['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, he presents a Halloween special in honor of devnull's Nethack tournament, which begins at midnight!]

The most impressive thing about devnull's Nethack tournament is its longevity. This is the tenth consecutive year it's been run. It's old enough that it's spanned multiple Nethack versions. It's been said that it could be the oldest-running computer gaming tournament in existence. It's a difficult claim to prove, but it may will be true.

Despite the great obstacles to making roguelikes work as multiplayer games they have long had a substantial online presence, and a big part of this is the relative ease in setting up terminal-based, ASCII games for playing over the internet via telnet, SSH, or some other form of remote console.

Originally intended for local networks, when the internet hit it big suddenly games that were originally shared between a group of students could be enjoyed from the other side of the planet. In the case of Nethack, despite the availability of graphics when played locally, a good case could be made that online play, such as though alt.org, is the best way to play.

It gets you other people's bones files (remnant levels of past, lost games), a community score list (now so bloated that the lowest entry on the top 2000 list is an ascension with over 4 million points), ghost names taken from prior players, realtime game spectating, game recording through TTYRECs, and even the sending of messages to players during the game by retrofitting Nethack's mail daemon monsters.

What is probably the best-known public Nethack server isn't even up year-round. The yearly Nethack tournament hosted by dev/null/network only runs during the month of November, usually making the front page over at Slashdot shortly before it lands. (Slashdot stories: 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2001) While light on features compared to alt.org's (mostly) perpetual setup, their tournament is interesting for many other reasons.

<oldnews>
Despite Nethack's great suitability for online play, there are some difficulties with running an actual tournament. Probably the biggest is that, in the years since the release of version 3.4.3, Nethack has been extensively analyzed and spoiled, even wikified, and its source code has been made searchable on the web more than once.

Anyone willing to put the energy into it can build an extensive bulwark of knowledge against the game, and a player that has acquired it can play amazingly well. New players are lucky to get to level 7, but people who have really studied the game win all the time. A few players, given enough time and effort, seem able to win on demand.

Three games over on alt.org have earned exactly the maximum possible score in the signed 32-bit integer variable the game uses to record it, over 2.7 billion points, and one of those wasn't even a winner. If more than one player is capable of reaching MAXINT-1 points then, it's sad to say, score is probably no longer the best measure of playing ability.
</oldnews>

devnull's award setup takes this into account by measuring some accomplishments other than score. To this end, there's roughly four levels of trophies, with some aimed at nearly every type of person who plays Nethack.

Things Most People Can win

The lowest tier simply measures progress towards winning a game. There's an array of several Stars, from plastic to dilithium (the most valuable gemstone in Nethack), that are awarded for making game progress. Each player earns one of these, corresponding to his best progress into the game.

A Plastic Star, for instance, is earned for completing the Sokoban levels. A bit further up the scale is the Iron Star, for beating the Quest dungeon. The Copper Star is awarded for entering Gehennom. The most notable stars are Silver (getting the Amulet of Yendor), Gold (reaching the Elemental Planes), Platinum (reaching the Astral Plane), and Dilithium (ascending).

Notably, one of the stars is earned from reaching the bottom level of the Gnomish Mines, which, with persistence and luck, most players can probably accomplish. Because of this, a good majority of players can win something. (Note that by winning "something," I mean a small gif suitable for linking to a website. I do not think there are physical trophies involved this year.)

Another category that tends to be wide open are the challenges. One of the most distinctive things about the devnull tournament is that it's not played, strictly speaking, with vanilla Nethack. Every year since 2003 2005 the maintainers have written and added a new patch to the game that implements a substantial new feature. The feature is never revealed ahead of time; the player must discover it during the game.

It always revolves around some thing that a player must accomplish. These "challenges" are sometimes surprising in their wide-ranging scope: the very first one required that players go to popular web game Kingdom of Loathing and complete a quest in a Nethack-inspired parody dungeon! Other challenges haven't required going to another site, but have some fairly heavy Zork references and a Pac-Man maze.

Nethack adepts may shaking their heads in dismay at that news, so they'll be relieved to hear that devnull's challenges are optional. The first time the player does something that in any way affects a challenge he's told and asked if he wants to participate, although the nature of the challenge itself isn't otherwise revealed. If he chooses then, he can completely disable challenges and play what amounts to (barring bugs) standard Nethack 3.4.3.

Most of the really good players know that to do well at Nethack requires knowing as much about the game as they can and so pre-disable them in their tournament config file. But to players who don't care so much about winning one of the big trophies, the challenges can be a fun diversion, allowing them to liven up a game of which they thought they had known everything.

Note, especially, that each year all the challenges from previous years remain in the game, in addition to the new challenge. All of the challenges get their own trophy awarded to players who complete it. This year, as revealed by the trophy description page, nine trophies center on the new challenge!

Things Experienced 'Hackers Can Win

The next tier of awards are for those players to whom ascensions are expected and foregone conclusions, and counts what a variety of ascensions they have during the tournament month. Ascending a character of each gender (that is, any male character, and any female character) has "shot the Birdie."

Ascending a character of each gender and alignment (lawful, neutral and chaotic) in any combination, requiring a minimum of three victories, is "throwing the Double Top." Add in all the races (human, elf, dwarf, gnome and orc, so five wins minimum) to "do the Hat Trick." "Hitting the Grand Slam" is to also ascend every role of the game's 13, which by implication means also winning 13 games during the one-month contest period. Last year, three players accomplished this.

Finally, "going the Full Monty" is doing all this, plus keeping all of the game's conducts in at least one won game. They don't have to all be done in a single game, but a few of the conducts, like foodless, weaponless and pacifist, are still quite challenging all by themselves. All of these awards can also be earned "with bells on," which in the jargon of the tournament means meeting their requirements in consecutive games.

So, to win the Full Monty With Bells On is to win 13 games in a row, one of every role, and getting in the foodless, atheist and pacifist conducts along the way. Last year someone won this for the first time in the tournament's history. Predictably, it was won by marvin, maintainer of the Atari ST port of Nethack, scourge of alt.org's scoreboard, and probably the best overall 'hacker in the world.

Things Really Good Players Can Win

Another set of awards goes to the player who earnest the highest score with each character role. Score, as mentioned, is no longer the best measure of playing skill, but the game still tracks it and it does serve an important historic value. It's interesting to note those cases where a score listed as winning a role trophy also appears winning another trophy; in this manner, one can discover that the player who won Most Conducts did it while playing a Monk.

The top tier of trophies are the mutually-exclusive (except for ties) ones that record the best players, according to various measurements, played during the contest period. The best scoring game played during the month is recorded here.

In 2007 that top score was 134,520,114 points, obtained in a game played by user nopsled. This was also that Monk game that won Best Conduct, with 10 of the game's 12 earned. (I've been unable to find conclusive details of the conducts he kept, but it was probably all of them except pacifist and foodless. The reason playing a Monk is significant is that they actually get bonuses for fighting unarmed, so the conduct for never hitting with a wielded weapon is relatively easy to keep.)

