobu Itagaki, and some interesting Grasshopper Manufacture personnel. I'm particularly excited by Brandon's promised Kenta Cho vs. Omega vs. Jon Mak showdown - it's bullet hell heaven!

[Oh, and a couple of interesting TGS points of view from folks we know: Game Girl Advance's Jane Pinckard (recently and sadly departed from the CMP Game Group) popped up on GigaOM, suggesting 'Tokyo Game Show: A Clouded Vision In A Web 2.0 World?', and Wired News' Chris Kohler sums up, a little deflatedly, as 'Final Thoughts: Tokyo Game Show Bigger, More Irrelevant Than Ever' - though he's talking more about Nintendo than Web 2.0. But either way, people seemed a little deflated by the show.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Other projects (specifically the Game Design Essentials series over at Gamasutra) have taken up a bit of time lately so this one's a week late, and kinda light besides. You may find it interesting, though.

We're going to start taking a look at some of the results from the 7DRL programming challenge, which asks participants to create a roguelike game in seven days or less. Many interesting games have come out of the challenge, such as personal favorite ChessRogue. This one's particularly interesting because it hews quite close to the pattern laid out by Rogue, as well it should, as it's made by one of Rogue's original creators, Glenn Wichman.

The Seven Day Quest is a roguelike implemented entirely in browser-side Javascript, a fairly interesting idea in itself. It thus runs on any system that can run Firefox (or Internet Explorer), and can take advantage of the browser's extensive UI support.

Most roguelike games require that the player memorize a dozen keypresses or more, but here the inventory is always shown, and objects are used or dropped by way of drop-down menus. The only commands the player needs to know are movement/combat (by the number pad), picking things up (comma or numpad 0) and stair travel (< and >). It's enough to make me wish more people would write Javascript roguelikes.

As for the game, there's a little more going on here than a Rogue remake. Unlike Rogue the player can go back and forth between dungeon levels from the start, and there are seven dungeons tackle.

Further, while Rogue had an implicit time limit with the player's need to keep exploring to find food to keep from starving, Seven Day Quest makes the timer explicit. The player is charged to find one amulet from each dungeon and return it to the surface within a day of game time apiece.

There are lots of bugs left in the code, which is to be expected from a game which was made in seven days. Leaving a dungeon level and returning causes not just the rooms to be generated in the same places, but items to be regenerated as well, which harms scarcity. This is balanced out by the overall timer, although there is an item that grants extra time that could possibly be farmed this way. Also, line-of-sight doesn't seem to respect room walls very well, although the game does limit the range at which players can see.

Sometimes it seems like the monsters are being generated too rapidly, but that results in increased experience. Sometimes it seems that there's too much treasure on each level, but the game's strict inventory limit mitigates that. A debug balance feature has been left in the code that allows the player to make various aspects of the game more or less prevalent, so if the player's tastes run towards more fighting, more fighting is available. Needless to say, this can also be used to cheat.

More annoyingly, while the game mixes in bad items with the good items to keep players on their toes and make it dangerous to just try everything, the game doesn't automatically name them based on their observed functions. Many of the items in the game seem to have purposely vague functions ("What the heck is 'You feel like you could dance like Catherine Zeta-Jones' supposed to mean?!") so this could be a design choice, but tellingly the game doesn't allow the player to name them himself either.

It's true this can be overcome by taking notes, but it still feels odd when the Call function dates all the way back to Rogue anyway. There are no Identify scrolls anywhere, and a perusal of the game's source code reveals that there are disappointingly few item types to be found overall.

Of course the game was written in seven days, and allowances must be made for that. And it is very nice that, unlike many of the more popular 7DRL projects, item discovery is still an important part of the game. Most people who write these fixate upon the turn-based, tactical movement and combat as the main focus, so it's nice to see one that tries to inject some of Rogue's old mystery into play.

Seven Day Quest
Created by Glenn "capmango" Wichman
http://www.babelsphere.com/7dayquest/game/index.html

Posted by John Harris at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Hanging around the Kokoromi art-game posse's site, we spotted an interesting blog entry about a game culture video segment, explaining: "Jason, AKA 6955 who’s currently busy doing all the music and sound for Fez is also busy putting together this new show he’s producing for gamevideos.com."

And? "It's called Points and its slick as hell. Its about game culture, the kind of stuff you never hear enough about. Rather than go on about previews and reviews and products, Points is about the culture that was spawned and revolves around videogames. The first episode is about these 2 gamer’s bars in tokyo. Reason 9982373 to want to go to tokyo: they have bars for gamers. Definitely check it out. Its sexy and uses bolded helvetica as its font of choice. Oh, and music by 6955, too!"

6955, who is Canadian but lives in Tokyo, is a notable chipmusician, and he was also behind the recent Nintendo Museum documentary run on GameVideos.com - and which is very neat indeed. Also, look around 6955's site for stuff like his modded, circuit-bent projects, including 'Rapidfire Famicom Controller' and a host of others.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Got a note from Rich over at indie stalwarts Digital Eel revealing some very neat news: "Hot off the hyperwire: Digital Eel's very first game, Plasmaworm (quite possibly the coolest Snake game in the Five Galaxies), is now absolutely FREE! You get the FULL GAME plus level passwords with no strings attached."

Here's the system requirements/info for the game, which includes: "360 degree movement; in-game level, music and plasma editors; solo or 2-player co-op or deathmatch modes; guns; bosses; cosmic ducks; the works!" And here's the 2MB installer for the Windows title, yay.

There are Plasmaworm screenshots on the site, too - these are the trippy folks behind super-neat 'short' space combat game Weird Worlds, let's not forget. Oh, also, just spotted a teaser for Digital Eel's next game on their front page, 'Eat Electric Death', described as 'Tactical starship combat in your living room!' Whatever insanity that is.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Back to Soren Johnson's 'Designer Notes' blog, then, where he's been analyzing Ensemble's 'Halo Wars' trailer and commenting, in some detail, on how the real-time strategy game genre should be adapting to the console format.

Johnson notes of the trailer: "At the very end of the video, however, there is a tiny suggestion of just how fun an RTS could be on a console. The human side has some sort of orbiting uber-weapon they can use to wreck massive destruction on a specific target. The console interface for this system is a snap - it's simply a huge reticule. Just aim and shoot."

He continues: "Personally, I was hoping that Halo Wars would focus more on these types of interactions - ones where the player is taking advantage of the joystick interface instead of fighting it. RTS's truly need to be built from the ground up for consoles, without the expectation of controlling multiple groups of soldiers." Johnson then references Moonbase Commander, Rampart, Defense Of The Ancients and M.U.L.E. as meaningful touchpoints for those considering a console RTS.

Also useful? Jason 'loonyboi' Bergman's comment on the post, which wraps up a couple of loose ends from the existing high-profile console RTSes: "I'm deeply biased of course, but I fall into the category of people that RTSes will never, ever, ever work as well as turn-based on a console. It's not that they can't be done well...I think EA did a great job with Battle For Middle-Earth 2 (I haven't tried Command & Conquer 3 yet, but I gather it's more of the same). But in that game it felt like the only reason you couldn't pause the game and give orders is because EA made some high-level mandate that you couldn't. The game would have played better if you could."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Game developer Brett Douville has updated his Brett's Footnotes blog with an intriguing chat/rant about Zelda's money system, particularly in Twilight Princess for Wii, which he thinks is, well, broken in terms of money management and its related fetch quests, to say the least.

Douville's overall argument starts by noting: "You are frequently maxed out on money, even when you go from the kiddie wallet to the adult wallet, even when you go from the adult wallet to the ultimate wallet", but then overflows to pure annoyance when he finally saved enough and did multiple rote tasks to grab the Magic Armor, the most powerful armor in the game.

And what happens then? "The Magic Armor converts damage to a loss of money, and slowly burns through money whenever you're wearing it besides... That's right, the whole exercise of spending something like 2600 rupees (easily found, slow to amass unless you're thinking about it) was to be able to convert money to health. Something that you could do basically the first time you got an empty bottle -- by buying red potions to fill that bottle from a local vendor."

Douville continues: "Now, I didn't feel gypped -- it more felt like some sort of cosmic joke, really. I had a bit of a laugh when I got the ultimate wallet and the magic armor, only to find myself quickly penniless (rupeeless?) whenever I wore it. It came in handy really only in one circumstance, in the Cave of Trials, a 50-level dungeon of increasingly difficult combatants where there was virtually no health to be found."

So what of this? Douville goes deep for his conclusion: "I can think of two explanations for the Zelda economy in Twilight Princess. The first, and the one I want to believe, is that the designers are trying to say, "Money isn't everything. Money just gives you means to do stuff. Doing stuff is more important." The other is that it's essentially the biggest shell game I've ever participated in. Come to think of it, it's probably both."

Hm - I vote for the latter alone, because I think repetitive leveling is such an ingrained part of many Japanese games that crazed money-centric shenanigans like this are considered legitimate gameplay-extending design concepts. Which is quite possibly a hoop-jumping shame.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Via Alice's Wonderland Blog, she's pointed out Nerve.com's regular 'Sex Advice From...' column, which has enlisted video game designers as agony aunts/uncles this time round - and they make an eminently sensible go of it.

Oddly enough, the people participating are listed with just first name and (in a couple of cases) website links, but they appear to be a developer at Red Fly Studios in Austin on Mushroom Men, [EDIT: ex-]Ubisoft [and now A2M!] designer Heather Kelley (already crossing sex and games with aplomb via her Lapis project), the mysterious 'Jordan' (anyone?), and Randy, who certainly appears to be ex-Looking Glass and Ion Storm designer R. Smith, judging by the snapshot.

Smith actually has the best/dumbest answer, to 'How can playing video games make me a better lover?', and it's as follows (yes, it's NSFW): "Back in the eight-bit days, we used the term "Nintendo thumb," which meant one of two things: One, you played video games until the hours and hours spent manipulating the rough edge of the D-pad gave you that unique blister that hurt so badly you could barely hold the controller anymore, but you soldiered on anyway. Two, the freakish teenage-boy ability to stimulate the A/B buttons so rapidly one's thumb only appeared as a vibrating blur, a Schrödinger's-cat possibility-field type thing. So if clits are just D-pads and A/B buttons, my entire generation should be rock-star gods in bed."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The local B&N decided to get in a few copies of PlayStation Official Magazine UK this week, so I decided to pick up one and see what's up.

PS:OMUK (not to be confused with PlayStation 2 Official Magazine UK, which is also still in operation and comes with a PS2 demo disc) is the only mag in the world, not counting the assorted continental European versions, to include a PlayStation 3 Blu-ray demo disc with each issue. I'm sure Future must've paid Sony quite a lot of money to convince them to put together a disc just for the European marketplace, and it's not a terrible disc either -- this one includes demos of many of the really important PS3 games released so far, including Ridge Racer 7, Resistance, Genji, and so forth. Nothing hugely new (and nothing you can't find on the PSN, really), but then again "official" UK mags love to pack their discs with ancient demos, filling them up as much as possible.

What's the mag look like inside? Well, a lot like how it looks outside, in fact -- extremely light 'n airy, with nothing but white backgrounds, easy-to-read text, and the occasional bit of original clean-line art demonstrating this or that feature of a game. The content is nothing terribly special, although there's a heck of a lot of it: ten pages on Resident Evil 5 (which seems to have all been written based off the old trailer and a lot of clip art), a couple of neat features on assorted topics (Folding@home, of all things, as well as a roundtable discussion of guitar/music party games), and then the usual previews and reviews.

Will I buy it again? Not for $15, no, but compared to -- uh -- the only PlayStation-specific magazine left in the US, this is an extremely high-quality product.

Anyway, let's check out all the mags released in the past fortnight! And God, all these specials! They're driving me to the poorhouse!

Game Informer October 2007

Cover: Dead Space

All right, what is it with GI's coverlines all being in PR-speak lately? Are you meant to imagine Don LaFontaine speaking the three sentences on the bottom in your mind? 'Cos that's the only guy who can say these lines out loud without sounding silly. The designer also chose a pretty bland cover subject when the art in the feature inside is way better. Arrrgh!

There's nothing all that "renegade" about the team at EA making Dead Space, but the feature on it remains interesting and engaging, even though 80 percent of it is producer GLen Schofield talking about all the things they're going to put into the game by the time it hits stores in a year. It's also nicely supported by a Classic GI piece on the history of survival horror, complete with an interview with RE4's Hiroyuki Kobayashi. The bit on Project Origin is more in-depth if not quite as long, but the highlight as usual is int he front section, which includes an interview with Warren Spector (can't get enough of him) and a timeline behind the creation of Rainbow Six Vegas which is very nicely designed and well worth reading.

PC Gamer November 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: Half-Life 2: The Orange Box (The cover is actually a pleasing fluorescent orange in color; cheap scanners choke on colors like these.)

After nine years, Greg Vederman is leaving PCG "to a new job in the tech industry," set to be replaced by executive editor Kristen Salvatore. A lady editing a magazine that, according to their own media kit, has a 97% male readership? Sacrilege! Pish and tish! (Though I will admit, she's a great deal more talented than Stevie Case proved to be.)

The cover being devoted to a review (one that runs five pages and ends with a 94% score, same as BioShock one page later), the main feature is instead devoted to hardware -- to be more exact, why you should upgrade to Vista and DirectX 10. Problem is, it doesn't do a great job of convincing -- in every game they profile, the DX9 and DX10 shots look exactly the bloody same to me, even though the captions are pointing out "flat, spray-painted textures" and "deep and sharply defined shadows" and things. Maybe this is part of the problem? I dunno.

This issue includes a Cellplay mobile-gaming supplement, as well as a weird ad for something called CrossBOARDlogic that's written in broken English and looks like something out of an early-1980s computer mag. I wonder how creator "P Onyszkanycz" came up with the cash to advertise in a magazine like this.

PSM November 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

No Cellplay in PSM (though the subscriber editions of both this and PC Gamer have annoying non-removable advertising covers), but there is a rad Assassin's Creed iron-on transfer!

I'm seeing an effort on PSM's part to do some more original features this month, which I applaud greatly. There's an interview with Everyday Shooter creator Jonathan Mak which is pretty nice, although Game Informer did pretty much the exact same interview with him this month too. There's a "11 PS2 Games You Need to Play (But Haven't)" feature which is pretty obvious, but still fun to read.

Otherwise, not too exciting an issue -- 100 pages, 16 of which are taken up by the Cellplay supplement. Soz.

Ultimate Guild Wars Guide

Future is going specials-crazy this month, and besides PCXL this is probably the most interesting one. As the cover insinuates but doesn't explicitly mention, this mag is mostly a Guild Wars artbook -- around 50 pages of full-page spread art, with commentary from the concept artists and storyboard guys dotted throughout. Very nice. If the page size were a little bigger, I could almost imagine Edge putting out something like this... except there wouldn't be the 30 pages of extremely text-heavy walkthrough in the back of the book. Ah well, nothing's perfect.

   

The other two new Future specials this month aren't of much interest to hardcore folk. PS3 Holiday Buyer's Guide is mostly recycled PSM stuff with some extra gear and movie reviews, and 2008 PlayStation Cheaster's Handbook is straight-on cheats, without so much as a table of contents. Doop de doo.

Game Developer September 2007

I liked Puzzle Quest a lot, although I never met anyone else who cared to admit it, and reading this postmortem warmed my heart, especially when writer/designer Steve Fawkner claims that the biggest problem the game had was that they ran out of copies to sell within two weeks. Two features up front -- one covering the theory behind save systems in games and another covering Saboteur's unique color-changing systems -- are also easy for laymen to follow and would be perfectly at home in Edge if they were around in the US.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

At JayIsGames, the lovely Lars Doucet has done an excellent interview with 'Fret Nice' creator Martin Bruggemann, that title that "...looks like a straightforward platforming game, but there's a big twist: instead of using the keyboard or a gamepad, you play Fret Nice with the Guitar Hero controller!"

The game (which has been out for a while, and mentioned on a few major websites) was done as part of a Scandinavian university thesis, and it really is impressive how such formality can bring rigor to the game design process, leading to smart moves like this:

"The control scheme was better fitted for a fast game play with lots of forward motion. It's sometime hard to build momentum in Fret Nice because of the clunkiness of the control scheme and therefore I tried to make it so that the player never has to stand still. This should be apparent in the level design."

Bruggemann also reveals: "I'm currently in the process of starting a game development studio with a couple of school mates. Fret Nice will be one of the games we will be working on. Visit our website for more information." All I have to say is - enough people have guitar controllers now, XBLA/PSN release for this, somebody?

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at a new discovery of mine, Stranger109's machinima-centric blog, they've tracked down Hugh Hancock to quiz him on his new book 'Machinima For Dummies', apparently a fine attempt at a comprehensive machinima tome good for a range of expertise levels.

Hugh actually contributed a chapter to my 'Gaming Hacks' book for O'Reilly, and in this interview promoting his new co-authored book for Wiley, he has some good insights on the different machinima flavors, I think:

"There’s a continuum on which machinimators tend to live. At one end is “Inside Out” machinima where creators tend to make movies from with in the game.... From the other end you have people coming from the direction that I come from, which is “Outside-In”, where you have a creative person or persons looking for a way to tell stories and they see machinima as a potential tool."

Stranger109's Robert Jones has also reviewed 'Machinima For Dummies' now, noting: "Hancock and Ingram have done machinima a great service in providing the most comprehensive resource available to date. And while the inevitable Monday morning quarterbacking will take place in the forums about the Second Life snubbing and the lack of Garry’s Mod coverage, the book as a whole remains an impressive effort and will serve as a resource for machinimators for years to come."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

GameTunnel and Reflexive's Russell Carroll has been writing about IAC's majority acquisition of Torque Engine creator GarageGames, which we covered on Gamasutra recently from a purely factual perspective. However, Carroll expands on by looking to what it means for indie games, in his view, and it's a very interesting read..

Basically, as Gama explains: "Officials from “interactive conglomerate” IAC have announced that the company has acquired a majority of independent games developer GarageGames equity. As a result the two companies now plan to launch a new Web-based video game network named InstantAction.com, intended to offer original action titles through a standard Web browser."

Now, Carroll has some reasonably strong views on the legacy of GarageGames, a company which has certainly provided some good indie flavor and a strong, low-cost engine to many developers, but, it's true, haven't really stepped up to break-out hit status in terms of critical mass, excepting perhaps their own XBLA title Marble Blast Ultra. The crux of his argument is as follows:

"What GarageGames didn't do was fully appreciate the importance of selling games to their future. They wanted to create the technology and let the developers create the market. That didn't work. 5 Years later there is no Indie marketplace, in fact there is less of a downloadable Indie market than there was when they started.

I think in retrospect the approach would have been something like:
1 - create great technology
2 - create games on that technology
3 - create a great community driven website store to sell the games
4 - release the games on casual portals, and then later steam and gametap to maximize awareness and drive customers back to the game store
5 - publish other people's games on the game store and create great add-ons for the great games that you'd already made
6 - improve the technology
7 - make new games on that technology
8 - repeat 4-7 multiple times

(my assessment is that GG got off to a great start doing 1 and 2, skipped 3, started to do 4 and then changed directions , dabbled with 5, worked on 6, didn't deliver on 7 and was ready to try a different approach by 8)."

This is, needless to say, quite strong stuff, and it draws a very interesting response from GarageGames co-founder Jeff Tunnell in the comments to the post: "Actually, this post is way off base in many respects. I take huge exception to your casual statement that the GG Game Store was an after thought. It was a part of the plan from Day One, and, in fact, a prototype was shown at the first IGC. I met you at the first IGC. For you to claim that you are somehow the reason that we tried to sell games is a huge overstatement.

We did sell a lot of games in the game store. Marble Blast has sold over 10,000 copies from our store, and many others are in the 1,000's of sales. However, it was not enough. We could not get enough good games to keep the stream alive. In retrospect, our standards may have been too high." So... who's right?

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Since it's almost the weekend and these are, uh, almost last weekend's GameSetWatch links, I figure it might be sensible to whip them all out in microlink form, an actionpacked line or two at a time. Hold on for a wild ride:

- Dubious Quality points out an awesome Capcom promotional campaign: "Capcom join forces with The Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] on a real life Monster Hunt to South America." Yes, "giant Anaconda specimens" are involved.

- Aeropause has posted the alleged full Guitar Hero III songlist, including "...all the songs by stage, including encore and extra songs you can buy from the store." Could be fake, could be legit - I reckon the latter.

- Matthew 'Fort90' Hawkins points out a YouTube episode of 'The Brews Brothers': "The focus of this episode is squarely on Italian programmer Simone Serra and his Atari 2600 title Lead. Lead attempts to bring the spirit of Sega's 21st century sleeper hit Rez to a thirty year old game system, and the results are astonishing!"

- Grand Text Auto has spotted that "...starting next week the GameWorld exhibition , ongoing at Laboral in Gijon, Spain, is expanding the show with Playware, adding more experimental commercial games, individual-produced games and installations. The art game list? "Armadillo Run (Peter Stock), Electroplankton (Toshio Iwai), flOw (thatgamecompany), Golf? (Chronic Logic, Detective Brand), Line Rider (Boštjan Cadež), LocoRoco (Tsutomu Kuono), mono (Binary Zoo), Neon (Jeff Minter), Okami (Clover Studios), Rez (United Game Artists), Shift (Max McGuire), Toribash (Hampa Söderström), vib-ribbon (NanaOn-Sha)"

- Gamezebo has interviewed Carla Humphrey of Last Day of Work, talking gaming roles with the co-founder of the Virtual Villagers/Fish Tycoon developer: "I mainly consider myself a co-designer on the games (the YIN to Arthur's Yang), and what I bring to this process is the 'softer touch'. I try to contribute look/feel elements that will be accessible and engaging to non-gamers."

- It's still controversial, but I liked Eurogamer's dual reviews of Space Giraffe: "Some people think it's an unfathomable load of tosh, others seem to think it's really rather splendid. So rather than provide you with one viewpoint, we looked at two contrasting opinions of Jeff Minter's Xbox Live Arcade shooter."

- The New Gamer has been checking out the local artgame world, "...as part of Chicago's summer-long series of Art of Play exhibits, the 'Come In & Play' interactive center would focus squarely on video games and system." They were faintly bemused, but oh well!

- Rock Paper Shotgun points out that Super Columbine Massacre RPG's "...creator, Danny Ledonne, trying to make sense of the whole thing has been working on a documentary called Playing Columbine for a while now, and has lobbed a rough cut of a 13 minute section online."

