[Last week's UK conference had some pretty GSW-worthy stuff flecked into it, so we'll be printing full versions of a couple of Simon Parkin and Gamasutra editors' write-ups of the sessions - starting out with some razor-sharp deconstruction from Braid's Jon Blow, for which the audio/slides are now available on his blog.]

In an inspiring talk at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Braid creator Jonathan Blow has been discussing how developers can "produce great games that will change people's lives", given the fact that, in today's market, "mainstream games are conflicted works".

Blow, who is a former programming columnist for Game Developer magazine and a sought-after consultant in the game biz, as well as the creator of IGF prize-winning Xbox Live Arcade title Braid, addressed the conference on "...how to build games that are important - that address the human condition but are still good games."

The creator started by asking what the problems are that act as obstacles to this aim? He noted: "Mainstream games are conflicted works. People can sense this. Games don’t resonate if the work is disharmonious. How can we remove this conflict that’s built into our games, and what is it?"

The Rise Of The Art Game

Blow started by referencing 'art games' as a genre. Often created by one person, they cost very little or nothing to make - and he suggested that they're not just little independent games, but they have a purpose. Often they are trying to communicate a theme emotionally or intellectually – not via the plot or characters, but via the framework that makes up the game.

One notable example is The Marriage by current Sims Studio head Rod Humble. The abstract game has you manipulating shapes and colors and "understanding your play session as it unfolds in front of you", but essentially, you play as the force of attraction.

This title helped to inspired other abstract play experiences that can be projected onto - for example Gravitation by Jason Rohrer. According to Blow: "Changing the design elements changes the metaphorical meaning of any game experience. Adding and subtracting the rules, you can move from any game to any game."

But what's the difference between this and more mainstream titles? Blow suggested that when we sit down and try to design a mainstream game, we start with story, setting and characters. Then developers create a gameplay system that will be fun to lay the story and setting on to.

As he noted: "Gameplay elements have meanings outside of the visual and linear; the meaning of the gameplay rules is often in conflict within the visual meanings from the linear meanings, which results in a game becoming conflicted."

Resolving The Conflict In Mainstream Games

In fact, the Braid creator suggested, game elements (for example story and gameplay meaning) work against each other, resulting in a conflicted product: "We are a young medium because we’ve yet to come to understand this."

He then listed out some specific examples - noting that they are commercially successful products, so these issues are not inhibiting success for the games in question:

- BioShock: there's a 'Little Sister problem' in altruism versus balance. Blow noted that there's only a marginal difference in the rewards you receive, no matter whether you choose to rescue or kill the Little Sisters. The game mechanics are telling you that it doesn’t matter which way you choose. So effectively, the game says that the Little Sister doesn’t matter, while the plot says that it does matter." He suggested that "...this is disingenuous [and] robs the game of its emotional impact and potential."

- Grand Theft Auto IV: Blow commented that girlfriends (and boyfriends) all have ‘benefits’ for befriending them. However, one character does not - Kate. The game rules tell you that you have no future with Kate (as she gives you no gameplay benefit) but, in the plot, the writers make Kate a romantic interest - a person pivotal to the story. So the game designer is saying 'don’t care about this person', but the game scriptwriter is saying 'do care about this person.'

- Half-Life 2: You often end up in an sealed-off area with your in-game companion Alyx Vance, and when you kill enough enemies you can move on to the next arena. Alyx will open these doors when you’ve cleared the room. Finally, opening a locked door gives you in-game rewards. Blow notes: "In other words, doors are the obstacles keeping you from the good stuff." In the game, the writers want you to feel close to Alyx, so you have short cut-scenes, and story elements happen as the doors are being opened. In this case, the game designer has taught you to get through the doors quickly so you can get your hands on the goodies - while the scriptwriters want to use this opportunity for you to get to know Alyx. The gameplay is well designed, and so is the fiction, but "...they fit together disingenuously."

Possible Solutions For Dissonance

So how can these conflicts be solved? How about having no story? This isn't an option, because story-based titles are the games that everyone buys.

Blow asked: "Why aren’t we building $10 million versions of Pac-Man? Maybe it’s because of tradition – as our computational abilities have increased, our aspirations have raised to movies."

So perhaps the challenge for the future is to scale up the art games whose narrative is implicit, rather than explicit, he argued.

What's an ideal solution for existing AAA titles, then? Blow suggested that 'tight coupling', where "...we do our best to eliminate conflicts" between story and dynamical meanings, is the best way to deal with such issues. Of course, he agrees: "These conflicts will happen because of the way that games are constructed".

But in Blow's world, a game where the story and gameplay fits together much more closely would help mainstream games become much less conflicted - and the expansion of the art game concept may lead to whole new avenues of less conflicted creativity.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Gonna do this week's round up from big sister site Gamasutra and other Think Services sites all at once this time - partly cos it's been so darn busy we didn't get to do a midweek update, yay.

Notable in here - a very neat roundtable with the abstract shooter kings, some ninja game design theory, the visual/design creation of BioShock (pictured), the gaming history of the Atari 8-bits, Xbox Live Community Games detailed, and lots more.

Gamasutra Features

Quelling The Rage: Carmack and Willits Speak Out
"What's the story behind new id IP RAGE? In this in-depth Gamasutra interview, John Carmack and Tim Willits discuss the state of the Doom/Quake developer, signing the game with EA, and why they're trying to "do something different.""

A History of Gaming Platforms: Atari 8-Bit Computers
"Gamasutra's acclaimed game history series continues, following entries for the Commodore 64, Vectrex, Apple II, Atari 2600, and Mattel Intellivision, with a look at the Atari 400, 800 and beyond, from Fractalus through Dandy."

Analyze This: What To Make of the Industry's Urge to Merge?
"With the Activision/Vivendi deal concluded and EA/Take-Two still in play, Gamasutra asks analysts from Screen Digest, Wedbush Morgan and EEDAR - why so much consolidation, and more importantly, who's next?"

Emotion Engineering: A Scientific Approach For Understanding Game Appeal by Stéphane Bura
"Is there a defining theory for game design? Kalisto and 10tacle designer Bura tries to create a 'periodic table of elements' for creating games - from surprise through dread and beyond."

The Indie Shooter Roundtable: Mak, Cho, And Omega Fire At Will
"The renaissance of the shoot-em-up has brought new perspectives to the genre - and Gamasutra sits down with the creators of Everyday Shooter, Blast Works, and Every Extend for a cross-cultural state of the union."

Gamasutra News Originals

In-Depth: Xbox Live Community Games - Multerer Tells All
"Microsoft is debuting XNA Community Games for Xbox 360 this fall - but what's the story behind it? XNA general manager Boyd Multerer discusses the royalty specifics, professional game developers using XNA, and why he'd like to see big-budget retail games releasing companion mini-games via XNA Community Games."

Develop: Media Molecule On The Power Of Constraints
"At the Develop Conference in the UK, Media Molecule's Alex Evans has been giving a 'semi-post mortem' of LittleBigPlanet for PlayStation 3, even within its completion crunch, suggesting that "arbitrary constraints" are the key to making both great games and enabling great user-generated content."

Epic's Capps Defends Unreal Engine 3's Flexibility
"Epic Games president Mike Capps has been commenting on the flexibility of Unreal Engine 3 for developing more diverse genres of games, referencing the Gears Of War/Unreal Tournament series by suggesting that while UE3 is "made to be modified and extensible... I like to say that it's ready to go to make a game, if you're making our game.""

Gamefest: Designing Rapture To Make Sense In BioShock
"How do you create a believable space for an entirely unreal location? Gamasutra was at Microsoft's Gamefest event, where 2K Marin's lead environmental artist Hogarth de la Plante and lead level designer Jean-Paul LeBreton looked back at the creation of BioShock's city of Rapture."

Interview: Creative Assembly's Sutherns Talks Total War Franchise
"Sega-owned developer Creative Assembly is continuing its noted Total War strategy series on PC with Empire: Total War - and Gamasutra recently sat down with the company's Mark Sutherns, who discussed AI, piracy, pathfinding, and expanding the genre outside the 'hardcore' PC gamer."

Casual Connect: Wildtangent CEO On The Fall Of Console Gaming
"Drawing from his experiences as CEO of Wildtangent, Alex St. John offered Casual Connect Seattle attendees a vision of what the games industry would look like in the year 2020, with predictions of everything from the 'death of the console' to the rise of the online gaming market."

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

[Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner held a fascinating San Diego Comic-Con session on translating games to films, designing Sands of Time, and thinking back to The Last Express - and Chris Remo got round to writing up a full account of the neat lecture this week, including Mechner's surprise announcement on the return of Karateka.]

Despite getting his start as a programmer with Karateka in 1984 and making his name with Prince of Persia in 1989, Jordan Mechner has never fully settled into the role of career game designer.

To a career that has seen documentary film directing and Hollywood screenwriting, Mechner is now adding a story credit on the upcoming Prince of Persia graphic novel.

During the San Diego Comic-Con, Mechner answered questions about his quarter-century ouevre in a lecture which Gamasutra initially covered late last week.

Ostensibly held to promote the graphic novel, the Q&A session ended up focusing much more heavily on the well-known games and feature film adaptation. It was moderated by Mark Siegel, editorial director of publisher First Second Books.

Siegel introduced Mechner, and explained how the publishing deal came about. "We're known for sort of classy, literary graphic novels," Siegel began. "When I was searching for my favorite graphic novelists in the world, I had this fond memory of Prince of Persia. I hadn't played since pretty much the Apple II days - the first Prince of Persia. I was really, really blithely unaware of what had happened to Prince of Persia in the intervening ten or twelve years."

Blissfully ignorant, Siegel contacted Mechner with the proposition. As he recalled, "When I found out there were all these games, and a movie with Jerry Bruckheimer, I thought, 'Oh, well, nice chatting with you, Mr. Mechner.'" Much to Siegel's surprise, Mechner was receptive to the idea, and the resultant book written by A.B. Sina (who, Siegel noted, "may or may not be a member of Iranian royalty - an actual prince of Persia) and illustrated by Alex Puvilland and LeUyen Pham will be released this fall.

(According to Siegel, internet comments on preview pages have ranged from "This artwork is great!" to "This artwork sucks! It looks hand-drawn!")

"In What Way Is This Even The Same Character?"

After that explanation of the graphic novel's origins, the microphone stayed with Mechner for the remainder of the session. Early on, the designer was asked about the evolution of the Prince of Persia series, as well as Mechner's own evolution as a game designer.

"The last Ubisoft game I was intimately involved in creatively was [2003's] Sands of Time, where I was a writer and game designer," he pointed out, indicating that he speaks mainly as an observer when it comes to more recent entries - but he is looking forward to Ubisoft Montreal's fall entry.

"When I started making the first Prince of Persia game in 1985, I was right out of college," Mechner recalled. "I was really focused just on doing a game, getting the bugs out of it, and being able to ship it. At the time, the job 'game designer' didn't really exist as we know it today. So though what I was doing was designing a game, the job I had was 'programmer' - that was my skill. Designing the game, programming it, and doing the animation were so intertwined."

"I didn't realize until after the game shipped that what was valuable was not the coding, but the design, which was something people could take and translate to other platforms," he pointed out. "Now, there's Ubisoft making new Prince of Persia games, which I kind of have to look at and say, 'In what way is this even the same character?' Yet there's something in its DNA that's still the same."

Mechner raised a question about the nature of the titular Prince, one which parallels questions about other long-running game characters such as The Legend of Zelda's Link, and implied some answers may be coming in the graphic novel. "That's like the graphic novel - are all these different princes of Persia the same character?" he asked.

"What is the prince of Persia? In all these different versions of the story, they could all be conflicting. If you've played the games, and you read the graphic novels, you'll find things that are almost echoes of the game," he continued. "It's not like, 'I remember this scene.' It's a totally different set of characters, a totally different story."

"That Style Wasn't My Style"

In 2005, speaking to Wired Magazine, Mechner voiced his distate for a number of creative choices made by the Ubisoft Montreal team in 2004's Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, a game in which he was not substantively involved. "I'm not a fan of the artistic direction, or the violence that earned it an M rating," he said at the time. "The story, character, dialog, voice acting, and visual style were not to my taste."

Asked about that disapproval, Mechner softened his criticism without actually recanting it. "Speaking of sound bites, I said something once that got quoted a lot of places about Warrior Within," he recalled. "You know, I don't like to criticize a particular game. Basically, what I meant to say was that the style wasn't my style. It's not what I would have done. But I'd rather just let that be what it is - Warrior Within and Two Thrones. And the new game is a totally different style. Rather than focus on that, I'd rather focus on the positive, and hope the new game is really awesome. I'm glad they're taking it in a new direction with this game."

Still, the upcoming Mike Newell-directed film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which is based on Mechner's own screenplay, is markedly distinct to the post-Mechner games. "Nothing from Warrior Within and Two Thrones is in the movie," the designer said flatly.

"A Video Game Story...Is Meant To Be Played"

Multiple questions dealt with the issue of translating a game story into a feature film or graphic novel. "Adapting a video game script into a movie script is actually, based on what needs to be done, to write an entirely new story," Mechner admitted. "If it ends up being the same thing, it's because on a deep level it's got the same meaning, similar plot elements and characters, and the same genre. But the way you achieve that has to be totally different."

He elaborated on the differences between the types of narrative. "A video game story is not meant to be, 'watch,'" he explained. "It's not meant to be told to you, it's meant to be played. In Sands of Time, you basically spend the game fighting monsters and being acrobatic. It's fun to do, but it's not necessarily fun to watch somebody else doing on screen. On a movie, you don't necessarily want to just watch somebody doing stunts, you want to be taken on an emotional journey. The awesome action is awesome only insofar as you care about the characters and what happens to them."

As an example, he brought up an early plot point in Sands of Time that effectively turns all individuals in the game world, with the exception of the prince and companion Farah, into sand monsters. "This is great for a game - it turns the palace into a place where he has to do all this dangerous running and jumping," he said. "And everyone he meets is a monster who's trying to kill him, which is great, because the only way he can interact with them is to kill them. But there's no button for, 'talk to someone.' All these other ways of interacting with people didn't exist in [our] game. You can't interact with anybody you meet except with your sword."

"For the movie, despite the differences with the Sands of Time video game story, it's very reminiscent of what the game's story is," he continued. "But you want other characters in a movie - not just the one main love story. You want things that happen elsewhere in the world, not just in rooms in the palace. Adapting from an interactive medium to a non-interactive medium means changes to the story, if you want to do it right."

"The Great Thing About The Myths Is That They're Timeless"

Speaking to his ongoing influences across the franchise, Mechner unsurprisingly cited Persian cultural folklore. "There's a book called the Shahnameh - the Persian Book of Kings - written down in the eleventh century," he said. "It's awesome. I had read some of the stories, but I didn't read the whole book until I was doing research for the Sands of Time game. It's a treasure trove."