Things The Very Best Can Win

Another top-tier trophy notes the lowest scored ascension, which in 2007 went to theta's game of 25,360 points. Earning an extremely high Nethack score is mostly a matter of patience, but earning an extremely low score for a winning game is a tremendous challenge.

The player gets one point for each experience point earned through combat (no free experience grants are counted), and that score is doubled upon victory, so to do this one must nearly play as a pacifist anyway. The first ascension trophy goes to the player to get the first victory during the contest period, usually on the first day.

The fastest ascensions in game time (turns elapsed) and real time (only actual playing time counted) are now tracked by separate trophies. 2007's fastest game in real time was aardvark's credibility-defying four-and-a-half-hour game, and its fastest counted in turns was r.g.r.n regular rast's playthrough of 10,067 turns, which is even more eye-popping to someone who knows what a player must go through to win.

Getting to the penultimate level of the dungeon rapidly is not hard at all for a player with just the right equipment (controlled levelport has been a trademark Nethack trick since ancient times), but getting that one last floor down requires getting three specific items that usually require a lot of fighting to earn. But the worst bit is that the player cannot purposely levelport while wearing the Amulet of Yendor, so he must walk all the way back up, while getting sent back levels randomly, purely through the malevolent whim of the game.

Things Marvin Can Win

Of the four remaining exclusive trophies, two of them, Most Ascensions and Best of 13, are nearly always won by marvin. Best of 13 is the number of won games out of 13 consecutive ones. Hitting a Grand Slam with Bells On would also earn one a perfect score in this, but I don't know what happens if two players qualify.

Things Kenny From South Park Can Win

Another trophy notes the "death by trickery" that the game reports when, due to a bug in the game's code, it wrongly counts a game as having been tampered with.

If Nethack thinks it detects tampering with the game files it'll end the game, reporting "A trickery" on the scoreboard. Since the tournament version patches the game software, it is always possible that this will occur (as it did a number of times last year). In that event this trophy is offered as a consolation prize.

The last trophy is a real favorite, awarded to the player who encountered the most unique causes of death during the contest period. 2007's trophy for Most Unique Deaths was won by theta who, with 141 different types, had 72% of all the possible demises.

This is pretty impressive in itself; much is made by all the ways a Nethack game can end, but the tournament's maintenance software lumps most monster-caused deaths into a small number of root causes, so one can't just get killed by every monster there is to shoot up his total. Many causes are rather obscure.

Everything that clips even a single hit point is potentially a source of mortality, and Nethack has so many sources of piddling low damage that the great majority of those death types, in practice, only occur to players who are shooting for them. And many death types, like being petrified by Medusa or dying to a demon lord, basically require giving up a game so advanced that winning would be a foregone conclusion to many players.

If this sounds like fun, new players can sign up once the tournament begins on November 1 on the registration page. If you just want to watch, check out the bragging board. You can also help the tournament out by purchasing merchandise at the swag page, which has new stuff as well as a few items left over from the very first tournament. Go have a look, and bask in that warm glow of awesome that only a printed adaption of a green-screen terminal display can provide.

[Come back in a couple of days for part two of @Play's devnull Nethack tournament special, a Q&A session with devnull maintainer Robin Bandy!]

Posted by John Harris at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

[A final IGF reminder is here alongside a neat Easter Egg for those who want to see prominent indies looking sheepish and/or triumphant in front of a few thousand people - the 2008 IGF Awards video is now online.]

The Independent Games Festival has debuted the full streaming video of its 2008 IGF Awards ceremony, also reminding interested possible entrants that the final deadline to enter the 2009 IGF Main Competition is Saturday, November 1st at 11.59pm PST.

The 2008 IGF Awards Ceremony was held in February 2008 during Game Developers Conference. It was presented by Venture Africa/Arctic designer Andy Schatz, alongside IGF content directors and Offroad Velociraptor Safari creators Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink.

With the ceremony accompanied by interstitials from comedic video troupe Mega64, the 2008 IGF victors included $20,000 Seamus McNally Grand Prize winner Crayon Physics Deluxe, Kloonigames' 2D physics puzzle game that allows players to experience what it would be like to transform drawings into physical objects.

Other major winners at the IGF ceremony included physics-based puzzle action game, 2D Boy's World of Goo, which won the awards for both Design Innovation and Technical Excellence, and Audiosurf. As well as the streaming video, there are also now pictures of the IGF Pavilion and Awards available on IGF.com.

The organizers are also giving a final reminder about deadlines for the 2009 Independent Games Festival, which is already seeing a very strong set of entries ahead of this weekend's initial deadline.

Games selected as finalists in the Main Competition (due November 1st) or Student Showcase competition (due November 15th) will be available in playable form on the 2009 Game Developers Conference show floor, with their creators given complementary passes to attend the event, which includes the third annual Independent Games Summit.

Entrants will compete for nearly $50,000 in prizes, including awards for Innovation, Excellence in Design, and the coveted $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the IGF Awards, held in March 2009 during GDC.

In addition, the IGF Mobile entry deadline is on November 17th, with $30,000 in total for those indie creators making games for iPhone, cellphone, and other handheld devices.

More information on the competitions are available at the official IGF webpage and the official IGF Mobile webpage.

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

[Happy Halloween, GameSetWatch readers! After a short hiatus, Mister Raroo returns to discuss some of the games he’s been playing this Halloween season. As is par for the course in Raroo’s articles, other topics manage to find their way into the mix, including embarrassing Halloween costumes, scurrying cats, The Puberty Fairy, and more!

Halloween Time With Mister Raroo

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, going back to my earliest memories of childhood when my mom wouldn’t allow me to buy pricey costumes, opting instead to settle for budget-priced fare that was, in her opinion, just as good. “Just as good” didn’t cut it when I was a Return of the Jedi-obsessed elementary school kid in 1983 and had my heart set on dressing up as one of the pig-like Gamorrean Guards from Jabba the Hutt’s palace.

Since my mom wouldn’t fork over the cash for an expensive costume, I had to don a cheap plastic mask and body suit that made me look more like a Gamorrean Janitor than anything else. Such a get-up effectively made me a subject of mockery for some of the hooligan junior high kids who also chose to dress as Gamorrean Guards but were lucky enough to have realistic-looking rubber masks. But, I forgive her! Now that I’m a parent, I understand that there’s not always money available for frivolous expenses like costly Halloween costumes.

Still, even something like the Gamorrean Guard embarrassment wasn’t enough to deter my love of Halloween. I don’t think there’s been a year yet when I haven’t dressed up, and between chaperoning my niece Autumn and my son Kaz, trick-or-treating has continued to be an annual ritual for me. This year will be no different; Kaz and I will be dressing up as bees and Missus Raroo will be taking on the role of beekeeper. I’m hoping that having such a cute theme will score us extra candy when we make our trick-or-treat rounds!

Halloween was the first major holiday Missus Raroo and I celebrated together, and the memory was so special that we decided to make it our wedding date. Having our anniversary on Halloween makes it feel like the world is celebrating right along with us. Instead of a cheesy romantic dinner over candlelight, Missus Raroo and I will be carving pumpkins, eating candy, and watching Kaz take in the wonder of his second Halloween.