- Zepy over at Canned Dogs has been discussing a 'forward-thinking' Japanese book: "The newly released book “Why did the PS3 fail?” by Tane Kiyoshi directly labels the PS3 as a failure and attempts to analyze the factors which led to this current situation. The author Tane Kiyoshi is an editor for the subculture + gaming magazine Continue and originally stated that the PS3 would succeed." Huh, fait accompli already?

- Vintage Computing & Gaming has dug out the 'Keith Courage in Alpha Zones' mini comic, explaining: "In 1989, the TurboGrafx-16 made its American debut with a lackluster pack-in title, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. Included within the Keith Courage game was an approximately 4.5″ x 4.5″, eight page mini comic book setting the story for the game."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We've previously trailed the competition, and now the TIGSource folks have pinged us to point out that voting is open for the 'B Game Competition' - a princely total of 29 games (one of which is a 100-game-in-1 'masterpiece'!) have been entered in the quest to find 'games that are bad in the right way'.

As TIGSource's Derek Yu explains of the 'bad games with some great personalities' competition: "Voting is subjective, of course, but you should aim to vote for the game(s) that dips the most deeply into the theme ("B-Games") and the medium (video games), with an emphasis on craft, passion, humor, originality, and entertainment value. Simple, right?"

If you want a vague starting point (written before the full set of games debuted), Indygamer points out that the Distractionware blog has posted a few of its favorites, explaining: "The overall standard is phenomenal. Practically everyone got a good grasp on the idea behind the contest and as a result, everything submitted is worth playing - be it for a cool gameplay mechanic or just a brilliant concept."

Some of those? 'Mondo Medicals', a 'cure for cancer' game including "counter-intuitive first person maze puzzles", 'The 100-in-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart' by Team Glorious Trainwrecks Dot Com - yikes - and even 'Weißer Punkt in der Schwarzlücke', which is: "A parody of arthouse gaming! Complete with director’s commentary, trailers for upcoming releases, a gallery and a lengthy credit sequence." This, my friends, is what entertaining indie gaming is all about.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, we've been posting a host of interesting content on CMP Game Group sister sites such as Gamasutra, WorldsInMotion.biz, GamesOnDeck, and GameCareerGuide.com this week, and I will attempt to wade through them in a random order (yes, we're covering Tokyo Game Show too, but every other website on the planet is, so let's go for the quirkier stuff):

- Continuing Gamasutra's histories of the games voted into the Digital Game Canon, following pieces on Spacewar, on Zork, and on Civilization, the site explores Doug Neubauer's Atari title Star Raiders, a somewhat obscure but vital precursor of the Wing Commander-esque digital space opera. The introduction explains: "Doug Neubauer’s Star Raiders was a game that made a vivid first impression. Released in 1979 for the Atari 400 and 800 computers, the game was a surprisingly complex space combat simulation. However, what left players entranced was its smooth, three-dimensional graphics. Star Raiders achieved a level of realism that few people had seen in a video game before."

- Over at online worlds site WorldsInMotion.biz, Leigh Alexander has been talking to Empire of Sports’ managing director, Christian Müller, and it's fun to hear how guilds might work if you're planning competitive sports teams: "The Coach, similar to a guild leader, has some special powers within the game. They indicate the gameplay, can nominate, dismiss or invite members on the team, and are required to play a social role." And for those wondering, the currently listed sports on the official game website reveal that "...tennis, basketball, skiing and a series of training/fitness games will be available at launch."

- Another notable Gamasutra story from earlier this week - 'The View From GameStop's Window: Retail Giant Talks Gaming In 2007', described thus: "Through multiple acquisitions and mergers, GameStop is now the predominant specialty U.S. game retailer - and Gamasutra talks to GameStop VPs Bob McKenzie and Tom DeNapoli about the state of retail for the PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii, stocking AO-rated games, the firm's digital download strategy, and more." High-level retail execs don't often talk so informally as this, and it's a nice change.

- Over at GamesOnDeck, Mathew Kumar has been chatting to Alex Goatcher of Mikoishi, a team which "...has developed mobile titles such as Phoenix Wright and Star Wars Battlefront Mobile, but have recently begun to concentrate on original IP and new platforms such as Nintendo DS and PC." Their new franchise sounds a bit crazed, too: "SteamIron: The Fallen... is an epic cross-platform sci-fi fantasy that plays out over multiple installments on both handheld and PC platforms.The story begins on 3G mobile with SteamIron: The Fallen with future installments planned for mobile, Nintendo DS culminating in a PC MMOG scheduled for release in 2009." Blimey.

- Finally, and this article really deserves a bit more notice than it go, we ran a detailed analysis of Codemasters and Activision's legal fight over Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty on Gamasutra. It's notable because it's overflow from an already-acrimonious Spark vs. Activision lawsuit. Highlights would include Spark's lawyers insisting the company was not working on a WWII title, and then signing an alternate reality post-WWII title (featuring Nazis!) with Codemasters, and Activision's internal emails about paying Spark royalties on the Call Of Duty title they worked on: "[Spark] will not be seeing a royalty check from me. I think this means that we’ve essentially replicated the ‘scorched earth’ scenario… royalty reductions [are] locked in, as [is Activision’s] ability to make them recoup against every expense known to man.” Ouch!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, you may remember that we recently asked for comments to help with reputational and specific direct-interaction comments from more than 300 game professionals, to help make up our Game Developer's Top 20 Publishers.

We're just finishing up the article itself, which is going to debut in the October 2007 issue of the magazine, alongside a a Game Developer Research report that will list all our the responses, comments, and detailed data. Look for the rundown to be released online in early October.

Anyhow, a lot of the anonymous 'reputational' responses ended up being somewhat polarizing and rhetoric-flecked. But when combing the comments, we kept spotting one particularly witty anonymous responder - and we thought his comments on some of the major publishers were worth printing in full here on GSW, for acerbic laughs, if nothing else:

"Activision - Solid - if unimaginative
Atari - First the good news. Bruno's gone. Now the bad news. Bruno's gone.
Codemasters - Plucky, intelligent senior management willing to take a risk.
Disney Interactive - Does what it says on the tin - and no more.
Eidos/SCi - Could yet grab defeat from the jaws of victory.
Electronic Arts - Currently in therapy.
Konami - Trying to be less Japanese. Currently failing.
LucasArts - Looking increasingly rudderless - the industry's biggest vanity publisher
Majesco - Two words - New. Jersey. 'Nuff said.
Microsoft - Succeeding in spite of itself. Will miss Peter Moore more than they know.
Midway - Sumner Redstone's folly. Spectacularly, almost entertainingly bad.
NCSoft - Playing the long game - and has the cash to do it.
Nintendo - It's their ball - and we can all play with it - on their terms.
Sega - One to watch - clever, nimble leadership who know how to succeed.
Sony Computer Entertainment - Sadly lacking leadership skills at the highest level - expect changes in 2008.
Take-Two - GTA 4 better be good.........
THQ - Looking a bit lost - despite some good work, does anyone know what is THQ for?
Ubisoft - The amazing Guillemots and their dedicated senior team run rings around slower, bigger competitors.
Vivendi Games - World class - in parts."

[Disclaimer: GameSetWatch doesn't necessarily think this arch wit is right. And fortunately, most responders to the survey were a little less flippant. We do think he's pretty amusing, though, whoever he is.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Thanks to RoushiMSX for pointing out Stefan's Treasure site, in which a Swedish fan shows off what must be the most beautifully presented physical collection we've ever seen in homage to game developer Treasure.

There's essentially one shelf per game, and the rather obsessive collection is also split out by game, and yes, that even includes Wario World, perhaps the Treasure game that's least identified as being made by Treasure - and I claim is actually a bit of a forgotten gem.

But yes, there are a few things Nimrodil doesn't have - and here are the totally obscure ones that made me grin: "Double Pack: Davis Cup World Tour and Gunstar Heroes (Australian)... Bangai-O (N64) Phone card... Radiant Silvergun: plush dolls... Light Crusader; Korean version." So if there are any slightly obsessive OCD-type folks with, uhh, doubles of these, you know where to go!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats-- those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]

Last week, this column discussed the dignity of our long-standing heroine, Samus Aran, the respect we as gamers maintain for a woman who doesn’t show skin, and the relative low popularity of searches for Samus hentai (which, ironically, have abruptly spiked in the recent week as if to spite me). Scantily-clad game heroines and burgeoning breast physics are a topic quick to raise ire in particular among female gamers – it’s exploitive and degrading, some say; it’s unnecessary and misleading, others claim.

Let's rethink that a little, shall we?

On this subject, the women of the fighting genre are perhaps the worst offenders. First of all, as Erin Hoffman points out in her recent Escapist feature, “Holding Out For a Heroine,” it’s not realistic – it’s obvious, for example, how lacking female fighters generally are in underwire support, which while titillating in a game would be prohibitively uncomfortable, to say the least, in real combat. As Aspyr Media senior producer Jennifer Bullard says in the article, fighting in heels is hazardous to the ligaments of the legs, and tight-fitting metal bodysuits would be outright painful to femme flesh.

It’s also common to take offense at what many perceive as the inequity in these sort of displays, too – female costumes are outlandish showpieces, while men are often credited with more sensible dress. Though, it’s not hard to find examples that beg to differ; it’s impossible for a red-blooded heterosexual female not to sexualize the decidedly pretty brutality of Street Fighter’s Vega or Tekken’s fire-eyed Jin Kazama, both shirtless and raw – and let’s not even get started on Voldo, Soul Calibur’s tightly-clad, eerily flexible submissive whose trappings bear more than a passing resemblance to bondage gear.

However, if we dismissed all gaming concepts that didn’t hold up to practical reality, we’d be out of a pastime, I fear. Moreover, it can be argued that the fighting genre needs every bare inch and crevice of exposed, exploited, inappropriate and excessive skin.

Why? Fighting games are inherently sexual, and the costuming of the characters is merely an extension of this. Any setting that brings together young, beautiful, powerful men and women in a no-holds barred, high-stakes grapple over lifelong goals is bound to make tensions and pheromones run high. At a glance and out of context, it can be tough to distinguish fighting from sex, and they share several key features in common – adrenaline, physicality, the goal of individual satisfaction.

The question as to why it necessitates such a strong degree of physical exploitation is a legit one, though. Taki’s nipples have been meticulously articulated since the graphics technology existed to make it possible, and as the next generation of fighting games lines up to march on the audience, concept art and preliminary scans reveals that the bustlines are bigger, the waistlines are slimmer and the clothes are smaller than ever. Is it all really necessary?

Games allow us to live in a deliciously debauched world. Take BioShock, for example, where in addition to the usual gun, the player is equipped with genetic enhancements. Using fire and ice as offensive weapons is as old as gaming, so the ante gets upped with a hive of raging bees that emerge from under the skin in squirm-inducing visceral detail. It’s not something we could do in real life, to say the least -- and lighting a Splicer on fire and then electrocuting her to death when she runs for the salve of water is brutality above and beyond that we probably wouldn’t want to do, even if we were put in that dreadful situation wherein we needed to end another life to preserve our own. It’s excess that makes the fantasy of freedom to commit violence without consequences and outside of society’s collective moral conscience feel like a mental vacation.

Survival horror, too, gains immersion from every repugnant detail. The sense of revulsion we feel when the stagnant whatever inside the toilet of a rotting, blood-spattered bathroom, the faint nausea induced by piecemeal, loathsome creatures and the crunch of their skull is necessary. Is it realistic? Of course not, for when do you ever actually anticipate having to fend off an undead two-headed dog or hiding out from zombies in a decaying village? The lavish excess creates the fantasy.

And that’s the key. A world where purposeful, passionate females with irrational proportions and a distinct absence of physical flaws fight without yield alongside hungry, animalistic men is much more fantastic than offensive. People often say they want games to be detailed in order to create realism whereby they can become more immersed in the action – but it’s often realism that interrupts the suspension of disbelief. Every facet of fantasy must be shamelessly rendered, no matter how ludicrous it would be through the lens of normal physics and real-world behavioral standards. There are limits, surely, else the array of gratuitous weapons that sometimes appear in fighting games would summarily dispatch their fist-fighting opponents in a singly easy stroke. And nobody’s clothing falls off – at least, not outside of the hentai fighting genre a la Battle Raper.

But given that the tension, frustration and raw physical action of fighting games will never be divested from its sexual undertone, the gratuitous endowments and high-cut battle skirts, every little plate of waist-cinching, virtually useless armor and every graphic jiggle is as necessary to the genre as the subtle moan of the shambling undead and the high-powered arsenal of the world’s best shooters. And to shamelessly enjoy and appreciate every bare-skinned brawler does not indicate unfairness or misogyny any more than an appreciation for wrench kills or car thievery indicates real-world sociopathy.

Gals like Samus that keep it covered are much-appreciated bastions of dignity, but our fighting furies have an important role to play, too. It looks like Ivy’s back is set to snap – but she’s a game character; she’ll be fine. Why not just enjoy it?

[Leigh Alexander is the editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Destructoid, Paste, Gamasutra and her blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

Over at game metrics blog We Can Fix That With Data, Sara Jensen has been doing some fascinating World Of Warcraft balance analysis, examining which player classes have been fixed, buffed, nerfed, and various other odd MMO-specific titles.

But how can you begin to ennumerate the changes? As Jensen, who works at Spacetime Studios for her dayjob, explains, a particularly data-hungry World Of Warcraft forum-goers has "...listed every class change made since the beginning of recorded history (i.e. early beta), and he’s categorized it by buffs, nerfs, bug fixes, changes, new features, and overhauls." Jensen has crunched that all into a very interesting set of graphs, showing that, for example, the Warlock has the most changes, but the Druid has been buffed the most in Blizzard's gameplay tweaking.

In comments, 'Scott' provides some useful color: "So, the biggest problem is that there’s no relative weight to the buffs/nerfs, so the nerf to Dire Bear armor in 2.0 is assigned the same weight as no longer being able to teleport to Moonglade while in tree form. Of course then you start having to assign subjective weight", adding: "The real interesting data points you’re missing are of course class population overlaid on these figures." Good points all!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aha - delighted to see that former Origin and Sony Online exec Raph Koster has revealed the major product from his new venture capital-funded firm Areae at the TechCrunch 40 conference in San Francisco - a new online worlds platform called Metaplace.

According to information posted on the official Metaplace website: "Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web."

The official FAQ continues: "You should be able to stage up a massively multiplayer world with basic chat and a map you can build on in less than five minutes. It's that easy. Inherit a stylesheet -- puzzle game, or shooter, or chat world -- and off you go... Metaplace will support everything from 2d overhead grids through first-person 3d. However, right now we only have clients that do 2d of various sorts, including grid view, 2d isometric, 2.5d heightfields, and so on. We expect to keep working on the 3d client support."

In addition, Koster himself has commented on the announcement on his official weblog, explaining of the technology: "We fully expect most users to be players, not makers. That’s just how it is. So for us, fun is absolutely key. I’m putting my money where my mouth is on that point, too. Yes, we have a new MMO we’re working on. And yes, we’re doing it in Metaplace."

This really does seem like intriguing tech - and a further continuation of concepts being worked out in Three Rings' Whirled, another diverse web-based engine for constructing games and social worlds. And thus, the ubiquitous web browser continues to conquer all, eh?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Aha - crossposted from Gamasutra but of interest to GSW folks too, here's the full information on the Independent Games Festival judge list for this year - and the Main Competition entry deadline is less than 2 weeks away at this point, so potential entrants had better get coding about, uh, now:

"Following last week's announcement of new Independent Games Festival judges, the full line-up of fresh and returning IGF judges has been announced, with late additions to the roster including Fl0w co-creator Kellee Santiago alongside Big Huge Games' Brian Reynolds and many more.

ThatGameCompany's Santiago, who was previously a Student Showcase winner with student project Cloud, and Neversoft co-founder Mick West, an industry veteran who writes the 'Inner Product' column for Game Developer magazine, are added alongside Games For Windows magazine's Darren Gladstone to round out the new judges for the 10th annual competition.

Other previously announced new judges for this year's IGF including Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, Bit-Blot's Alec Holowka, and Gastronaut's Don Wurster, and the full line-up of over 40 judges includes many returning for the fourth or fifth time to help judge the competition.

The journalistic and content-centric contingent for this year's judging panel include Wired's game editor Chris Baker, Joystiq's Chris Grant, Wonderlandblog and Channel 4's Alice Taylor, Kotaku's Brian Crecente, and Joystick Nation author JC Herz.

The independent game stalwarts hopping onto the judging panel this time include Raigan Burns, previous IGF prize-winner with N, Indygamer editor Tim W., and TIGSource editor Derek Yu, as well as new additions Santiago and Wurster. Other notable 'mainstream' game industry judges returning this year include Sony and Ubisoft veteran Mark Deloura, Foundation9's Chris Charla, Nihilistic's Mark Cooke, Midway's Richard Rouse III, and Big Huge Games founder Brian Reynolds.

As for the competition itself, the IGF ceremony will take place February 2008 at Game Developers Conference, with all finalists playable on the GDC show floor, and an Independent Games Summit again running alongside the main festival.

In addition, the 2008 IGF Main Competition will again be open to all independent developers to submit their games - whether it be on PC, console digital download, Web browser, or other more exotic formats. The prizes again total nearly $50,000, with a $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize, and the deadline to enter the Main Competition is Monday, October 1st 2007.

The 2008 IGF Student Competition will once again award the best student games, and this year will also include student 'mods' to existing games. As a result, the number of Student Showcase winners has been increased to 12. The deadline to enter the Student Competition is Monday, October 15th, 2007."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Roboto-chan!' is a fortnightly column by a mysterious individual who goes by the moniker of Kurokishi. The column covers videogames that feature robots and the pop-cultural folklore surrounding them. This edition covers yet another Gundam tie-in but one that excels with its controls in a similar manner to that of the latest Metroid.]

After the hellish release of Gundam Target in Sight, gamers (outside of Japan) still perceive Gundam tie-in games to be something wholly evil; a mechanical plague of functional mediocrity if you will. This ill-conceived point of view was covered in a previous column by my forbearer Ollie Barder, showing that there are a number of excellent Gundam games available.

Gundam MS Sensen 0079 was released for the Nintendo Wii and it has very quickly earned its place amongst the more accomplished Gundam games. Developed by Team White Dingo (who were also responsible for the Blue Destiny trilogy on the Saturn, Rise from the Ashes on the Dreamcast and Lost War Chronicles on the PlayStation 2) Sensen 0079 uses their signature first person approach to mobile suit control and like Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the use of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk is superlative.

More after the jump...

A claustrophobic cockpit...

Team White Dingo’s previous Gundam games were covered in passing in a previous column but the interesting thing about their approach to emulating the experience of controlling a mobile suit is that they focus solely on what it must be like for a pilot sat in a claustrophobic cockpit. Both the Blue Destiny trilogy and Rise from the Ashes were very faithful to the design work featured in the host anime.

You had large girders surrounding your screens and that made you feel as though you were encased inside a large machine, rather than just looking at a TV. They dropped this in Lost War Chronicles and just offered a straight-laced full screen first person view and this is the same approach Sensen 0079 takes. Most probably because the original implementation was too effective in making you feel helplessly trapped when combat kicked off.

Gaiden Gundam

Like their previous games, the main campaign mode has you work as a grunt on the frontlines in underpowered hardware. This is always a more interesting approach because it allows more leeway for the developers and consequently the player when they actually get to choose how they approach a mission.

One of the trickier aspects of recreating the events of the original shows is that you’re tied into the events that occur. Thankfully, the game separates this out into an Ace Pilot mode which allows you to play as famous characters from the One Year War era, encompassing shows like the first TV series, 0080, 08th MS Team as well as cameos from the Blue Destiny characters.

Comparisons to Corruption are only really valid in terms of how you control your mobile suit. You point at the screen with the Wii Remote and lock-on to targets which you can then orbit. Similar to the Free Aim option in Corruption, Sensen 0079 offers identical functionality that allows you to lead your fire depending on how your target moves.

That is where the comparison ends, however - Corruption is a game based around a persistent environment which you have to explore and solve puzzles within. Sensen 0079, on the other hand, is much more action orientated and is based around distinct missions in fixed environments that you have to wipe clean with an array of weapons, both ranged and melee.

Again, unlike Corruption, you also have a large selection of mobile suits to choose from all with disparate functionality, rather than a singular protagonist with a very standardised ability set. Not that I mean to criticise Metroid, but where Corruption is resolutely an adventure game, Sensen 0079 earns its S Rank in regards to the "shooter" in FPS.

FPS = First Person...Swords?!?

Considering the dearth of FPS titles in the Wii's library and those scant few that do hold a candle to that genre are more often than not similar to stapling your head to your shoulder and encasing your elbow in concrete. On the whole, as a gaming experience, they fall a fair bit short.

Sensen 0079, despite its basic mission framework, is incredibly competent when it comes to speeding through the jungle and sniping highly nimble enemies with very potent beam weaponry. The difference here though is that once you're within range, melee combat becomes available. Melee combat that's gesture controlled via the Wii Remote.

Weapons can be swiped horizontally and vertically, they can be used as a means of blocking enemy melee attacks if your unsheathe your weapon in time. Naturally, during a block you can also turn the tide by pushing back your opponent to the point you unleash several powerful swipes, which are normally able to kill most other mobile suits outright.

In regards to sniping, true to the original series mobile suits come equipped with a sniper scope. Unlike speeding through the air and relying on a keen eye and a steady hand in order to down enemies, the scope allows you to zoom in on targets from a great distance away but at the expense of remaining stationary. Accuracy is key though, because you are more than able to pick off limbs leaving your enemy aware of your location and able to close the distance (sans a limb or two). Ideally you want incapacitate an enemy by removing its primary ranged weapon, which it normally carries though there are some mobile suits that pack shoulder mounted artillery as standard. This is where squad tactics comes in.

Mobile Suit Minions

First person cockpit views maybe Team White Dingo's signature approach to Gundam games but their true calling is their ability to give you wingmen that obey your commands. So, whilst sniping would leaving you naked in other FPS, here you have two plucky comrades that can be deployed in various positions around you. This means even if an limbless and decidedly irritable enemy bears down on you, they'll have to deal with your buddies first.

Compared to Rise from the Ashes, this ability to command your troops is pretty limited. Instead of specifying routes and the distance at which they engage the enemy or even guard you, they literally only offer basic preset positional options.