"It's a lot of mythology, and it's sort of similar to One Thousand and One Nights, which was one of the other influences on the games and movie," Mechner continued. "Some of the stories from One Thousand and One Nights came from Persia, some came from Syria, some came from China, and so on. The great thing about the myths is that they're timeless. The idea of retelling the same stories, but having them be different, is in some ways the same as what we're doing [in video games]. The storyline in Prince of Persia 1 doesn't fit with the story in Sands of Time or Prince of Persia 3D - it can't be the same prince. There are contradictions, but it doesn't matter."

"The Last Express...Was A Labor Of Love For Me"

Asked by Gamasutra about Mechner's 1997 real-time adventure game The Last Express, rendered in a unique rotoscoped visual style and telling a fictionalized account of the days leading up to World War I, the designer expressed fond memories but also held doubts as to the viability of further games in that style.

"I love The Last Express," he said. "It was a labor of love for me and the team. There are a couple of members of the team here today. They coded the elaborate logic that would make it possible for characters to interact around the train. It was incredibly expensive at the time. It was 5 million dollars - that's the kind of budget where you need to sell millions and millions of copies, and adventure games just don't."

"The audience for adventure games is just a lot smaller than the audience for action games," he said. "I'm really fascinated by the potential of that kind of gameplay, but not any time soon."

"POP 3D Was What We Didn't Want To Do"

Though Sands of Time was highly acclaimed with its re-imagining of the franchise, Red Orb Software was less critically praised for its 1999 attempt to bring the series into the third dimension: Prince of Persia 3D. Mechner reflected on how that game informed the design processes of himself and the Ubisoft Montreal team going into Sands of Time.

"In 2002, when Ubisoft Montreal and I were finding how to bring Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time to next-gen consoles, we were looking at Prince of Persia 3D as an example of what we didn't want to do," he stated. "At the time, a lot of other games that had the basic Prince of Persia running and jumping mechanic. [They] just weren't exciting to us."

It wasn't until the team hit on making a more explicitly three-dimensional game that the design clicked. "I think the insight that really got us all excited was that because it's a 3D world, we could be vertical as well as horizontal," he explained. "You could be running on walls, not just running around. The whole game then became about that, about creating levels around that, and a story around that. Parkour was an inspiration. We were trying to do something that would have the same excitement and impact in 2002 that simple 2D fluid running and jumping had in 1989."

Wrapping Up

Towards the end of the session, Mechner fielded a question about Karateka, his first foray into commercial games and one that laid the groundwork for the impressively fluid animation that was Prince of Persia's trademark. Surprising the audience, he revealed that the series will return, and "it's not going to be in the way you expect."

The Q&A wrapped up with a question about Mechner's game system of choice. "For Sands of Time, which is the last Prince of Persia I played very deeply and my hands know how to play, I played it on PlayStation [2], since that was the lead development platform," he recalled. "Now I have an Xbox 360, and that's the one I play a lot of different games on."

Following the Q&A, Gamasutra sat down for an extensive The Last Express retrospective with technical lead Mark Moran and producer Mark Netter - look for it in the near future.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yay for weekend GameSetLinks - headed by David Kushner's IEEE article on machinima (Bloodspell pictured!), and closely followed by Benj Edwards' 1UP article on Simon - the small colored device, not the GameSetWatch weblogger.

Also in here somewhere - why Scrabulous fighting is annoying, a neat European hack for a very Japanese NES game, the Mean Girls game, someone playing far too many Rock Band songs in a row, and... other stuff!

Okey dokey schmokey:

IEEE Spectrum: Machinima's Movie Moguls
By the excellent David Kushner, of Masters Of Doom fame - via MBF.

1UP: Simon Turns 30: The History of the Toy and Gaming's First Grudge
More excellent Benj Edwards write-ups for 1UP. About Ralph Baer, of course!

Indie Game Panel Reviews [July Edition] by Game Tunnel
Now cutely described as 'long-running Famitsu-styled panels', heh.

Interview with a drum hero: Rock Band pro plays all 235 songs in one day | Fidgit
'I just wanted to see if I could do it. Well, actually, about four years ago, I was training to do something similar for Dance Dance Revolution.'

Variety: 'Video Games Impact Report'
Lots of famous people. And Jamil! Haw.

Critical-Gaming: Organic and Inorganic Design
'It's a shame when a game works hard to establish a fiction and a form only to take away from it by arranging levels that don't make sense according to that fiction.'

COPE: James Wallis levels with you » Scrofulous
'Here, in three short Q&As, are what annoys me about the Scrabulous mess.'

auntie pixelante › warsaw city
'warsaw city is a patriotic hack [of nes game battle city] that has you defending poland from an invasion of nazi tanks'

Are Credits Really a Thing of the Past? « Applied Game Design
'I have eight games here right now, and not a one of them has credits in the manuals. Zip, zero.'

MTV Multiplayer » ‘Mean Girls’ Game Plays Like ‘Puzzle Quest’ In A High School, Stars Lindsay Lohan
Wow, awesome crazy.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Bell, Game, and Candle' is a regular new GameSetWatch column by game commentator Alex Litel, discussing stuff that happens in the game business. This time - trips to North Carolina and Los Angeles reveal ineffable truths about the human condition.]

As a young person in this twenty-first century, it is requisite that I participate in some sort of counterculture; that is why my vice of choice is cosmopolitan patience - I love to wait and spend most of my time doing such. These waits could be anything from a David Sedaris book signing to vampire bingo. In addition, there is also the occasional wait related to video games and thus I am here today to share the two most memorable (and possibly only) gaming waits of the first half of 2008.

North Carolina

It is an early February night and, as I do every night, I check out the following day’s “Buzz Waits” on LineWire; I notice something sizzling in a peculiar place—Cary, North Carolina. Being an impolitic fiend, I book the next flight to Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

Eight or so hours later, I come out of my cotton tent and notice I’m in front of an office in front of some guy carrying a Huey Lewis & the News duffel bag and wearing sunglasses and a Cosby sweater. Then I began panicking because I was certain that I had indulged in some sort of hallucinogenic; it was an utterly rubbish wait, perhaps the worst since that midnight screening of The Terminal.

“Hello there, my name is Kudo Tsunoda,” said the man behind me. “What is your name? I am trying to get the names of everyone here at Epic before I enter the building.”

“Oh, I’m Alex Litel, enthusiast of enthusiasm,” I responded. “Where would I happen to be?”

Kudo told me I was at the headquarters of Epic Games, developers of the Gears of War series, and even though I was not an Epic or Microsoft employee, he insisted that I accompany him into his meeting “to ensure that the deciding is not corporatized and actually reflects the interests of the common gamer. Also, I really have not played Gears of War because I am not so hot on the kill-fests with contrived narratives.”

So, I tag along with Kudo on a fairy treacherous fifteen-meter quest from the fifty-three degree coldness of Cary at eight in the morning into a heated office, where a man who is obviously recovering from serious RTC follicle follies greeted me.

“Clifford Michael Bleszinski, commander of aesthetic here at Epic; Epic Games has developed games such as Dare to Dream, Jazz Jackrabbit, Unreal, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Unreal Tournament, , Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict, Gears of War, Unreal Tournament 3 and engines such as Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 2, and Unreal Engine 3,” said the man.

“Epic Games is currently at super secretly at work on the game Gears of War 2, a sequel to the 2006 game of the year Gears of War that no one suspects the studio is developing, for a late fall release,” Bleszinski continued while I pondered if he was a fellow Jew. “There is this stupendous teaser that will be unveiled at the close of the Microsoft Game Developers Conference 2008 keynote in thirteen-ish days that depicts this gnarly chainsaw battle overlaid with this trendy gritty graphic style.”

Then we walked up into to the conference room, where Clifford Michael Bleszinski introduced Kudo and me to a whole bunch of “Epicureans.” The meeting as it went down, more or less, follows.

Epicurean #1: Yo CliffyB.
Clifford Michael Bleszinski: Clifford Michael Bleszinski has told you Clifford Michael Bleszinski wants to be called by his entire name, like Neil Patrick Harris. Clifford Michael Bleszinski is an artist who desires to eschew sophomoric tendencies like nicknames, juvenile creativity, and unkempt hair. A man in his thirties must engage in professionalism and maturity in order to be taken seriously.
Epicurean #1: Sorry, Clifford Michael Bleszinski.
CliffyB: Clifford Michael Bleszinski thought this should be started with a gameplay demonstration, which can talk for itself.
Kudo Tsunoda: Alright.
Cliff Your Hands Say Yeah: Kudo, it is very disrespectful to wear sunglasses while I am demonstrating this game.
Kudo I can see fine; like Bono of U2, I have a medical predisposition to light.
Clifforoni: Anyways, as Clifford Michael Bleszinski has said in internal meetings the past seven months, BioShock was a fucking epiphany; you have to do a human story with characters who dissimilar to those found in a Duke Nukem game, sonorousness, and conspicuous originality. A game has to be about something—--the lawman beating up the wrong guy or sailors fighting in the dance hall.
Kudo: Clifford Michael Bleszinski, how does Gears 2 differ from the first title?
The Cliffster: It is darker, deeper and bloodier—man, there’s fountains and trails of blood, classic Jodorowsky. There are these extremely intimate chainsaw battles that allow you to slice Locust in half. But simultaneously there is this ironic “Semi-Charmed Life” overture. It is really girl-friendly, goes mano-a-mano with Nora Ephron or CSI: Miami in the ability to attract females with a story innovative in how deeply personal it is and accessible gameplay. There are also these really beautiful environments that make Yellowstone look like Bakersfield, even more so than the first game.
Me: All of this sounds so bloody am-dram; you should do something original like have Marcus and Dominic be lovers.
Kudo: That is some narrative innovation right there, I agree with it.
Cliffs n’ Chips: That is not possible, Dominic’s main motivation in Gears 2 is searching for his wife Maria, who appears in the game. He is on a very heterosexual quest.
Epicurean #2: “Heterosexual quest”? Are we making a video game or pornographic film here?
Epicurean #3: Both, dude. Ha! Psychic high five time!
Me: How does that null the possibility of Dominic and Marcus falling in love with each other? They can have bisexual discovery like Ennis and Jack. It might, just maybe, even be a little subversive.
Gears of War Dude: I don’t understand the gay experience; I don’t want to be held responsible for an inauthentic portrayal.
Me: Oh please, the John Hughes excuse did not pass in the early 90s and it definitely will not fly today, regardless of medium. The cardboard characters who the relationship is between are interchangeable, but it is important that the protagonist be involved in the relationship instead of a “fringe” character.
Clifforoni: Are you going to want to use Antony & the Johnsons for a Gears 2 ad as well?
Me: If you want an ad so solemn that it will make “Mad World” look like Pushing Daises, then yes; however, your eyes are telling me that your shortlist is the Jeff Buckley cover of “Hallelujah,” “Hoppípolla,” “Suicide is Painless,” Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt,” and a children’s chorus something from Sea Change or TV on the Radio.
Cliffhanger: The point is to sell a video game, something that you are not going to do with “Gloomy Sunday.”
Me: You do have a good point there.
Clifford the Big Red Dog: Yes, Clifford Michael Bleszinski is like a factory of quips—total East Coast Diablo Cody.
Epicurean #3: My eggo is preggo, homeskillet!
Chocolate Cliff Cookie Dough: That brings this meeting to a close.
Kudo: Sounds good, thanks for showing us your latest masterpiece.
Cliff Upper Lip: Also, Alan Alda is voicing Chairman Prescott—the leader of the Coalition of Governments.

Santa Monica

On a Friday in the middle of June, I am walking down Cloverfield and I notice David Hayter, David Benioff, Major Tom, Michael McCullers, Zak Penn, Mark Fergus and Werner Herzog waiting in a line outside some building. Of course, I immediately joined the line after noticing patience luminary Werner Herzog was in it. Using my deductive skills, I figured that the crowd of primarily screenwriters was there to pitch their take on some license; I was right, Capcom’s Lost Planet somehow warrants a film adaptation.

(At this moment, you probably are asking “Alex, what would qualify you to be amidst established screenwriters?” To which, I would respond “I was briefly attached to Stay Alivee, the direct-to-DVD sequel to the apparently successful 2006 horror film Stay Alive, and I pitched a sequel to 300 that is just as historically accurate as its predecessor, it takes place 2132 and has robots.”)

I actually have played Lost Planet, and, while it may have only been a demo that I didn’t spend more than twelve minutes with two years ago, I remembered the important things—jetpacks, snow, colonizing, aliens, bases, space, shooting, mediocrity, and pirates.

In other words, it is a relatively easy pitch—much easier than having to devise a storyline from Hot Wheels, Ziploc bags, or Jimmy Kimmel Live (to be honest, this was an elevator pitch for one TV movie: Jimmy Kimmel Live: the Hot Wheels Quest for Ziploc).

Unlike the other wait I wrote about, this was completely solid. There was plenty of people and no lack of vivacity.

What did I pitch?

“Okay, so this spaceship crashes on the completely snowy planet Commodore Four with this guy, I don’t know, Ralph Holden. Holden was on his way to examine Commodore Five as a possible outpost for the remaining human colonial population.

This ragtag gang of space pirates, who have these rad mechs and stuff, discovers him—techie named Zach, tough-as-nails chick named Zip and her too-cool-for-school adopted bro Zap, who is the leader. Leader quickly notices his gold dog tag, which symbolizes that is a commander—something that will prove useful in the gang’s battle against this clandestine party led by this enigmatic figure, Zeta, that is determined to dominate over all resources once and for all.

There is a love triangle between Zeta, Ralph and Zip. Zeta is the abusive, albeit beautiful and powerful, ex-boyfriend of Zip, and pushed her to learn Space-Fu and to current distant and distrusting tendencies. This makes the fight personal for Ralph, who is, as I have said, in love with Zip and vice versa.

However, Zeta’s forces attack the gang’s base and grab Ralph and Zip, who are sleeping. Both are sprayed with a mind control drug, manufactured by a company owned by Zeta, that makes them totally subservient to Zeta.

Zip falls back in love with Zeta and is impregnated by him, whilst Ralph becomes another soldier in Zeta’s vast forces. Zeta offers Zip a private plane for the two of them in exchange for her hand in marriage, she agrees. All of this occurs in the span of half-a-day.

At that moment, the human colony army that Ralph is a member of and Zach locates him by finding the coordinates of his heart GPS. There is a brief battle, during which both parties discover members have turned on them.

Then, Zap works with army chemists to design an create an antidote that they would bomb the base that Zip and Ralph are at. Then they bomb the base, an action that reduces Zeta’s forces to zero.

The now-mentally free soldiers that were Zeta’s forces revolt against him, easily toppling Zeta. Ralph and Zip kiss against the backdrop of explosions.

As a new member of a gang, Ralph sets off a climate bomb and the planet turns into myriad of grass fields and bodies of water. Commodore Four becomes the new permanent outpost for humanity. The end.”

Apparently, I was not picked to write this film adaptation.

[Alex Litel can be reached at alexlitel@gmail.com and occasionally found at alexlitel.blogspot.com. This column may include some statements and facts which are not, in fact, factual.]