But when all is said and done, one of my favorite ways to wind down after a long evening of Halloween festivities is to kick back and play some video games. Over the years there has been no shortage of game releases perfectly suited for a creepy Halloween night, and this year has been no different. So, without further ado, I present you with Mister Raroo’s Top Picks for Halloween 2008!

Silent Hill: Homecoming (Konami, Xbox 360/Playstation 3)

The original Silent Hill on the Playstation will always be my favorite, not necessarily because I think it’s the best game in the series, but because it really scared the heck out of me. The game was released during a period in my life when I really didn’t have much going on. I had just graduated from college and was living back at home, working part time and basically trying to figure out what to do with my life. With so much free time, I often stayed up into the wee hours playing video games until I finally passed out from sheer exhaustion.

Silent Hill was one such game that I’d stay up playing until almost daybreak. While the game featured some pretty frightening visuals, it was the brilliant sound design that quickened my pulse and made me question if there weren’t unspeakable atrocities lurking in the darker corners of my room. I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared playing a video game, but that’s why it was so fun.

In the past few years, though, I’ve become less enthused about being frightened. I’ve stopped watching movies that give me the creeps and my gaming tastes have moved towards more light and cheerful fare. Perhaps avoiding scary games has lowered my tolerance for fear, but whatever the case, when I decided to give recently released Silent Hill: Homecoming a try, I once again came down with a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

I dabbled with all of Silent Hill’s sequels, but none of them managed to capture my attention as much as the first. Homecoming, however, has grabbed hold of me more than I expected, and I’ve spent quick a few late nights cautiously exploring the game’s unnerving world. In a lot of ways, Homecoming feels more like the first game than any of the other sequels, and while that might turn some fans off, it made me feel comfortable diving into the world of Silent Hill once again..

As always, a frightening atmosphere is set by appropriately gloomy sound design, and thankfully, the game’s environments are detailed and filled with dreary fog and shadows. However, what appeals to me most of all is that the character control is vastly improved, making navigation and combat much less cumbersome than in previous Silent Hill games. There were too many times I died in the other Silent Hill games because I couldn’t get the character to move how I wanted (or at least I’ll just keep telling myself that so I don’t have to admit that maybe I just wasn’t very good at the games!).

I’m not sure how well the hardest of the hardcore Silent Hill fans have reacted to the familiar ground explored by Homecoming, but I’ve had a blast staying up past my bedtime, jumping at any tiny noise I hear in my house. For some reason my cats become particularly mischievous whenever I play Homecoming and decide to dart around the room at particularly tense moments. Or, at least I hope it was just my cats and not some gruesome monsters!

Dead Space (Electronic Arts, Xbox 360/Playstation 3)

Dead Space is billed by EA as a scary game, but it really didn’t have that effect on me. Sure, there are a few moments when a monster unexpectedly leaped out and frightened me, but overall I never had the same sense of perpetual dread that I did with Silent Hill: Homecoming. Still, exploring the game’s desolate setting—namely a dilapidated husk of a giant space ship—is the perfect fit for any Halloween.

Feeling like a mix between Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, and BioShock, Dead Space caught me off guard with its quality. I’m not anti-Electronic Arts by any means, but besides the Burnout series there really isn’t much released by the company that interests me. Imagine my surprise, then, when I first booted up Dead Space and found that not only was it damn good, but I couldn’t put the controller down.

There has been some criticism that the game’s overall structure is too linear, but to me it just makes playing Dead Space feel like I’m on an awesome amusement park ride I don’t want to end. The game begins with a dramatic voyage to the doomed spaceship and the pace stays brisk from thereon out. There are times when it feels as if the game is on-rails, but I can’t imagine the pacing would be so steady and engaging if a different design direction had been adopted.

More than the spectacular visuals and sound design, more than the fantastic pacing, and even more than the innovative removal of a typical HUD in place of ingeniously-integrated in-game menus and options screens, what had the biggest impact on me is that at any point in the game I can press a button and a line will appear on-screen directing where I should go next. The line only appears for a few brief seconds, functioning more as a clue or reminder than a way to hold your hand, but it has been integral to my Dead Space experience.

I have a tendency to get lost and frustrated when I play games that require even the slighted bit of exploration, so I am very thankful to whatever member of the development team decided to integrate such a smart navigation feature. This means that instead of the annoying omnipresent direction arrows found in many other games, Dead Space players who want to explore without any unnecessary guidance can do so. But for a doofus like me who can’t find his way around the game’s spaceship, being able to bring up the visual guideline whenever needed is a godsend.

Though Dead Space may not inspire the same visceral sensations of horror that I felt while playing Silent Hill: Homecoming, it’s still a great choice for a Halloween romp. Dead Space’s eerie spaceship is the type of destination that’s almost begging to be visited on a dark, quiet night. And, it’s worth pointing out that the main character’s outfit that sort of makes him look like he’s wearing a Halloween costume! In fact, since killing the game’s monsters often results in them dropping a useful item, it’s almost like trick-or-treating!

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Konami, Nintendo DS)

About halfway through fifth grade, I arrived at school one morning and found a strange man sitting near my desk. I thought maybe he was a new student teacher or one of my classmates’ fathers. It turns out this “strange man” was actually an unusually tall new student named Adam. Standing at 6’4”, Adam was literally head and shoulders above the rest of us. The Puberty Fairy had definitely visited him early; he shaved regularly and had a deep, booming voice. Needless to say, the rest of us boys were in awe.

Despite looking like a man, Adam was definitely still a kid when it came to his interests. This became abundantly clear when I attended his sleepover birthday party near the end of the school year. Adam’s parents went all out, turning the family living room into what most of us deemed to be heaven. There was a table overflowing with every type of junk food imaginable, a stack of action and horror videocassettes to watch, and a massive pile of Nintendo Entertainment System games to play. It was at Adam’s party that I became acquainted with one of my lifelong loves: Castlevania.

Since that fateful gathering, I’ve played every Castlevania sequel imaginable, even those there weren’t quite up to snuff with the rest of the series. I love the atmosphere, I love the music, and I just love the core gameplay. Cracking skeletons with a whip (or sword, or axe) never gets old! Whenever a Castlevania game hits stores, it’s a pretty safe bet that I’ll be there on day one to pick up a copy.

In the past few years, the Castlevania series has become a Halloween tradition of sorts, with annual releases coming right before the big day. This year was no exception to the rule as Konami released their third Castlevania for the Nintendo DS, Order of Ecclesia. Thankfully, the development team did more than churn out a cookie-cutter sequel. Order of Ecclesia makes a number of small but interesting changes to the formula, including a darker art direction, an intriguing magic-based attack system, an overworld map filled with atypical locations, and (not counting Sonia Belmont’s lackluster starring role in Castlevania Legends for the original Gameboy) a female lead character that can go toe-to-toe with any of the rugged protagonists from previous games.