In all fairness though, the pacing in Sensen 0079 is far quicker and setting up complex routes through enemy territory for your fearless wingmen would detract from the visceral excitement of multiple high speed enemies striking poses as they tear you a new one.

Encounters in Retail Space

This is a worthwhile point to make, Sensen 0079 is not an easy game. It's not an unfair game mind you but there are many instances where you will have a tough time just surviving (this is especially true on the Ace Pilot mode as well, though that's probably more to be expected). That being said their older games weren't exactly a walk over either and certain spin-off gaming progeny, such as Zeonic Front, were actually fascistically difficult.

The controls do make a huge difference though and actually help you to realise that when you die it was actually your fault for being a gung-ho moron than anything the game did wrong (something Target in Sight suffered from due to its framerate woes, in that you couldn't see certain shots fired until they hit and killed you).

At present there aren't any plans to release this game outside of Japan, which is a shame considering that Bandai go out of their way to publish the rubbish Gundam games in the West (why they do this is beyond me). With any luck a modicum of sense will prevail and we'll get to see this game a bit more locally and that would only be a good thing.

[Kurokishi is a humble servant of the Drake forces and his interests include crushing inferior opponents, combing his mane of long silvery hair and dicking around with cheap voice synthesisers. When he's not raining down tyrannical firepower upon unsuspecting peasants in his Galava aura fighter he likes to take long moonlight walks and read books about cheese.]

Posted by Kurokishi at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well, not so much as an expose as some brief doodlings from someone who doesn't particularly play the genre, perhaps, but I wanted to pick up on a particularly interesting entry in the recent NPD game charts for August in North America - specifically, Xbox 360 RPG Two Worlds, published by Southpeak, making it all the way to #13 in the all-formats countdown.

To say Two Worlds, which is a first-person/third-person title developed by Polish studio Reality Pump, is a surprise on the charts would be an understatement - with a minor publisher and relatively little overt buzz from at least my point of view, I'm not sure anyone would have guessed it'd show up in the Top 20.

But here's a great hint as to why, from the first line of the gameplay description on Wikipedia: "Two Worlds is a three-dimensional role-playing game which has often been compared to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion." And indeed, if you Google for 'Oblivion' and 'Two Worlds', you'll see a whole heap of previews, articles, and opinions comparing the two games. It appears that Oblivion has created a whole mess of latent demand for firstish-person, open-world RPGs that even the game's expansion packs couldn't satisfy - hence fans latching onto Two Worlds.

Indeed, here in the CMP Game Group, our sales admin Gregg Silberman mentioned to me that he pre-ordered the Collector's Edition of Two Worlds (again, remind you of anything?), before cancelling when he heard that the gameplay was a tad more hack and slash than Oblivion. And indeed, critics aren't spectacularly happy with Two Worlds on the Xbox 360, with an average of 52% on Metacritic.

But that doesn't necessarily matter if there are semi-insatiable Oblivion fans out there, quite happy to start long threads comparing their favorite Bethesda-authored game series to Two Worlds. Difficult to say the exact sales for Two Worlds as a result, but it's certainly broken 100,000 on Xbox 360 by now in the States (probably edging 150,000?), and it's already topped the charts in Germany, where the PC version is also well-received.

Mind you, one of the oddest things about the surprise U.S. success of the game is that I suspect Oblivion wasn't necessarily the primary influencer in the game's development - the open-ended Gothic series seems to be one of the most influential European PC RPG series in recent years, and other people have picked up on the Gothic 3 comparison. On that front, imagine how well Gothic 3 might have done in the U.S. if they'd sorted out an Xbox 360 version?

Sounds like Gothic 4 might be coming to the Xbox 360, depending on your definition of 'current-gen' - but maybe the Oblivion geeks will have had their fill of debatably buggy Continental European open-world games by then, hm. However, Two Worlds is slightly poisoning the drinking water for everyone right now, one fears. And not saying Gothic is the premiere open-world daddy here - that title itself might well have been influenced by Daggerfall and heck, you get the general idea.

[Incidentally, I was going to go check out sales numbers on VGChartz.com, but then discovered it's the first site I've ever seen to be tagged as having malware by Google - awesome! I went and checked anyhow, and they're estimating 256,606 sales in North America so far - which I think is a bit high, but gives you the general idea.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Over at Gamasutra today, one of our quirkier interview pieces - chatting to David Cornelson of Textfyre, a new startup that "intends to target a young audience with regular episodic [text adventure] titles featuring reoccurring characters, with the first game expected near the end of the year." That's right, someone is trying out commercial interactive fiction once more - an eyebrow-raising prospect.

Cornelson talks about a bunch of cool hypotheticals related to if he ever got hold of the Zork or Harry Potter licenses, but here's his main pitch for his company's distribution plan: "We’re going to use simple DVD cases with a full color cover, a 10 page full color comic book, instructions, and a full color labeled installation CD. We will also offer downloadable versions and possibly versions to play online. We’re also going to seriously look at adapting our games to the mobile PDA market, but that’s a long term strategy. There are other packages I like better, but they’re more expensive. We plan to do “feelies” when it’s obvious."

Interestingly, Cornelson sees his pitch as competing with Young Adults fiction on bookshelves: "Yes. If you look at the Young Readers section, you’ll see numerous series-based fiction. These books are enormously popular and some of them have dozens of books. I think the market that is attracted to these books is my target market."

Specific authors aren't mentioned in the piece, but Grand Text Auto spills the beans in a recent news story: "Michael Gentry (Anchorhead, Little Blue Men) was the first IF author to join up with Textfyre, as a writer... Ian Finley (Babel, Kaged) has joined to do world and game design... Jon Ingold (All Roads, Muldoon) will write a game for Textfyre." These are 'names' in the IF world, and it's going to be highly interesting to see how the outside world will react to their fiction.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Now, here's an interesting one. We do still get 'archaic' faxes from time to time at GameSetWatch and the CMP Game Group - sometimes the odd press release, sometimes indignant ones from Jack Thompson (more on this soon!), and recently, and most intriguingly, a 'junk fax' strenuously inciting us to buy Signature Devices' stock.

Now, why would you guys care about this? Well, Signature Devices, despite the generic tech company name, is almost entirely a game developer and publisher, sometimes under the Graffiti Entertainment name. Gamasutra has covered Graffiti in the past - the company "...is perhaps most recognized as the publisher of Neko Entertainment's multiplatform budget release Crazy Frog Racer and Sabarasa Entertainment's Mazes of Fate for the Game Boy Advance."

Here's the fax, which includes one of those delightfully fake handwritten notes on it - let's go from there:

A lot of similar text to the junk fax appears in this 'Wall Street News Alert's "stocks to watch"' listing from February, tipping the company alongside Microsoft and Netflix, and which claims: "The company has a long list of noteworthy PC and Xbox game credits including "SAMURAI SHODOWN V" for Xbox, "King of Fighters '94 Rebout" for Xbox, "Far Cry" and "Medal of Honor - Pacific Assault," and many others."

Those last two are, needless to say, not games wholly developed by Signature Devices - the junk fax itself says that the firm 'did the 3D engineering' for those two last titles, and the 'the' is stretching things too - as the company's Far Cry page reveals that it did DX7 fallback and optimizations and shader work. But the company is indeed listed on the credits - though it's only under 'Performance Consulting & Support', which is pretty far from 'did the 3D engineering for'. They are credited separately and non-specifically (under their own company title) for Medal Of Honor, mind you.

You will also note in the disclosure below the stock website's tips: "WSCF has been compensated Fourteen Thousand Dollars for coverage of Signature Devices, Inc. (PINKSHEETS: SDVI), by a third party (Alex Consulting Inc.), who is non-affiliated and may hold a significant position in the stock, for services provided including dissemination of company information in this release." Nice that they disclose it, but you can see what's going on here.

In any case, many of the company's press releases seem to be stoking the fire, with such non-events as the announcement of 'negotiations' with undisclosed parties and even better, under the headline 'Royalty Streams Fuel Growth for Potential Explosive Returns for Signature Devices, Inc' - yes, there may be royalties in the firm's much-starred future!

Interestingly, the firm also boasts that it won a lawsuit against SNK recently, with General Counsel Philip Kramer commenting gleefully: "In the end we received tens of thousands of dollars from SNK to settle the lawsuit. We could have taken this further, but were willing to settle early and have a clean slate with no more pending litigation." Nothing like a sore winner, huh? Presumably this is regarding the SNK-licensed Xbox titles.

Now, a couple of clarifications here - we're not saying that Signature Devices is necessarily a bad game publisher and developer or intrinsically terrible people. But it does rather seem like at least a few shadowy figures are trying to get people to buy Signature Devices stock based on slightly hyped-up claims - and the company is putting out enough press releases to drown a few kittens in order to support that. So let's see what happens next, huh?

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

The other day, I was bemoaning the relative lack of Western coverage for the Japanese AM2 arcade show (although my co-worker Brandon Sheffield did post some video links on Insert Credit). But now, catching up on RSS feeds, I find that Arcade Renaissance has a gigantic mess of reports from the 45th Amusement Show, well worth scrolling around and checking out.

One handy uber-guide is the Amusement Journal's most popular games from the show, which reveals: "Expectedly, Tekken 6 took the top spot on Day 1 and Day 2 of the event, but was surprisingly beat out on Day 3 by Deathsmiles. A lot of this can probably be attributed to the Day 3 lines that Tekken 6 was experiencing, which at one point was said to have reached about a 3-4 hour wait just to get some hands on time with the title."

A separate post points out shakycam vids of Tekken 6 in action, including bloated new character Bob, and there's also hands-on impressions of Sega Race TV, as well as a Deathsmile dance number at the Cave booth promoting the new arcade shooter, and a crazy amount of Japanese links on the show. Bravo, Sir.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, we started the GameSetVideo Treasures column, highlighting important historical game-related videos on the Internet Archive's Game Videos collection, which I set up and help out with, and this week we're going to highlight a new addition that's a good 'might have been' for Ultima fans.

Archive contributor Andrew Armstrong dug this one out (with permission from the good folks at FileShack), and it's the 'Ultima X: Odyssey Making Of Video' from 2003.

Of course, Wikipedia has plenty more on the game's genesis, which "...was the first Ultima game developed after series creator Richard Garriott left Origin, and is the second Ultima-based MMORPG to be cancelled (Ultima Worlds Online: Origin — Ultima Online 2 — was cancelled in 2001)".

For those intrigued, you can click on the picture below to get to download and streaming links on the Archive.org site:

The video's description explains that this is "...a "making of" video for Ultima X: Odyssey (by Origin Systems). The video was released September 26th 2003, and is notably important due to the game being cancelled - Origin was disbanded by EA in Feburary 2004, and this was the last game the company ever worked on... The video contains interviews with Daniel Campbell (QA Lead), Rick Hall (Senior Producer), Jonathan Hanna (Lead Designer), Jonathan Lecraft (Designer), Andy Dombroski (Lead World Builder), and Kevin Saffel (Client Programmer)... interspersed with footage and concept art."

Also worth mentioning, from the Wikipedia page: "Drawing from the single-player Ultima games, Ultima X: Odyssey was to use the established Virtues of Ultima in addition to skills, experience points and levels. Players would be able to practice in the eight Virtues (Compassion, Honesty, Honor, Humility, Justice, Sacrifice, Spirituality, and Valor) and eventually reach the maximum level with it."

[Of course, there are copies of this trailer in a good few places - not claiming that we are 'saving the only copy' or something. But it's good that we can get a version of this and many other rare videos onto Archive.org in a reasonably high-quality version - preserved with multiple file mirrors and redundancy by a non-profit.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Under the faithful editorial leadership of Chris Remo, veteran game site Shacknews has been positively resurgent of late, and I particularly liked the new feature 'EVE Online: The Bears and the Rat', written by Nick Breckon, and the second in a series of features analyzing the exquisite skullduggery at work in CCP's PC MMO.

It's allusive, positively Clancy-esque stuff: "In September of 2006, a historic meeting between officials of EVE Online's player-run corporations took place. Red Alliance, the notorious Russian organization, reached out to offer a partnership with the equally-infamous GoonSwarm. For the first time, the traditionally straightforward Russians were using the olive branch, actively seeking a major ally through diplomatic means--and Westerners at that."

Breckon continues: "Of course, it's not surprising that the American leadership of GoonSwarm rejected the initial offer. Separated by both practical and cultural divisions, the two organizations had never before spoken--and in a throwback to the Cold War, it would take some convincing before the Americans could trust an alliance known for being even more ruthless than they."

I do believe that EVE Online is the online world that has most accurately modeled real-life geopolitical machinations at this point - though feel free to disagree?

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

   

If anyone remembers the IBM PCjr today, it's as a major market failure and as one of the computer industry's greatest examples of hubris coming to bite a company in the arse. Originally announced in 1983 and launching in March 1984, the PCjr ("PC Junior") was IBM's first attempt to market a computer for the home -- a system that was kinda-sorta compatible with the more business-targeted IBM PC, with enhanced three-voice sound and 16-color 320x200-pixel graphics.

Heavily rumored for months before its official announcement, the PCjr was presumed by many industry wags to do the same for IBM in the home market what the original PC did for the business sector -- i.e., allow the companay to completely dominate it. It's easy to forget, but this really was the general opinion of much of the industry in early 1984 -- you could say that Apple's January '84 Macintosh Super Bowl ad was appreciated more by the general public than by people who drew their salary in computers at the time. The magazine biz was no different, as two different magazines debuted on US newsstands before the PCjr was even available for purchase: PCjr. from Ziff Davis, and jr from Wayne Green Publications, later CW Communications. (Only one Mac mag -- IDG's Macworld -- debuted with Apple's computer.)

For Ziff, launching PCjr. was an easy decision. Even by that point, PC was their most successful magazine ever -- purchased in 1982, ballooning up to 500 then 600 pages within half a year's time, and becoming the de facto outlet for advertising and commentary on IBM computers. IBM was now launching a home computer, and undoubtedly it'd be a huge success, so Ziff went in on the ground floor, debuting its mag in February 1984 with a surprisingly large 176-page book. Everything about PCjr.'s look exudes professionalism, from the in-depth writing (with largely the same adult and business-oriented outlook as the original PC) to the art-laden and remarkably colorful graphic design. It's a fun mag to read, in other words, and it's obvious from the start that Ziff put a ton of money into producing it.

jr, on the other hand, is kind of an odd duck. Launched in May 1984 just before Wayne Green sold his New Hampshire computer-mag empire off to IDG, jr is written from a serious beginner's perspective, more so than any other non-kiddy computer magazine I've seen from this era (yes, including Family Computing). Every term is exhaustively defined (from "RAM" to "word processor"), and the editorial team's target seems to be people who have never touched a computer in their life before, much less the PCjr machine itself. This leads to a lot of neat original art and photography showing off the PCjr's innards and how computers work in general, but it's not the most interesting thing to read through.

   

Both PCjr. and jr are decent enough mags in their own right, but at the risk of being blunt, they were charged with the task of taking a turd and polishing it all over again, month after month. There were a number of hardware issues on the machine, including a lack of easy expandability and a frustrating wireless keyboard that was impossible to touch-type on. Even the entry-level PCjr model (which lacked a disk drive and was largely useless for anything except running game/productivity cartridges) cost $669 sans monitor, less than an Apple II but far more than the Commodore 64 or an Atari computer, both companies in the midst of a debilitating price war that drove other 8-bit PCs out of the market.

IBM redesigned the PCjr in late 1984 with a new keyboard and better expansion abilities, but it was too late in the public's eye. There was never a mass audience for the PCjr, which means few companies were interested in making products exclusively for it, which means ad dollars plummeted for both PCjr. and jr over 1984. I can't confirm exactly when both mags ended, but the last jr I have is September '84 and the final PCjr. is dated November, and both are later than any date I can find on the Internet, so I'll say they're both final issues and leave it at that. Even as book sizes shriveled toward the end, though, both mags maintained a surprisingly high level of writing and illustration. It's a surprise, in fact, as most computer mags show a pretty marked quality decline once it's plain the subject platform has no marketplace.

The really interesting thing about all this is that funneling cash toward PCjr. instead of a Macintosh magazine in early '84 arguably cost Ziff dearly for the rest of the decade. IDG's Macworld had that computer all to itself for almost 14 months before Ziff finally launched MacUser in 1985 -- and even that was a UK license deal, not an original project. MacUser was successful enough, but always played second fiddle to Macworld's lead in the marketplace before getting closed down and merged with its rival in 1997. If Ziff launched a Mac mag first, the tables may've been turned...

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We believe we've mentioned this one before, but the MC Frontalot music video for 'It Is Pitch Dark' [YouTube version] has just been released, and boy, it's a potent mix of nerdcore, deep Infocom lore, and geeked-out retro props, thanks to the lyrical mastery of Frontalot and director Jason Scott.

The YouTube video description is a good start: "Front geeked around for an evening in a basement in Massachusetts. It got filmed in HD. Then Jason Scott made a whole video out of it. The song and the video are in service of Jason's upcoming documentary about text adventures, Get Lamp, but you get to enjoy it now. Peek the cameo by Steve Meretzky."

For those wanting to read the full lyrics, there's plenty of references to classic text adventures from the charmingly mellifluous Frontalot - his official site frontpage has a link to the MP3, too:

"You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
If this predicament seems particularly cruel,
consider whose fault it could be:
not a torch or a match in your inventory.

...none of whom are too concerned about Nord & Bert,
not one of whom ever aimed a fish around the room,
trying to get it in the ear canal because doom
beset the last planet they were on, or near
the verge of a set of poetics they wouldn’t hear."

Scott's 'ASCII' blog has links to high-res versions of the video, including resolutions as high as 1280x720 (!), and he links to a bunch of other posts he made about making the video, and mentions happily: "Would I do it again? I'd be setting up the first shot before you got halfway through the request." Certainly makes me grin - go check it.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Our new Features Editor Christian Nutt has settled comfortably into the wide-ranging Gama interview style, and showed as much with the new article 'Feeling The Elite Beat: Keiichi Yano On Crossing Over', posted over at Gamasutra yesterday .

In it, the Tokyo-based iNiS founder and Gitarooman, Ouendan, and Elite Beat Agents creator is quizzed about "...his work with Nintendo, the sudden rise of the rhythm game genre, and most vitally, how Japanese and American developers and technologies interact."

As we extracted in a news story, Yano has also confirmed that the company is working on an unspecified game for the Xbox 360 - which is very neat! Not quite sure what it is, mind you - as we mention, "...the company's nFactor 2 graphics engine, which is listed on iNiS' official website as being Xbox 360, PC and Wii compatible, is public knowledge" - but the slightly Pikmin-like screenshots using the engine (pictured above!) are from 2005 or so, so it's probably not that. Also, the parrot on the iNiS site needs to not squawk so much.

There are lots of other interesting questions I could reference, but randomly, here's a fun one - Yano cautioning on a possible glut of rhythm games and associated quality issues: "I'm very concerned about the quality of the music games that are coming out and will come out, because again, I do feel as though it's kind of a special genre that requires specific knowledge of music and what makes music fun. Hopefully, the games that come out that are in that genre can take advantage of all that and do all those things right, and make sure that it's a really fun experience so that the genre itself can stay strong and not have a lot of bad clutter in it." Amen to that.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since it's verging upon the weekend, time to debut some of the GameSetLinks we've gradually accumulated during the week, eh?

My preferred multitasking media to be consumed in the formation of this post is 'The Three Doctors' on Netflix On Demand, which is appropriately surreal for a Friday sojourn. Anyhow, here goes:

- You may have heard that the World Series Of Video Games is canceled, but why is that, which of the three or four pro gaming circuits is this, and how does it change professional gaming? The editorially independent GotFrag.com has a neat article summing up the effect of WSVG's axing on the community, explaining: "CGS managed to steal the limelight from WSVG in 2007 and overshadowed the events they ran all over the world... Major League Gaming, parent company of GotFrag.com, also continued to be the dominant player in the console space, with EVO being the premier fighting game event and Madden tournaments largely run by EA itself. This left little room for WSVG in a crowded space of growing competitors." More coverage on the GotFrag homepage.

- Textfiles.com's Jason Scott has posted an intriguing article with an important piece of Infocom/Activision-related history - a video interview with Steve Meretzky on "the never-finished "Planetfall II: The Search for Floyd" (or Planetfall III, as it was sometimes called)." It's from an old CD-ROM cover-disc, and Scott adds: "The disc also contained a (again, only workable through the DOS program) preview of this version of Planetfall, including initial graphics and screenshots." This also has been posted online by Mr. Scott, who deserves kudos for resurrecting neat game history.

- Blatantly borrowed from a post on Petri Purho's Kloonigames blog, there's some great indie prototyping links, as he notes: "Martin (of prototyprally and Argblargs fame) has been running this interesting series of articles called: “The games that didn’t make it”. In the series he introduces some of the games that he has created in the past that were never published. He openly shares the early prototypes of these games, so you can get a pretty decent idea why he decided not to finish those games." The more failed prototypes we can see, the more we learn.

- Apparently I had completely missed this announcement, but GarageGames' IndieGamesCon is happening again next month in [EDIT: Eugene!], Oregon, and they've posted IndieGamesCon sign-up details on the GarageGames blog. Sure, the conf tends to be a bit of a Torque lovefest/developer conf rather than being indie scene-wide, but that's rather valid in its own way - and GG CEO Josh Williams mentions: "We've been a bit tight-lipped about what we're working on here in the Garage, but at IGC we plan to blow the lid off of our activities and talk about the future direction of Torque and amazing new publishing opportunities for Indies." Probably including blancmange!

- Justin 'Taintmonger' Leeper is a freelance journo, game writer, and wrestling/stuntman type all at once (impressive!), and he's posted 'Short Live the Queen! Assassin's Creed Live-Action' on YouTube - something done (a little late?) for a Ubisoft competition. It's got some grinworthy stunt choreography and amusingly iffy camerawork, and Leeper bemoans some of the hilarious user criticisms on his LJ: "Some of the things people complain about... My facial hair; I didn't have the wrist-knife apparatus brandished by the game's star; The slow (i.e. REAL-TIME) speed of the fights; The fast speed of the credits; The Queen looks like my "mom"; The set looks like it's out of Ninja Gaiden; The fact that I have all my fingers (unlike the game's star)." Yeah, lose the fingers already!