Posted by Alex Litel at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[In this constructive editorial, Ron Carmel of 2D Boy (World of Goo, in development for PC and WiiWare/Wii) takes a look at the developer's perspective on Xbox Live Arcade and Xbox Live Community Games, and calls out for Microsoft to improve on what he sees as unfavorable terms.]

I want to love you, Microsoft!

I really do, and I want to raise a family of little indie games with you, but every time things are starting to feel good between us, you go and do something to spoil it.

Microsoft has so far made three moves that are unfriendly towards independent game developers:

1. Xbox Live Arcade royalties cut by about half
2. De-listing of games from XBLA
3. Xbox Live Community Games terms established

The first two have already been discussed to death and I feel it's too late to do anything about them. I would, however, like to discuss the third item in the hope that good people at Microsoft will take note and reconsider their approach to Community Games before it officially launches this coming holiday season. So if you know someone who is involved with the Community Games initiative, kindly send them a link to this page.

When I first saw the announcement I got pretty excited. On the surface, everything looked good - huge audience, 70 percent royalty rate, and only a peer-review process standing between a game and its audience. Fantastic, I thought! This is certainly Good for Games!

Good For Games

The video game medium has been in a bit of a rut for about a decade. Many truly great games have come out in the last 10 years, but the market is dominated by big-budget photorealistic sequels and movie tie-ins produced by large public companies. Many of these games are the equivalent of second rate airport novels, straight-to-DVD movies, formulaic TV, and synthetic tween pop.

I'm not saying anything new here, and it's clear why this trend exists. Brand recognition reduces risk and creates more sales, sales create profit, and public companies are single-mindedly focused on profit. It is the explicit responsibility of the board of directors and top executives to create these profits for their shareholders.

Design, creativity, innovation, and expression are always secondary considerations in this environment. John Riccitiello recently said: "I don't think the investors give a shit about our quality. They care about our earnings per share."

I find his bluntness refreshing.

One characteristic of independent games is that design often trumps financial considerations. This means that compared to public companies, independent developers tend to:

1. Get a lower return on investment
2. Produce more creative games

Anything that makes it easier for independent developers to earn a living by making games will drive more developers to go indie. As indie developers grow in numbers we will be seeing more creativity and more new kinds of games and the medium will evolve and change and be vital.

A diverse and ever-changing landscape of games is not just more fun and interesting - I think it's essential for long-term health of the game industry.

Problems With Xbox Live Community Games

So what about XBLCG is bad for games? First, it puts a very low cap on the amount developers can charge for their games, but more importantly, Microsoft's promotion gimmick is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Price Cap
Say I make a game that I'd like to sell for $15. That prices me out of XBLCG, and would force me to go through XBLA with its significantly lower royalty rate and difficult certification process. Why handicap developers instead of letting the free market determine how much they can charge for their games? For an individual developer, this might limit how much time and money can be invested in a game.

On a larger scale, I believe this will promote the making of quick and cheap games, and will tend to drive quality-focused developers away from XBLCG. A price cap is fine if you feel you need one, but cap it at a more reasonable amount like $20 - generally the high end for Xbox Live Arcade.

Promotion
This one is a much larger problem. Microsoft reserves the right to promote your game with or without your consent and take an extra 10 percent to 30 percent for this "service," dropping the royalty rate to as low as 40 percent for the duration of the promotion.

Microsoft's announcement tries to present this promotion as a great opportunity for developers, and in some cases it might be, but it could actually end up hurting the developer financially.

According to a fellow indie who has a game out on XBLA, sales during the period when the game was promoted by Microsoft were about double than what they were the week following the promotion. Keep in mind that the fall in sales is only partly due to the end of the promotion. It also followed the natural decline that happens with any game over time.

If the royalty rate drops from 70 percent to 40 percent for the promotional period, the promotion would barely affect the developer's bottom line, only stuffing Microsoft's pockets. Worse, if sales do not nearly double, developers actually lose money due to the promotion. Nickel and diming developers will not help XBLCG get the best games and is in my opinion a myopic strategy.

Fixing The Promotion Royalties

So what's the alternative? Let's assume that Microsoft will promote five XBLCG games at any given time, probably ones with the highest demo-to-purchase conversion rate. (I chose five based on the number of XBLA titles simultaneously promoted on Xbox.com.)

A quick calculation based on rough XBLA sales estimates shows that the top five XBLA games account for about 40 percent of the total revenues in a given period. Taking an additional 10 to 30 percent (let's call it 20 percent) from this 40 percent is the equivalent of taking 8 percent across the board. So just lower your royalty rate to 62 percent and drop the sneaky stuff, Microsoft.

It would be a little lower than WiiWare's and PSN's royalty rates, but a more attractive proposition overall, considering that you have the best development tools - and developers won't have to go through a strict approval process or develop on custom hardware (expensive in terms of both time and money). Additionally, developers would actually be grateful when you promote their games.

If you feel you must keep this extra deduction on promoted games, there are still things you can do to make it more palatable. First, there's a huge difference between a 10 percent and 30 percent deduction. Get rid of the sliding scale or set predictable parameters for how the actual deduction rate is determined. Otherwise, developers can only assume that the deduction will always be 30 percent.

Second, allow developers to opt out of this promotion. If you think you're offering a fair deal, something that would actually benefit developers, let them participate of their own free will.

Microsoft's Deeper Problem

I can't help but feel that Microsoft sees small developers more as laborers than long-term partners who are also entitled to turn a profit.

I'd like to illustrate this by walking through how Microsoft calculates royalties for XBLA and XBLCG. First, Microsoft Points are converted into US dollars, and then (if necessary) to the currency in which the developer is paid.

Because of the weak dollar, prices for Microsoft Points are higher outside the US. In Europe, for example, players pay about 50 percent more for a Point than in the US, but this extra revenue never reaches the developer because Microsoft converts all Points directly to dollars. For sales in Europe, a developer might think he is getting a 70 percent royalty rate, but in reality he gets a mere 47 percent of the sale price while Microsoft profiteers off the exchange rate.

I very much doubt that this practice would remain in place if the dollar ever overtakes the Euro. In contrast to Microsoft's underhanded tactics, WiiWare royalties for sales in Europe are paid out in Euros, so if players pay more, the developer gets more as well.

It gets worse. The XBLA distribution agreement allows Microsoft to change the rate at which they convert Points to dollars independently of how much players pay for Points. Initially, these conversion rates lined up, but currently the Points-to-dollars conversion rate is about 3 percent lower than the Dollars-to-Points conversion rate. This means that Microsoft has already sliced 3 percent off the royalty rate for every single XBLA developer.

What good is setting a royalty rate in a contract if Microsoft retains the right to lower it as it sees fit?

Conclusion

The bottom line is that under the current terms I won't consider developing a game for XBLA or XBLCG, and I'm encouraging developers who have other options to stay away from those services as well. There is strength in numbers, and if we sell our games exclusively through the channels that offer the best terms - WiiWare, PSN, Steam, and Greenhouse - we will make those channels more successful and promote higher royalty rates industry-wide.

But even ignoring the bigger picture, I'd rather be working with companies like Nintendo, which not only offer terms that are financially better than Microsoft's but also deal with developers fairly and honestly.

Microsoft has an opportunity to do something Truly Great for Games here and I hold hope that it will. I'd be the first to jump on my soapbox and advocate its services if it does. Good for Games means more developers, better games, more game players, and in the long run more money for everyone - including Microsoft.

Posted by Chris Remo at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days, as well as any notable features on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The goodies in this latest version include a platformer inspired by a certain classic, an arena shooter, a commercial RPG, plus games from IGF finalists cactus and the guys at Three Rings Design.

Game Pick: 'Boondog' (Matthew Hart, freeware)
"A puzzle-oriented platformer largely inspired by Mechner's Prince of Persia series, where you progress from stage to stage by jumping and grabbing ledges, moving blocks or barrels, avoiding hazards and activating all manners of switches."

Game Pick: 'G:plus' (maw, freeware)
"An arena shooter in which your ship continuously moves in a perpetual orbit around the center of the screen, and time on the clock can only be replenished by collecting power-ups left behind by the enemies you've destroyed. Available for both Windows and Mac platforms."

Game Pick: 'The Spirit Engine 2' (Mark Pay, commercial indie - demo available)
"Gorgeous pixel art, engrossing gameplay, captivating soundtrack and engaging storyline - this sequel to the similarly-titled freeware RPG released by Mark Pay several years ago has pretty much everything going for it."

Game Pick: 'Stallions in America' (cactus, freeware)
"A new action game from cactus where players will get to choose one of the four available characters to take on a cross-country journey, filled with massive explosions and wanton destruction. Seeming inspired by a certain television series..."

Game Pick: 'Corpse Craft' (Three Rings Design, browser)
"A Collapse-like browser game by the developers of Puzzle Pirates made as an example game for their Whirled site. Take charge of a mobile workshop as you attempt to destroy your opponents' work sheds by unleashing hordes after hordes of undead."

Posted by timw at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Another of the complex lectures from last week's GameFest in Seattle that's well worth recapping on GSW - thanks to Christian Nutt (notes) and Michael Zenke (write-up) for encapsulating some really interesting concepts on just how art direction and gameplay imperatives blend.]

Microsoft's recent Gamefest featured a number of discussions talking about both gameplay and art, but none entwined the two disciplines as closely as a talk from two Valve employees.

Team Fortress 2 art director Moby Francke and Randy Lundeen of the Left 4 Dead team offered attendees a peak behind the scenes at Valve's unique design philosophy.

Team Fortress 2

Moby Francke kicked things off with an extensive discussion of Team Fortress 2, prefacing the new with an examination of the old. Francke explained that Valve hired the team behind the original TeamFortress Quake mod.

When development of the sequel to the eventual Half-Life mod version commenced, it was being created with a realistic military style, both in visual and gameplay terms.

Of course, it didn't end up launching as that realistic game. Instead, "TF is over-the-top from a gameplay perspective - you can rocket jump, you can magically heal people. They started to run into problems during play testing."

For example, there was a tiny medic patch on the sleeve of the medic, but it was nearly impossible to tell medics apart from other players.

After the fact, the Valve designers came to the conclusion that they should aim to match the game's look to the gameplay. This ties very closely into previous comments the artist has made about the current state of game art direction.

"Due to this high-paced, very stylized gameplay, we thought of going for something more unique, something that's more shape driven, color-driven," Francke noted.

He continued, "Readability was a very important thing - we wanted the characters to stand out in the world, and the ability to tell who is who. From a branding perspective, TF2 differentiates itself from other games quite easily."

Making the characters stand out required the artists and designers to develop multiple ways for players to "read" the world. They ended up with three different levels of readability.

The first was through simple colors: "Starting off with teams, we wanted to differentiate the characters through the colors alone inside the world. This is really the best way we could describe it." They used a color swatch that has a general set of colors per teams, not a simple red and blue distinction for clothes.

The second part of readability was grossly distinct physical shape. Color differentiates teams, but what class is your opponent? "We did it through silhouettes," said Francke. "We wanted very unique shapes; you can tell they have very different shoes and hats and clothing folds."

Francke concluded with the third level of readability, fine details for players to remember: "We wanted to put all the detailing up towards the chest area of characters, so you could easily see the weaponry - the patches, vests, bandoliers, neckties, caps, pants. They all contribute to this readability factor. We then also gradated the character from the dark bottoms to the contrasting upper torso for better readability."

The artists looked to three specific illustrators for the game's general look, each from the early 20th century, including Dean Cornwell and Norman Rockwell.

The third, and possibly the most important, was JC Leyendecker. From Leyendecker, artists pulled a sense of color, folds, shapes, and edge lighting.

Noted Francke, "A lot of his lighting was rendered from warm to cool - cool in the shadows, but never going black. He really rendered his silhouettes with function, like clothing folds. This will be read in the silhouette and the interior shapes of the characters when hit by the light."

The artist continued, "He used rim highlighting to pop the character from the world but at the same time to give the character more information. We used the same idea. We didn't want to go the cel-shaded route, we wanted to go more true to the way that lighting occurs."

To demonstrate, Francke showed a hand-painted rim lighting test on a screenshot which pops out the character: "At the same time you can see that without it, it just seems a little bit boring. You can see that the shadowed side gets lost into the background [without it]."

He offers up some comparisons of silhouettes, another Leyendecker signature: "It's a building block of character design - it's identifiable at first read. We work out the character in a three-quarter pose. The reason we do that is so you can get a little more information into the character, and it can be used as information for going into the modeling aspect."

This thought process even extended to black and gray models: "We solve the interior shadow shapes off of the interior design. There are some discrepancies but overall the character still obeys the model sheet."

This "readability" extends even to the world around the characters, he noted: "To contrast the two teams, for the red team we used predominantly warm colors - some grays, but they're warm as well. We used natural materials such as woods and red brick, and angled geometry."

"Then for the blue team we used cooler colors, and industrial materials such as concrete and steel, and orthogonal forms. Our world is hand-painted, lovingly," Francke continued. "We're actually analyzing the photo reference and then translating. Sometimes we look at other art for inspiration, like Miyazaki and some Disney as well."

He noted, particularly, that the brick and wood work even as hand-painted artistry: "It doesn't have to be a photo to show what the material is in some cases."

Left 4 Dead

Randy Lundeen, of the Left 4 Dead team, opened by his portion of the talk with some broad context. Left 4 Dead is an as-yet-unreleased Source engine title from Valve - originally developed by Turtle Rock studios, now known as Valve South. It's a cooperative zombie horror game that pits a group of players against an almost-unstoppable horde of onrushing undead.

Art is important to the game, but there are a lot of unique technological decisions going on as well. The game's "dynamic narrative" is entirely down to what the team calls the "AI Director." Explained Lundeen, "It's a presence in the game that is keeping track of all of your health, your ammo, and how you're playing, and it's controlling the pacing of the experience you're having in the game."

Showing imagery from the still in-development title, he continued: "As you can see, it's a very different game from TF2. It's dark and gritty, a cinematic experience. At the same time we want to take all of the lessons [learned by the TF2 team], particularly [regarding] the silhouettes."

The result is a game that relies on a number of filmic tricks to get across elements of tone and mood. These effects include color correction, artificial grain, and vignettes. Of course, the AI Director affords game-specific effects one could never see in a movie, such as local contrast enhancement, and a dynamically-communicated game state.

To begin with, Lundeen showed the audience an effects-free screenshot of the game. Minor visual changes are the first things added to this simplistic image. "First, we color correct," he said. "It simplifies the palette, but we still wanted health packs, blood, exit points to pop. We did that with a saturation threshold. Anything below that moves towards gray."

From there, the team added grain to the imagery: "We had a lot of dark spaces and a grain does a good job of implying detail in darkness. What we found from playtesting we found that if we apply grain uniformly, people would get tired. In the darker places, like a shadow, there's more grain, but in the brighter areas there's no grain."

"Another film effect is vignetting," he went on. "This is a lens artifact where you get dark edges around the edge of the screen. We decided we wanted to do vignetting just in the top corners. This is a really great looking effect."