All things considered, Order of Ecclesia seems to have been a labor of love. The sprite animations and background graphics are meticulous, the music is catchy and often hauntingly beautiful, the character control feels spot-on, and the entire package comes together into what I consider to be one of the best Castlevania games ever constructed. With this in mind, it's no surprise that I adore it, except for one troublesome aspect: Order of Ecclesia is hard!

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the relative ease of the past half-dozen or so Castlevania games, but Order of Ecclesia’s enemies and bosses really seem to have it in for me. It’s shameful how many times I’ve seen the Game Over screen, but I’ve got to hand it to the strength of the overall game design that I’ve jumped back into the mix every time. That being said, would it have killed the development team to put in an Easy Mode for sissies like me?

Like many of the kids I grew up with, chances are Adam has left playing video games in the past. Of the few friends I’m still in contact with from my youth, most of them no longer partake in gaming, instead funneling their efforts into other uses of their free time, such as watching sports, playing golf, or getting drunk. Nevertheless, some part of me hopes that Adam is still a Castlevania fan and gets excited the same way I do whenever a new entry in the series is released. Who knows, maybe Adam will happen across this article and realize his birthday party is what got me hooked on Castlevania in the first place!

Happy Halloween from Mister Raroo!

The three games discussed above are but a few pebbles upon the massive mountain of video games ideal for a Halloween night. Whether you dust off your Atari 2600 and go vintage with Haunted House, pop a well-loved Luigi’s Mansion disc into your Gamecube, or download Siren: Blood Curse for your Playstation 3, I hope your Halloween gaming is pleasant and satisfying.

And if you’re not doing any gaming on Halloween, have a good time all the same! Halloween is one of the rare holidays that you can have a blast without spending any cash. There is a certain type of magic in the air that only appears on Halloween night. Whatever you have planned for Halloween, I wish a safe and fun evening to you and your friends and family. Happy Halloween, GameSetWatch readers!

[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. Some of his Halloween costumes from past years are a creepy old man, a flower, Super Mario, and a giant banana. You may reach Mister Raroo at mister.raroo@gmail.com]

Posted by Bill Sannwald at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, still trekking across the universe with plenty of RSS-related GameSetLinkDump goodness in tow - and this episode starts out with MTV Multiplayer discussing the state of game over with some smart developer types.

Also hanging out in here - hidden-ish characters from Grand Theft Auto 3, the best ZZT games ever, the MUD's birthday, Crispy Gamer's cash injection, new shooting game figures, LBP fun and games, and... some other things!

Link 'em up:

MTV Multiplayer » Are ‘Game Over’ Screens A Thing Of The Past?
'I recently spoke to three developers who’ve all been making dying in games a little less painful.'

QBlog: XXX
Richard Bartle: 'Today is the official 30th birthday of MUD. This anniversary has been reached without causing a ripple of interest. There are no articles in newspapers, no radio interviews, no podcasts, no blogs:'

Essex Girl | Technology | guardian.co.uk
'The animated electro-pop artist RiK has launched a new single called Essex Girl, and simultaneously launched this game as a 'game single'.'

The Independent Gaming Source: Recommended ZZT Games
Tim Sweeney's ASCII make-your-own adventure tool has spawned a lot of good stuff.

Hidden beta characters have been found in GTA3 | Unseen 64: Beta, Unreleased & Unseen Videogames!
Interesting, some game characters that got dropped before the final version and still have on-disc assets.

Game journalism sucks: So Crispy Gamer raises money for an alternative voice » VentureBeat
Interesting... only $2 CPM? I love Crispy Gamer conceptually but I think something like Giant Bomb is a lot closer to the future (for the Wiki awesomeness, not just Jeff, sorry Jeff!)

Shoot The Core: Gashapon Shooting Game History volume 3
Just picked up Vol.2 in Tokyo, is yummy.

The anatomy of the first video game - On the Level- msnbc.com
'“Tennis for Two” created in 1958, was a science experiment'

Media Molecule - we make games. » Blog Archive » Creator Pick - Geosautus
Already some super-impressive LBP stuff coming up, despite network/holy book-related problems.

Lost Levels - Happy Camper for NES discovered
'Game collector “NationalGamesDepot” has recently discovered, via his collection of various Color Dreams memorabilia and development assets, a copy of the unreleased action-adventure game Happy Camper for the NES.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[So Christian Nutt was kind enough to attend this event for us in SF, and here's a write-up of what Microsoft is planning with Xbox Live Community Games. Looks to me like there's some strong indie goodness going on here, though as remarked later, it'll be interesting to see how the wheat/chaff separation is done - maybe we can help on GamerBytes. Overall, looking forward to it!]

At an invite-only event in San Francisco last night, Microsoft execs Chris Satchell and Boyd Multerer welcomed the press to play and enjoy a slate of the most promising early examples from its XNA Community Games lineup, at the same time introducing some of the key developers of these games.

The event, held in a San Francisco nightclub with a lounge atmosphere -- plenty of comfy couches and HDTVs -- was a showcase for some of the most promising, professional-looking games in the Community Games lineup.

These drew from the top entrants to Microsoft's 2008 Dream-Build-Play competition, as already showcased in video form on Gamasutra.

Those most notable titles gave the press a roadmap to which games are likely (but not assured) to be included in the launch lineup for the service. The titles will come online for Xbox 360 alongside the New Xbox Experience update on November 19th.

XNA Community Games As 'Sea Change'?

Satchell and Multerer praised the efforts of Microsoft internal staff in getting the service ready, and the developers in creating their games -- noting that this project had always been part of the Xbox 360 roadmap since the beginning of the console.

Multerer, in particular, believes that this will lead to an "sea change" in game development, with indie game development finding a truly wide audience. This is, according to him, thanks to the easy access to a built-in console audience and simple, standardized monetization of the titles. (It's worth noting that, unlike with Xbox Live Arcade, there's no expensive or excessively lengthy submission process, other than a peer review.)

In discussion with Gamasutra, Multerer compared the incipient ability for indie developers to reach a large, commercialized console audience on the Xbox 360 to be akin to the shift in the film industry precipitated at the end of the '80s.

He noted the example of how Steven Soderbergh's 'Sex, Lies, and Videotape', in 1989, helped spearhead the indie film movement which was explosive throughout the '90s and beyond, and hoped XBLCG could do similarly for games.

An important distinction between Community Games' strategy -- and the vaunted user-created content in Spore and LittleBigPlanet -- is that these games are fully created by those with game development skills. This is significantly different to gamers modifying content within the parameters defined by individual games' editing systems.

With XNA Game Studio, Microsoft allows complete game customization, custom coding, and content insertion, with creators needing the software package (and some reasonable C# coding skills), an Xbox 360 to connect to your PC, and an inexpensive yearly XNA subscription.

Multerer and Satchell were both also keen to point out at the event that over 700 schools are currently using XNA Game Studio in their computer science curricula.

Surprisingly Professional Results

One thing that was notable is that the games -- which will retail from 200, 400, or 800 Microsoft points (US$2.50, $5, and $10), and which will all have timed demo versions -- seemed to be on par with many of the "professional" games on Xbox Live Arcade.