- At GameDaily BIZ, Kyle Orland is looking at 'the most controversial bits of game writing from the last few years', in two parts - so this week is #10 to #6, for those who adore their countdowns. Anyhow, many of the items will be familiar to those who hang out on GAF a bit too much, and include the oft-repeated phrase "There's probably no game journalist out there more polarizing than Tim Rogers", and also the death of the GameLife video show ("The final bit of weirdness came when one of the hosts, Andrew Rosenblum, was arrested for making threats in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre. Now that the train wreck is over, the only question is what else to watch.")

Finishing some even more left-over, brain-expanding links on a line by line basis:

- 2D Boy posts the first World Of Goo trailer - mm, goo!
- NeoGAF points out a bunch of AM2 arcade show videos - long live arcade?
- Microsoft's Andre 'Ozymandias' Vrignaud has had his wings clipped by Microsoft for his Croal betting spree. Shame.
- [EDIT: Beijing]-based online gaming don Bill Bishop gapes at a spectacular investment success - an $8 million investment in a Chinese MMO firm being worth $250 million after 12 months!
- On10.net, a Microsoft-sponsored video blog, has a look at Microsoft Research's Donnybrook experiment, "an FPS with hundreds of other players".
- Poking at referrers, spotted that GameTunnel's Russell Carroll has started the Video Game Business & Marketing blog. Bookmark now!
- We just tipped them a wink, but Kotaku's Bashcraft has a great interview with Q-Games up. Go Junk!
- Finally, GamesRadar presents 'Pokemon Money Shots'. Oh dear. Oh dear (pictured). Oh dear.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Now, I'm sure GameSetWatch isn't the only person reading Warren Spector's blog of late, but hey, he's posting some interesting stuff, and we're obligated to link 'interesting stuff'. His latest blog entry is called '“Hobby Games: The 100 Best” or I Love Lists', and it's about that most favored of Digg bait - the top list!

Spector explains: "I was recently asked to participate in a [pen&paper game-centric] book project called “Hobby Games: The 100 Best” from Green Ronin Publishing and edited by an old colleague from my papergame days, James Lowder."

Apparently, he picked Tikal, which I'm not so familar with, not being a BoardGameGeek, but he then goes ahead and lists his genuine video game Top 10 of all-time (alongside his top boardgames and movies!), in alphabetical order, as follows:

1. Diablo
2. Guitar Hero
3. Half Life
4. Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past
5. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
6. Suikoden
7. Super Mario 64
8. Tetris
9. Ultima IV
10. Warcraft II
11. (Ico)
12. (Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess — okay, so I cheated and went for 12 on the videogame list. So sue me.)

There's also some fun disclaimers after it from the Spector: "I didn’t include any games I worked on. In some cases, I’ll acknowledge that there are games I think are better than some on the list (e.g., Ultima VI is, I think a way better/more fun game than Ultima IV, but U4 kind of changed my life, so U4 makes the cut and U6 doesn’t — plus, I worked on U6)." So there.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We're keeping on publishing videos from this year's Independent Games Summit, which took place at Game Developers Conference 2007 last March as part of the Independent Games Festival - because a lot of the content is rather intensely useful, we reckon.

The sixth 2007 Independent Games Summit lecture to go up is actually another of my personal favorites, because it's sharp, sensible, and brutally honest - it features Russell Carroll, who indie sceners probably know as the founder of GameTunnel.com, a seminal indie game site.

But Russ is also part of the casual/indie game biz himself, as marketing boss of Reflexive Entertainment, which both distributes casual games and makes its own - Wikipedia has a good list of Reflexive's own-developed titles, and their portal is also v.important for PC casual titles. Russell explains why marketing is absolutely not a dirty word - and has some great thoughts on the nature of indie games in his intro, too.

Here's a direct Google Video link for the lecture, plus a higher-res downloadable .MP4 version and an embedded version:

Here's the original session description: "Want your game to be the one everyone is talking about? Interested in increasing how many copies you've sold? Russell Carroll, who heads up marketing for Wik & The Fable Of Souls creator Reflexive, and also founded key indie game press site GameTunnel, discusses how to maximize your buzz and sales opportunities. Using and abusing the press and game portals, alternative marketing, viral marketing, press release tactics and an overview of brand design and development all will be discussed in a whirlwind thirty minute presentation that will forever change the way you market your games."

(Other IGS 2007 videos posted so far are Matt Wegner on physics, alongside the Gastronaut founders on 'Small Arms' for XBLA, the Telltale folks on Sam & Max/episodic gaming, Gamelab's Eric Zimmerman on 'The Casual Cash Cow', and Braid's Jon Blow on indie prototyping.)

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The irresistably enthusiastic James Mielke has apparently sauntered over to 1UP.com's bosses and insisted he do a gigantic, loving Panzer Dragoon series retrospective, and he's done a fine job of it, interviewing series creator Yukio Futatsugi and Panzer Dragoon Orta producer Takayuki Kawagoe in depth on the franchise.

Our very own Jeff Fleming did a neat mini-retrospective of the series a few months back, but this one is a little more lavish - as Mielke explains: "The reason for this unique cover story is to take a look back at this underappreciated, underbought, near-legendary series that climaxed with the release of 1998's Panzer Dragoon Saga, a game that is unlikely to ever see a port to any system, ever. Taking the DNA of Sega stablemate Space Harrier and welding it to an Empire Strikes Back-style plot, developer Team Andromeda created an epic, picturesque showdown between good and evil that would send lasting shockwaves through the fledgling 32-bit era."

The 1UP executive editor continues: "In this exposé, we go behind the scenes of the Panzer series and talk with Futatsugi (also the director of Phantom Dust) and Kawagoe about one of Sega's most beloved properties. Futatsugi, especially, has plenty of surprises to share about the development of the franchise, so dive right in and rediscover the world of Panzer Dragoon."

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of Panzer Dragoon Saga, with some fascinating comments about the issues of stress and Japanese game development 'collective responsibility' compared to discipline-based U.S. game development: "We don't have those clearly defined areas about what we do. The lines blur, so if someone is lacking in a certain area, someone working next to him feels obligated to pick up the slack, or feel obligated to do more, and is more stressed by the overall burden."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ah yes, worth cross-posting that the new issue of our rather educational magazine is out - and in fact, if you're a subscriber or were at Austin GDC, you will have probably picked up a copy already. Here goes:

"The September 2007 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra.com, and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats.

The cover feature for the September issue is 'Postmortem: Infinite Interactive’s Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords' by Steve Fawkner, and it's explained of the exclusive postmortem:

"Infinite Interactive took a leap into the console market with Puzzle Quest, after years of dedicated PC focus. The much more casual title tore up the charts, due to the incredibly long period of time the company took to polish it. CEO and lead designer Steve Fawkner takes us down the path that led these hardcore veterans to casual glory."

Another major feature for the new issue is 'Saboteur: The Will to Fight by Christopher M. Hunt and Thomas French, of which it's explained: "Pandemic’s upcoming title Saboteur uses dynamic color changes—from vibrant and full, to black and white film noir—to indicate the state of allied resistance in-game. It’s art as gameplay feature in this unique look at the design and technical challenges of an in-progress high profile title."

Finally, the September issue also looks at 'Saving the Day: Save Systems in Games', from Backbone designer David Sirlin, explained as follows: "Games are designed by designers, naturally, but they’re not designed for designers. Save systems that intentionally limit the pick up and drop enjoyment of a game unnecessarily mar the player’s experience. This case study of save systems sheds some light on what could be done better."

The issue is rounded out by the customary in-depth news, code, art, audio, and design columns from Game Developer's veteran correspondents, as well as product reviews, editorial columns, and much more.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of September 2007's magazine as a single issue."

(Also worth noting that if you buy the digital version, you now also get access to a PDF, as well as the browser-readable version - and we're gradually extending that throughout the back catalog for subscribers over the next few weeks, with more improvements to come - yay!)

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, you may have spotted that Q-Games' indie title PixelJunk Racers, which appears to be something along the lines of slot-car racing for the 21st century (woo!), debuts on the PlayStation Network today. But something you may not have spotted (and I just did, thanks to Brandon Boyer!) is that there are teaser images for their next two downloadable PlayStation 3 games in the series on the Pixeljunk.jp website.

The site acts a bit strangely, and sometimes doesn't show the teaser images when you click on them (maybe it's still loading?), so I thought it would be handy to extract and label them for you, dear GSW readers:

When I was at Tokyo Game Show last year, I also sat down with Cuthbert and his co-workers, discussing the small Kyoto-based indie developer's history and attitude (not to be confused with Mizuguchi's Q Entertainment, btw!) - Q-Games has previously shipped "...Starfox Command for Nintendo's DS handheld and Game Boy Advance title Digidrive, part of Nintendo's unique 'Bit Generations' retro-styled original game series", and Cuthbert was one of the creators of the original SNES Starfox in association with Nintendo while working at Argonaut Software in the UK.

Lastly, I wanted to mention that Dylan and the Q-Games folks have entered the self-funded PixelJunk Racers into the Independent Games Festival this year, making it the first-ever PSN game to enter. This also means that there will be some fierce PSN vs. XBLA vs. PC indie competition in this year's contest (not that target platform really matters, but hey, it makes everything a bit more exciting, right?) More on the full IGF entry list after the October 1st deadline...

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So, there's a new game blog in town from a slightly unconventional source - IEEE Spectrum, which is the magazine/website of the gigantic professional tech association, has started 'The Sandbox', a site in which "David Kushner, Rob Garfield, and Harry Teasley blog about the latest in gaming."

It's an interesting mix of writers, actually - I remember Teasley's name from the original Half-Life, and as he blogs in his intro: "The highlights [of the] games I've worked on are Civilization, Doom PSX, Half-Life, and most recently, Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. The lowlights would be... hmmm, probably Double Dragon V, and Dr Floyd's Desktop Toys." Good/youch. And Garfield is a joint academic/gamer with some neat perspectives.

But maybe the most interesting blogger on board is David Kushner, who wrote the excellent Masters Of Doom, as well as a recent Wired article on the cyberstalking of Linkin Park's Chester Bennington (!) that I thought was absolutely riveting - albeit not game-related. In any case, he's been extracting John Carmack interviews from his book, as well as commenting on 'The Dawn of eToys'. Overall, the blog is all just a _little_ pedestrian thus far, mind you, but bookmarkable nonetheless.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats-- those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]

It was the eighties, and our eight-bit protagonists didn't give us too much to chew on. Who they were, why they were, wasn't deeply explained, and didn't really need to be. The elaborate discussions of character and story we're fond of (or sick of) today would've been ludicrous, infeasible. And yet, somehow, there was room for one of the most arresting character revelations of all time, one that goes down in generally accepted history as one of gaming's most singular moments.

Samus Aran undressed, and a generation fell to its knees.

This 1UP article documents our twenty-year relationship with the silent hunter in far more detail than this column has space to address, but it doesn't answer the question of why. Metroid is a space action game with aliens and pirates, not a psychological essay in character development; the drama revolves around the alien threat, the treacherous terrain, the ubiquitous destruction countdowns - less on the story of the girl at its center. You get more personal information from a generic townsperson NPC in any RPG than silent Samus has offered us in two decades. And yet, perhaps to spite the relative lack of information, fans prize her more dearly than all of the other more gratuitously rendered, more vocal, more revealing (in every sense) game females we've been offered since - Samus is more beloved than most male heroes, too.

Miracle of miracles - could a woman in full-body armor and a helmet be sexier than all the rest? Could it be we don't need breast physics to fall in love?

Perhaps the idea of "falling in love" is a little too rich for the blood of some when we're talking about video game characters. But surely it's a very real idea to others; countless fansites still exist, after all, for characters from games that have been out for so long that those who were in middle school when they played them are working adults now. Zelda, Aeris, Lara. Ghaleon.

With love, of course, comes sexual fascination; you'll get an entirely different set of image results from Google if you turn off the default "safe search" when entering these names. Video game porn is as common as video games, from the sophisticated doujinshi drawn by Japanese professionals to the obscenely deformed, pencil-on-lined-paper atrocities drawn by artists who (hopefully) can't be older than young teens. That it's possible to find porn of anything and everything is one of the "rules of the internet," after all, and so erotic designs of Samus Aran certainly exist in plentitude. But there's a certain reverence reserved for the Chozo daughter, an uncommon hesitance to portray her with all manner of unimaginable objects in her orifices - more hesitance, at least, than that with which the girls of Soul Calibur are treated.

Could it be because the almost ever-present Varia suit leaves so much to the imagination that a single portrayal of Samus in flagrante is difficult to pin down? Maybe it's that, without some element of the suit (and it must be tough to draw) she's somewhat more difficult to recognize - after all, despite her imposing height, she looks pretty much like an unremarkably-featured woman -- thereby defeating the purpose of portraying her that way? Any explanation is possible, but the one I'd prefer is that it's respect, after all these years, for the solidly reliable, fearless hunter who couldn't resist rescuing a baby Metroid in one of the most significant glimpses we've gotten into her nature - maternal.

There are any number of reasons why porn of video game characters is such a boom on the internet. Simple brain chemistry dictates that if we see a human being - or even something we feel is one, like a game character - in front of our eyes often enough, our brains will start to recognize it as a friend, which means we personalize it and develop affection for it. Sexualization is a rational next step. Games also let us step outside ourselves; one of the many reasons they're appealing is that we can live in a do-anything universe (it's safe to disagree with most politicians and say those of us who enjoy GTA are not at all likely to commit auto theft and robbery anytime in our lives); therefore, undressing the characters is a logical extension that, not given the opportunity to do so within the game, we take into our own hands.

Once in a while I check the recent keywords that have led people to my blog, Sexy Videogameland, in my stat counter. Samus is a popular search- but her name is rarely paired with baser words; instead, her fans appear to be looking for those classic Samus glimpses, as if they were altars to her significance. People are crazy about Samus' relatively revealing Smash Bros. pictures - even the usually-jaded games media isn't immune, as Kotaku's Michael McWhertor admits to being so preoccupied with Miss Aran's hind end he missed the E3 revelation of Solid Snake in that game last year. Lately, though, the clear favorite search has been for Persona 3 hentai. The older, sexier upperclassman Mitsuru Kirijo isn't nearly as popular as the vaguely obnoxious, stubborn Yukari Takeba; in other words, it's safe to make the assertion that people are more interested in pornography of less likeable characters, rather than those they love.

And love Samus, we do in spades. In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the latest installment of Samus' adventures, we still don't hear her speak - decisively, that's for the best, since after so many years of creating her identity individually in our minds, nearly every Metroid fan would be let down somehow. In fact, the 1UP article quotes fans who suggest we've already seen too much as it is, like Victorian prudes protecting a noblewoman.

She's not gonna get naked - you can quit holding your breath. But Prime 3 is played from her first-person perspective; looking at her eyes reflected on the inside of the helmet's visor almost feels intimate. It's about as close as you can be to getting inside Samus Aran's Varia suit - after twenty years, that's good enough.

[Leigh Alexander is the editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Destructoid, Paste, Gamasutra and her blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Aha, time to update the GameSetNetwork with what's been happening on Gamasutra and all the CMP Game Group's other sites so far this week.

I particularly wanted to note a 'Question Of The Week' on Gamasutra that may be right up the alley of some GSW readers, but there's also Ian Bogost discussing Resistance: Fall Of Man's churchly duties, where tribes will migrate after World Of Warcraft, and some new IGF judges for this year, as follows:

- Question Of The Week: World Of Warcraft Vs. Habbo? (Gamasutra)
The "Question Of The Week" feature, an industry-related question to be answered by professional game developers reading this site, is following up last week's Austin GDC event by asking what high-end MMO World Of Warcraft can learn from Web-based social world Habbo, and vice versa.

- Persuasive Games: The Reverence Of Resistance (Gamasutra)
In his regular Gamasutra column, writer, game designer, and Colbert Report guest Ian Bogost examines the recent controversy over Resistance: Fall Of Man's use of Manchester Cathedral, suggesting Insomniac's PS3 game is actually "steeped in reverence for the cathedral and the church, rather than desecration."

- AGDC: Bateman Reveals The 'Temperament Theory' (Gamasutra)
At last week's Austin Game Developers Conference, veteran designer Chris Bateman spoke in the Writing Track on improving the player experience through gauging and designing for their personality, citing games from Metroid Prime through his own Discworld Noir.

- IGF Confirms New Judges For 10th Annual Competition (Gamasutra/IGF)
The organizers of the Independent Games Festival have announced the new judges for this year's 10th annual IGF competition, including high-profile indie creators such as Derek Yu (Aquaria) and Don Wurster (Small Arms), and notable journalists such as Newsweek's N'Gai Croal and MTV News' Stephen Totilo.

- The Academics Speak: Is There Life After World Of Warcraft? (Gamasutra)
Are MMO populations 'tribal', and if so, what's the next tribal shift after World of Warcraft? In this exclusive Gamasutra feature, academics including MIT's Henry Jenkins and Ludium's Edward Castronova discuss the fascinating future of online worlds.

- Ask the Experts: 'The Advantages and Disadvantages of Game School' (Game Career Guide)
In this new installment of the advice column on GameCareerGuide.com, Jill Duffy answers one reader's question about the benefits and drawbacks of going to a game development-specific institution.

- WIGI Report: Dona Bailey, BioWare, SOE Talk Diversity (Gamasutra)
Gamasutra attended the recent WIGI (Women In Games International) event in Austin, and presents a full report, with Centipede creator Dona Bailey keynoting with tips for women in the industry today, and figures from Sony Online, BioWare, and Midway discussing diversity.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Am still enjoying the Surreal Game Design blog, which is one of the first times a major developer/publisher (Surreal is a Midway division) has set up a group-contributed, game design-specific weblog. A recent post analyzes the game design of Rockstar's Bully, as part of a discussion across all Midway studio creative directors.

Their starting point is an interesting one: "We really, really wanted to like [Bully], but only played a few hours before giving up. Since it was blessed with many high reviews (the Gamerankings score settled at around 87%), we were left wondering… “What were we missing?” Senior types like Harvey Smith (of Blacksite: Area 51) and Simon Woodroffe of Midway Newcastle (Creative Director of Wheelman, and designer of Simon The Sorceror!) then weigh in on design topics related to the oddly controversial title.

As well as 'Board school culture' and 'Class attendence', here's another point on Bully's game design made by Surreal's Patrick Lipo that made him a tad skeptical of the game: "While it was generally done for laughs, the characters you deal with early on are all complete losers… You have to help the nerd to the bathroom so that he doesn’t wet himself, you date the ugliest girl in school… your only “friend” is a totally unappealing jerk. In the end, this was enough of a turnoff that I just stopped playing." What do you folks think?

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Just wanted to put this up quickly, since Microsoft put out the press release overnight announcing titles ahead of next week's Tokyo Game Show, and right at the bottom of the announcement, in the Xbox Live Arcade section, is official confirmation that Jon Blow's IGF winner Braid is coming to XBLA early next year. (There's also some other notable XBLA announcements in the release, as covered by Gamasutra, including Mizuguchi's Rez getting a re-release for the service.)

Here's the paragraph officially announcing it: ""Braid" (Number None Inc.). Arriving in early 2008 on Xbox LIVE Arcade, "Braid" is a platformer/puzzle game. The player journeys across seven worlds to rescue a princess; in each world, time behaves in its own peculiar way. The player must cleverly manipulate the flow of time to solve puzzles. "Braid" aims to provide a mind-expanding, filler-free experience."

Good news, I think - console would have been my preferred way to play the game, since it's a twisted Mario-ish 2D platformer at its root, so I'm glad it's finally going to debut in the next few months - it's been a while since it won the Innovation In Design Award at the 2006 IGF (for which, disclaimer, I am Chairman.)

For the two GSW readers who haven't seen it in action, there's a demo of the current PC version in Jon's Independent Games Summit lecture we recently posted in video form - skip to 15.10 in the video to see it. Hopefully it won't get overhyped before it debuts, but it's a genuinely interesting, neat game.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

[“Play Evolution” is a bi-weekly column by James Lantz that discusses the changes that games undergo after their release, from little developer patches to huge gameplay revelations, and everything in between. This week: the life and death of Team Fortress Classic.]

The evolution of Team Fortress Classic is one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. It was so sudden and so decisive that it, quite literally, divided the player community into two halves. As the community played quasi-intellectual tug-of-war, individuals began to take sides and the game itself began to change - every server began to branch off into its own set of rules and restrictions. Most of these are still explicit, but some became unwritten and, to this day, are laid carelessly about the fringes of the game, the final nail in Team Fortress Classic’s long-suffering coffin.

Team Fortress began as a Quake mod in 1996. Based on the Quake engine, it was an incredibly fast paced CTF game based around movement exploits: bunny hopping, rocket jumping – all that fun stuff. It developed a small but devoted following, but only a few people followed it to its next iteration in the form of a slow paced Half-Life mod called Team Fortress Classic, three years later.

Team Fortress Classic caught fire, both as a competitive and a casual game. The draw of CTF is universal, and the meticulous setup of offense and defense adds a fresh layer of strategy to what is otherwise a pretty plain variation on Team Deathmatch. As the competitive players began to explore the limits of the game they found it warm, fleshy, and pleasantly yielding. For awhile, everything was roses and unicorns and happy springtime elves.

At some point, the competitive players rediscovered a familiar exploit – bunny hopping – and the evolution of Team Fortress took a sudden leap. Now, bunny hopping refers to a lot of different things in a lot of different games. In many games, bunny hopping simply requires you to mash your spacebar key as quickly as humanly possible and watch as your character hops up and down erratically like a foaming idiot – but this is not the kind of bunny hopping Team Fortress classic has. In Team Fortress Classic, bunny hopping requires a complex series of deft mouse movements that takes a few days to learn, and many more to master. However, bunny hopping allows you to travel almost twice as quickly across the map, as long as you know where you’re going and don’t hit anything.

In a split second, the game changed completely. Bunny hopping gave skilled players an impossibly large edge over unskilled players. Players who memorized the map and knew how to bunny hop were unstoppable. However, the game remained balanced, albeit fast paced and hectic. At the competitive level, the game flourished and continued to evolve around bunny hopping, returning to its fast paced roots from a different and refreshing angle. However, at the casual level, the game suffered. Bunny hopping was difficult to learn, and bunny hopping players had such an advantage over other players that it began to drive new players away.