Even still, he noted, there is such a thing as too much processing of the image. He elaborated on that point: "We didn't want to do it all around because we didn't want you to feel like you're looking through binoculars or a scope. Once we got it in the game, people didn't feel like it was obtrusive and it did a really good job of softening the top edge, focusing the gameplay down towards the center of the screen where you want your players to look."

With these elements in place to set the tone of the overall experience, the team explored options to enhance gameplay through visuals. They accomplished this by having visual cues related information to the player.

They accomplish this in a few ways, said the Valve staffer: "One is the notion of third strike. If a player goes down or gets killed in this state it's bad news." The third strike appears to the player as if the entire world were a black and white negative, with high contrast at the edges. "If the player is in this state, the player knows they need to get health right away."

The AI Director's omniscient knowledge of the game state allows the game's visual tone to change even before events take place. Said Lundeen, "We take the local contrast and crank it up. Everything gets sharper, like there's an adrenaline rush, and things start to feel more clear, like people get in near-death experiences. What the Director is subtly saying to you is, 'I am going to spawn 100 zombies around the corner.'"

Lighting is also used to dramatic effect in the horror title, as might be expected. In some cases, the drama and gameplay can be enhanced just by having a source of light. Offered Lundeen, "There's a warm point down the end of the street where maybe the player feels like it's a safe place to go." This lets the designers plan the action around players staying in the light.

"For navigation, it gives us the opportunity to use these very liberally. In our playtests, especially in a very dark game we've discovered that players will go wherever there's lights, so we just set these up and our players will go like a moth to a bug zapper," Lundeen chortled.

The game's narrative is affected by this simple lighting as well, he noted: "Another source of lights we decided to use are car headlights. They tell a good story, a sense of abandonment. When you see a car with its headlights on and nobody around, you know something's wrong."

"Another common film technique that we looked at it to help enhance silhouettes is smoking the set. You use this to separate background and foreground elements," Lundeen continued.

The problem there, he admitted, is that gameplay and visual design can sometimes interact with each other negatively: "If we just went with a more accurate, darker fog, we found it's really hard to get that silhouette read that's so important to the players. Without the silhouette read players would be too surprised. When we'd get feedback people would be really frustrated."

By lightening the fog, "people can see things much better and it's much more dramatic," he explained. "When you can see the zombies climbing over the rubble you have a much better chance to coordinate with your team. The players have a much better time and can anticipate the attacks."

Player-controlled light sources are just as important to take into consideration, according to Lundeen. "The flashlight, for a dark game, is a very important tool. What we found by just moving [the flashlight] onto the weapon is that it's a little off center and it's much more dramatic and you get more interesting shadows. When you reload your gun, the flashlight disappears now. When you shove an infected, it goes out of the way, and also the muzzle flash is creating all these great shadows as well."

The visual design here even helped to enhance the team's intended multiplayer design: "By putting the light source on the gun it helped encourage that co-op with teammates," Lundeen said. It also required some technical considerations as well: "Normal maps were an important thing to have on as many surface as possible," because it's a dark game generally lit with flashlights.

Self-shadowing normal maps added greater surface richness at no code cost, he pointed out. They also decided to make the environments as lush as possible, as a nod to dark films.

"Another film technique that we noticed is that whenever you watch a dark setting mysteriously it's always wet. It creates highlights, it creates parallax, it creates moodiness. It makes it feel more miserable, so that was perfect for our product," he concluded.

Responding to an audience inquiry, Lundeen addressed the team's decision to change the game's character models, a move that has garnered some criticism from fans.

"What we found in a lot of our playtesting was that for the original main characters, players would have a really hard time separating them from the zombie hordes," the artist explained. "It was pretty tricky to pick out who was who - people were just going in spraying bullets everywhere."

"What we wanted to do specifically was take those lessons we learned from TF2. The survivors now have different silhouette reads, different colors. There's a dynamic light on the flashlight that's kicking back a little bit of light to illuminate their faces. The character redesign was to alleviate issues we saw while playtesting," he concluded.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The return of GameSetLinks at midnight, then, with a delightful semi-obsession with The Prisoner being one of the main - possibly non-game related - parts of today's post. Although maybe somebody would like to do a game version of The Prisoner remake? Yes plz!

Also in here somewhere - calculations on the PS3 and Xbox 720's total Gigafloppage, fanboys everywhere startled by the sound of ripping shrinkwrap, Eegra's indie game winners, morality in games, and much more.

Un deux trois:

Seven Degrees Of Freedom: A Parallel Future
'Looking at previous releases dates and performance I've put the next Xbox being released in 2010 with approximately 2 Teraflops (2,000 GFLOPS) and the PS4 at 2012 with 10 Teraflops.'

Introducing the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection Blog | How They Got Game
Classic games, '...many still in shrinkwrap (which I remove)' - cue collectorgeek collapse, heh.

Eegra: 'First Annual Game Makin' Shindig WINNERS ANNOUNCED HOORAY'
Conor O'Kane, of 'Harpooned' fame, wins out. Sorry, spoiler!

About Microsoft Research: Faculty Summit 2008
With mentions of gaming research, featuring a... Wiimote! (Scroll down the age).

Morality in Murder: Giving weight to player actions « High Dynamic Range Lying
'It was not until I returned to Osaka that I really started to think about murder, violence and aggression in games, and the moral implications therein.'

Killing real people becomes a video game. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine
'Raytheon looked at this mess and realized that civilian gamers had better equipment. So, it hired game developers to redesign drone operation.' Via Eating Bees.

IO9: 'The Prisoner: Seek The Six Viral Marketing Revealed'
ARG-ish teaser goings-on for a TV remake I'm looking forward to.

I review Virgin America's in-flight video games | Remowned
'Alternatively, the text to all reviews could read, “The framerate is unbearable.”' Remo on the case!

Obo's comment on GameSetWatch - GameSetLinks: Atlus Brings Us... Ice Cream?
'Byron's piece has had a paragraph excised.' Indeed it did.

Derek Powazek - 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments
Also very true for more formal game sites - #1 happens to be more or less exactly how we do it on Gamasutra, anonymity-wise. (Via Waxy)

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Design Lesson 101' is a regular column by Raven game designer Manveer Heir. The challenge is to play a game from start to completion - and learn something about game design in the process. This week we take a look at Tales of Game's homage to JRPGS, Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, an independent freeware release.]

Narrative and story are the backbone of many games, like BioShock, Gears of War, and Crysis. These games use their back-story as a way to immerse the player into their world. Every element of these games, from their voice-overs to their level design, all tell a story that helps support the rest of the game.

Often what occurs in these games are little flaws that momentarily draw a player out of the game world. A character in a sci-fi game could say a line that is considered an anachronism from the 21st century; a game full of realistic enemies could suddenly introduce monsters that don't fit the rest of the world.

This is usually due to player expectations that are set by the production values, the story, and often a serious tone that games take of themselves. The indie production Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, however, manages to avoid all of these issues through a number of design decisions and constraints.

Design Lesson: Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden's irreverent universe and style create a world where literally anything can happen, allowing the player to believe in even the most unbelievable of events and drawing the player into the world more than many of its commercial counterparts

To understand what I mean by irreverent, let's quickly recap the story of the game. The year is 2053 and you are Charles Barkley, former NBA star and citizen of Neo-New York. Twelve years previously, you performed a Chaos Dunk, a slam dunk so devastating that it killed many and led to basketball being outlawed and many of the great players killed in “The Great B-Ball Purge of 2041”. Now, 15 million have died in Manhattan due to a Chaos Dunk and you are being blamed.

If that sounds utterly ridiculous to you, it's because it is. That's just the intro to the story, the actual game itself plays out even more ludicrously. You meet a dwarf from outer space that has skin made out of basketballs, fight the dreaded Ghost Dad, who looks just like Bill Cosby, and even come across Harriet Tubman in the Underground Railroad. Nothing is off-bounds in this game - and that's what makes it work.

The best part is it all makes sense from a narrative perspective when you play the game. It's random, sure, but as a player I bought it. After the mood of the game was set with the opening cinematic, I was prepared for everything. Tales of Game's gave me even more.

Instead of trying to tell a serious story, it seems as if the developers just did whatever seemed funny to them. As a result, nothing in the game that could ever happen would feel out of place. If Jesus came from the sky during a battle, and fought against Charles Barkley, you would say to yourself “I should have seen that one coming!”.

On top of the game being over-the-top from a story perspective, Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is a parody of gaming as a whole. References are made to Super Mario Bros. 3, Gears of War, and countless JRPGs. Combat plays out like many JRPGs, with Barkley having special “verboten jams” to damage enemies, instead of magic spells. There's an entire section of the game that plays out like an old graphic adventure game. You even get the equivalent of a warp whistle at one point.

This parody of game styles meant when part of the game did something different than the rest of the game, it didn't feel completely out of place. There were quick-time events (timed button pressed) like in Shenmue and God of War, but the felt more like mocking these games rather than embracing the mechanic. The same with the adventure game section.

Also, since the game is made by amateur developers using Game Maker, it has very low production values. The sprites are blocky and often taken from other sources. Music is often inspired thematically from other mediums as well, such as the opening theme referring to Space Jam, the Michael Jordon/Looney Tunes cross-over film.

This stopped me from over-analyzing each scene. Instead, I took the low-resolution graphics at face value, because the game didn't aspire to do anything more (also, it didn't cost $60). Nothing was too weird for the game and nothing looked out of place in it. I accepted everything.

In the end, all of these decisions and constraints made me end up liking and caring more about the story and characters than I do in most mainstream games. With many modern, commercial games, I end up nitpicking and finding flaws. I wasn't able to do that with Barkley Shut up and Jam: Gaiden. I didn't want to.

Instead, I only ended up ceaselessly entertained by the insane plot that kept turning in ways no one would expect. I was enthralled by half-cyborg, half-robot characters and how Michael Jordon was a traitor in the game world. I was giddy when I found the end boss, in what can only be described as one of the biggest non-sequitur's in gaming history.

More commercial games should try ideas and concepts this crazy. Games like this probably serve a niche market, which is why they don't get made, but they feel like what gaming is truly all about. Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is the game that The Joker would make if he were a game developer.

[Manveer Heir is currently a game designer at Raven Software. He updates his design blog, Design Rampage, regularly. He is interested in thoughtful critique and commentary on the gaming industry.]

Posted by Manveer Heir at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

[Just a note on early deadline for Austin GDC, which is put on by my colleagues here at Think Services, and is a very agreeable blend of practical game-related knowhow - particularly in online/social gaming, but also in writing, audio, getting into the biz, actually.]

The organizers of 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference (Austin GDC) are reminding possible attendees that early registration for the September 15th-17th event - which includes keynotes from Bruce Sterling and Club Penguin co-creator Lane Merrifield - ends tomorrow, July 31st.

Austin GDC 2008 is presented by Think Services, organizers of the industry-leading Game Developers Conference (GDC) and the parent of Gamasutra.com and related websites, including this one.

The event is a three-day, multi-track game conference taking place at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas September 15-17, 2008, and continues a multi-year tradition of an Austin-based game event appealing to a nationwide and worldwide game community.

The Austin GDC this year consists of the following elements:

- Austin GDC Online Summit - Austin's signature summit, with four parallel tracks on business and marketing, technology and services, design, and social networking and community for online games. Major speakers from Bioware, Cartoon Network, Disney, EA, NCSoft, and Sony Online Entertainment are participating, with Club Penguin's Lane Merrifield keynoting.

- Worlds In Motion Summit - specifically concentrating on virtual worlds, and expanding from the successful GDC Summit, this business-focused two-day event includes sessions on Facebook gaming, user-created virtual world content and the future of the metaverse - with speakers from IBM, NBC.com, IAC, and more.

- Austin GDC Writing Summit, featuring a keynote from futurist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling on 'Computer Entertainment 35 Years From Today', plus notable lectures from leading writers from id Software, Carbine Studios, Red Storm Entertainment and Ubisoft.

- Austin GDC Audio Summit, with a keynote from Sony's Jason Page on next-gen audio, and other speakers including Austin Wintory, composer of fl0w, Slipgate Ironworks' Kurt Larson on adaptive music for MMOs, and a special 'Iron Composer Texas' to be fought out on site.

- Game Career Seminar, including notable lectures and panels for those wanting to get into the game biz, such as 'The Game Job Interview RPG', the ever-popular 'Pitch Your Game Idea' panel, and 'You're Hired! How to Get HR to Notice You' - featuring speakers from Vicarious Visions, Nexon, Ghostfire Games, and more.

In addition to an Expo show floor with many game technology companies in attendance, Austin GDC will also showcase the recently announced winners of the 2008 IGF Showcase for Austin GDC, picking the very best examples of 'local flavor' in terms of indie games from Austin and the Southern U.S.

Those interested in registering for the event can visit the official Austin GDC website to purchase their pass - early registration ends on July 31st, though passes will still be available after that date.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[So, you may have noticed that Gamasutra folks including Chris Remo attended San Diego's Comic-Con last week, and as a result got some good new info such as Jordan Mechner's resurrection of Karateka. Anyhow, he sent in these notes from the Halo Universe panel he attended.

While it was perhaps entertaining for some in attendance - they do give an indication of why these kind of dog and pony shows can be problematic. We didn't run anything from this panel on Gama. But I enjoyed Remo's primal scream so much that I thought we'd reprint his unedited notes here.]

On stage: Corinne Robinson/Jon Goff (McFarlane, action figure brand manager or something); Tobias Buckell (Tor Books, Halo novels author); Eric Nylund (Microsoft Game Studios, Halo novels author); Joe Staten (Bungie); Frank O'Connor (Microsoft, ex-Bungie); Graeme Devine (Ensemble).

Devine, lead writer on Halo Wars: his development history began porting Pole Position to PC, then working on 7th Guest, 11th Hour, and Quake III Arena. Now at Ensemble Studios

"How do you expand upon the Halo universe when Bungie's done the first three?"

"We talked long and hard with Bungie" to determine how to take the story to a strategy game. Ended up with a story set before main Halo games.

(showed cinematic from game)

Moderator: "Since E3 doesn't invite you anymore, I'm glad you guys could get in here to see this trailer." (boos from audience)

O'Connor, Halo universe supervisor at MGS (On his job at MGS) "I'm bean counting, doing powerpoint presentations."

Staten, Halo universe writer, novel author, directed series cutscenes: "I'm actually not the director of cinematics anymore, that's C.J. Cowan's new job. I can't tell you what I'm doing right now, but it's super fun."

[GREAT THANKS FOR COMING THEN]

Moderator: Do you have any announcements to make today?
Staten: "No I don't."

[AWESOME GOOD JOB]

Nylund, author of three Halo novels. "I work at Microsoft Games, I do a lot of work on a lot of secret stuff."

[HOORAY]

Also working on non-Halo book

Buckell, author of a forthcoming Halo book
Moderator: "Are you done with the book yet?
Buckell: "I don't know, am I allowed to talk about that yet?"

[THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE]

"I jumped over from the PlayStation [hardware] franchise for Halo, so when they asked if they could send my books over to Bungie, I was like, 'Oh yeah.' My wife said, 'Now you can justify all those hours spent on the game.'"

Robinson/Goff talk about action figure stuff and show pictures. They made a "Hell Spartan" which is "like a cross between Spawn and a Spartan."

[Thanks McFarlane. Clearly there was absolutely zero planning for what anyone was going to be talking about during this thing.]

Question regarding cliffhanger-ish ending of Halo 3 if you beat it on Legendary difficulty:

Staten: "Bungie has a grand tradition of coming up with stuff in the heat of battle, and not really thinking it through, and it takes us years and years to think of what it means. The Legendary ending [of Halo 3] was one of those things."

[People are asking the most insanely detailed story questions about the most ridiculous minutiae, this is crazy. Now some fan is seriously giving like a prepared speech as his "question."]

"When the first Halo was released, I could hardly believe it would blossom into a successful franchise of books, comics, toys, movies blah blah blah"

[Are you serious?]

[At this point, Mr. Remo snapped and had to be restrained from plunging a ballpoint pen through his eye socket. No, seriously - there were elements of good information to be had in here, but overall, it's probably an abject lesson in why people need to be prepared for panels, beyond show and tell of who you are and what your job is. Oh, and the fans are just the fans - that's fine.]

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

[Regular GSW column 'The Game Anthropologist' is all about gaming communities. Recently, Michael Walbridge interviewed a number of game writers and summarized their thoughts on why so many game writers spend their spare time writing even more on their personal spaces. In the coming weeks, Walbridge will be detailing some of the key points from the individual interviews conducted for the piece. This week describes his third interview with former GSW columnist and current Kotaku writer Leigh Alexander.]

My wife and I went on a disaster of a vacation for over a week after I had talked to Kieron Gillen. My wife had a work party thing at the worst theme park of all time on the day of our return. I originally had thought I could interview Leigh inside of this park, but decided that no, I really couldn't, even if background noise was minimized. We went home and I rushed inside and called Leigh immediately because a car wreck on I-15 had made late (five minutes) to calling her.

Just as with the other New Yorker I interviewed, I talked to Leigh on Friday as the weekend dawned. I think I looked forward to talking to her more than anyone else because her blog was the first or second one I discovered and I had really based my own doctrine, if you will, on the content and style of what is written there and at the Aberrant Gamer.

Instead of immediately asking about the whole label or community thing, I simply asked why she had her personal weblog SVGL. Kotaku must take a heavy toll--that's a lot of writing and a lot of work and yet she still writes on her personal, non-ad-supplemented blog.

Why did she start it?

"I wasn't really sure what I wanted to say yet, so it was simply a repository for my thoughts and a place to practice my voice," she told me.

"Well, don't you get a hell of a lot of practice now without it? There must be another reason, a reason you still keep it."

"It's still important for me to be able to say things I want when there is nowhere to publish them," she told me. "I mean, it'd be a misconception to say that we are getting paid for our opinions all day and write thoughtful stuff--that's not what our jobs are." She did stress that thoughtfulness and opinions are still part of journalism as a whole; it's just that "think-pieces and editorials" are not the bulk of what she is getting paid to do.

Then I shifted, and asked if there's a commonality, a common, unacknowledged sort of creed all those blogs kept. "Game journalists are constantly having an identity crisis," she told me. "Fans have so few places to go," she told me. "Lots of people don't know about this kind of discussion, and many still don't. If more people knew this discussion was taking place I think we'd have more people who are interested."

"I didn't even know about this kind of discussion myself," I said. "I'd have gotten into a long time ago had I known about it. Gamasutra and GameSetWatch introduced me to it and from there I found the Aberrant Gamer and from there I found your blog and eventually decided to write this piece. Would you say there is a name for this? What do you all do?"

Unlike the last two people I talked to, there was no caution or hesitance with Leigh, at least not on this question. I'd never seen it written anywhere, but she'd obviously been thinking about it longer than I had. "Oh, I'd call it game criticism," she said.

Game criticism? Well then! "It's kind of like the difference between simply being a film review or a critical commentary on film. We have both of those in film, we see people being reviewers or truly being critics. We have plenty of game reviews--now we have critical game commentary."

"Only there isn't very much of it," I complained. "Why does it have to mostly be in little corners, blogs, all these writers' side-projects that provide no money?"

"Well, I don't think there's any game that's really justified it yet," she explained. What about Metal Gear Solid 4? Or others? Plenty of talk about that on SVGL "Well, I mean, to the world, to everyone else. I think we kind of consider ourselves ambassadors, really." I had felt that way before even meeting her. Fans of games, she told me, are "very insular" and "not open to change."

"We only discuss games in context of other games, not other life experiences. I recently wrote about a friend of mine who had a friend that died in Iraq. He played Call of Duty 4 to learn about it and deal with it. That's how someone is really playing it and viewing it. But we don't see much room for that kind of conversation."

"It's not going to get bigger until there's a mainstream need," she said.

"At least it's changing," I said. "SVGL has been around a while."

She laughed. "You think so? Do you know how long it's been around?"

"Uh..about a year, isn't it?"

"Well yeah. But why is it considered a veteran blog? It's only a year! And we're not ending up satisfied, are we?"

How long will it take, I asked? What's going to happen?

"Perhaps in 5-10 years it will change as people see that video games have cultural relevance."

"Really?" I said, thinking of N'gai's "young fogeys."

"I keep [doing SVGL] because I have hope. I have to. And anyway, the responses I get on it mean a lot to me."

She then launched into rapid fire comments--she just got done telling me she's not a veteran, but for all the opinion, experience, and stress in her voice, I certainly wasn't feeling like I was talking to someone who isn't a veteran. She started talking about burnout and how in all parts of the game industry, including games journalism, one is exhausted quickly.

"One frustrating thing is games journalists have to play a lot of crap for their jobs, and so they write about crap, and the game-makers never wanted to make crap in the first place and are now stressed to learn that their games are crap in our eyes; crap begets crap and misery begets misery." Sometimes, I thought, crap begets crappy writing. I thought she thought so too.

"I think part of it, too, is that people don't realize games are still stuck in the 'toy' mindset," I said. "They're still toys in the eye of the public, and we can safely always think that--there are entire companies who make games as toys. I have a friend who develops mostly Disney IP. I hadn't seen him in a while and asked him 'So, what have you been making?' 'Well, we just finished out last project,' he said, and started tensing up. I didn't feel he needed to tense because I really liked him, so I pushed. 'Well, what was it'? 'Don't laugh,' he said--"

"Oh, what was it, Hannah Montana?" Leigh interrupted.

"Haha! Yes! Exactly!"

"SHUT UP!" She's having more fun and learning that we see things similarly; she's starting to sound more like herself and less like someone who is forcing herself (out of necessary habit, I'm sure) to sound androgynous. Oh! That reminds me...

"Yeah, it was crazy," I explained. "He just got so defensive before he even told me, but I explained I understood. He then let himself get excited and proud about what he'd done."

I continued, "Oh! Before I forget, speaking of toys...I have a question that I'm going to ask you and I know you hate being asked questions because of this--"

"Is it about being a woman?" she said.

"Ah...yeah. But wait! It's really a question that you are best qualified to answer, because the question is about women in general. Um, okay. So N'Gai and you and I'm sure many others think the age factor is part of why gaming has the status it does. However, I was thinking that the gender gap is part of it, too. You can't deny there is a gender gap, especially in the industry's workers..."

"Nope, I never have denied that or said anything to that effect," she said.

"Right. Well, I was thinking part of it is because women just consider them toys. Only like, scary ones. Women may groan when they learn that someone who is dating them really loves sports, but at least they know what that entails. But guys who love games, not so much. So I have a theory, but I'd really like to talk to someone qualified, as no one cares what a man thinks."

"Makes sense," she said.

"Okay, so...why do women hate games? I've even seen them denounce them in public and in journals and newspapers and...well, everywhere."

"Well, I'm not entirely sure, since I don't agree with them."

"Oh."

"But you know, I've certainly had girl friends, and I've heard lots of them talk about them. They don't seem to bother to learn more about games because they consider them unfeminine and they worry about it because it's messing up their men."

"Messing up their men?"

"Yup. Definitely. And when I meet new women, the majority are put off by what I do for work. It makes many people, especially women, uncomfortable; they don't find it interesting. Kills conversations. I mean, once people get to know me, it doesn't bother them so much, but all the time when I'm meeting new people...I have hard time even finding people who accept that what I do is a career."

"They don't even accept your job?" I say.

"Nope."

"Wow."

"Yeah."

So the story goes. I talked to her for a while and found her to be one of the most interesting people I'd met online or off, games journo or no. A charismatic woman who can carry her charisma online and off, is interested in games and sex in games, and has strong opinions while remaining civil and (here's the hard part) able to keep the conversation interesting if anyone disagrees.

Yet, all that by itself won't net Leigh a legion of adoring male fans (the only kind available), and she knows it. Game enthusiasts are harsh critics and demanding of the other parts of life, too. No, she has to write well, too, and write she does, in spades. Thank goodness for that, because, perhaps unlike most other writers, she's aware that as a woman, she is a needed voice when the discourse between "gamer" and "fogey" emerges.

Because of the vacation, my wife and I take out my dad for Father's day that evening. "Dad," I say to him, because he's long been interested in technology and the Internet, "what would it take for women to be interested in video games, or a specific video game?"

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As timeless as a Stereo MCs video, it's time for GameSetLinks to return, this time headed up by a look at that ever-popular cult lust object, LucasArts' Grim Fandago, thanks to a group of concerned Internet citizens.

Also in here - ridiculous Virt game music noises, Alice Taylor on a not safe for work (from an audio perspective) Wiimote multiplayer folly, Keith Boesky going off on one valiantly again, and plenty more.

You knows it:

Cruise Elroy » Grim Fandango, Year 1
Expanding on group play of the title: 'I don’t think my incompetence is completely to blame, because to my mind some of the puzzles were pretty illogical.'

The Small Details - The Quixotic Engineer
'Unless you’re experienced with a genre, it’s very difficult to notice the small details that separate a decent game from a great one.'

Shoot The Core: Ultimate Shooting Collection for Wii
Interesting niche upcoming import: 'Priced at only $30, this disc will include Chaos Field, Radilgy, and Karous.'

Wonderland: Dark Room Sex Game (PNSFW)
'You won't want to play this at work due to the sounds, although on silent it's entirely harmless.'

Google Lively, yet another pointless virtual world. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine
'In retrospect, I was a fool to mention Barack Obama in a place where I could get body-slammed.'

Kotaku: 'Indiecade 2008: Winterbottom! Gravitation! And More!'
Nice to see more coverage of this at places like the Kotak.

Jake 'virt' Kaufman's first Kwakfest YouTube video
The insane(ly good) game musician video narrates his goof-off 60-minute game competition MIDI jam.

List of Major Game Releases - giantbomb.com
I'm very impressed indeed with the Web 2.0-ness of Giant Bomb, which I thought was going to be YET another editorial site, but is something v. different.

YouTube - GameMaker-TV Interview
Indie game maker Cactus makes my mind melt - via IndieGames.

A Tree Falling in the Forest: Raising Games: Charles Dickens Edition
A little ranty, but good stuff from Keith Boesky.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Explaining why something like Let's Compute! exists is going to take a few sentences. Bear with me here.

In the UK, one of the major 8-bit computer formats in the realm of education was the BBC Microcomputer System, made by Acorn Computers Ltd. for the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of a computer-literacy campaign in the early '80s.

For a generation of British kids, the BBC is the equivalent to the Apple II -- every school computer lab had tons of them, and despite its high price (about £375) compared to the C64 and Spectrum, it was popular enough in the home market to support a decent-sized games scene. The Acorn Electron, then, is sort of to the BBC what the Apple IIc was to the full-sized IIe -- somewhat cheaper (£175), a fair bit cut down in capability, and geared more exclusively toward private use in advertising.

Database Publications' The Micro User (later BBC Micro User) was the predominant BBC mag in the UK. Electron User, a spinoff mag devoted exclusively to the home machine, launched in October 1983 as a Micro User pull-out and became its own publication soon after.

The Electron was never a success on the scale of the Spectrum or C64, but retained enough of a userbase to support a burgeoning games marketplace all the way to the early '90s. It was never a very mature audience, though, and by the time 1990 rolled around, the editors of Electron User realized that most of its readership was very young. So it compensated.

Let's Compute! is the rebranded version of Electron User, with program/game listings suited for all the BASIC-speaking computers of the day but Acorn's assorted systems still getting top billing. It is unabashedly a magazine for children -- almost exactly like CTW's Enter or Scholastic's extremely short-lived K-Power in America.

You have very simple programs, very simple tutorials, a bunch of game reviews and hints, and even some puzzle and comic pages. The cover feature is also not exactly the sort of thing you'd see in PC Magazine, either -- if you can't guess it from the art, it's a piece with tips on earning computing badges if you're a member of the Cub Scouts.

I think in 1991 I was mainly interested in NES games and having Kayla from English class be my girlfriend, so even if I happened to be British and reading this mag when it came out, it wouldn't have been of much use to me.

By all indications online, Let's Compute! stopped publishing after issue 12, one after the issue pictured above. Not too hard to see why -- I have the feeling the editors' hearts were in the right place, but their idea of a kid-oriented computer mag was about five years too late considering the state of the 8-bit marketplace in 1991.

There...did all that make sense to you?

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Quiz Me Quik' is a weekly GameSetWatch column by journalist Alistair Wallis, in which he picks offbeat subjects in the game business and interviews them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. This time - a look at sculptor Sid Garrard and Gears Of War replica company Project Triforce.]

I'm going to take a stab in the dark here, and suggest that maybe – just maybe – GameSetWatch readers aren't exactly the kind of people to require the pictured Locust bust in their respective lounge rooms. Now, that's possibly a generalization, but I'm going to run with it.

Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against the kind of people who horde this kind of thing. I just tend to go more for the subtle approach – a couple of signed Sam and Max posters and the odd Master System box is all I've ever really gone for. And I'm thinking that maybe GameSetWatch readers have that air of refinement that would suggest they do the same.

So, I don't totally understand that side of what Sid Garrand and his company TriForce are doing with their new range of Gears of War replica equipment. 'Do I really want a whopping great lancer propped right in the middle of my coffee table?' I pondered while conducting the following interview. 'No,' I thought. 'No I do not.'

But, somewhere in the dingy depths of my CV exists a little bit of prop making. Yes, readers, that field of heather at the start of the Honda Jazz advertisement voiced by Tony Robinson? The tremendous trees? That was me. Well, some of it was me. Admittedly, that's all the experience I've got in that field, but it's a fine field none the less, and so it's the actual sculpting side of things that I really dig. It's pretty amazing work, in that regard. I don't want it anywhere near my house, but I respect the huge amount of work that has clearly gone into it.

And so, with pre-orders on offer right now – oh go on, readers, indulge yourselves! - it seemed like a great chance to talk with master sculptor Sid Garrand to find out more about the line of products available, as well as querying how easy it is not to laugh while dressing up as Marcus Fenix.