This is perhaps because some of the top titles were created by small groups of former industry professionals, or well-resourced, talented academic teams.

For example, CarneyVale: Showtime, winner of Dream-Build-Play, was created at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Weapon of Choice (pictured, another DBP entry) was developed by Mommy's Best Games -- which is principally Nathan Fouts, an ex-Insomniac staffer who worked on Resistance: Fall of Man and Ratchet & Clank Future.

Both games exhibit a high level of polish -- in line with games already released on the commercial XBLA service -- and mature gameplay ideas.

Conclusion: The Road Ahead

While the event was slick and the games were polished and enjoyable, it still leaves us wondering what cornucopia of games will debut on November 19th.

After all, the 3.0 version of XNA Game Studio, required to package and submit the games through the final stages of readiness for distribution, has just been officially released today.

And while the games on display were promising, even these hand-picked examples sometimes failed to show breakout innovation -- relying on tested, traditional gameplay concepts, albeit adapted in charming ways.

Nonetheless, it appears that Xbox Live Community Games is a service uniquely positioned to deliver indie games to a broad and receptive audience (and monetize them quickly and close to seamlessly).

But will the amount and varying quality of the games overwhelm the average player? This remains to be seen.

Nonetheless, Xbox Live Community Games is the beginning of something, not the end. It should be fascinating to see something closer to the iPhone Store's open marketplace on a console for the first time.

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

['Design Lesson 101' is a regular column by game designer Manveer Heir. The goal is to play a game from start to completion and learn something about game design in the process. This week, in honor of Bethesda's release of Fallout 3 we take a look at Interplay's classic post-nuclear apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout and its sequel, Fallout 2.]

Every single day of my life I make choices. I choose what clothes to wear. I choose what food to eat. I choose who to be friends with. These choices I make affect my life and the lives of those around me. My choice to eat yogurt this morning probably doesn't have huge consequences, beyond how hungry I am later. However, my choice many years ago to work towards being a game developer has has major consequences on not only my life, but the lives of others around me.

These consequences and the choice that fuel them are the heart of the Fallout games and the focus of this week's design lesson.

Design Lesson: Fallout and Fallout 2 use choice and consequence to deliver a world of enormous opportunities to the player and give the player agency over the type of character they develop.

Like in many RPGs, Fallout lets you choose if you want to be good or evil. Your actions will decide your alignment. If you save the people of a dying town or kill the slavers that look to put all humans into bondage, then your actions will be looked on favorably. If you kill children and women for sport and perform unsavory deeds for mob bosses, you will be looked at as an evil person.

No matter what your actions, your choices will have consequences however. In Fallout, saving a girl from a group of Raiders gives you the ability to have her join your party and adventure with you. As a result, you can get into tougher fights, since you have the help of another person.

In Fallout 2, I was granted a temporary day-pass to go inside the gates of Vault City, a very closed-off city that could have information that would help me with my main quest. While inside Vault City, I spoke to a high-ranking official in a rather rude manner. As a result, I was immediately kicked out of the city and my pass was permanently revoked.

Unless I fought my way into the city and killed everyone within, I was now unable to get inside the walls of Vault City. All of the quests that I had accepted in the city, were now impossible to complete. The important information inside the city was unreachable. The people in the city would not speak to me, sell me goods, help me out. They reviled me.

In many games, this would be the end. The poor choice I made in talking to an official in a snide manner would result in the consequence of game over, since the critical information was hiding within.

However, in Fallout, while the consequence of making my life more difficult was apparent, the game wasn't over. There were other sources that had the same information elsewhere. I just had to explore some other cities to find them. I had to find an alternate path. A path that the designers made available, knowing that someone would talk themselves into a pickle inside Vault City.

The game never told me if I talked back to the man in Vault City that I would get the boot. It just did it. I made that choice. I remember clicking the dialog option and thinking to myself “Man, this guy is a little annoying. I'm going to be a smart-ass”. Nowadays, many games would broadcast you the consequence of your choice before the choice is made. Give the player all the information up-front, and they can make the right decision.

But life isn't about having all the information up-front. Often you make your choices and have no idea of the consequences until much later. Fallout emulates this with it's game mechanics, and as a result it results in the world feeling richer and deeper. Your choices feel like your own and not what the designer wanted you to do. You are able to make your own mistakes and recover from them. Your choices are your own, and the unique set of choices you make as you play is what makes the game play differently for all different players.

Being evil opens up doors that aren't available if you are good, and vice-versa. The game uses the different choices you can make and offers alternatives in-case you ever make a “bad” choice. Those alternatives fill the game world with opportunity and gameplay. As a result, there is no right way to play Fallout. The same can't be said for many modern games, where there is one correct way and path to play (or two paths to choose from).

The choice and consequence also affected my character and how I role-played him. I ended up rolling my vilification by Vault City into my character's personality. Since there were rival cities, I sided with the other cities and not Vault City. I didn't want to help Vault City; they hated me.

This led me to feel like I was playing a true character, and not just a cookie-cutter blank slate that is prevalent in many games. The game gives enough background to keep the story interesting and relevant, but lets you impress enough of your own personality into the character to make him yours.

My personality came through in my actions and the choices I made. I controlled the actions of my character and how he responded to the situations of the world. Nowhere is that more apparent than at the end of both games, when the narrator talks about what happens in the future to different characters and areas. Some cities will prosper because you helped out. Others will die off, because you abandoned them. Still, others will fail even after your best efforts.

All of this makes the world of Fallout feel bigger and richer than it really is. It doesn't end up feeling strictly like a sequence of designer-created events. It feels like a world that responds to you, that lets you be the person you want to be, and gives you a chance no matter what. That's the beauty of Fallout and it took replaying both games to realize why I consider them to be my favorite games of all-time.

[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 (2)

[Well, it's incredibly early in the cycle, but hey, the GDC website is open, there's some new summits announced, and I'm looking forward to seeing what my colleagues at the conf come up with for this year's event - should be mega.]

Game Developers Conference organizer Think Services has opened registration for next year's GDC event, to be held in San Francisco's Moscone Center from March 23 to 27, 2009.

Also announced was the addition of new summits falling under the GDC umbrella. These summits, which take place on the Monday and Tuesday of GDC week, are aimed at providing specialized coverage for various crucial development categories and practices.

In addition, the traditional Wednesday to Friday main conference, including major keynotes and existing Audio, Business, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts tracks will continue for 2009.

Newly established Monday-Tuesday summits include the AI Summit and Localization Summit, bringing the total summit count to nine, as follows:

- AI Summit
- Casual Games Summit
- Game Outsourcing Summit
- GDC Mobile
- Independent Games Summit
- IGDA Education Summit
- Localization Summit
- Serious Games Summit
- Worlds in Motion Summit

Longstanding GDC initiatives such as the GDC Career Pavilion, the Independent Games Festival, the Game Developers Choice Awards, and the Game Career Seminar will also continue.