As fewer and fewer players joined the game, the community became divided. Some players argued that bunny hopping was a necessary evolution in the game, that it made it more interesting and that it was the only way the competitive game could evolve, all of which was true. Other players argued that it was too hard to learn, and that it was driving away new players, and that was true too. As the community divided, casual servers made up their own rules, disallowing bunny hopping and other forms of movement exploits. Meanwhile, the competitive league began to shrink due to the lack of new blood. Eventually, the casual community, having actively restricted the evolution of the game, grew stagnant, and Team Fortress Classic became a ghost town with a few dedicated followers. Its own evolution had destroyed it.

What went wrong? Occasionally the player community decides that a certain change imbalances the game ([EDIT: Akuma] in Street Fighter) and restricts it. However, it is usually the competitive community who dictates this change, not the casual community. When the casual players decided to restrict bunny hopping, the competitive players let it run free, and it became the very heart and soul of high level play. It was true - bunny hopping did not imbalance the game, and it was a key point in the evolution of the game’s strategy - but the player base couldn’t handle it.

When the casual community isolated themselves from bunny hopping, they isolated themselves from any high level play and, thusly, the evolution of the game as a whole. Each server was its own tiny world parked within the greater lot of Team Fortress Classic. To play on a different server meant learning the game all over again, and so, with a crippling lack of new strategy and a daunting multitude of restrictions, the casual community drew its dying breath. The competetive community continued on in small, nomadic groups - but the game is a ghost of its former self.

Although I’m usually against developer involvement and I prefer to see how a game evolves on its own, the learning curve of a game is pretty important. If a technique creates a chasm so large that the casual community just ignores the game at a competetive level, the evolution of the game is brought to a screeching halt. All the new strategies are meaningless to the casual community, and all the casual players are useless to the competetive community. The learning curve had to be fixed. In Team Fortress Classic, that gap between the skilled players and the new players, though necessary in all games, was just too daunting, and it ultimately scared away all the players that it needed to stay alive.

[James Lantz is a starving writer whose idea of proper viral marketing is to blurt out "Psychonauts!" every other sentence. He also writes a blog, of course.]

Posted by jamesl at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

As is often happening nowadays, I'm piling up GameSetLinks so efficiently that I need to spit them out in a couple of discrete lumps. This set deals with high-brow interviews, CIA arcade game abductions, and all kinds of other craziness:

- New blog The Brainy Gamer (stop boasting, there!) has posted a swift interview with gaming academic Mark J. P. Wolf, who has written a number of earlier books about the video game medium, and is soon debuting 'The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond'. Wolf talks about the state of game studies, and also offers some randomly fun 'playing now' game tips: "I would actually recommend some older games from the 1970s or 1980s, games like First Star's Spy vs Spy, or M.U.L.E."

- GSW has been semi-obsessed with Polybius for a good while now - it's a mythical early '80s arcade machine that was allegedly an experimental creation (including horrible side effects) of the 'men in black' - so thanks to TIGSource for pointing out that some crazy people have recreated the 'urban legend': "This game really did kind of screw up my vision after a few playthroughs, so I would strongly suggest playing in moderation." On that very front, Erin Mehlos did a great Polybius illustration (pictured above) for Gamasutra.com a while back - one we toyed with putting on a T-shirt.

- Both interesting and completely random is Virtual Pets Blog's history of Dream Pets and Dakin - game-related because Sega Toys licenses the new Dream Pets, physical/plush and virtual pets are increasingly tied (see Webkinz!), and the timeline and overall history is very readable: "Due to the prominent influence of Dream Pets on today’s virtual pets, we decided to trace their history and try to fill in the blanks. It reads like a movie script with several highs and lows, an earthquake, a tragic plane crash, bankruptcies, acquisitions, and a suicide. Through much of it, one man, Robert Solomon, played the leading role."

- GameTap's editorial section needs an RSS feed, still, but I managed to find a thought-provoking piece on 'Violence In Media' by Ready At Dawn's Ru Weerasuriya, in which "...the mind behind games both warm and fuzzy (Daxter) and violent and brutal (God of War: Chains of Olympus) has some strong opinions about censorship in the industry." Some snappy rhetoric: "Is there violence in games? Yes. But do games engender violence? No. Ignorance does."

- Jesper Juul is kind enough to point out the launch of a new gaming academic journal, Eludamos, and there's all kinds of craziness in there. For example: 'Electroplankton revisited: A Meta-Review' from Martin Pichlmair, which says amusing stuff like: "Electroplankton should be regarded as an art game by all standards, if only because it is a game designed by an artist." Lots more in there, for those who want to see what academics are talking about in games nowadays.

- Both Brandon (at Insert Credit) and John (at 3PointD) pointed this out, a conversation with Nintendo's Satoru Iwata set up by Shigesato Itoi, who, you may know is best known in the game world as the creator of Earthbound. It's handily translated into English, too, and it's all very arch and oblique, e.g. this, from Iwata: "It's about the relation between the creator and the customer. The king isn't the creator. He's the customer."

- Arcade Renaissance has handily spotted the first footage of Japanese arcade shooter Illvelo, commenting: "With the location test this weekend, the first video footage of Milestone's new game, a cel-shaded shooter have hit the web. After Karous and its dynamic blacks and whites, the artists at the company look as though they wanted to expand back into the bright colors and odd surroundings that were present in Radirgy." And lo, this looks pretty adorable.

- An (indirect) update to a previous GSW post has Dan Amrich of Official Xbox Magazine commenting to the reaction to his 2/10 Space Giraffe review on his Bunnyears.net blog, and I think he justifies his point of view in a fair manner: "I really do stand by my review. Space Giraffe is unique, which is to be applauded, but hostile to the player, which is not. It took a while to understand the game — really, even after taking the tutorial twice and fiddling with the game for a week, the game simply didn’t give me the feedback I needed to learn how to play it. And once I did get a bead on it, I didn’t like it for all the reasons stated in the magazine."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You may recall that Icelandic space MMO EVE Online appointed an official in-world economist, Dr. Eyjo Gudmundsson, a few months back - here's his first post on their official site, promising he'll monitor inflation and trading and "...publish economic information to the EVE-Online community."

Well, earlier last week, Dr. Eyjo duly published his first in-world analysis, and it's stacked with the kind of complex graphs and charts that would make a lot of MMO developers/geeks drool. One notable thing upfront is that current subscription numbers for EVE are revealed: "EVE Online's population has increased by 0.9% per week since launch, currently residing at 190.000 paid subscriptions and nearly 40.000 active trial accounts which are disregarded from these economic studies."

The conclusion mentions that there will be an economic newsletter, the first of a quarterly series, published before Fanfest 2007 in November, and also reveals surprisingly real world-esque trends: "Overall trade quantity and volume has increased dramatically over the last 3 years and the price of minerals has fallen considerably due to increased mining efficiency through better tactics and improved technology. The price formation has also improved showing that price difference between regions is becoming minimal in Empire space and reflects only the time value of moving minerals in low sec. However, smaller population and the risk of piracy in zero-zero space results in less efficient markets with low volumes and great fluctuations in prices given an arbitrage trade opportunity for the brave entrepreneur." [Via Clickable Culture.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now, I heard a nasty rumor that some of you GameSetWatch readers are actually in the game biz (!), so I thought I'd point out something we just posted on Gamasutra, which is actually about Game Developer magazine's call for submissions for its 10th annual game tools awards. If you use a game tool that you really enjoy, make sure you suggest it to us! Info is below:

"The editors of Game Developer magazine have announced that nominations for the historic 10th Annual Front Line Awards, continuing the magazine's tradition of honoring excellence and innovation in tools for game development, are now open.

Game Developer magazine accepts nominations from the game development community for its annual Front Line Awards during a fixed nomination period.

The Front Line Awards, highly regarded in the industry, are the only major awards to honor the year's best development hardware and software for programming, art, audio, hardware, books, game engines, and game components.

While a great many considerations go into determining a winner, innovation is the real name of the game. Products are nominated in all categories by the readers of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra, and will be judged by select game professionals from a list of all nominations put forward.

Nominations are open from September 10th, 2007, through October 9th, 2007, to all new products and new versions of products related to game development released between September 1, 2006, and August 31, 2007 (betas are not eligible). Front Line Award finalists will be announced in the December 2007 issue and winners will be announced in the January 2008 issue of Game Developer.

To go nominate a piece of hardware, book, or game engine - whether a satisfied user or a creator of that product - please visit the 10th Annual Front Line Awards website and fill in the supplied form."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[“Might Have Been” is a bi-weekly column by Todd Ciolek that explores the ways in which promising games, characters, and concepts failed. This week’s edition looks at Vic Tokai's Chester Field, released for the Famicom in 1987 and the Commodore 64 in 1989.]

Nintendo would never have another year quite like 1987. The NES had just broken through the anti-videogame bias that lingered in the American public after that Great Atari Crash of ’83, and the Sega Master System provided only token resistance in the console market. Nintendo would become an even bigger cultural icon in the years to come, but 1987 saw the NES truly realizing its potential, and a limited software library meant that any game more promising than, say, Chubby Cherub had a shot at becoming a cult favorite.

Chester Field never had that shot, but it came close. An action-RPG released for the Famicom that June, it was among Vic Tokai’s first console games, and it was set to lead the company’s first wave of NES titles in the U.S, even landing ad space in those Fun Club Newsletters that predated the marketing wonder of Nintendo Power. Yet Vic Tokai inexplicably backed off later that year, and their localized Chester Field vanished from release schedules just when it would have mattered most.

Fantasy Island

Chester Field’s title screen gives way to an introduction surprisingly elaborate for an early NES game: when the king of Guldred is murdered by General Guemon, a loyal knight named Gazem flees for the island of Chester Field with the deposed queen and her daughter Karen. Along the way, Guemon’s forces attack their ship, kill the queen, abduct Karen, and leave Gazem to die. The fatally wounded knight washes up on the shores of Chester Field and lives just long enough to sum up the plot for a young man named Kein. Our hero immediately sets out to rescue the princess, because there’s not much else to do on an island with only a few dozen people.

At least Chester Field’s scarce residents are all shopkeepers, village elders, and other fairly useful villagers. In each of the game’s eight levels, they offer numerous weapon upgrades and items, and the game progresses surprisingly fast; Kein can pick up a mace, the game’s other major weapon, on the first level. And though the story’s a routine save-the-princess yarn, there’s a twist or two, such as when the game’s second-to-last boss is apparently revealed to be that very princess.

Chester Field’s origins are also curious. The game’s story is introduced as “Episode II,” but there’s no record of a previous chapter in Vic Tokai’s catalog, and though its advertising sports the manga-style art common to most Japanese RPGs of its day, it doesn’t seem to be tied to any novel, comic, or other license. Perhaps it’s just trying to be like Star Wars. Or Xenogears.

Better than Kid Icarus, anyway

Beyond its basic plot and marginal curiosities, Chester Field is a side-scrolling action-RPG through and through. Kein’s moves start out no flashier than an upward stab, but the items he’ll gather let him fire projectiles from his sword, jump higher and use three different types of spell. And if Kein’s sometimes awkward to control, he’s also rather quick for an early NES hero.

Of course, the game’s over two decades old and looks it. The monster designs and scenery are dated by simple graphics, and the enemies often blend in with the backgrounds. This is first-generation NES stuff, and the visuals wouldn’t have impressed even back in 1987, aside from some animated character portraits.

Chester Field is, however, rather complex for a mid-‘80s RPG. Each of the eight stages includes both a straightforward overworld section and a labyrinth, along with several bosses and hidden items in each level. There’s even a relatively simple password system to keep track of power-ups.

Poor programming becomes gameplay

Not that Chester Field is easy. Or fair. Its enemies and level designs are unforgiving, and the game almost seems to delight in misleading you. Case in point: the first thing Kein sees on the opening level is a beached shipwreck, but any players who venture inside will find Kein ill-equipped to handle it. Instead, he’s meant to hack through other areas of the first stage, level up, and then head inside the ship. An even bigger challenge in Chester Field lies in finding all of the bosses and earning special items, one of which is essential to finishing the game.

Yet things are made easier in ways the designers never intended. Even decent first-generation NES games had disguised glitches, but they crop up so often in Chester Field that even pausing the game messes things up slightly. Un-pause it, and you’ll find that all power-ups and enemy projectiles have disappeared from the screen. If you crouch and hit pause, Kein will actually fall through the floor in the sections of some mazes, thus making them a lot easier.

'80s childhoods that never were

Yes, Chester Field is a buggy, bizarrely difficulty little game, but it’s strangely compelling in its primitive way. There’s a scrappy feel to the quest's progression, and a catchy beat in the soundtrack, even if it loses its majestic appeal after a few stages of repetition. This would’ve been a solid diversion, a good chaser just after you’d finished The Legend of Zelda and before better games came along.

Better games did, of course. By the end of the decade, Chester Field had been trounced in every way by similar action-RPGs, including Faxanadu, Battle of Olympus, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and SNK’s still-amazing Crystalis. Vic Tokai, after balking at releasing the NES game for unknown reasons, ported a translated version to the Commodore 64 in 1989. No one cared, and Vic Tokai went on to make other games and cancel a few of them, including Lost Mission and the enjoyable Secret Ties. Vic Tokai is a strange study.

And Chester Field is a sad one. Though its time may have passed twenty years ago, at least it had a time, unlike large clumps of the thousand-odd games in the NES library, and it’s unfortunate that Vic Tokai’s humble epic couldn’t charm impressionable kids to the point where their adult versions would defend it on message boards decades later. Chester Field may not deserve more than a short, retroactively nostalgic glance today, but it deserved a fighting chance all those years ago.

[Todd Ciolek is a magazine editor in New York City and will be disappointed if no one protests his remark about Kid Icarus.]

Posted by Todd Ciolek at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at unofficial but rather fun GameTap blog Angled Whiteboards, their latest game announcement post reveals: "Today we launch our first titles under the GameTap Indies banner: Blast Miner and Morning’s Wrath."

GameTap Indies was originally announced back in February, and was part of the PC gaming service's sponsorship of the Independent Games Festival [DISCLAIMER: for which I am Chairman]. And actually, Blast Miner was one of the special IGF prizewinners that got a $5,000 advance against appearing on the service, which is cool. And GameTap has a GameTap Indies submission form now, too, for those who want to put their titles forward.

When discussing these new titles, Angled Whiteboards' xamount comments: "I’ve dipped into the fantastic Blast Miner a bit — it’s got a deceptively steeper learning curve than the “falling Tetris-shaped blocks” appearance would lead you to believe. The floaty, wacky physics are definitely a change of pace. And is the first time that a puzzler like this has allowed you to float dropped blocks back UP to reposition them?" Looking forward to seeing more indie titles appearing on the service v.soon.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Preserving video game-related material for posterity is something that the folks at the San Francisco-based Internet Archive are committed to, alongside digital preservation of all kinds of other material, and it's something I've been helping them with for a few years now.

In particular, there are some good, active video-related collections as part of the Game Videos collection at the Archive right now - particularly the Speed Runs collection, which is run by the Speed Demos Archive, and the Machinima collection, run by Stanford University. The other collections have been semi-dormant for a while - but thanks to some help from new IGDA Preservation SIG volunteer Andrew Armstrong, there's some new goodness being uploaded.

I'm going to try to highlight various interesting, rare, or videos hosted on the Archive every week or so, starting with Dreamworks' EPK for 'The Neverhood' (click through to download) - and as noted: "Electronic Press Kit includes making of, Steven Spielberg [and Doug TenNapel] interviews, much fascinating/unseen behind the scenes material" for the cult 1996 Claymation adventure game. It's also important because, since it comes from before the Internet video streaming boom, a lot of EPK-style video from this period isn't available on anything apart from videotape.

This video actually originally came from Stewart Cheifet's collection - he's an Archive staffer who presented Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe for many years. Click below to go to the Archive page where you can stream or download the movie (I tried embedding, but Movable Type didn't like it, for some reason - better safe than sorry!)

Incidentally, why should we care about the Internet Archive keeping copies of these videos, when YouTube or Google Video or any number of other sites have videos available too? A couple of reasons - firstly, there are high-quality downloadable version of the media available, not just sometimes grainy streaming versions - but then, some sites such as GameTrailers do that too. But secondly, the Archive is a non-profit, and it's not going to ditch any of its old content or do commercially motivated things to it - it's just going to keep it and preserve it.

[A couple of other neat Internet Archive projects in other media I want to highlight - current projects with the Prelinger Library include adding to the Prelinger Archive ephemeral movie collection by digitizing some neat ephemeral books/magazines, adding to a gigantic book digitization project. I also like the new Center For Home Movies collection - more interesting stuff that would otherwise get lost. In addition, coming up, NASA has agreed a deal with the Internet Archive "...to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video" for free access. Awesome.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Crazed UK-based game webazine Way Of The Rodent recently added their latest ramshackle Issue - #86, called 'Caribbean Queen', and I particularly wanted to highlight their tribute to UK software 'legends' Ocean Software - who were eventually subsumed into the Infogrames monolith, but rocked things for about 15 years from their Manchester, England HQ.

Of course, it's filled with informal language and odd slang, but I quite enjoy this intro, for starters: "In my This Gaming Life two months ago, I made a claim that was in retrospect difficult to substantiate. I dared to suggest that Mankind's greatest accomplishment, his longest lasting legacy, was to have successfully converted Taito's coin op Chase HQ to the ZX Spectrum." A detailed analysis of the reasons that Ocean (sometimes maligned at the time) actually rocked ensues.

Ocean were probably best known to Europeans, of course, but their Wikipedia page explains things further: "Ocean were famous for often buying the rights to make video games from different movie and television franchises. Many license games combined several styles for example featuring platform action and car driving." Mm, Batman: The Movie for Amiga was a particular favorite of mine.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

No time to lose, let's get right to the highlight of the newsstand over the past two weeks:

PCXL Fall 2007

Cover: The Frag Dolls

As Simon mentioned earlier this week, PCXL is a one-off from Future that, while not a clone of the old PC Accelerator (1998-2000), at least tries to recreate the spirit of the old magazine. The book is roughly divided into six sections:

- Gear, pages of gadgets and other gamer-type merchandise, the great majority of which is from ThinkGeek.com
- Trends, the "feature well" of sorts that includes bits on game-related cons, how to run a LAN party, gaming tattoos, and other stuff that'd be at home in the front end of EGM or GFW
- Game Faces, the interview section that's mostly dominated by the Frag Dolls (Ubisoft's team of competitive-gaming hotties) but also includes a bit on the CGS gaming league and a humorous look back at PC Gamer's Nov. 2000 "Game Gods" issue, the one that identified Stevie Case as a shining light of the PC scene's future
- Games & Tech, the previews and hardware section
- The Internets, a few quick one-off bits on net trends and wacky online stuff
- Popular Culture, bits on comics, movies and action figures

Add in a few columns from ex-PCXL staff about the old magazine and the current state of gaming, and you've got your brand-new, 100-page PCXL. It's all well designed, and the text ain't bad, which makes this a very neat (and very unique) one-off. Would I want to see a regular publication like this? I don't think so, and I doubt Future does, either. It's been proven several times by this point that throwing girls into a game magazine in an attempt to snag a broader audience actually serves to narrow it instead. Kicking off the magazine with unadorned, catalog-like pages of gadget photos is also really uninteresting.

Perhaps looming the largest, though, is the fact that the mag PCXL looks closest to in terms of design and general tone is Stuff, the US edition of which is closing with its October '07 issue. If Dennis couldn't keep Stuff going, then I doubt Future could do it with PCXL in this newsstand environment, either.

Electronic Gaming Monthly October 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: Silent Hill 5

Pretty strong (easily GI-caliber) preview issue this month, with Silent Hill 5 leading and EA's NFL Tour and Ubisoft's Lost following close behind. They're all seriously good articles, and it more than makes up for the usual very old E3 coverage toward the middle. EGM also has arguably the biggest coverage of The King of Kong, the Donkey Kong high-score documentary, and the article inside serves as a neat follow-up to the film as it explains why Billy Mitchell got a bum rap (though I've met him in real life and his "game face" is pretty damn intense, I have to admit).

Game Informer September 2007

Cover: Borderlands

I really don't like this cover. The coverline is "5-second Hollywood pitch" PR-speak and doesn't tell me anything interesting about the game; why it's exciting and why I should want to read all about it right now. The choice of art features the same sort of pseudo-futuristic army dudes that seem to populate every developer's pet project over the past year or so, and it's also all blurred for a speed effect that doesn't really work. (There are a couple of art pieces in the article itself that could've worked better, including one with an Autoduel-style car and some wyverns that'd match the "Diablo meets Mad Max" line perfectly.) If you're reviewing Bioshock or have exclusive hands-on coverage of Killzone 2, why not make one of those the main subject instead? Both admittedly have the same "buff rugged armored dude" look as Borderlands, kinda, but at least Killzone 2 has those easily-recognizable enemies.

Despite all this, the internal article is really neat, thanks to a ton of colorful screens/renders/character art and the always entertaining Randy Pitchford and his gang at Gearbox commenting. The same goes for Killzone 2, which GI wisely portrays in a "payback for all the crap they got over the E3 '05 showing" manner and rounds out with a bunch of lovely screens.

GI's E3 coverage is also the most solid of the mags I've seen, concentrating extensively on hardware and presentations in lieu of software, although there's plenty of pages on that too. At this point, I'd say GI's position as the most industry-oriented consumer games mag in the US is pretty well solidified -- and for good reason.

GamePro October 2007

Cover: Grand Theft Auto IV

I got a letter the other day stating that GamePro is withdrawing its EX subscription program, which bundled newsstand extras and special bonus items with each subscriber issue. In place of it they're extending subscriptions. Why're they doing this? Because the newsstand GamePro is losing all the posters and stuff, too: "We've decided to focus on that's IN the magazine, and that will continue to be the BEST reviews of the HOTTEST new games," and so on and so forth. I didn't think that anyone really liked collecting all that extra stuff, anyway.

A pretty solid issue, although nothing stands out too much in the eye of the hardened gamer. I really enjoy how their art design has solidified over the past few months. I think the GTA IV article has some new screens, but I don't keep up with GTA media the way many folks do so I could be wrong.

Edge October 2007

Cover: Super Mario Galaxy

My subscription to Edge has finally commenced (though I got two copies for some reason, will need to bring that up with the distributor on Monday), so I'm skipping September and going right to the very latest issue, one which heavy on the industry stuff even by Edge standards. Up front is a pretty big interview with John Carmack discussing his company's strategy for the current multi-platform marketplace, followed by the Guild Wars guy defending Guild Wars and coverage of BlizzCon and two different UK developer expos.