GSW: What is it about Gears of War that you find so interesting? Is it the design aesthetic?

Sid Garrand: Actually - and this will make you laugh - I just loved the game so much that it inspired me to make the weapons and armor to show my appreciation for the amazing job that Epic did in creating the game.

GSW: When did you start working on making replicas of the equipment from the game?

SG: As soon as I completed the last mission back in November 2006.

GSW: What made you want to do it?

SG: Seriously, it was my love of the game, the character design, the level design and the gameplay. Corny but totally true.

GSW: Have you had experience in making replica equipment or sculpting before this?

SG: I own my own company, Nightmare Armor Studios, where I did all private commission work for the last 10 years.

GSW: Any formal training?

SG: No schooling, just an incalculable amount of hours spent sculpting.

GSW: How did you get the chance to show the equipment to Epic in the first place?

SG: I just showed up at their offices in Raleigh, NC fully outfitted and they welcomed us in with open arms. As a thank you for their hospitality to us I gave Cliff Bleszinski a Lancer replica which I am proud to say he displays on his office wall for everyone to see.

He has actually been photographed with the Lancer replica I made for him a bunch of times, at the Microsoft press conference where the announcement for Gears of War 2 was made and in numerous magazines publications as well. Needless to say, that really made me smile.

GSW: Did you discuss obtaining the license with Epic at the time?

SG: The discussions for the license evolved from that day when I showed up at their door.

GSW: How long after that was it that you heard about gaining the license?

SG: We didn’t officially obtain the license until last April.

GSW: What has been the reaction to the replicas at conventions and things like that?

SG: The reaction has been tremendous. We take 1,000s of pictures with fans whenever we attend a convention. Everyone asks, 'Can I hold the Lancer or try on your helmet?' It is so great to talk to all of them because as I explained this all started because I am a huge fan of the game.

GSW: Is it hard to take something like this seriously? Does the posing come pretty naturally once you've got the equipment on?

SG: The sculpting work we take very seriously. Because we do everything by hand it takes a great deal of time to make sure each piece comes out perfect. I mean the people who will be making purchases from us are some of the most hardcore fans in the world and they won’t settle for anything less. As far as posing in the suits that is pretty easy because you definitely feel like Marcus when you strap it all on.

GSW: What level of interest are you expecting in regards to sales of the equipment?

SG: Whenever we attend shows the main question we get is, 'Wow, how can I get a set?' When we put up our site thousands of people registered for updates and information about the products. That being said. it is a high-end item that many guys will have to sneak past their girlfriends when it gets delivered.

GSW: What's the process for making it? Has this changed much since the first replicas?

SG: The process has become much more refined. When I made my first set I did it based on screenshots from the game. Now I am working of hi-res photos and must get everything approved by Epic. They are really great to work with and are always willing to help me out whenever I have questions.

GSW: How quickly are you able to produce them?

SG: I really can’t say because I am my own harshest critic and have been known to get stuck on a screw or bolt for hours because it just doesn’t look or feel right. I want fans to get the best product they can from us because in the end if they aren’t happy then I wont be happy.

GSW: Have there been many requests from the Epic team for replicas?

SG: They are all very interested to own a replica of something they designed. Over the last two years I have given them a bunch of products as a thank you for all they have done for us.

GSW: Have you received any hint of what to expect from Gears 2? Any plans to include that into the TriForce line-up?

SG: They have been pretty tight lipped about details but on a recent trip to the Epic offices we did get a chance to play Gears 2 for about an hour with Cliffy and the design team but their aren’t enough Locust in the world to get me to talk about what we saw in the game. I will say this, I will definitely be online to get my copy in full suit of COG armor the minute it comes out - it looks and plays phenomenally. And yes we plan to include new items from Gears of War 2 in our upcoming product lines.

Posted by alistairw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[We sent regular GSW columnist Mister Raroo and his family to Comic-Con to report on the event from their usual unique perspective. While the Raroos spent a lot of time investigating the games on display, they also found time to meet up with friends, ride long escalators, and even overhear the difference between Ronald McDonald toys.]

In The Beginning

It all started with Maurice. He used to be a delivery driver for the library system I work for. In his spare time, he volunteered for San Diego Comic-Con International. Almost a decade ago, Maurice was kind enough to use his influence as a volunteer to get Missus Raroo and I into our first Comic-Con. We’ve been hooked ever since.

Maurice was always a humble and unassuming guy, spending his days driving heavy totes of books from library to library. However, as we were about to find out, at Comic-Con he was almost like a rock star. We set up a place and time to meet and before long, we saw Maurice walking toward us.

Dressed in a full suit, Maurice escorted us past the massive lines of hopeful attendees. Along the way, security guards and other Comic-Con staffed greeted him, calling him “sir.” At the front of the line Maurice introduced us as his personal guests and the staff treated us like we were royalty. It was rather surreal.

I haven’t talked to Maurice too much in recent years because he transferred to another department, but every now and then we bump into him at Comic-Con. He’s often leading panels with big name celebrities or generally walking around looking busy but happy. It’s pretty neat to think that Maurice’s simple kindness of hooking Missus Raroo and I up with free Comic-Con passes that one Summer led to us becoming regular attendees, anxiously looking forward to each year’s convention.

Over time, our interest in Comic-Con has waned a little, mainly because it has become increasingly crowded, making the simple act of walking very difficult a great deal of the time. In addition, as we’ve gotten older we’ve had less energy and patience—not to mention spending money—to handle the demands of such a massive event. Nevertheless, we always end up having a good time and each year has been a memorable event.

Preview Night Line Time

Preview Night takes place the evening before Comic-Con officially begins. Until a few years ago, it used to be something truly special. Just as it is now, Preview Night was only open to members of the press and people who had pre-registered as four-day attendees. Because four-day registration was much rarer and the event didn’t attract nearly as much media attention in the past, the floor was free from heavy traffic and attendees had a good chance of actually speaking to their favorite artists or scoring special deals and rare finds.

It’s not like that any longer. Now Preview Night feels just as busy as the other days. In fact, since there are no events and panels going on, the floor actually seems even more crowded on Preview Night than any other time during the convention. We were shocked at just how packed the convention center was on Preview Night, and our time to visit booths was limited due to the line being so slow to check in.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years that Comic-Con has outgrown the San Diego Convention Center, and if the lunacy that was pre-registration check-in is any indication, it definitely has. With disorganized lines snaking every which way, it was a big mess of people trying to figure out just what the hell they were doing. Even the line for press—which I had assumed would be quick and orderly—took an absurd amount of time to get through. I overheard a number of people in the press line saying that in years past it only took a few minutes and everyone seemed befuddled as to why it was taking such an excessive amount of time.

While we were standing in line, I realized a crew from IGN was behind us. I turned and tried to strike up conversation with them a couple times, but they didn’t seem interested in talking to anyone outside of their huddle. Eventually they were permitted to cut to the front of the line. From what we could gather from their conversation, famous PSP-licker Jessica Chobot had somehow finagled a way for them to have priority registration ahead of everyone else. As they walked past the rest of us in the press line, I saw more than a few jealous and angry looks cast their way.

Overhearing what the guys from IGN were talking about made me realize that I’m definitely in a different camp of games journalism. They were focused on what would be the best place to head out and get drunk later in the evening, whereas Missus Raroo and I were worrying because we forgot to bring our son Kazuo’s snacks. I think we were the only press in the line with a toddler. It’s actually pretty cool that there are so many different angles to games journalism.

Game Time at Comic-Con

As one might expect, I spent a great deal of my time exploring what video games were on display. Years back, there weren’t nearly as many game companies with booths at Comic-Con, but recently it’s become almost like a mini-E3 of sorts, with demos, previews, and even unveilings of games happening at the event annually.

Without a doubt, Street Fighter IV was the most popular game on the convention floor. Extremely long lines coiled all around Capcom's booth, and those who tried their hand at the game were proudly showing off the red headbands that were being passed out to players. I attempted to get into the booth to check out Mega Man 9 but it was impenetrable, with security telling me to back off and get in line. I tried to explain that I wasn’t trying to see Street Fighter IV but they didn’t care. So, I didn’t bother after that!

I did, however, check out the Street Fighter IV presentation, along with hundreds of other attendees. Really, it was a pretty ho-hum affair, with the focus being on anime created for the game. There was one man sitting in front of me, however, who obviously felt the opposite of how I did, and was excitedly on the edge of his seat the entire time. At one point a couple of people walked in front him, obscuring his view and he angrily signaled “Out of the way!” with his arms.

Beyond Capcom’s offerings, most of the other games on display were much easier to check out. In particular, I enjoyed taking a look at what Telltale Games had to offer. Sam & Max: Episode 1 and Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, both for the Wii, seemed like delightful games that should definitely appeal to Wii owners. Pointing and clicking to objects on screen is a breeze in both games, and they really seem like titles the whole family can sit down and play together. Telltale also announced that they are working on a Wallace and Gromit game, which sounds like a winning license for them.

Speaking of Telltale, I attended a panel with members of Telltale and Hothead Games about episodic gaming. I’d never really considered the benefits of episodic games, but there are some unique positive values intrinsic in the medium. For instance, episodic games allow developers to implement changes based on feedback received between episodes, and they also permit a strong relationship that can be formed between developers and consumers—a special type of relationship that is perhaps not possible with larger-scale game releases. I’m definitely curious to check out what the future of episodic gaming has in store.

Sony's booth was very popular, with LittleBigPlanet and its attractive swag drawing a lot of interested people. Everywhere you looked, people were walking around with sturdy and adorable LittleBigPlanet bags in hand, which no doubt contributed to the popularity of the title. While I thought LittleBigPlanet looked pretty amazing, my heart was captured by PixelJunk Eden and it was fun to have an opportunity to get some play time in with a member of the development team. I sort of felt sorry for him at times, though, because trying to explain the premise and gameplay of Eden to clueless Comic-Con attendees seemed like a bit of a challenge!

The saddest booth was probably Konami's. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia looked particularly nice, and Silent Hill: Homecoming and New International Track & Field both seemed pretty decent, but everything else failed to impress.

Comic-Con attendees literally looked bored as they played Rock Revolution (and the game mysteriously disappeared from the booth by Sunday) and Castlevania: Judgement wasn’t playable to the public. Instead, two Konami representatives demoed the game, all the while acting like it was the most fun game ever created. It looks a bit like Powerstone and I while hold out a smidgen of hope since Castlevania is perhaps my favorite game series ever, I have a bad feeling about that poor game.

I really loved developer The Behemoth's Castle Crashers, which is now my most anticipated Xbox Live Arcade game. It was refreshing to speak to a member of the development team and hear firsthand how passionate they are about the game. Judging from the reaction people had when playing Castle Crashers, The Behemoth definitely have a potential knockout on their hands. I loved the super bright, hand-drawn graphics and awesome four-player gameplay. Castle Crashers might be reason enough to purchase a Gold Xbox Live membership!

The most charming game booth was probably NIS America's , which was located at the other end of the convention center, away from most of the other game companies. Fittingly, NIS America were situated next to many booths selling anime DVDs, toys, and the like. Dressed in Prinny costumes, the NIS staff members wore cute face paint and were energetic and happy to talk to attendees. It was a busy booth and in the short time I was visiting it I saw more than a few people buy games and other goodies.

Perhaps most interesting for me was talking to Peter Payne from J-List about the adult software they offered for sale. I’ve never played any bishōjo games, but Peter was more than happy to fill me in on what the genre was all about and the types of games available to interested parties. On the surface it’s pretty funny to think someone would buy a game that allows them to live out their fantasy of having sex with bunny girls, but is that really so much weirder than some of the other things people are into?

I was surprised to find that many bishōjo games featured higher production values and deeper storylines than I would have otherwise expected. When all is said and done, most humans are pretty kinky in one way or another, and it’s actually kind of nifty to think that there’s a place people can get the adult software they want without fear of being judged or criticized.

Family and Friend Time With The Raroos

I was so happy that Missus Raroo and I were able to take our son with us to Comic-Con. Though some of the people manning the various booths seemed taken aback when I’d ask them questions with a sixteen month old strapped to my chest, for the most part everyone acted really accepting about babies and toddlers being in attendance.

In fact, we saw a lot of babies everywhere we looked. Back before parenthood, Missus Raroo and I used to wonder why people would bother bringing their babies to Comic-Con, but now that we are in that situation, we understand. Family is important to us and we like to do things together. If we weren’t with Kaz, things wouldn’t feel complete. I imagine that other parents who bring their kids to Comic-Con feel the same way. It’s an experience we all want to share with our children.

We brought our nine-year-old nephew Mario with us on one of the days and he absolutely loved it. Seeing how excited he was to scope out the wide breadth of Naruto toys, give THQ's enticing de Blob a whirl, and learn the ins and outs of the Pokémon trading card game from a Nintendo volunteer was really cute. Mario’s presence was a good reminder that no matter how crowded the convention center became, there was something magical available to anyone willing to take the time to look.

Comic-Con also served as an opportunity to get together with some people I’ve been in touch with but never had the opportunity to meet in person. On Thursday I got to spend some time with Joel Hamilton, Ian Ferguson, and Brandon Sheffield, all of whom I know through a shared affinity for the Neo Geo Pocket Color.

We went out to lunch at a local pizza place and had a swell time kicking back and talking. Kaz even fell asleep in “Uncle” Brandon’s lap, which was cute! Joel and Ian came back to our home in the evening to enjoy some video game discussion and frozen yogurt from our favorite local establishment, The Yogurt Mill (though Brandon informed us that it’s most likely actually soft serve, not yogurt!).

Our pals Raina Lee and John Pham spent Friday night at our place, and it was great fun. We had a wonderful evening filled with good conversation, import Dreamcast games, and the consumption of my famous baked-from-scratch chocolate chip cookies. We also discovered that John was mortified by our pet chinchilla, especially when Raina kept trying to make him hold it! After sleeping in the next morning, Missus Raroo and I cooked a hearty breakfast to give us all energy for another day at Comic-Con.

Until Next Year…

San Diego Comic-Con is not for people without patience. You’ll end up getting stuck in large crowds of people, your feet will get tired, and you may even end up questioning your sanity for attending in the first place. But there are little moments that make it all worthwhile. For me, these moments came while doing unexpected things such as riding the long lobby escalators because it made Kaz smile and laugh. As we went up and down the escalators, the security personnel had a confused look but we didn’t care—we were just having fun as a family.

Other small moments of happiness came from overhearing the enthusiasm people held for things we didn’t necessarily appreciate. Missus Raroo witnessed someone explaining to his friend the difference between two different Ronald McDonald toys that were on display. “This is Ronald 1971, while that is Ronald 1974.” Meanwhile, a lady sat down nearby with bags of free goodies, playfully panting while happily muttering “Too much swag! Too much swag!” Even though we might not able to value the difference between Ronald 1971 and Ronald 1974 and we do our best to avoid accumulating swag, we can’t help but smile at other people for being so excited about such things.