"You can expect more specialized content through our new and existing summits in conjunction with compelling talks in our main conference," said event director Meggan Scavio, a 10-year veteran of the conference.

"The Game Developers Conference prides itself on continually improving the conference experience based on the needs of our attendees and the industry. With the help of feedback from the community, our advisory board, and editorial staff, we've crafted a conference this year that speaks to the changing landscape of the games industry."

More information on next year's GDC line-up, hotel details and registration specifics are available on the official Game Developers Conference 2009 website.

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

[In this in-depth analysis, Chris Remo looks at fan and critical reaction to Ubisoft Montreal's Far Cry 2 to examine the emergent gameplay elements in its 'slow burn' structure that make initially frustrated gamers later become enthralled.]

Ubisoft Montreal's just-debuted Far Cry 2 is not an inviting game. Like the war-torn (and presumably fictional) African state it depicts, Far Cry 2 is brutal, sparse, and often gives you little guidance.

Right from the start, your vulnerabilities are made clear: weapons you find on the ground rust and jam; you periodically suffer the effects of malaria; damaged vehicles require basic engine maintenance; and serious injuries demand improvised surgery, often with pliers.

On top of that, combat encounters (often approached with those rusted, jamming-prone guns) are fairly straightforward FPS affairs, and with the amount of mission-to-mission driving required in the game's enormous open world, their frequency can grate.

Many gamers have gone online to post initial frustrations with the game -- an understandable reaction from the perspective of somebody unaccustomed to its structure and design ethic, particularly in the context of an FPS.

But in the week since its release, there has been an interesting phenomenon unfolding. I have seen more and more posts by people announcing that Far Cry 2 finally "clicks" with them, that they have internalized the game's structure and systems, and have been rewarded with unique, memorable moments.

For me, those have been Far Cry 2's stock in trade. Game designers often speak about the dominance of the personal player story over the designer's authored narrative. Indeed, that potential is powerful, and clearly more relevant to games than any other entertainment medium. But practically speaking, to me, relatively few games truly exploit that potential.

Far Cry 2 has been an exception. What at first seemed like unfortunate sparseness now feels to me like a canvas for emergent gameplay (those well-worn buzzwords). There's your recurring sickness; the unreliability of found weaponry; the combination of almost uniformly dry environments, video game-y inflammable objects, and fire that propagates convincingly.

The game's persistent component parts feel designed to convey a convincingly (but not flashily) coherent world, but even more importantly to increase the chances of memorable things happening.

In addition to progressing the game's main quest line, you can help out your buddies with their own tangential objectives, sabotage arms dealers' competition to open up new weapon options, or perform hit jobs for that old game chestnut, the deep mysterious unnamed voice.

I find myself constantly telling people stories about my own Far Cry 2 experience. Sometimes they involve the game's rather basic plot, and sometimes they don't. This is not something I usually find myself doing.

There was the time, very early in my playthrough, when I got out of my 80s-era hatchback to track down a diamond in the jungle using the game's No Country For Old Men-esque homing beacon, forgot where I parked the car, passed out from malaria trying to find it, and was safely awoken by the buddy character I had recently rescued.

Or the time I was patiently scouting out an enemy encampment with my sniper rifle scope and startled by nearby sudden movement, reflexively snapping my crosshairs over to the source -- and finding my sights trained on a young gazelle that had wandered out from some overgrowth.

Or the time I had just blown up an entire base in a domino-like chain reaction, with a single well-placed rocket; turning to leave, I found myself blinded by the reflection of the high noon sun on bright white sand dunes -- and out of the shimmering brilliance trotted a pair of zebras.

These events, just a few examples of the many Far Cry 2 moments I take pleasure in relating, are not even particularly remarkable in and of themselves. Part of the game's success is its sense of restraint -- another area that works against it in the short term, but for it if you decide to take advantage of what it has to offer.

Unlike its predecessor (with which it shares only the most tangential thematic bonds of environmental openness and...shooting), there are no supernatural or science fiction elements to Far Cry 2.

Certainly, the player can soak up more bullets than the enemies, and the AI is not going to win any strategic matchups, but when it comes to the setting and the feel, few exaggerated liberties are taken -- a surprisingly (and, to me, unfortunately) uncommon approach in video games.

Africa is not rendered in a particularly stylized way, and the events that take place are often only as over the top as the player makes them (and that potential is there, if you want it).

This is video game Africa to be sure, but closer to real Africa than most video games would bother to go. One doesn't really appreciate Far Cry 2's attention to detail in that regard until the time has been invested to generate enough of the unique moments that result.

Far Cry 2, headed up by creative director Clint Hocking (a vocal proponent of exploration and player-driven experiences in games), is not for everybody. It has its flaws -- the frequency at which enemies respawn, for example, is frequently and justifiably called out.

Some of its impressive features, like its self-constructing narrative, are handled quietly enough that most players may not even notice them at work. And, in the end, some may find its fundamental gameplay building blocks too repetitive to hold interest to completion.

But Far Cry 2 does succeed where many games do not -- and very few shooters even attempt to go there. On the other side of the design spectrum as the Half-Lifes and Call of Dutys (extremely impressive games in their own right), Far Cry 2 doesn't so much attempt to define a memorable experience and effectively communicate it to the player.

In fact, the game tries to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, and simply lets the player loose in its world -- a fascinating prospect.

Posted by Chris Remo at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

As the week wends its happy way along, another GameSetLinksDump appears in your RSS, and lo, everything is alright with the world - or at least not terrible, if you like odd homebrew Atari 2600 games with psychedelic visuals.

Also hanging out in here - a profile of Koji Kondo, Jane Pinckard on picking your mate in Fable II, Tom Chick on Starcraft Deux, some good game fiction, Simon Parkin on playing different games without tripping over your shoelaces, and a good sight more besides.

In for mer:

Infinite Lives » Lead: synesthasia homebrew for the 2600
'Lead is a music shmup from programmer Simone Serra, designed for the Atari 2600. It boasts unforgiving gameplay and a catchy ‘glitch’ soundtrack.'

Hit Self-Destruct: Murder Charge
Some really interesting, well-written game-related fiction - I once tried to do something similar with Graves & MacGuffin and an early IC-related piece of fiction, to less effect, I think.

::: C o r e T a l e n t G a m e s :::
Bit of a 'grassroots' approach to game development here. Complex, but will it work? It's interesting, nonetheless.

Greenspeak: A blog about gaming.
Yikes, Jeff Green's EA project (which was early in production) got canned 4 weeks after he joined, he's on SimAnimals now helping to finish it before moving onto something else he will be more instrumental in.

A New Game for Super Mario's Maestro - WSJ.com
Good profile of Koji Kondo - via GameCulture.

game girl advance: Missing: One Husband-to-Be
'It took me a long time to find someone who wasn't a laughable buffoon or a stuck-up prig.'

Why Deus Ex Is Important « Double Buffered
'The element that elevates Deus Ex from a great game to a brilliant one is the way the choices in gameplay complement the plot choices.'