One of the many subtle differences between Edge and other magazines is that they don't mind slagging off a game in the previews, or "Hype," section. Here's a few excerpts from their full-page Spider-Man: Friend or Foe preview: "[A lack of variety] is the most fundamental problem with Friend or Doe, and it ruins the experience. Scores of indistinguishable opponents may have been inevitable many moons ago, but they're not now... The levels shown aren't pieces of inspired design... It could be claimed that Spider-Man: FOF is being designed for children and should be treated as such. And yet that presumes that children are undiscerning, and that any content produced for them can be simply cranked out, but cross-generational appeal is a balancing act the comics have managed for 40 years, so there's no excuse there." Of course, a game has to be really terrible to get this treatment -- other titles, like Fable 2 and Tecmo's Project Rygar, are handled a little more amicably.

You'll probably also note the extensive dev-oriented coverage, once more. This is really hammered home if you subscribe to Edge -- subscribers get a mass of extra game-school and "how to get into games" literature with every issue, which I'm sure must help out the mag's bottom line a great deal.

Games for Windows: The Official Magazine September 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

This is the fifth WOW cover in four years for CGW/GFW, as Jeff Green admits in his letter, but at least it's a pretty feature, and it's accompanied by a few neat side articles on online gaming -- one on stories (with endings) in MMOs, and another on "editorial video games" made by Persuasive Games. Otherwise, the usual gang of previews and reviews, but at least GFW doesn't preview anything and everything.

Xbox 360 Cheat Guide Volume 6

Yep, it's another Future cheat special. Nothing much to say about it, other than it suggests readers consult GamesRadar.com for full walkthroughs of certain games (like Lost Planet), and if I wanted to do that, then why would I be buying a mag like the first place, is what I'm wondering.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Sometimes unfairly ignored (partly because it lacks a public RSS feed!), Alex Kierkegaard's Insomnia.ac blends reviews of new Japanese arcade machines with direct, sometimes caustic editorials on a variety of gaming subjects, and Alex pinged me to point out his relatively recent editorial on 'Arcade Culture', which starts out with a Baudrillard quote and spirals rapidly off from there.

Now, remember, Alex lives in Japan, where the arcade scene is still putting out a fair amount of new titles, and his opening gambit is provocative, to say the least: "The starting point of this essay then -- and make of it what you will -- is the observation that games released in the arcades are of a much higher quality, on average, than games released for the home console market."

He continues: "In other words, if you decided to walk into an arcade today blindfolded, and spend the evening playing the first game you bumped into (having taken off the blindfold first, yeah), chances are you'd have a lot more fun than if you spent the same amount of time playing something picked at random off the shelves of your local game retailer."

Even if he does needlessly trash the rest of the game biz, Kierkegaard's slightly crazed views seem almost Utopian: "So this is how the arcades work: a highly competitive and transparent environment, experienced players, no magazines, no clueless reviewers, practically non-existent marketing budgets -- and what do you get? Good games and players who are capable of appreciating them."

Well, here's the problem, in my view - a lot of new arcade games, particularly Japanese fighting games and shooters, are tuned for the ultra-hardcore gamer. The game developers and distributors are interested in extracting tens of dollars each from a few punters, not a couple of bucks each from lots of punters. This means that the arcade scene is, and will remain, gloriously insular. So it's a niche of a niche - albeit one that produces some genuinely interesting and complex gameplay. But that doesn't make it any better than casual DS games or XBLA titles or, say, Halo 3 - just different.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A pleasant weekend watching DVDs of Torchwood and QI from my home La-Z-Boy planet can also be punctuated by writing up some of the interesting, bizarre, and obscuro game links that I've taken note of for GameSetWatch this week - and here's the inevitable result:

- You guys probably know Tosho Iwai from his video game work on Sim Tunes and Electroplankton, and now Music Thing has lots of videos/impressions from the UK launch of Yamaha's Iwai-designed Tenori-On instrument, a spectacular touch-based standalone music machine (early version pictured) which is a tad expensive (UKP600!), but definitely drooled over - lots of awesome videos within.

- Australian game biz blog Sumea has posted video from the recent Australian festival Free Play, which included a keynote from Braid creator Jon Blow and some interesting other lectures including 'The Indie MBA', "...a comprehensive and practical overview of the business of running an indie shop", and reminiscent (in a good way!) of a similarly named session we ran at IGS this year.

- John Andersen continues to sling me random good Asian links, and he points to a Korea Times article about NCSoft's Zero-G flight at Austin this week, which includes some hilarious Richard Garriott gossip - claiming NCSoft will pay to fly Garriott into space, quoting a 'source' as saying: "Garriott is rumored to be on board for a 2008 shot to the space station. It is to be announced in early October along with his new game, `Tabula Rasa.' He can then play his new game from outer space." While I guess Garriott could go eventually, a $30 million promotion for the game? Guessing not.

- Rock Paper Shotgun continues to be, in a deliriously rambling way, the best new blog out there, and John Walker has an interesting post about free-to-play, pay for items PC title Drift City, explaining that "...is a game from the madly named ijji (which is an awful lot of fun to say out loud, and also free). It’s a driving MMO-alike, very much like Test Drive Unlimited, except with cel-shaded graphics, and it runs via your browser." They also have an interesting post on a Birmingham, UK LAN center that looks, well, swish.

- Textfiles.com's Jason Scott, whom, rumor has it, may be writing for GSW soon, has posted with the news that The Last Starfighter Musical is returning to play in New York City from September 28th through to October 7th. He explains: "I've already written, to great length, in my previous weblog entry about how the musical was for me personally and how the scenes flowed in a musical format; trust me, it's everything you could imagine it'd be like."

- Mopping up old links, I ran into Game-Science co-founder Jonnyram's link to the Assembly 07 demo competition winners on YouTube - and it's a lot easier to see the awesome real-time rendering effects this way - even if it misses the real-time point. (Here's the second-place winner, for completeness' sake.) A lot of European game developers' technical prowess is down to historical events like this, so it's great to see that the scene didn't die after game fidelity got just as good as demo-scene technical fidelity.

- Clickable Culture has correctly raised questions about this already, but LivePlanet's 'Virtual Worlds Prods' is not only a bit misguided, it's absolutely lunatic - check out this story, ' Couple Found Dead in Hellfire Peninsula', from Azeroth World News. It's all done 'straight' as in-world reporting with dubious, borderline news value - for example: "The bodies of a man and a woman were found early yesterday morning just off the path from Honor Hold to Hellfire Citadel, deaths that investigators have labeled as suspicious." Is this trying to be Onion-y, or...? Head hurts!

- Gotta love Tim Schafer's chutzpah: after news of his next game allegedly leaked, he decided to announce Double Fine's triumphant follow-on to Psychonauts, explaining: "In this all new, action based IP, you play the part of a barbaric hero in an epic fantasy world, fighting his way from Rock and Roll Hell to Rock and Roll Heaven." And the resulting free, uhh, web game is, uhh, Epic Saga - Extreme Fighter. Has this put people off the scent of DF's next real game? Not really, but it's a lot of fun.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Pixel-Love blog was kind enough to point out a new blog post from UK game biz veteran Dan Marchant, who has "been writing a series of posts about stupid reasons to go into game development", and recently posted 'Stupid reason #4 - “Most of the games today are rubbish - I’m sure I can do better”'.

Now, sure, you could say the post is a tad depressing, but it illuminates an excellent point: "The logic behind [this motivation to enter the game biz] seems to be that a huge percentage of games that reach the market are badly made, unoriginal, poorly tuned rubbish and so there is a space in the market for a start-up dedicated to making good games. The assumption seems to be that there are a huge number of developers out there who simply don’t care if their game is good and thus it will be easy for a new team to come in and do well."

Of course, as Dan points out, there a multitude of reasons why the end product doesn't necessarily match the vision - from 'Business dictates deadlines' to 'Design is overly ambitious and there is no editing' through 'Lack of ability in critical areas of the dev team' to the perennial 'Lack of publisher support for the developer's vision'. Some of these may be fixed by the 'coming indie storm' of digital distribution - if such one indeed exists - but a number of others won't.

As Dan concludes - and having worked in the mainstream game biz, I broadly agree: "So, if you are an individual looking to break into the games industry in order to “make a difference” you will find that few, if any, of the causes of poor quality games are solvable by just one person." But of course, if you know the right people...

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Still enjoying the editorials from the folks at HDRLying.com, and their latest is entitled 'Quirky Games: Making Boring Tasks into Great Games'. It's a little on the meandering side, but worth highlighting because it takes a thoughtful look into what makes casual hits such as Nintendogs into, well, casual hits.

As HDRLying blogger Nayan notes: "Accessibility goes a long way to making a game successful. In the case of Nintendogs, the game provided a chance for players to raise, walk, and even enter dogs into shows, without the undesirable time investment. I myself felt quite silly playing Nintendogs in my own house in the US, while my two, very real Golden Retrievers went hungry and unloved. My feeling towards the game changed when I moved to Japan, and began to understand its pull far more."

He continues: "Not only does the game offer a lot of reward with very little time investment, but it gives players the chance to play with their puppies anywhere they are. The game’s success makes an incredible amount of sense in the context of Japanese society. Despite space concerns and the impracticality of owning a mid-sized dog, Japan is dog-obsessed."

HDRLying's conclusion suggests that it's really the wish fulfillment element and ease of success of a lot of games which helps them break through to the mainstream: "Perhaps that is the secret in casual gaming success. Its success lies in the same vein as more traditional games. Despite a far more down-to-earth or traditional grounding, casual games, much like their hardcore counterparts, offer success and achievement without gross investment and fatigue. Without the years of investment in attaining the knowledge, and without all of the negative portions of the experience, players are able to enjoy all the positives of a given activity, with a constant and almost immediate reward." This may or may not be obvious, but is well phrased here, I think.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, we already did one of these on GSW, but my co-workers have been laboring so hard to cover Austin GDC this week (and my other co-workers laboring to run the show!), that I thought it fair to pick the highlights of their comprehensive coverage of the rest of Thursday and Friday.

Some of the key lectures include some great stuff from Nexon on MapleStory and KartRider, as well as BioWare on writing for Mass Effect, a particularly neat Final Fantasy/MMO-related talk by some Square Enix execs, and a host of other goodness - specifics are as follows:

- AGDC: Nexon's Min Kim On The Power Of Microtransactions
In Friday's keynote at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Nexon America’s director of game operations Minho Kim discussed his firm's incredible Korean success with games such as Maple Story and Kart Rider, and explained how the company's microtransaction model adapted to the West.

- AGDC: Jacobs, Bethke Tussle For Online's Future
In an amusingly heated 2007 AGDC match-up, online game execs Raph Koster of Areae, Eric Bethke of GoPets, EA Mythic's Marc Jacobs and SOE Austin head John Blakely convened for a frenzied debate on the biggest online gaming opportunities on the horizon -- and whether Blizzard should sell gold.

- AGDC: Koster, James, Ybarra Reveal Startup Lessons
What do Three Rings' Daniel James, Cheyenne Mountain's (Stargate MMO) Joe Ybarra, Areae's Raph Koster, Heatwave's Anthony Castoro, and Conduit Labs' Nabeel Hyatt all have in common? They're all acquainted with the trials and tribulations of forging out on their own in the wild world of startups. More interesting, perhaps, are the differences in their experiences, as you can read from their stories, advice and suggestions in Gamasutra's full coverage of the panel.

- AGDC: BioWare Charts Writing for Mass Effect
A conclave of Neverwinter Nights vets -- Bioware's Mike Laidlaw and Mass Effect lead writer Drew Kapyshyn, along with managing director Mac Walters, share the secrets of their approach to story crafting -- and hint at next-gen products to come.

- AGDC: Flagship, Nexon Talk Worldwide MMO Licensing
Multiverse's Corey Bridges moderated a panel that brought together Nexon's Calvin Yoo, Jeff Anderson, CEO of Turbine Entertainment (which is currently starting to license out MMOs) Flagship Studios' Steve Goldstein and Joshua Hong, CEO and founder of K2 Network, which is licensing Korean titles to the West. The topic? The challenges and benefits involved in licensing MMOs worldwide, from localization to currency models -- and why Hong thinks Chinese publishers have been bad for the entire industry.

- AGDC: Marketing Your Indie Game, Guerilla Style
"The worst games are done strictly for the money," said Strategery's Jay Moore, formerly a founding father of Garage Games. Along with Mode 7's Paul Taylor, the two talked about getting guerilla with indie marketing, demystifying the topic and boiling it down to knowing the soul of your game and your company, and ways to communicate what sets you apart.

- AGDC: Engaging and Empowering Community Influencers
Out of an entire community of players, this roundtable of community managers - Flying Lab's Troy Hewitt, SOE Austin's EM Stock and SOE Global's Alan Crosby, Blizzard's Paul Della Bitta, CCP's Charles Dane, and Guild Cafe community director Sanya Weathers - know how to identify and employ those star-powered individual users with the power to turn the tide of the entire community in your favor, as well as what to do when those 'community influencers' turn on you.

- AGDC: How Square Enix Hunts The Hunters
The fact that Final Fantasy XI was originally supposed to be an Xbox 1 game is just one of the revelations from producer and Square Enix executive officer Hiromichi Tanaka on building the game, the necessity of excluding microtransactions -- and what was learned, and what's next for the ever-expanding MMO.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Scottish game development scene, home of companies such as Crackdown creator Real Time Worlds, is in relatively bonnie health, and Brian Baglow, who runs ScottishGames.biz, kindly pinged GSW to note: "I'm the Screening Director for the Edinburgh Interactive Festival. For last month's bash I was asked to do something for the industry here in Scotland... I suggested something I've been wanting to do for ages - an actual film about the industry."

He then explains: "Now this could really have sucked - big time - but thankfully we've got a secret weapon over here in the shape of the Consolevania team. They agreed to do something and the Scottish Games Industry Fluff Piece [Google Video streaming link] was born. It was shot over three days (one each in Glasgow, Edinburgh and [EDIT: Dundee?]) the week before the festival and then edited and mastered in about four days max."

As Brian mentions: It evolved from a sort of promo piece, into a full blown errm, documentary type thing. It's something unique in the games industry I think - and it's well worth a look." Actually, it is - and needless to say, as Consolevania have got hold of it, it's very far from a 'fluff piece' - in fact, it's delightedly awkward and watchable. We already referenced the Google Video streaming link, but there's also a downloadable AVI version at the Internet Archive (part of a full Consolevania archive that relates to something I'll be talking about soon!), and even a BitTorrent version should you be so inclined. Huzzah!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at indie game aggregation site Manifesto Games, Greg Costikyan has put up an announcement revealing a new project for them, the 'Play This Thing!' weblog, which is a standalone recommendation blog for cool, alternative games - whether carried by Manifesto or not.

In the blog post, Costik asks the question: "Why are we doing this, and why is it separate from the Manifesto site?", explaining: "In essence, we're divvying up responsibilities: Manifesto Games becomes an ecommerce site, while Play This Thing takes care of content and community." The reasons for this? "For one thing, when we launched the Manifesto site, we expected it to be a content-and-community site as well as an online retailer. That hasn't turned out as well as we had hoped; "The Word," our pages with reviews and articles about games, never got a lot of traffic--and in any event, reviews there sat a little uneasily on a site that was trying to sell you stuff. It was also not updated frequently enough to draw much repeat traffic--and perhaps was too much inspired by print magazine reviews."

He adds - and laudably, I think: "For another, we wanted to celebrate the full range of creativity in games outside the mainstream, including games that we ourselves don't necessarily sell--free games, games from people who haven't signed up to sell here, and so on. Play This Thing lets us do that, without confusing the Manifesto Games mission unduly. Of the five games on the front page at launch, for instance, only two are ones we sell. When Play This Thing features a game that Manifesto sells, we'll link back here for purchase, of course--but we'll be covering a lot of games we don't sell, too."

Anyhow, this looks like a good thing to do - if you poke around the Alexa rankings of some indie, casual, and various other digital distribution sites, you'll see that Manifesto hasn't got the kind of uptick that some other sites have managed. Here's a slightly crazed graph comparing ManifestoGames.com, GameTap.com, the surging Kongregate.com, alongside Reflexive.com and Miniclip.com. (Actually, all of these are not totally in the same market or even have the same business models - but they are all game sites who are distributing things digitally, so it's interesting to see their relative traffic rankings, even if Alexa doesn't always get it perfect.)

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats-- those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media.]

The following article contains minor BioShock spoilers – there’s no discussion of the ending or of major plot points, but this week’s column focuses on a character who appears about halfway through the game and on the environment in which you fight him.

Still with me?

Andrew Ryan’s ideal for Rapture was a world in which the creative elite, unconstrained by social obligation, were free to pursue their own ends to any extent that their effort awarded them. Everybody came to Rapture thinking they were going to be “captains of industry” – of course, no one realized that “somebody’s gotta scrub the toilets.”

Sander Cohen, musician, artist and composer, was Rapture’s poster child for that creative elite. With Ryan himself as the prime supporter of his arts, Cohen held court in Fort Frolic, his musical scores the toast of the city, his artwork held up as the standard of genius. In his battered suit, his hair a nest of pomade and his face a white pancake mask, holding court now over none but a grim army of plaster-cast statues – the bodies beneath, still bleeding – a city that should have become his joy became his madness.

His mad taunts to the player vacillate between imperious demand, lavish praise and vengeful rage; perpetually unstable, the single-minded viciousness with which he assembles his masterwork, what he calls a quantych (though it’s technically a “polyptych”, isn’t it?) composed of the photographs of his disciples’ bodies, is one of the more unsettling of BioShock’s many tragedies of the human mind’s descent. It’s both repugnant and infuriating, the way he refers to the player character as a “little moth” – and enlightening, too.

After all, the most alarming thing about Cohen is how he still lives in a delusion of his prior grandeur, fancying himself a radiant light to which all things are drawn. Though all but the most crazed of splicers in Rapture have either been killed or perhaps hidden themselves somewhere safer, far out of sight, Cohen remains, lording over Fort Frolic, hosting performances no one will see and continuing to “create” – and nursing a psychotic desire for revenge against his students for slights that were slight, if not fictional.

BioShock’s strength lies in all of the subtle ways that Rapture has become a sort of time capsule for the world it once was. Though Arcadia’s Farmer’s Market is rotting, swarmed with insects, in the scattered bottles of fine wine and the display cases which sometimes still hold faintly recognizable shapes of meat and cheese, it’s not difficult to imagine how beautiful it once was. The “ghosts” the player sometimes hallucinates, one of the myriad side effects of splicing plasmids, tell a story of people who once loved their world. As menacing as the world is, as much as Rapture itself is our antagonist in a sense, even the most grim of its vistas is less a horror and more a tragedy, when we see the tiny details. A burnt-out home that was once someone’s joy and pride; an Arcadia advertisement for pet adoption where, beneath a picture of puppies that wouldn’t be out-of-place in a school library, it reads, “BEST FRIENDS”.

Though, never is the window into Rapture’s past more illuminating, more poignant– and more tragic -- than it is when we look at the world of Sander Cohen. He’s not immediately crafted for empathy, combining egomania with antagonism, the flighty esoterics of an archetypal artist’s worst qualities, and his uncomfortably proximal, demeaning overtures. But then we see Fort Frolic’s promotional posters, for whimsical romantic comedies and musical plays that look quite like something Cole Porter would have come up with (and indeed, Porter’s “You’re the Top” scores a spot on the BioShock soundtrack). Even the way he titles his grim program, “An Evening With Sander Cohen,” makes it sound like the sort of Broadway cassette tapes my grandmother would have loved in my childhood. And so, we are able to get a glimpse of the man he must once have been.

He would’ve been no saint. When we follow Cohen’s coaxing into Fleet Hall theatre, where he’s rigidly critiquing the piano performance of a soon-to-be-very-unfortunate student, his urgent demands, even the way he attempts to vocalize the way the notes should go, make him not so much a psychopath, but a typical acting teacher. The character designers responsible for Cohen’s personality must have been intimately acquainted with theatre people.

Last week, on the topic of choice in games, I offered the opinion that while games provide the structures for experiences, it is the player’s choice to use those structures. That rather than expecting emotional satisfaction for technical behaviors, it’s up to us to take that next step and find a point of empathy with a game. This isn’t always easy, but that it is so limitlessly possible in BioShock is one of its strengths. We gain the most from our experience when we find ways to make a story personal, and it was Sander Cohen, not the Little Sisters, who provided the first in-road to me.

In 2004, I graduated not as an English major, but from a Madison Avenue, New York City acting conservatory, one of the finest in the country. I spent two years there with some of the most archetypal “theatre people” imaginable – black-cloaked, emotional Method actors, flamingly homosexual dancers, proudly egomaniacal Shakespearians, and hysterical, demanding pianists prone to throwing fits. Sander Cohen’s pitch-perfect rant, “my muse is a fickle bitch with a very short attention span!!” Might have been snatched from one of their mouths.

We, the conservatory students, were all the protégés of such, and it was there that I learned a little bit about the nature of acting, about any kind of creative art in general. When done well, it’s driven by a desire to give. But many times (perhaps more often than not), creative types are hunted to the edge of madness by a desire to please, and to be validated. They create not primarily to contribute, but so that they can be elevated socially for their singular achievements. Consumed deep-down with self-doubt, they instead try to earn love and validation from others through art – at first aiming to please, then to impress, then to control.

It’s a tragedy, really; combine creative talent and a simple, human desire for love and approval, and you have a recipe for madness. Rapture promised Sander Cohen a cocktail more fatal than the Moonshine Absinthe of which he appeared to be fond – a world wherein his creativity was his greatest merit, but also a world that constantly wanted more, more. It’s a simple fact of human psychology that the love and approval of millions is not enough. The splicers, at the edge of the end of the world, needed more and more power to feel safe, or to feel beautiful, until it destroyed them. In the madness of Rapture, the same happened to Cohen and his gifts – and in the vacuum left behind by a decimated population gone mad, he began to cannibalize himself.

Many actors, artists and composers later go on to teach, and it seems Cohen undertook disciples also. In a final, absolute rejection of the act of giving, he turns on his own students.