In a lot of ways, this year’s Comic-Con was my favorite yet. Even a very negative experience we had—namely Kaz and Missus Raroo’s passes being stolen (don't worry, we got them replaced!)—couldn’t hamper the fun we had. I didn’t necessarily enjoy navigating the crowds, but it was fun to share the experience with Kaz and we had a great time meeting friends and hanging out together. At the end of Comic-Con my legs felt like jelly and I was happy it was finally over, but I can’t deny that overall I had a blast.

Comic-Con provides so many things to so many people and while it’s certainly overwhelming—especially to outsiders that just don’t understand it—for most attendees it’s a safe haven where they can act the way they want and pursue the interests they love without fear of ridicule. Dressing up as your favorite anime character might go underappreciated in most social situations, but at Comic-Con strangers will ask to have their picture taken with you. Whether someone is into vintage comics, collecting movie stars’ autographs, Japanese animation, rare toys, or even sexy cat girl adult software, Comic-Con offers so much that just about anyone can find something to their fancy. I’m already looking forward to next year!

[Mister Raroo is a happy husband, proud father, full-time public library employee, and active gamer. He currently lives in El Cajon, CA with his family and many pets. You may reach Mister Raroo at mister.raroo@gmail.com.]

Posted by Bill Sannwald at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Really enjoy wandering around the Internet and finding GSW-worthy information for you good readers.

This weekend is no exception, starting out with a fun post from a Splash Damage game designer on Far Cry 2's 'possibility spaces', or something.

Also hanging out in here - some neat pics of California Extreme, Harvey Smith on having his faith in games revitalized, PARC on avatar gender choices in MMOs, Mystery Science Theater messing with PlayStation, and lots more.

Go go go:

It's Bezness Time: Far Crying and Far Wanking
Best name for a blog post on Far Cry 2's narrative structure evah.

MST3K Playstation Underground 2CD set + VHS tape - eBay
Aha, it's on YouTube, too, inevitably.

Interview: Codeglue Talks Rockets and Rotterdam | XBLArcade.com
Another neat XBLA indie title to watch for.

witchboy.net » Blog Archive » 5 moments
Harvey Smith (wonder what he's cooking at Arkane Austin?) rhapsodizes: 'I think 2007 reinvigorated my faith in games, which had (perhaps understandably) flagged.'

Tokyo Exhibition Turns Game Carts Into Pop Art | Game | Life from Wired.com
'Held in May at Tokyo retro game specialist store Meteor, the show invited artists to contribute their own cartridge art using the carts themselves as the medium.'

PlayOn: Avatar Survey: Gender Demographics
The infamous Palo Alto Research Center looking at how people play in MMOs.

Heartless Doll - Top 10 Most Ridiculous Undergarments Worn by Women in Video Games
All of these look painful to some degree.

More Captain Rainbow details « Lovedelic Life
'Some extremely nice person on YouTube has taken the time to upload and subtitle the first two Captain Rainbow trailers that are currently available on the Japanese Nintendo Channel.'

Techcrunch: AOL Makes Big Budget Cuts Across Blogs
Oh dear - commiserations to any game-related blogs affected, there's some nice people over there.

California Extreme 2008 at Lepus Lepidus
Good write-up of a show I forgot to plug closer to the time - especially neat that The Act was there.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Held in conjunction with our upcoming Austin GDC show, this IGF line-up that we've just put together comprises a regional-centric indie game showcase, for a change - and an enduringly eclectic bunch of titles there indeed are in this bunch! Thanks to all who submitted.]

The organizers of the Independent Games Festival have announced the nine winners of the Austin GDC IGF Showcase, picking the very best examples of 'local flavor' in terms of indie games from Austin and the Southern U.S. to be exhibited at the Austin Game Developers Conference from September 15th to 17th.

Some of the top local titles span the gamut from one-man teams through tightly focused console indies, including Texas-honed games such as physics-heavy iPhone puzzler Enigmo, CosMind's evocative art-game Glum Buster, Red Fly Studios' Wii/DS quirky Mushroom Men duo, knockabout Guildhall @ SMU student title ToyBox Heroes, and user-generated game website Mockingbird.

The Showcase winners receive complimentary passes and get to showcase their titles in a special IGF Pavilion at the Austin event, which this year features learning tracks including Online, Audio, Writing, Worlds In Motion and Game Career Seminar, and is hosting a local Independent Games Festival Showcase for the first time.

More information about the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference - for which the early registration deadline is July 31st - is available at the official event website.

The full list of the honored Austin GDC IGF Showcase winners is as follows:

Enigmo (Puzzle, iPhone/iPod Touch)
Developer: Pangea Software, Inc.
Description: "A 3D physics based puzzle game where the goal is to get the falling water droplets into their containers by using various bumpers, slides, sponges, etc. There are 50 levels that get increasingly challenging."

Fireteam Reloaded (Multiplayer Action, PC)
Developer: Pixel Mine Games
Description: "Fireteam Reloaded is a team based multiplayer game that will get your blood pumping and your heart pounding! Play as one of three character classes across a variety of post-apocalyptic urban settings in a struggle to dominate your opponents. Go solo or team up with up to three other friends."

Glum Buster (Action/Adventure, PC)
Developer: CosMind
Description: "A collection of my daydreams, for your daydreams."

Mockingbird: The Game Making Game (User-Generated Game Site, Web)
Developer: Mockingbird Games
Description: "Mockingbird invites everyone to make their own games! Using a simple, intuitive set of tools, Mockingbird takes the pain out of game making and helps people tell stories using casual arcade games. Change anyone's game you play, share them with friends, put them on your blog!"

Mushroom Men: Rise of the Fungi, Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars (Action Platformer, DS/Wii)
Developer: Red Fly Studio
Description: "Mushroom Men shows gamers the mundane world from the surreal perspective of a three inch high Mushroom Man. As a brave Bolete Mushroom, players can wreak havoc on their enemies by transforming common household trinkets and trash into weapons and tools."

Ashen Empires (Fantasy MMO, PC)
Developer: Iron Will Games
Description: "Ashen Empires is a classic fantasy MMORPG and one of the few games that gives its players the freedom to role play with complete control over the character creation process. At any point you may begin training any skill of your choice to aid you in your journeys."

ToyBox Heroes (Action/Adventure, PC)
Developer: Team Shirt @ The Guildhall at SMU (Jacquiline "Kim" Acuff, Arturo Caballero, Christopher Cotton, David Demaree, James Farmer, Mark Flieg, Ryan Jenkins, Jonathan Long, Dane Munkholm, Jonathan Pittman, Adam Reynolds, Brandon Souders, Daniel Talaber, Benjamin Wagley, Eric Young)
Description: "Toybox Heroes is a console-style physics-based fighting game for two to four players. Players select one of four action figures, each available in four colors, and duke it out in a variety of household environments. Weapons range from crayons to cherry bombs to Rubik's Cubes. As players receive and inflict damage, their rage meters build; once full, each character may unleash a unique special move."

Goo! (Action/Strategy, PC/TBA)
Developer: PillowFort
Description: "Goo! is an action strategy game where the player controls a giant glob of amorphous liquid. The players’ Goo is constantly decaying as they fight against a constantly growing and very aggressive Paint Goo. When different color Paint Goo mixes, A.I.s mix and the Paint Goo becomes very aggressive."

Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball (Arcade Sports, Xbox 360 Live Arcade)
Developer: Blazing Lizard
Description: "Mortal enemies collide in the ultimate playground sport of Dodgeball. Choose from 4 teams featuring Pirates, Ninjas, Robots, and Zombies and compete across 4 levels in 3 different variations of the sport. Characters come equipped with special moves and melee attacks to make our rendition of the sport a much more action packed experience!"

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Aha, the rest of the week have brought some pretty notable original features, interviews, and other articles from big sister site Gamasutra and other Think Services sites - particularly because we had people simultaneously at GameFest, Comic-Con, and Casual Connect.

It was probably Brandon Sheffield's interview with David Cage about storytelling and censorship in games, as it pertains to (the pictured) Heavy Rain that got a lot of the notice. But there's a lot of other neat stuff in here - here's the full line-up:

Gamasutra Features

Dreaming of a New Day: Heavy Rain's David Cage
"Quantic Dream founder David Cage created the emotional storytelling in the acclaimed Indigo Prophecy, and, with Heavy Rain intending to take things further, Gamasutra talks to him about maturity and censorship in gaming."

Working Remotely: Yes, It Sounds Good, But How Do You Actually Do It?
"Can the game industry make telecommuting work for its employees? Midway and Maxis veteran Simpson looks in detail at how game developers can set up a remote working-friendly ethos - and make better games along the way."

Gamasutra News Originals

Prince of Persia Creator Jordan Mecher To Helm New Karateka Game
"Karateka, the 1984 debut effort from Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, will see its first true followup since the original game, Mechner has revealed during a San Diego Comic-Con panel. Brief details inside - along with an amusing tale of a particularly unique Karateka Easter egg."

Comic-Con: Street Fighter IV's Ono On Continuing The '2D Series'
"As part of his Comic-Con presentation attended by Gamasutra, Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono has been discussing the upcoming Capcom franchise rebirth, suggesting: "Street Fighter is not a 3D game. It's a 2D series, and we're keeping with that tradition.""

Gamefest: Capitalizing On Middleware
"Speaking at a group panel at Seattle’s Gamefest, Epic’s Michael Capps and a trio of Unreal Engine 3 licensees presented their company’s experiences on how to best make an out-of-the-box engine fit a project’s specific requirements."

Casual Connect: Hawkins Defines The Omni Media Gamer
"Delivering a keynote at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Digital Chocolate CEO and Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins described the iPhone as "better than Star Trek" and predicted the rise of the Online Media Gamer (OMG), consumers attracted to online games because of accessibility and social features."

Gamefest: How GTA IV's Niko Bellic Got Animated
"How did capture/animation studio Image Metrics help bring Grand Theft Auto IV's characters to life? Head of production David Barton and technical director Vladimir Mastilovic explained how Niko Bellic was brought from actor to game in this detailed Gamefest presentation."

Comic-Con: Will Wright On 'Your Fans Entertaining You More Than You're Entertaining Them'
"Talking at a special Comic-Con presentation of Spore attended by Gamasutra, Maxis' Will Wright has been discussing the success of the Creature Creator for the game, quipping: "At some point, your fans are entertaining you more than you're entertaining them.""

Big Fish CSO: 'Casual' And 'Hardcore' Insufficient To Define Market
"During the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, web-oriented game developer and distributor Big Fish Games presented its research into gamer buying and playing habits - and determined that the labels "casual" and "hardcore" are far from sufficient in an ever-diversifying market."

GameFest: How Halo 3's 'Lots And Lots Of Sparks' Got Made
"Is the effect artist one of the unsung heroes of today's game biz? Bungie's Steve Scott, who created Halo 3's fire and flames, revealed the graphical secrets behind the title at Microsoft's GameFest developer conference in Seattle, and Gamasutra was there to document it."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After being developed under heavy secrecy with the moniker "Project White Rock" - an allusion to the game's intended addictive qualities - Nokia's flagship mobile title for its reimagined N-Gage mobile platform was unveiled in May as Reset Generation, an action/puzzle game that somehow fuses Tetris, Bomberman, and Super Mario Bros., among others.

The game is the dream project of producer Scott Foe, who has been bandying the idea around since his teen years. It is being produced in conjunction with Helsinki-based RedLynx, developer of Pathway to Glory, one of the genuinely well-received entries in the long-suffering N-Gage's prior incarnation as a fixed hardware device.

As Foe puts it, Reset Generation is "a game about video games," and that description applies not only to its schizophrenic but effective gameplay blend but also to its art and music design, which is sure to inspire waves of 8-bit nostalgia among long-time gamers.

The score was provided by chiptune band 8 Bit Weapon, and the pixel art characters are based on designs by well-known artists such as Dan Paladin, Scott Kurtz, and Feng Zhu.

The game is planned to launch this year for Nokia mobile phones - since the N-Gage platform is now built in to the company's smartphones, as opposed to being a standalone branded device - and for free on PC via the game's website. The two versions will be compatible in the game's four-player online, and will be tracked on the same leaderboards.

Nokia is even hoping gamers will become invested in Reset Generation that they make their own tributes - art assets and the game's soundtrack are being released for free.

Gamasutra sat down with Foe at Nokia's offices for an in-depth discussion about Reset Generation's formation and influences, its development, and - in notable detail - what Foe thinks about Scrum.

What was the genesis of this project? It's unusual for the mobile space in some ways.

Scott Foe: Well, the genesis really goes back to before there was even a mobile space. I mean, I've been thinking about this title since I was seventeen years old. I wasn't even in college yet when I started fantasizing about this. I cannot describe it, I recommend it to everybody, the experience of doing that thing you've been telling yourself you're going to do for so long.

So that being said, people always ask, because the term "producer" is so flexible, “What do you do? What do you do?” I'm kind of like Hannibal from The A-Team. I collect this amazing virtual network of amazingly talented people. We've got the character designers, we've got 8 Bit Weapon, and of course we have RedLynx and these fantastic people, and you know, I love it when a plan comes together.

So, it takes a village. Everything that we have is because everybody contributed and brought their A-game. And so, seeing all of that come together, and all of that cooperation - at the end of the day, companies don't make games. Nokia doesn't make a game. RedLynx doesn't make a game. People make a game. And we've been working with some amazing people. And because of that we have this amazing game.

So that's the short genesis version. The long genesis version is, of course, we are investing money in the N-Gage platform. It's mobile, it's connected. You need something that really flexes the platform, you know, a flagship title which is going to basically show off every feature that the platform has, and even features that the platform doesn't have.

At the same time, it's going to be the lighthouse, you know, the beacon - plant the flag for other people to look at and say, “Wow, mobile gaming isn't just this 64k experience that was in my phone in 2001.” It's now come into its own right as this very special form of entertainment, at home or on the go.

That's a very first-party console publisher mentality - trying to light the way for other developers.

SF: Set the bar. Yeah, and being at a first-party console publisher, or mobile publisher, as it were - a platform - that's definitely the way we went.

How did you end up in this area, having worked on more console type of gaming in the past?

SF: Nokia acquired the Sega Network technology infrastructure in 2003, and we had started a project called Pocket Kingdom, which was the world's first global, mobile, massively multi-player on-line game with Sega at that time, and both I and Pocket Kingdom went over with that acquisition.

And it's been in development for like two and a half years now?

SF: It's been in production for two and a half years... I mean, there was preproduction, and concepting before that, so two and a half years is when we brought the studio into the equation.

That seems pretty considerable for a mobile title. That's not typical, is it?

SF: It's not typical, but then again the things we're doing here... you know, we're running, running, we're way out ahead, and there are rocks in the road, and we only find those by tripping over them.

Earlier today you were speaking about the development structure. How does that work when you have development overseas, you're here, QA is somewhere else, and so on?

SF: Yeah, I like to think, going to our pop/schlock book collection, you always hear that “The World Is Flat.” Well, our tools aren't flat yet, but they are getting flatter.