Crispy Gamer - Column: Rush, Boom, Turtle: The Game So Nice They Made It Thrice
Talking StarCraft II-y things: 'But the actual real-time strategy gameplay doesn't lend itself to storytelling, because -- and I almost hate to tell you this -- it's a puzzle.'

chewing pixels » The Videogame Bends
'Move too quickly from one game to the next and you’ll trip up, like a multilinguist moving too fast from one country to another, mixing-up their vocabularies in transit.'

Gamestop.com - Buy Ultimate Shooting Collection - Nintendo Wii
Don't forget about this, 3 Milestone Japanese arcade shooters for $30, including the neat-looking graphically Radio Allergy, Karous, and Chaos Field. Good deal.

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

[Following his ebullient first installment praising Nintendo's Wii, designer Brice Morrison looks at the flip side - discussing just how the console "has failed to deliver on the magic it promised."]

Released in November, 2006, the Nintendo Wii is revolutionary to say the least. With its innovative user interface, it has completely taken the world by storm by reinventing what video games are and who they are made for.

With nearly 30 million sold worldwide and over 160 million lifetime sales predicted (more than twice that of the Xbox 360 or PS3), Nintendo has clearly hit the ball out of the park.

Critics are raving, the crowds are cheering, it seems as though the once sagging console industry has been rejuvenated and ready to run at a blistering pace for years to come.

To this day, two years after launch, you still have a hard time finding a Wii in stores. But what consumers are lining up to buy isn’t the Wii, what they are buying is the idea and the dream of the Wii.

Consumers, many of whom have never played games before, have been picking up a Wii, enjoying it for a few weeks, and then watching it collect dust by their TV. They can’t explain why, but for some reason they just don’t play it anymore.

This is because the Wii has failed to deliver on the magic it promised.

A License to Dream

When I first heard about the Wii, I was completely ecstatic. Though the idea of movement-based controls are now obvious, at the time it was completely and utterly original. Such an idea had never even crossed the average gamer’s mind.

All we saw for the future was a jump from button-mashing to VR Headsets, with nothing in between. This first step off of the classic game controller was nothing short of mind blowing.

Everyone who watched in awe at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) 2006 also watched their minds begin spinning with ideas. This is a godsend, we thought. We can do everything!

We can make fitness games that work your body, shooting games with actual movement, puzzle games with tactile interface, and much more. Truly, the Wii seemed like a license to dream anything.

But the ceiling was bound to appear.

Waggle: The Empty Promise

The principle failure of the Wii and its Wii remote is in its promise of immersion through movement. When many people imagine what playing the Wii would be like after seeing the commercials and experiences of other players, they imagine an incredibly immersive experience.

The movement based controls of the Wii hearken to a completely visceral play session, becoming one with the virtual world in front of them. We all drooled at the opportunity to dive behind couches in our living room to escape gunfire, being able to replicate a real tennis match without leaving the house, or having a sword fight that was even more real and tactile than the ones we had as children with wooden sticks.

It has been a disappointment, therefore, to see our promised virtual experience reduced to shaking the controller.

The problem is that waggling the Wii remote does not, in itself, add to a gameplay experience. If I want to open a virtual door and am asked to turn the Wii remote instead of pressing a button, that doesn’t make the experience more immersive.

While it may be novel once or twice, the simple movement itself does not enrich the game. In fact, it can become tedious and frustrating. Developers are just as guilty as players in this regard.

Creating one game after another that is essentially a recycled last-generation title, but with new Wii remote action, does not make it any different than the title was before.

The sad truth is that substituting Wii remote movement for a button press is nothing more than an empty promise. Upgrading to a new technology only to have the freshly minted fun evaporate after one run through is not technology well spent.

Looking Behind the Curtain

I remember teaching my cousin how to play Wii Tennis, and when he went to serve the ball, he lifted his left hand, the one not holding the Wii remote, to toss. At that moment, he didn’t understand how the Wii worked.

All he knew was that it was some sort of magical machine that mimicked your real life movements. It was a joyous occasion and a incredible exploratory experience.

But the innocence did not last long. Upon further experimentation, he learned how the controller worked, discovering that a quick snap of the wrist gave the same forehand as a loopy swing of his whole upper body. As the initial amazement wore off, Wii Tennis became simply another video game.

When the public imagined what was possible with the Wii, we imagined complete, full-on physical experiences akin to backyard football. Perhaps, we thought, you may even get a little bruised up in a game on the Wii, playing with competitive friends.

Many of the early press responses to the Wii held this view, with parents saying that they enjoy it because it gets them and their kids off the couch. But to say that you think the Wii gets you off the couch is to reveal a naive understanding of its fundamental gameplay.

Sure, it may get kids off the couch, but when they’ll be doing off the couch is flicking their wrists, not playing basketball.

The limitations of the Wii remote’s accelerometer (even with Wii Motion Plus) reveal it to be far short of the dream machine that players were pining over. The necessary later release of Wii Fit shows that Nintendo developers have come to terms with the limitations of the Wii remote by itself.

Wii Fit may be fantastic for those who want exercise, but it’s too specialized of a peripheral to do much for those who want to explore the virtual worlds present in other games, but in a more immersive way. We wanted the Wii remote to satisfy our needs outside of exercise, too.

What We Bought Vs. What We Have

The Nintendo Wii is an elegant symphony of hardware, software, marketing, and imagination. At first glance, it appears that it can do everything you could think of, an experience full of promise.

Everyone loves the idea of the Wii. The idea of a totally immersive experience. The idea of games that are more like kickball and less like Tetris. The idea of entering a brand new world. But after some time, we learn that we have purchased nothing more than a shakable A-button.

Without doubt, future console releases and peripherals will attempt to satisfy us further. The Wii has made a great leap forward, but those who think we have already arrived are mistaken.

[Brice Morrison is a game designer who has been developing quirky titles since he was in middle school. Before taking a job at Electronic Arts, he developed several successful independent games such as Jelly Wars, an action adventure franchise, and QuickQuests, a casual MMORPG.

While at the University of Virginia, Brice founded Student Game Developers, an organization which continues to produce games every semester and open the doors to the games industry for students. His blog at BriceMorrison.com discusses games in a broader context and how they can be more than simply entertainment.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

[Every week, sister weblog GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley will be summing up the top console digital download news tidbits from the past 7 days, including brand new game announcements and scoops through the world of Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and WiiWare.]

Welcome to another exciting week of console digital download content - with plenty of new released to check out. This week's Xbox Live Arcade releases include Penny Arcade Episode 2 and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and WiiWare has just debuted Strong Bad Episode 3 and the latest in the under-rated series: Art Style: Rotohex.

Elsewhere, this week's PlayStation Network titles are unknown as of press time, but last week they got the excellent Prince of Persia Classic and the first episode of Penny Arcade Adventures. Here's our top picks for stories in the last seven days:

Xbox Live Arcade

Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 2, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? And Marble Blast Ultra DLC Available This Week On XBLA
This week is the first time we've had double 1200 Microsoft Point titles. 5th Grader actually looks a whole lot better than other downloadable quiz titles, but probably won't get released outside of America. Some long awaited Marble Blast Ultra DLC debuts too.