He’s a brilliant character not only for his spot-on characterization, but for the way his endless wrestling with “the muse” is a perfect metaphor for the consumptive nature of Rapture in general. More is never enough to salve the spectre of self-doubt, and when there’s no more to be had, one will take from one’s own mind until one lives alone in a closed world of delusion – contrast Cohen’s sprightly musical posters with his later works, such as the aptly titled “The Doubters”, a grim plaster cast of an entire family frozen at the dinner table, or the insane “Wild Bunny”, in which his inspirational musical works is replaced simply by a hysterical nonsense refrain: “I hop, and when I hop, I can’t get off the ground. I want to take the ears off, but I can’t.”

Contrast this with the later, optional glimpse into the home of Sander Cohen, where sepia-toned portraits of friends in groups, musicians playing piano, and a solitary figure performing on stage, stand as forgotten homages to a life that was once happy, imbued with the joy of performing and the adoration of colleagues and fans.

When in the game Cohen’s masterpiece is at last, as he says, “accomplished,” and he descends the atrium stairs bathed in spotlight, a rain of confetti and canned cheers, waving lovingly to an audience that only he can see, trapped in a lost life, I confess I shed a tear. And that’s the key to connecting emotionally with games – somewhere in there is a point of empathy just for you.

I’m a writer, not an actress today – you may draw your own conclusions about that.

[Leigh Alexander is the editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Destructoid, Paste, Gamasutra and her blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 8:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Something that's been keeping us all busy this week is our own Austin GDC show, of course, and as of yesterday morning, big sister site Gamasutra has debuted a dedicated landing page for Austin GDC 2007, with full coverage of keynotes, sessions, roundtables, and associated breaking news from the CMP Game Group's first Austin-based conference.

Various of our correspondents (including Brandon Sheffield, Brandon Boyer, and Christian Nutt) are marauding around Texas as we speak, chewing up the countryside and listening to the state of the online game universe - thus far, here are some of the original-reporting highlights from the conference:

- AGDC: The Warren Spector Interview
Disney and Warren Spector's recently acquired Junction Point studio a match made in cartoon heaven? Probably more than you might think, and in this exclusive interview, Deus Ex creator Spector tells Gamasutra all about his extensive history in the cartoon world, and hints on plans for the newly formed partnership.

- AGDC: BioWare's Walton On Making MMOs Post-World of Warcraft
Making an MMO in a post-World Of Warcraft world is tough, but BioWare Austin's Gordon Walton was inspired by the hugely successful game, presenting a twelve-point talk with lessons to learn in an engaging and popular GDC Austin speech.

- AGDC: Denis Dyack - 'The Media Is The Massage'
In his AGDC talk, Denis Dyack touched on Silicon Knights' methods for story, and warned that the media of games will often overpower the message you're trying to tell - he also dropped a few hints about Too Human along the way.

- AGDC: Raph Koster On Designing For Everywhere
Areae president Raph Koster, designer of Ultima Online and previous CCO of SOE, gave his talk at GDC Austin in front of a full-capacity crowd, all of whom were eager to catch a shred of what he’s been talking about for the last year or so: how the web is destroying games in terms of revenue and access.

- AGDC: Blizzard's Morhaime On Overcoming 'Myth' With WoW
Think every aspect of your game play has to be customized for regional players? Blizzard disagrees, citing the "myth of regional taste" and Gamasutra has president Mike Morhaime's full comments on the history of his company and his approach to World Of Warcraft from the Austin GDC keynote.

As well as that, the dedicated landing page for Austin GDC includes all the latest announcements and product news from the event - including a fun piece about Star Wars Galaxies' in-game house demolition helping charity donations to Habitat For Humanity.

[UPDATE: Oop, and one more - incidentally, watch out for an upcoming GSW piece about how I'm spending my millions (OK, a $10 Target gift card) in Habbo:

- AGDC: Haro On Making Habbo A Success
Sulka Haro's keynote speech on Web-based teen hangout Habbo Hotel, which kicked off the second day of the Austin Game Developers Conference, delivered a lot of wry commentary and useful information on the building of successful online worlds, from McDonalds roleplaying to Spider-Pig.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adorable GameSetWatch tipster Scott S. is upon us, and he points out the following: "Remember this GSW article about PC Accelerator? Well, guess who's BAAACCKK?" And then he links us to a PC Gamer forum post which reveals that the infamous Future PC gaming mag has indeed returned.

Not much information out there just yet - other commenters note that "Norman Chan is the senior editor of the magazine. I flipped through and saw that Greg Vederman also has an column as well... Cost is 9.99 US, 12.99 Canadian."

The cover of the relaunched PCXL features the Fragdolls, and a 'leave on news-stands til December' note elsewhere on the front, which indicates that this isn't a monthly magazine, but rather a 'special' - not sure if it's quarterly or just an experiment to see how the games + girls crossover fares on news-stands nowadays.

In any case, a little history lesson - the Wikipedia page for PC Accelerator, aka PCXL, explains: "PC Accelerator (PCXL) was a personal computer game magazine that was published by Imagine Media (now a subsidiary of Future Publishing). It was known for its Maxim-like humor and photography, and its last issue was dated June 2000. After the split up of the magazine editor-in-chief Mike Salmon went on to start the Official Xbox Magazine while some of the staff was sent to PC Gamer; others went on to work for Daily Radar." And now they're back. For a bit. Or a lot. Depending!

[UPDATE: Our very own Magweasel Kevin Gifford has a copy, and will be discussing it further in his column on Saturday - he notes that the spine says 'Fall 2007' and he believes it's one of the quarterly PC Gamer special issues under a sneaky PCXL guise. More on this soon!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Nethack (and Hack) keeps coming up again and again in this column because, after the original, it is the most Rogue-like of them all. Rogue is a game with profound design: changing even the tiniest bit affects everything else.

Of all the roguelikes, the Hack games are those which most recognize that Rogue is an interesting game for reasons other than its turn-based tactical combat. Many of these games pay lip service to some of Rogue's more profound features, especially item identification, without really embracing them. In Angband, attempting to ID some things by experimentation is a really bad idea, because of the existence of items that can instantly kill a player who uses them, and anyway players can usually find all the identify scrolls they need through the town shops. Dungeon Crawl's maintainers admit that it downplays its item identification game. And all of these roguelikes weight item generation by level, which upsets the identification game by making it even more unlikely that very useful items will appear early on.

Nethack's deeper features tend to be extensions and elaborations of Rogue's: its identification game, its objects with heavily programmed functions, and the secret uses of many items. And these are the things that roguelike fans who don't like Nethack disapprove of. I maintain this is because they've been trained to enjoy "mainstream" gaming first, which tends to be devoid of real strategy, values providing the player with an "experience" more than being a game that can be lost, and are forgiving to the point where he can't really ever die: he can always return to a previous save, after all. The absence of those things allow precisely the aspects of Rogue that make it worth playing at all.

My own thinking regarding Nethack's design has undergone some adjustment over time. Most people who become fans of the game upon first exposure like it for being Rogue Deluxe. After further play, they notice that although there are many more secret features in the game, after learning them all they make the game easier than the original. Some of them appear unbalancing at first, but actually they seem to be rather deviously balanced. After many games, it sometimes turns out that they may not be balanced as well as it seemed at first, and some of it actually overturns some of Rogue's elegance out of the exuberance of adding new stuff.

Yet that exuberance is an important part of Nethack. It is filled with interesting things, and as any worthwhile game designer will tell you, it is profoundly difficult to put something really interesting into a game. There are not actually that many things that can be put into games, and the artificial strictures placed upon them by "modern" game design, like returning to old saves, overbearing balance, hard-coded levels, and even the tutorial aspect of the early sections serve to restrict the designer's imagination even more. Nethack's Dev Team seems to be saying through Nethack that it's more important to add new cool stuff than to make sure it's properly balanced, and provided that it really is cool, I tend to agree with them.

But this is not to say that balance isn't important, nor that the Dev Team isn't concerned with it. What they're really about, in my opinion of course, is adding cool new features yet making sure they "fit" with the rest of the game. Sometimes they get it right immediately, sometimes it takes them some time to figure out the problem and fix it, and sometimes the problem survives. Sometimes it survives long enough that it becomes part of the game, and the thought of removing it becomes unthinkable. Sometimes it even turns out that the misfeature isn't so bad after all, or later features remedy its balance issues, but also sometimes they aren't so fortunate.

Here is a short list of some of the more immediately evident of these features, and their current status:

Problems that have been fixed:

Wishing for wishes
Wishing items used to allow the player to wish for objects that could then be used to get wishes. In the case of wands of wishing (which used to be fairly common in hell), the net gain in wishes would be positive.

This was fixed long ago, although it can be noted that drinking smoky potions, no matter what they might be, may very rarely summon a djinn who could offer a wish. There is no restriction of the wishing of smokey potions, although the wish chance is slim enough that it's hardly an exploit.

Nurse dancing
Players wearing no clothes and wielding no weapons get healed, not harmed, from the attacks of nurses. If the player's fully healed, then a few of these hits will raise his maximum hit points.

This is a prime example of a feature that other games would either never have included, or if they did would remove rather than work through balancing it into the game. In Nethack, taking off all your clothes can open you up to quick death from suddenly-appearing monsters, especially liches, but there are other checks as well. There's a limit to how HP can be raised this way, and when a nurse heals there's a chance it'll vanish from the game, not just teleport as with nymphs, leprechauns, etc.

Problems that were balanced around

Polypiling
Zapping a wand of polymorph can turn a monster into another kind of monster, but if the invisible ray travels over items it'll turn them into other, random items of the same type, i.e., weapons become other weapons, armor becomes other armor, gauntlets other gauntlets, rings other rings, potions other potions, and so on. Equipment keeps its enchantment, wands retain prior number of charges, and so on.

The major incentive to explore dungeon levels, as opposed to just heading for the stairs, is to find new random treasure, but if you can get that with a quick zap from a wand? And if it'll affect all items over five spaces, even if there's hundreds on that spot? This got fixed by causing large stacks of polymorphed items to "merge" into smaller piles when changed, discarding large amounts of stuff, and the creation of golems, which are sometimes strong opponents and who also take some of the objects out of the pile.

Succubus dancing
Succubi and Incubi are a particular type of demon that can be... "consorted with"... to make special things happen. With high stats and luck, the chances of the things being good ones can be very high, even guaranteed, and one of those things is gaining an experience level.

The balancing from this is two-fold. The direct method, and the indirect. As for direct, such an encounter leaves the player mostly unclothed, like with nurses, the monster always ends up with "a headache" afterwards, unwilling to do it again for a random number of turns, and after a while getting a severe headache that disables its benefit-generating ability with permanence. To get benefits consistently from a foocubus also requires the player have high scores in Intelligence and Charisma, the two most difficult stats to raise (they don't change through exercise), and the benefit granted is chosen from a list out of which level gain is only one element.

The indirect balance is much more profound, and is actually a balance against all the instant level gains the game offers. In many other games arbitrary sources of level gain are obviously a balance flaw, but Nethack's monster generation system means it's not as bad as it might be. The traditional way to select random monsters is to pick from a list that's hard-coded for each level. Nethack does it by selecting monsters, from a big list of all those that can appear in the current dungeon branch, by taking the average of the player's level and the dungeon level, and trying to generate monsters of around that difficulty. This means that gaining levels itself will increase the difficulty of monsters generated, by about half the rate the player advances.

Current problems

Pudding farming
When monsters greater than a certain difficulty are killed, in addition to sometimes leaving a corpse and always dropping what they were carrying, sometimes they'll additionally leave behind a random item. This may not make sense but it does fulfill a game role, since monster possessions are not very random but vary according to the monster type. For example, soldiers get military equipment, and elves and dwarves sometimes get cloaks, mithril and appropriate weapons. The random item drop thing provides extra loot incentive for killing strong monsters even if they don't ordinarily get treasure.

One of the monsters that can drop random stuff is the black pudding. Every time a black pudding dies, it can drop treasure. But whenever a pudding is struck by a weapon that does more than one hit point of damage, it may divide into two puddings. Each of these monsters now has a chance of dropping random loot, and they may also further divide themselves. Split puddings end up with half the hit points of the original, but they can heal back up to maximum.

Some players have pushed this into an epic exploit. By engraving a certain word on the ground, one that causes monsters to avoid spots on the floor, around their location except for one space, then purposely filling the level with puddings through division, they set up what is known as a pudding farm. They endlessly kill puddings, leaving behind vast quantities of loot over time. The chance of getting something from a kill isn't large, and the chance of getting something really good like a wand of wishing is extremely small, but after killing tens of thousands, or more, puddings, the small chances add up.

The only checks on this tactic in the game are the usual ones against sitting in one place doing very little, mostly hunger (pudding corpses, while acidic, are edible), and the tremendous ennui that results from playing the game this way. Players strong enough to divide puddings this much and survive are probably strong enough to win the game already, or could become so with little trouble, but some kinds of conducts become much easier through farming. And by producing huge amounts of loot, gaining high scores becomes much simpler, increasing Nethack's already-great score inflation.

Pestilence farming
I've mentioned this before (in Giant Eel Stories), but as an advanced case of farming, which has taken scores up to MAXINT-1, it's interesting.

Using a somewhat similar setup as with puddings, players can repeatedly kill Pestilence, one of the three Riders at the end of the game, for large score awards. By restricting how other monsters can approach the player, and when playing a telnet game (such as through alt.org), the process can then be automated through a macro, attaining absurdly high scores.

Posted by John Harris at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Over at CNN, there's a neat post called ' Video games' new frontier: The visually impaired' in the 'very future' Digital Biz section, and it discusses the neat use of a Wii-mote on the PC for a blind person-accessible music game.

As is explained: "A team of researchers at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Massachusetts set out this summer to make a music-based video game that's designed for mainstream players and also accessible to the blind. Appropriately, perhaps, they incorporated the Wiimote into the game-play, though it's optional."

The piece continues: "The resulting DJ game, designed for the PC, is called AudiOdyssey. In it, players try to lay down different tracks in a song by swinging and waving the Wiimote in time with the beats. Or they can just use keyboard controls." And yep, it's freely downloadable, which is neat - the creators had as an aim that: "The visually-impaired and the sighted can enjoy the same level and quality of gameplay." Is this true of any other rhythm games?

[Also notable - the full set of GAMBIT games done over this summer, all products of the Singapore-MIT Game Lab, look like they're both innovative and relatively interesting - everything from mobile through PC to more Wii-mote compatible titles are showcased there, with titles like Backflow and The Illogical Journey of Orez looking intriguing.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Following our previous special report from Richard Garriott's fund-raiser for The UT Videogame Archive, J. of Damned Vulpine fame has also contributed a gallery of pictures from the event.]

For those confused, or who haven't read the full report, here was our pre-show post about this fundraiser: "The Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin is kicking off our new UT Videogame Archive with a party and fundraiser at Richard Garriott’s estate on Lake Austin."

Below is a full (and slightly high-bandwidth, sorry dial-up folks!) gallery of pictures taken at the slightly damp but extremely successful event, which took place on the night before Austin GDC kicked off:

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[This special report from Richard Garriott's fund-raiser for The UT Videogame Archive, held the night before the start of Austin GDC, was compiled for GameSetWatch by J., journalist and blogger best known for his Damned Vulpine weblog, and both a previous Gamasutra contributor and a stalwart of the Austin gaming scene.]

Out under the trees, down by the river, far below the castle's view, they were making history. And, like a moron, I didn't bring my swamp boots.

The Event

Rain or shine, Tuesday's fundraiser on Richard Garriott's property, overlooking Lake Austin on the northwest edge of the city, was going ahead. History was the reason, the kind that could educate the next generation of game enthusiasts and possibly developers, at the brand-new UT Video Game Archive, at the University of Texas-Austin's Center for American History.

It had rained most of the afternoon, enough for event staff to raise tents over most of the grounds down close to the lake. I'd been here before, but the mud hadn't been so deep. But since I didn't have my boots, my nice white Adidas trainers will have to get me through the rest of the week at the Austin Game Developers Conference, stained brown. Still managed to have a good time, though my head's fogged and bullet points are all I'm going to manage from here on out. Apologies for conciseness.

The whole archive idea came about because local leaders approached Don Carleson, Ph.D., executive director of CAH-UT, about nine months ago. He's a political historian, not a gamer, but he immediately saw the utility in having an archive devoted to video games. “As I tell my students,” he told people gathered in Garriott's outdoor “Globe Theater” for the auction, “everything has a history, and everything belongs to history.” With an archive, Carleson said, students can use it to learn about the history of game development, and make new history with their own creations, made better by what they've learned.

Garriott said he was inspired to dive into his own trove of past documents and files from all the games he's made over the years, mostly at Origin Systems, by his friend and former colleague Warren Spector, now of Junction Point Studios, who stepped forward first with the need for “a place to put my stuff.” Technology continues to advance regularly, Garriott said, but game design methods seem stuck. Part of the reason, he said, is that most games don't have useful documentation, of the sort that he called “the Tolkien school” -- with extensive research and background material that the audience will never see. The design bible for Ultima VI, which he and Spector worked on, is probably revolutionary by today's standards, he said. “I'm learning things as I go through my stuff,” Garriott said. “There are things I used to do that I don't do anymore.”

Spector, called to the stage before the auction, said games industry professionals have an opportunity that those in the movie business didn't have, to preserve their history. “Eighty percent of silent films are gone,” he said, many of them thrown out with the advent of synchronized sound, just like the materials used to make games are often thrown out when the game ships, or alternately, when the development shop goes out of business.

Plans for the archive absolutely include a public presence, said Erin Purdy, assistant director of CAH-UT. First things first: Plans are in the works for how to present it and where it will be housed, and materials are being collected, but they need support in the form of money. Thus, the fundraiser. Tickets to the event, which ranged in price from $75 all the way up to “Platinum” sponsorship of $5,000, were sold in amounts well above the original plan, Purdy said, but there were hors d'oeuvres enough for everyone who showed. She said a final total should be ready by the end of the week.

The Live Auction

Silent auction items were still being tallied at the close of the night's events. The major items were auctioned off on stage by Michael Hanley of National Gavel, who muddled a few pronunciations, but “Akalabeth” and “Kilrathi” would throw most people. They were, including the winning bids:

A bundle of Rock Band, with all four instruments, signed by the crew at Harmonix. $500 (to Gamasutra editor Brandon Boyer, yay!)

Prince Thrakath's Paw, foam rubber prop from Wing Commander the movie, preserved in glass by the Origin Museum. $600.

“Cowboy in the Storm,” a skyline photo of downtown Austin looking from across Lady Bird Johnson Lake with the statue of Stevie Ray Vaughn, taken by former Ion Storm executive and photographer Trey Ratcliff. $800.

Gaming immortality: Arkane Studios, Gearbox, Junction Point, Kingsisle, NCSoft, Pixel Mine and Spacetime Studios would put the winning bidder's name in a game they made. $2,000.

Two tickets to the Tabula Rasa party, thrown by Garriott on his property Sept. 5 (today!). Unlike Tuesday's party, he would let the winning bidders inside his castle. $2,100.

“Games As Art – Evolution of a Design,” a framed piece of the original artwork for the cover of Ultima Underworld, with preliminary sketchwork, by artist Denis Loubet and prepared by the Origin Museum. $3,000.

“Ultima: The Ultimate Collector's Guide,” a compilation of research by Stephen Emond, compiling the history of every Ultima game ever made, and signed by Garriott, Spector, and George “Fatman” Sanger. $1,250.

The Garriott Anthology, a plastic bin full of first-release boxed copies released by Richard Garriott and Origin Systems, including a rare Akalabeth copy. $5,000.

Two tickets to ride in the Zero-G suborbital space plane, of the sort used to train astronauts in low gravity but now privately available as a high-end touristy thing, coming to Austin later this week. $5,000 each, to two winning bidders.

A new-model Dell laptop, to Arkane Studios head Raphael Colantonio for the low price of $20. Hanley played a different game for this item, encouraging anyone interested to give ushers a $20 bill, and then call successive coin tosses. Colantonio won after the fourth toss, and he intends to use his new laptop on a round of showing demos to publishers. “I was short one laptop,” he said.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Veteran game designer and top hatted geezer Ernest Adams has posted the 8th yearly edition of his 'Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie' column over at Gamasutra, running down things game designers absolutely should not do.

The first (of many) is 'wildly atypical game levels', described by a submitter as: "Optional mini-games are fun, and can be a refreshing change of pace, but optional is the key word here. Levels where a player must complete a game that uses a completely different skill set in order to continue back to a point that uses the original skill set can be irritating as hell."

Adams adds: "Bullfrog was often guilty of this -- I remember some wildly atypical levels in Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet, and Populous: The Beginning. They padded out the game, but because they made just about everything you had learned useless, they were very annoying." There's also now a No Twinkie Database on Adams' site, collecting all of the submissions so far.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[“Marketing Melancholy” is an occasional column by Siliconera's Spencer Yip that examines multiple facets of marketing games from an end user's point of view, from advertising campaigns through box art and beyond. This first column tries to see what happens when a video game store-goer gets literal with game boxes.]

For informed gamers, the box art is not going to be the deciding factor whether to purchase a game or not. By reading magazines, reviews and seeing shakycam clips on YouTube they already have an opinion whether on they are going to buy a game, wait for it to drop on to the clearance racks or ignore it forever. However, box art does serve an important purpose. It’s a first impression for uninformed gamers to learn about a title.

Introduction: The Idea

As an experiment, I’m going to venture into an unnamed 'popular-video-game-store' as an “uninformed gamer” (or at least, my attempt to blank my mind and become one!) and do something you should probably never do to a person - judge a book game by its cover alone.

Part 1: The Movie Game Enticement

The first thing I noticed was games based on movies. Why? Because as a “non-gamer”, the box art was familiar to me. Take a look at the Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End or Spider-Man 3 box art. The images are similar, if not identical to the movie posters. I may not be a gamer, but repetitive branding has conditioned me to recognize these titles, whether their gameplay is rudimentary or revolutionary.

I might actually pick one of these games up because I have not read reviews and I get a warm fuzzy feeling when I think of (insert favorite movie title here). The same goes with video games based on TV shows or anime. Naruto is on the front of all the Naruto anime-based games, of course, because he is the selling point for anyone who hasn't previously read up on the games.

Part 2: The Mascot Advantage

Hmm… there are a lot of boxes with this “Mario” character on the Nintendo side. I may not be a gamer, but I've certainly heard of Mario and Sonic before. The box art for Sonic the Hedgehog (next-gen) has a simple message: 'Look - Sonic is in this, you’re buying it because Sonic is in this.'

Mario Strikers Charged has a similar message: this game has Mario playing soccer; you don’t need to know any more. The majority of video game box art out there relies on pre-branding, familiarity with the characters or franchise.