This project being so distributed all over the world, and having so many moving pieces, because you've got not just a platform and development studio to deal with, you also have operators, and operator networks, and different operator network characteristics, and outsourcing firms, et cetera. This project just wouldn't have been possible a few years back.

But when we got onto the project, you know, you look around the internet, and you see all these off the shelf project management softwares, and different processes that help ease the pains, and you're able to pull those things down and get to working with them, and you're doing things that, again, just weren't possible before. And it's pretty amazing.

You said you're using Scrum.

SF: That's the project development methodology that we've employed. You know, Scrum is - especially with the recent [Game Developer magazine] article from, I believe, last year, “Scrum Rising” - a hot topic in the games industry of late.

People have strong opinions.

SF: People have strong opinions. I definitely have my own strong opinions. It's definitely not a silver bullet, nor is any development methodology. I mean, for example, yes, Scrum leads to greater team communication and cooperation, but if one of your team members is an axe-wielding barbarian, then that might necessarily be a good thing.

But there is certainly, in publishing minds, this kind of idea that Scrum is this evil dragon that - “Oh, if we don't have a waterfall project planned with everything mapped out in detail, then this project is just going to go way overboard, and way over budget.”

I have to say that if you're doing a quality-driven title - so I'm basically separating the universe of game projects into release-date driven, and quality-driven; release-date being, “We gotta get it out by this date,” and quality driven being, “It's gotta be out when it's ready” - for a quality-driven product, using an iterative development model like Scrum is excellent for bringing that home, and for revisiting issues, and making sure that everything is just perfect.

For a release-date driven model, Scrum is excellent because, at the end of every sprint - Scrum project cycles are broken down into a number of sprints - you have something which could conceivably go to quality assurance. So if your due-date has to be - cannot miss! - this certain date, then at the end of every sprint you have something that you can conceivably ship with. Whether that's good or not, that's in debate. But you could theoretically launch it.

From the publishing side, Scrum has very few artifacts, so when you go into a Scrum product development methodology, instead of having, like, oodles of Microsoft Project files and Excel files, and this and that, what you have is the product backlog. People take product elements off the product backlog, the team puts it in the sprint backlog, they complete it, then they give you a sprint report and a playable build. The sprint report and the playable build are probably the best visibility into how the health and well-being of the development project of any of the corporate artifacts that come from the different development methodologies out there.

So, for example, if you're at a publisher, and you really want complete visibility into how is the team doing, what are they accomplishing, you have that sprint backlog and can see, at the end of each sprint, what the team did, what they failed at, and why.

You can't get more clear-cut than that. Having the actual sprint review build, that build of the game, to be able to take around internally and say, “Here, look. This is what the game is about. This is how we're doing. This is how we're going.” There's no better feel for how a project is going, instead of waiting however long for a given milestone build.

From the contractual side? I mean, it requires flex. Say you're doing a release-date driven title, and you're making a contract, and you know the team is operating on a Scrum development methodology. Well, it's easy to say, “This is the due date. These are the payments. And go. These are the number of people you have, and we'll be out on this date.”

Now when you go for a quality driven title, contractually it becomes a bit more sticky, in that you either have to, one, plan on going back to amendments to the contract to say, “Okay, we need two more sprints. We need three more sprints. We need this many more sprints.” Or actually building into the contract the possibility of approving and paying out more sprints on an as-needed basis. And of course, most business development people, and people who write the contracts in the publishing arms of organizations everywhere are probably not familiar with this, and very married to the standard way of doing things, which, of course, causes friction within the publishing organization.

Again, not a silver bullet, but I definitely couldn't see myself using any other development methodology that's in current practice today. I definitely am a huge Scrum fan.

I imagine that kind of heavily iterative method would be particularly suited to a game like this, where you've got fairly disparate gameplay styles that you're bringing together. I suspect that took a lot of trial and error.

SF: Most definitely. I mean, a piece of paper is never fun. Right? First person shooter is easy. Well, easier. You've got a point of reference, you know you're going to need some weapons, and some enemies, and maybe you're going to do an amazing narrative structure, and blow everything else out of the water. But for the most part, you know what you're aiming at.

For something where you are planting the flag, and you are running out ahead of everybody, and there are rocks, it does take time and iteration, and polish to get the jetpack to be as fun as the jetpack could be, or to make sure that the princess-rescuing is satisfying.

One other point, going back to the transparency, I don't think it's really part of the standard Scrum development methodology, although I may be incorrect about this, but one of the things we found really useful on this project is doing our burn-downs by discipline, so you have a burn-down chart which is basically, here's all the work that needs to be done on the project, and you watch it burn-down as elements are taken out of the product backlog.

When you burn-down by discipline, and you see the velocity of how the project is going, you can say, “Oh, we need more artists, or we need more designers, or we need more programmers.” And it becomes more obvious, sooner, although, again, that might already be written down somewhere. I haven't read all the Scrum books. That might be out there.

From a design standpoint, what that was like working with a studio that was overseas? You talked a little bit about the production pipelines...

SF: Oh, I mean, I can probably count on one hand the number of local studios I've ever worked with. It's been that way for me, pretty much. The only advantage is, I speak Japanese, so back in the day I could actually listen in on conversations - whereas now, I don't speak Finnish.

But again, I really have to applaud technologies like activeCollab and Basecamp. Both are fantastic, and the choice between them comes down to whether we want to host our own servers or not. So that's great for keeping coordinated, and of course there were visits out to the studio and workshops, and getting together.

But going back to Scrum, and the transparency that that offered - basically, we knew what was going on at the developer, through the sprint backlog, through the coordination tools like TestTrack or activeCollab. And like I said, the world's flat, the tools are getting flatter.

Also, it really helps to work for Nokia, where I don't pay my phone bill. So anytime I want to, at two a.m., I can give the developer a ring, and we can chat about something. And there were many, many, many phone calls in addition to everything else going on in the project.

Has this project been on schedule? That's probably not the right question since it seems like you didn't have a real date, but what was your initial projection for how long it would take?

SF: Well, I mean, our initial... This is a quality-driven project, so... when it's ready. N-Gage obviously - you know, it's no secret - took a lot longer to come. One SKU for all titles, on mobile, that's the golden egg. To get the golden egg, sometimes you forget, somebody has to fuck the goose. There are feathers flying, and there's squawking, and it's not pretty. But at the end of the day, you know, you get there, you got that golden egg. And five years from now people will be appreciating and enjoying the golden omelette.

So, I suspect when development on this game began, the target for you guys was still the N-Gage hardware platform?

SF: No.

No. You knew this was coming.

SF: From day one, we knew... or from day one of concepting, we knew that it was going to be cross-platform, multi-platform, web widget, N-Gage.

Where do you see mobile gaming going, with respect to platforms?

SF: It depends on if it's the far future, or the near future.

Pick one.

SF: All right. In the far future, there is no-compromise convergence. I mean, eventually, Moore's law catches up with the mobile handsets in the same way that it catches up with the PCs. It won't be about the platform, but the content, and where and how you're enjoying it.

So I could walk into my living room, put my device down, it starts broadcasting to my television. I pick up a wireless controller, and I play it, and it's talking to the device, which is talking to whatever display I'm using, and I play a game. Or maybe I just pick it up and go outside and do the same.

And while this sounds like the stuff of high fantasy, I mean, you can go on the internet right now and see videos of people using game controllers to control a racing game played on a device, and that device has a RCA connection to a television. So it's just like, definitely not the stuff of high fantasy. That being said, futurists and historians always tell a different tale, so I'll go on record as saying that's one possible future.

Okay. So what's the intermediary then?

SF: The intermediary is: bigger, better, grander gaming experiences, more satisfying gaming experiences on the mobile devices. You've got to remember that there are a lot of economies, a lot of places in the world, that are coming online through the mobile devices, never having had a computer. And for them this is the only form of gaming entertainment, or one of the major forms of gaming entertainment that they're going to get. And I think that will definitely shape what comes after.

On that note, it looks like one of the things you guys are trying to do - with the online community, with tapping into the very gamer-centric culture - is maybe trying to introduce more of a sense of the core gaming experience to mobile platforms. A lot of the things you're doing echo online communities people might be familiar with as hardcore gamers.

SF: Well, like any good homage that works on multiple levels, transcendentally, it's layers of the onion, but the key is not to let the love of gaming get in the way of loving the game. Right? Take Kill Bill, for example. You never need to have seen a Bruce Lee movie. You don't need to know she's wearing Bruce Lee's track suit to be able to enjoy Kill Bill. Right?

You never need to have ever played a video game to enjoy Reset Generation. For those of you who have never played a video game, maybe it's just an action/puzzle title that you can't put down. But if you do love gaming, if you are a hardcore gamer, then you're going to find more to love. You're going to see the different levels of love and homage that we have baked into the title.

But it also looks like you're trying to attract a certain type of audience - the core community who cares about things like leaderboards, releasing the art assets to people to make their own things, and so on. Those are things that are more typical for a console or PC developer to do for their games than what a mobile developer would do. Do you agree with that?

SF: Again, content is king. It's all software, man. Consoles are big games, grand experiences, things that people will love, things that will touch lives. The ability to get out there, whether it's on a console, or on a mobile device, it's still entertainment.

Sure, but it seems like you're trying to make a concerted effort to reach a certain type of gamer. Because I think there are a lot of gamers who do play games, but who would not necessarily have that inclination regarding mobile titles.

SF: Ah, yes. Yes. For a great many people, Reset Generation will be either the first indoctrination into mobile gaming, or the first indoctrination into N-Gage, and we are trying to send the message that, “Hey guys, it's not exactly what you might think. Let's clear up these misconceptions here. You can try it for yourself.” And we do, through the PC side, have a volume of users there to get that experience.

Yeah, I was going to bring up the PC. It does seem like sort of a “the first hit is free” kind of thing.

SF: Yeah, it's "Project White Rock," you know? No, I mean, it's no secret, the game is an advertisement for the N-Gage platform. If you look at the widget, it has a little Nokia phone skin around that. We're not shy about that. We want you to see that we've done something really cool, and we want to share it with you.

How did you end up getting all of those well-known concept artists?

SF: Oh, reams and reams of concept art. Oh my God. If I see another picture.

But how did you approach them all? Did you just sort of work up a list?

SF: I had my hit list. I went down the hit list. “Yeah, you like me, I like you, let's work on this.” Yeah, I'll tell you this. Seth Sternberger of 8 Bit Weapon, I hope you're reading. Horrible negotiator.

I write him an email saying, “Hey, I really dig what you guys do. I think we should work together.” Here he comes back saying, “Oh my God, this is a dream come true!” So then it's, "Okay. Let's talk money."

Tipping his hand a little too early there.

SF: Yeah. But he was fantastic to work with. And he did get taken care of, because we really appreciate him, and would like to work together again.

As someone who is, I guess, part of the generation that this game is named after, it is pretty...

It is nice to see a fully-produced, commercially developed game with pixel art and the 8-bit style music, and all that stuff. That's unusual these days.

SF: Well, we wanted to make something that was non-perishable, right? Where other people focus on graphics, we focused on artwork. Like, you look at technology, technology moves quickly. We were talking about Moore's Law earlier. You make a great looking 3D game right now, and it might look like not-so-great twelve, eighteen months from now. You make a fantastic 2D game, and a fantastic 2D game does great forever.

It's an experience that endures, and we didn't just want to do another game. We wanted to do the game for the reset generation. And this was definitely the right way to go about it.

How did you end up with what you have? There are sort of shades of a lot of different genres and games in there, but obviously at a certain point you have to congeal that into one experience.

SF: Oh, it's probably not a very interesting story. It was me with a box of Legos. And then when we brought RedLynx in, they made a couple of key contributions, which has made things incredibly even more fun, like the combos - basically, the combo system came from them. So instead of just laying down blocks, you can actually build impenetrable blocks.

At the end of the day, for me, it's all about physical modeling. And like I said, it was pretty obvious that you couldn't just do this story about games, that it had to be homage in both mechanics and story. So that, that was just kind of intuitive, but how it got to be from, “We're going to do mechanics about games,” to something that is just really fantastically fun mechanics about games. That's blood, sweat, and tears on the part of all the designers and playtesters involved in the title.

I don't know if you've played No More Heroes on the Wii. It's not as explicitly about games as your game is, but it does have a sense of being an homage to classic video gaming, incorporating some of that pixel art and music. I'm curious if you think that that will be something that, as the "reset generation" grows older, becomes an embedded part of the cultural recollection.

SF: Well, I think we'll find homage everywhere, especially as the medium matures to a point where you can actually go into a store and buy a ten-year-old game. Then, you know, how many period-pieces are there? Every major movie studio makes at least one period piece every year.

I definitely think that we'll keep riffing off each other. I mean, video games are like jazz, right? Or like Carlyle Brown once said, “If you like something, steal it.” You're playing a game. “Oh, hey, man, this motion physics, or whatever, this is really smooth. I gotta have that.” Or, “We gotta have bullet time!” I don't know if you remember, but there was a time like that.

Right, when everything had bullet time?

SF: Right! Scott Miller and the Remedy guys had started it off [with Max Payne]. Every producer in the country was going in to their developers, and saying, “Stop everything! Cut level twelve! We need bullet time!”

Yep. What's different about projects like this, though, is that this is less about specifically taking a feature, and more about taking from the cultural texture overall.

SF: This is a cultural celebration, is what it is, right? It's a summary of things that we've seen before, but it also opens the door for new things. And I think the community elements play a lot to that.

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

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days, as well as any notable features on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The delights in this latest version include a new RPG by the creator of a popular physics-based web toy, three different Game Maker projects, and a simplified real-time strategy game involving universal conquests.

Game Pick: 'Ceramic Shooter' (Theta Games, freeware)
"An abstract scrolling shooter with a unique concept - players will have to actively avoid destroying objects on screen while attempting to pilot a malfunctioning ship. And yes, it's one of a trio of Game Maker projects to be featured this week."

Game Pick: 'Galcon' (Phil Hassey, commercial indie - demo available)
"A multiplayer strategy game where participants will wage war with one another in an attempt to wrestle control over an entire planetary system. This is achieved by commanding entire fleets and propagating their influences to as many planets as they possibly can, before their adversaries do the same and overwhelm all other opposing forces."

Game Pick: 'I Was in the War' (Bisse, freeware)
"I Was in the War is a short action game which involves undertaking a dangerous mission to infiltrate the enemy territory, all the while being subjected to relentless offensive attacks from all fronts. Created in under three hours for a friendly Poppenkast competition."

Game Pick: 'Stick Ranger' (DAN-BALL, browser)
"A new Java-based application by the developer of Powder Game, where players will manage a party of adventurers by dragging them towards the enemies to engage in either ranged or melee attacks."

Game Pick: 'Destructivator' (Chris Roper, freeware)
"The new retro-style platform shooter from Chris Roper, developer of The Pyramid and Return to Sector 9. Shades of Brøderbund's Lode Runner? A definite and resounding yes."

Posted by timw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)