Part 3: Preaching To The Converted

Take the box art for Final Fantasy III as an example - it's a simple logo mounted on a white background. Yes, it looks classy. However, if I've never heard about Final Fantasy in the first place, I’m going to ignore it. Obviously, there is a problem here. Not for Final Fantasy III, but for games that aren’t part of an established series. What kind of box art can break through the branding barrier?

Conundrum: Box Art Differentiators?

One option is to have a different design for your box. I know fans might not have been thrilled with the outside box art for Persona 3, but on a shelf the packaging stands out. When you quickly scan the walls of unnamed-popular-video-game-store the larger box is noticeable, perhaps noticeable enough for people to pick up.

BioShock has a similar eye-catching trick - it’s shiny and puffy. Viva Piñata (pictured) takes this concept a step further by making their box an entirely different shape. Too bad unnamed-popular-video-game-store alphabetically sorts games, which puts Viva Piñata close to the floor. Ouch.

Solution: Use Familiar Elements?

When you can’t make special packaging, the next best thing is to piggyback on familiar elements to showcase a new product. I may not know what Riviera: The Promised Land is, but the PSP’s box art has anime-style characters on it. Lots of localized games from Japan go with this concept.

They know which niche they are catering to, but this is a double-edged sword. While they are catering to the growing anime crowd, the box art doesn’t tell enough of a story to attract potential customers uninterested in anime. Perhaps explaining the gameplay may make a title more accessible, regardless of the art style.

Boxes Done Right: Picross DS

A great example of gameplay illustrated by box art is Picross DS. The box art does a fantastic job of explaining what the game is, and how to play it. On the box you can see the Picross grid with a completed picture. Just to the right of it, you have a DS with a stylus touching the picture. The concept is easy to grasp and the text on the box makes it obvious - “Solve the picture, see the puzzle”.

The packaging explains what Picross is to a non-gamer and a gamer who didn’t pay attention to the title. Games aimed towards the casual gamer should pay special attention to this. If their cover art can explain how to play the game, a potential buyer who doesn’t pay attention to the latest game news may think: “Hey, I can do this, this game is for me!”

Boxes Done Me Wrong: Trapt, Soul Nomad

Not every game can be as simple as Picross to explain, but highlighting a feature or two can broaden a title's appeal. Let’s look at the box art for Tecmo's Trapt as an example. Trapt is a unique game involving setting and triggering dungeon-based traps, but the box art doesn’t scream: “Hey look I have something new to offer!”

In fact, the generic cover shows an anime heroine with electricity flowing from one of her arms. If I knew nothing about it beforehand, I would pass on it. I have no clue how Trapt plays or what it is - other than I’m probably playing as the girl on the cover. Tecmo could have explained the game by showing Princess Allura with a sly smile watching in the distance, while the assassins trigger the traps - for example.

The same goes for NIS America's PlayStation 2 RPG, Soul Nomad. Seeing Gig on the cover placates the close knit community of strategy RPG fans. But I wonder how many more copies Soul Nomad would sell if the art explained the sandbox system or how you set up rooms in the game.

Of course, both of the above titles cater to a niche audience, but there are elements in both of these games that extend outside of the usual. These games also share a similar problem - a limited marketing budget. In both of these cases, my opinion is that self-explanatory box art can be another cheap form of grass roots marketing. What do GSW readers think?

Posted by spencery at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Now, we previously reported back in April that the highlights of Game Developer magazine's latest Salary Survey had been released - well now, over on our sister educational site Game Career Guide, there's a more in-depth run down of game industry salaries, taken from the very same survey.

There are plenty of graphs to check out, all surveyed from more than 3,000 responses from Game Developer and Gamasutra readers, who relayed their real-life salaries in 2006, and as is noted on the first page: "Programming is where the money's at. Unless your sights are set on becoming an executive of a game company, the most financially rewarding position within game development (not to mention the job that typically employs the greatest number of people) is that of a programmer. The average salary for a game programmer across all levels of experience has been more than $80,000 for two years in a row."

You can also compare and contrast to last year's salary survey, also available over at Game Career Guide. Of course, it doesn't have nearly as much information as the multi-year Salary Survey research on the subject, but then it doesn't cost $3,000 - rather, a couple of mouse clicks. Bargain!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah yes, the remaining long weekend-ish GameSetLinks must be disseminated to you, the vaguely interested public. This shall happen immediately, as follows:

- Ubisoft producer Ben Mattes is impressed by the official Jam Sessions tracklisting - and I'm also impressed by Ubisoft's choices on these Japanese-converted guitar strumming title. Death Cab For Cutie? Beck? Nirvana's Bowie cover? And the deluxe version (optional!) comes with an 'amp' for your DS - ie an external speaker system. Very cute.

- Adventure Gamers is reporting on the new title from Samorost 2 developers Amanita Design, the just-unveiled Machinarium. It's noted: "Amanita was reluctant to reveal too many details at such an early stage, but the game will use a classic point-and-click interface, and share certain similarities with the Samorost games, such as 2D backgrounds and characters, and no spoken words. However, Machinarium will be much longer and more complex in many ways, and this time around, the art will be hand-drawn and players will have a small inventory." Good to see the IGF winners (for Best Web Game) making an interesting-looking follow-up.

- John Passfield has passed on info on a neat new indie titles, as follows: "How cool is this? Comic creator Michel Gagné working on a cool game based on his beautiful artwork - called Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. It appears to be a quirky side scroller with lots of UFO action. Nice. His web site says that he's currently seeking a publisher... surely it's the sort of game that Microsoft or Sony would snap up for Xbox Live Arcade or Playstation Network?"

- A random tip from GSW friend John Andersen: Konami has successfully enforced its rhythm game IP/patents against Amuse World regarding Beatmania clone EZ2DJ. This lawsuit had been rumbling on since 2001 in one form or another - and Amuse World had released about 8 expansion packs to the arcade game in that time. Blimey. After this and the 'In The Groove' lawsuit - would Konami ever go after Red Octane or Harmonix regarding Guitar Freaks and Guitar Hero? One wonders.

- After our post on the German picks for most influential games ever, Jared Newman was kind enough to graph out the nominated games per year, and he concludes: "As you can see, we’ve recently entered a dark age of influential games, at least according to the German game journalists who compiled the list of nominees." But is it possible to work out what new games will become classics? Hm?

- New face Christian Nutt kindly pointed out a GamesRadar piece he helped on before he left, discussing what's described as 'The death of hardcore gaming?' For starters, there's an interesting quote up front: ""Shifting development to cheaper, simpler games is a smart one, given the state of the industry," said Ryan Payton, assistant producer at Metal Gear Solid developer Kojima Productions, in an e-mail interview. "The state of next-gen gaming really isn't all that great," Payton said, adding that "it's too expensive, it lacks a Trojan horse like PS2 enjoyed with its DVD playback capabilities, and Japan has been curiously late to this next-gen party.""

- The creators of Gish at Cryptic Sea have set up a new weblog to document the making of Gish 2, the follow-up to the IGF-winning squishy platformer, and made by the biggest band of Santa Cruz-based crazies you could possibly meet. And it starts in fine style, with the video 'How To Break Into The Mainstream' - apparently by _not_ reaching Reggie @ Nintendo! There's also some bizarre teaser art, step by step. Looking forward to more!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Obviously, if you're playing an MMO or other online game, you're doing a lot of interaction, and managing a lot of information along the way. So do you need a third-party social networking site to help you manage that? MMO blogger Aggro Me has a post called 'You Got Web 2.0 in My MMO!' in which he examines just that issue.

As he notes: "The great thing is that MMO's already have so many ready-made social groups. In addition to player-made groups like guilds or a friends list, each player is part of server, a class, a race, a level range. These groups are the perfect foundation for creating a social network." He then goes on to suggest a bunch of features that it would handy to be aggregated on a webpage - from server status through game information to rankings, etc.

Interestingly, there's some crossover of this kind going on in more web-based online games - for example, Habbo has shared groups on its site, as part of the web-facing interface to its Shockwave-based online chat world. (Of course, if you want to keep track of your friends and users across multiple online worlds, individual game-specific solutions don't work.)

But in the hardcore MMO space, where the game tends to run a lot more independently of the web, and figures and information is even less abstracted out to feedable data in many cases, there are a couple of VC-funded startups trying to aggregate MMO players - Curse, whom we recently interviewed at Gamasutra, and rival Guildcafe, whom we also chatted to at Gama following their funding. Will people flock to interact on such sites? The jury is out, but since it coincides with the rise of social media, the VCs are certainly on board.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Brand noo PC game blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun (which is already differentiating itself, in my eyes, in being a blog in which all correspondents are enthusiastic about the subject matter) has some amusingly mystified posts about Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn - as Alec Meer examines the graphical update of the now 10-year-old (!) MMO.

The series extends to a couple of posts, thus far. The first one is bemusedly sarcastic to a tee, and reveals what I'd suspected - that UO is probably about half as arcane as Rogue-likes nowadays: "While I understand that the interface has to remain largely as it was so the veteran subscribers don’t explode, having to hold down shift, click on something in my inventory, then select ‘assign as key item’ from a baffling menu before I’m allowed to give it to the man who’s just asked me to give it to him is a special kind of ‘huh?’."

In the second post, a little more of the delightfully arcane gameplay mechanisms emerge: "Before I turn and resignedly head back to town again to be restored to life, I notice the deadly Wandering Healer is still lurking around. Initial instinct: anger. The bastard NPC's camping my corpse, hoping for another pop at me! Then he happens to wander near my ghost while I’m thinking about what to do next, and a message pops up. “Would you like to be resurrected?” Of course. He’s a healer - that’s what he does. It’s like a bully just offered to buy me a pint after boxing my ears. Except this guy has, being an NPC, entirely forgotten that he was merrily punching me in the kidney mere seconds ago." It almost makes me want to play it!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Gamasutra late last week, our new Features Editor, Christian Nutt had a chance to talk to Ken Koyama from Yuke's North American office - and it's pretty interesting to see the Japanese firm, "best known in the U.S. as the developer of the massively popular WWE Smackdown vs. Raw series for THQ", make a move into the States as a niche publisher - thus far debuting the relatively unsuccessful (as far as I know?) D1 Grand Prix.

The company was promoting its DS puzzle title Neves, which is 'seven' backwards, and is a tangram-based game licensed from Hanayama Toys, who first debuted 'Hanayama Lucky Puzzle' in 1935 - old school 'casual games' from way back - Koyama notes: "We have exclusive licensing with Hanayama, and they have a whole line of puzzle games that we could probably bring over to the DS."

Also notable is the possibility of Yuke's publishing anime-licensed titles it's created in Japan, like Berserk and Armored Trooper Votoms ("We're trying to see what we can do and what we can bring over"), as well as some honesty about why the company isn't located on one of the coasts ("One of the reasons we're in Chicago is based in the fact that the cost of living -- the amount of rent and stuff like that -- is a lot cheaper in Chicago than it is in like the West coast, or in New York. Obviously, that played a role for us to be in Illinois.") Neat interview.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As we've previously noted, Junction Point head honcho and Deus Ex creator Warren Spector now has a game design blog, and his newest post looks at a multitude of issues, the most interesting being a recollection (from a GDC design talk) of his own internal meters for the criteria he applies to each of his game concepts.

As he comments, in the design talk "...I revealed for the first and only time the Seven Questions I always ask myself to determine if an idea is worth pursuing. You know the really weird thing? I don’t even tell my teams about this — I go through this exercise alone, evey time, every game." The Seven Questions are:

"1. What are we trying to do? What’s the core idea?

2. What’s the potential? Why do this game over all the others we could do?

3. What are the development challenges? Really hard stuff is fine — impossible or unfundable? Not so good…

4. Has anyone done this before? If so, what can we learn from them? If not, what does that tell us?

5. How well-suited to games is the idea? There are some things we’re just not good at and shouldn’t even attempt. A love story, for example!

6. What’s the player fantasy and does that lead to good player goals? If the fantasy and the goals aren’t there, it’s a bad idea.

7. What does the player do? What are the “verbs” of the game?"

A good set of questions - Spector ends by noting: "If I can’t answer the questions above, or the answers come out negative, the idea never makes it to the next stage — conceptualization. If the answers are positive — if there are good reasons to make the game, the development challenges aren’t too bad, the idea is well-suited to the medium... we move on to concepting and the real fun begins."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The wonderfully irascible J. at Damned Vulpine, who has covered the Austin Game Conference for Gamasutra in the past (but is shouting at PR people for us anyhow this year, to make up for us not having room to use him!) hangs out in the Texas game nexus all year round.

Therefore, to commemorate Austin GDC, which is run by us at the CMP Game Group for the first time, and kicks off this coming Wednesday (here's the conference at a glance PDF), J. has posted an awesome guide to the city of Austin, explaining: "Here are some things to do in Austin besides aimlessly wander the halls of the Austin Convention Center" - from movies, through bridge bats (!), to great restaurant listings - it's actually really helpful and sweet of him.

Sadly, I have to stay home and mind the fort, but we have multiple journalists at the Austin show itself - which has keynotes from Square Enix exec Hiromichi Tanaka, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime, Habbo Hotel designer Sulka Haro, and a whole bunch of other interesting talks - so watch out for special Gamasutra coverage starting on Wednesday.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Aha, a fair amount of links have again piled up, and I'm going to do my best to unload them this weekend, in two discrete lumps - with a wide range of GSW-liked content, from the game development to the casual to the indie to the mainstream, even. Here goes:

- The Surreal Game Design website is a new design and development weblog from the creators of Drakan and The Suffering - made "...as a reaction to the typical game company website, where usually all you can get are press releases and official game information." Plenty of good intros and here's a neat design article, called 'Making the Rules: Great Enemies', about "..perils and pointers for creating good combat AI."

- The Speed Demos Archive continues to go from strength to strength, and both ridiculous and fun is the Promo Video 2007 page, a "...promotional music video that formed the introduction to a hour-long speed run clip showcase exhibited at Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in August 2007." It's oddly over the top and demo-scene - check out the news for the speed runs proper.

- Jay Is Games has pointed out that Digital Chocolate has released the mobile puzzle title Tower Bloxx in Flash form - noting of the gameplay: "A swinging crane holds a section of a tower above a platform. Press the button to drop it, then try and stack the following pieces on top as neatly as you can." Great title, go check it out.

- Soren Johnson's 'Designer Notes' blog has a post called 'J.K. Rowling: Good Author, Bad Game Designer', and it's got some good thoughts on Quidditch: "Games should not penalize players for doing their job well. It's not really even a game rule, it's just common sense. Of course, if you write the stories, you can make sure the fictional games never result in such a sticky position. Quidditch as a real game, though, would be a bit of a mess."

- More fun from Klei Entertainment's blog, in a post named 'Where Xbox Live Arcade Excels', discussing how Eets Chowdown appears on it, but noting something I've heard elsewhere: "I think many AAA developers could use a couple lessons in upselling, and building an Arcade game might not be a bad idea to do that. Too many of the demos on the Marketplace actually make me want to buy the game less than before I played it because of how badly it was put together."

- Petri Purho has compiled a list of the experimental games he's made over the past few months, from Crayon Physics to a multitude of other titles - ALL worth checking out. He adds: "The Season 2 of Kloonigames will begin in the couple of months, but in between I’ll try to release some updates to season 1 games or do something completely different. Maybe I’ll do a board game or I’ll collaborate with someone or something."

- There are not that many Japanese XBLA titles (especially indie-created) thus far, so good to see that Trigger Heart Exelica is coming to Xbox Live Arcade, with Arcade Renaissance commenting: "Though the game has seen mixed reviews, I personally enjoyed its grabbing and throwing mechanics. It isn't a perfect game, but its defintiely enjoyable and a worthy addition to the ever expanding XBLA library."

- The metrics craziness continues at the Orbus Gameworks blog, where they have been analyzing Guitar Hero clone Frets On Fire, revealing greater accuracy on faster songs from their playtester: "Jeff is actually more accurate when the notes are closer together! It’s like he knows he has to buckle down and concentrate when the notes come fast, but doesn’t really need to pay attention when the notes are sparse."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Having just debuted his Independent Games Summit lecture video, I had a chance to go check out Jonathan Blow's blog, and there-in he has a very interesting post on Space Giraffe, dealing with the minor critical dust-up currently going on over whether Jeff Minter's new XBLA game is, uhh, any good or not - and suggesting: "Dare I say that Space Giraffe is something like the arcade game analogue of Ulysses? Is that controversial enough?"

Blow notes: "The first time I saw Space Giraffe, I didn’t realize it was an excellent game. Jeff Minter was showing it off at the Game Developer’s Conference, and it looked just like Tempest, except you could push guys off the top of the web sometimes. And Jeff kept saying it wasn’t Tempest. But he was not sufficiently able to communicate to the audience why the game was interesting."

He then explains that his opinion of the game started middling, but ratcheted up super-high: "As you proceed through the levels, the enemies not only get more numerous, faster, and more devious, but the game also pushes you deeper into the land of warped perception, and then demands that you see through that. Well, often you can’t. At first. And then you start to see the patterns, and then you break through, and then you are sailing through this batch of levels, dancing the whole time. This game is about expanding your perception. It demands that you learn to see."

My own views? I am obviously pre-identified as a Minter fan, having set up his GDC appearance in the first place. Overall, I've been enjoying Space Giraffe. I haven't played the game quite enough yet to know for _sure_ (only have the one Achievement), but my main observations are that:

- The obfuscation in terms of so much blurred craziness happening onscreen is perverse but addictive - some of the key gameplay cues could stand out a lot better. Yes, it's intentional. But it's a bold, alienating move. I think the basic game itself is harder to grok than most other Minter titles I've played, especially with the enemy-pushing angle being so key. Yet I love it, and I'm going to play it a _LOT_ more.

- I personally think the game should have launched at 800 points ($10), not 400 ($5), because its appeal is definitely hardcore gamer-specific. I'm a little concerned, looking at the high-score tables so far, that the same XX,000 people would have paid twice as much for it - and the pricing structure should have been set up a bit more like the Japanese super-niche dating titles, which deliberately price higher for a limited audience. Just my 2c.

Anyhow, Minter has spotted the Jonathan Blow post, too, and his reaction is, well, cute: "I think at this point it's all beyond me now. We've been hated and loved for it, it's the best game ever and absolute rubbish, we are great, we are evil, we're the future and the past, we are masters, we're incompetent, we are ERROR_SUCCESS and ERROR_ERROR. At least we provoked a response. I think that's good. I feel like I'm Schrodinger's cat." Meow.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

   

On Ebay the other day I got a complete collection of Amiga Game Zone, the United States' first, last and only magazine devoted entirely to Amiga games. A complete collection's only three issues, yes, but it was still a major feat in my book -- after all, publisher/editor Geoff Miller states in his page on the mag that the title had a subscriber base of about a thousand and a total circulation of 5000. I remember seeing it on the newsstand once, at a Micro Center somewhere outside of Philadelphia, and the sheer novelty of discovering a US-produced Amiga game magazine was such that I still remember the encounter today.

It could be said that launching any sort of Amiga games mag in the US was a pretty foolhardy idea. The platform was big in Europe, especially after 1988 or so, but whether through sheer bad luck or due to Commodore's well-documented inability to market the machine in its home country, it was never a mainstream success in America. I remember seeing demo units maybe around 1990 or so at software stores, but that was about it. And this situation was doubly true in 1994, the year Amiga Game Zone was launched -- Commodore declared bankruptcy early in the year, which pretty much eliminated any advertising base AGZ would've had even in the best of times.

But Geoff wasn't pessimistic enough to let these little details stop him. Amiga Game Zone is very much a one-man production -- Geoff was the editorial, publishing, and sales department, wrote a lot of each issue, and also ran a mail-order Amiga software store from the magazine's pages, all while toiling as a grad student at the University of Illinois. Thumbing through the three issues (which range in size from 40 to 48 pages) really gives you a feel for how much enthusiasm he had for both the print medium and the Amiga. The internals are black-and-white, but the design's obviously inspired by the British Amiga mags of the day, and every page is packed with eye-pleasing screens and catchy headlines. It really reads like a cut-down version of Amiga Power, which is pretty high praise in my book.

Sadly, the market was beyond not there, and although Geoff states that the magazine was profitable in the limited scope he was working in, the "bimonthly" magazine was released haphazardly in 1994 and closed up shop with its third issue.

A pretty cool mag, and reading it, I can't help but think in "what if" scenarios. Namely, what if there was a 100% games magazine devoted to the Commodore 64 in the US, like there was in the UK with Zzap64? There were several home-oriented C64 mags, of course, including RUN, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, and Transactor, not to mention Commodore's own self-titled rag. But the funny thing was they all acted like reviewing games was beneath them, giving them only small, text heavy coverage and often talking very little about the substance of the game they were reviewing. It was obvious that no one in the regular editorial staff were real gamers -- this, despite the fact that at least half (if not three quarters) of advertising in these mags was for recreational software by the late '80s. What if there was the Commodore, or Amiga, equivalent of Nintendo Power on the stands in 1988? It could've made a mint for the mag publisher willing to try it out.

PS. Condolences to the Game Informer staff for losing circ manager and long-time writer Paul Anderson, who passed away Tuesday from ALS at the age of 38. He had been working for the mag since 1992, making him one of the title's most experienced veterans alongside Andy McNamara.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Former Gamasutra news editor and current Atlus localization guy Nich Maragos has just updated his blog (hurray!) with notes on a very neat Mario video series, and one that showcases an oddly passive angle on everyone's favorite moustachio-ed plumber.

Nich reveals: "The Detteiu Mario series (available in eight installments [in video on YouTube] so far: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight) is the work of a man who decided to hack his own levels of Super Mario World, the first 16-bit Super Mario game, in a way that allows the levels to be completed with no controller input whatsoever."

He continues: "This isn't so clever in and of itself; it wouldn't be so hard to construct a level that drops Mario onto a conveyor belt that takes him directly to the exit. What makes these videos so incredible to watch is the style, inventiveness, and wit that goes into the design... Under the direction of the designer (one 'daigam'...) Mario becomes sort of a cross between Buster Keaton and Mr. Magoo, blithely making razor-thin escapes through impossible deathtraps... the capper gets more and more outrageous until Mario literally sleepwalks his way through defeating one of the game's major bosses." These are, as Nich says, awesome - peruse through them and grin handily this weekend!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)