Zombies!!! And Wings Of War Coming To XBLA And PSN In 2009
Big Rooster are working hard on bringing two strategy board games to the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, both of which are growingly increasingly popular on the board game circuit. Turn based dogfighting and zombie killing? Sounds like a blast.

Xbox Live Primetime Delayed Until Spring In America
The New Xbox Experience coming on November 19 won't have everything originally announced for it - the Primetime service, allowing people to play games like 1 vs. 100, will not be available at launch.

PlayStation Network

EU PSN Store Update - NoveStrike And Prince Of Persia Classic
Europe finally get the chance to play third-party indie PSN title NovaStrike, while Prince of Persia makes its way from the XBLA to the PSN.

NA PSN Store Update - The P's Have It
Penny Arcade Episode 1 and Prince of Persia Classic highlight this week's releases on the PlayStation Network. Some notable updates to High Velocity Bowling also top up this week's debuts.

Sony "Adapting A Global Approval System" For The PlayStation Network?
Europeans are getting sick of having to wait weeks upon weeks for unnecessarily delayed content for the PlayStation Network. According to new media reports, it seems Sony is determined to rectify the situation.

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update - Art Style: Rotohex and Strong Bad: Episode 3
The third Art Style game has been released in the US, a new simple rotating puzzle game called Rotohex. Strong Bad Episode 3 continues the monthly episodic release for the series, too. Nice to see Nintendo following an actual release plan - now where are the Art Style games in Europe?

EU WiiWare Update - Building Up And Breaking Down
Europe now gets the chance to play Tetris Party along with the rest of the world - rejoice! They also get The Incredible Maze from last week's U.S. debut, and Home Sweet Home, an interesting title which allows you to design your home. A game that came out in Europe first? Do my eyes deceive me?

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

[Attending PopCap's release event for Bejeweled Twist, our own Brandon Sheffield looks at the four-year odyssey to create the latest in the massively popular Bejeweled casual game series, the appropriateness of holding a grandiose launch party during the current economic crisis, and why the 'mom test' conquers all.]

Bejeweled has been incredibly important for PopCap over the years. It launched the company to success, and even now the series claims between 30 and 40 percent of the company’s revenue, depending on who you ask. In fact, the franchise has now had 350 million copies downloaded and over 25 million units sold.

And let's not forget that the firm has sprouted majorly in size -- it has a worldwide staff of over 200 people and offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Vancouver, B.C., Dublin and most recently, Shanghai.

The company’s large-scale launch party for Bejeweled Twist in Seattle, held at the Paul Allen-created Experience Music Project museum, only goes to show how much stock PopCap has in this game.

The evening’s activities, which included a presentation from a "Spanish professor of twistology," (who I happened to see in line for the event, and who had a whisk and an egg beater in his pocket), alongside circus-style hoop artists, food and drink, loads of stations to play the game, as well as the usual hoop-la.

The game, which has just launched for PC download, took four years to make, and co-founder John Vechey told me that, at one time, there were four programmers and three artists all working on various aspects of the game, which he categorized as "insane" given its straightforwardness.

But what sets PopCap games apart from other casual titles is their attention to detail, and the look and feel. Vechey naturally agrees, and told me, “Three years ago, we could’ve showed you something that looked a lot like this, and had a similar mechanic, but it just lacked a lot of that slickness.”

During the creators' speech, designer Jason Kapalka commented on the long process. "I guess that’s four years," he said, "which I guess means we suck. I don’t know."

Co-founder Brian Fiete corrected him: "It means we iterate on games, and keep working on it until it’s done, it doesn’t mean we suck. We could make it in two nights if we had to." To which John Vechey responded: "Dude, not cool."

The evening was lined with a tinge of guilt on the part of the PopCap crew, for throwing a huge bash during the current world economic crisis.

During the opening remarks, CEO David Roberts said "I do think it’s important to acknowledge the realities of the global economic situation. We planned this event, the launch of our biggest product ever, well before the economy started its recent slide."

"More recently," he added, "we discussed whether we should even talk about those sorts of issues. But I concluded that the need for fun in our lives may never be greater than it will be for the next year or so, and millions and millions of people will find much-needed relief and comfort in our games and Bejeweled Twist, and we do believe our business is relatively resistant to economic downturns."

As John Vechey said, "You don’t want to be the band on the Titanic."

The core mechanic of Bejeweled Twist revolves around the idea of rotation -- rather than switching jewels as you did in the previous games, you rotate a group of four gems clockwise in order to get groups of three, or four, or more.

Power-ups appear during the game, and different modes have you completing different challenges. This core gameplay is similar in concept to Hexic or even more like Super Puzzle Fighter II’s Z mode, the latter of which none of the founders had played.

The play mechanic really is subtly different, as evidenced by the fellow who played the game next to me stating that the game was "not that much different from their other ones."

He was visually disappointed with the game, but what he failed to note is that in the casual arena, there are one or two game mechanics at max. If you change one of those up, you have a drastically different game for the casual player.

However, some of the over-the-top, borderline psychedelic visuals that appealed to the more 'core' players in Peggle have been added to the game.

Then I saw the true test. There was an elderly woman of perhaps 70, who was trying to play the game. She couldn’t get her head around the mechanic, and a PopCap employee stepped up to help her.

Her response was: "I don’t want you to tell me, I want the game to tell me!" She spent some time in the tutorial, and then finally got it. After that, she was stopping strangers to show them, and exclaiming, "I did it!"

This is going to be PopCap’s true test. The game is, on the surface, still too simple for the hardcore crowd to immediately latch on to. Yet the play mechanic is just complex enough to give its core audience cause for alarm. But once they figure it out, they’re quite engaged, and in fact feel a real sense of achievement.

Interestingly, the game was much more complex before, with more power-ups, more matching patterns, and the ability to rotate blocks counter-clockwise as well as clockwise. But none of this tested well with users, according to Jason Kapalka. Even the original Bejeweled had diagonal matching in its original iteration, but this was scrapped in favor of better playability for the casual market -- or the "mom test", as they call it.

The series is clearly still of extremely high importance for the company, and rare is the casual game company that does an AAA game launch for its new product. But PopCap has taken a risk here, by making the game just a little more difficult to wrap one’s head around.

If PopCap is any indication, the casual market is having its boom time. But the economy, fierce competition, and most importantly confused grandmas and housewives will ultimately determine what the future holds for this mainstay casual series.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, I've already described today's pictured Wii game on the Gamasutra group-chat channel as 'full of win' - though you guys can decide for yourselves whether it is or not by drinking in the exceptionally silly artwork and mini-game descriptions.

But luckily, there's more than just that on here, with some of the below posts poking at Yakuza 2, discussing web developers vs. game developers, looking at the Persona series' aftermarket value, talking about unionizing, and lots more.

Down for the count:

The Brainy Gamer: A cutscene offer you can't refuse
Bravo to Michael for pointing out Yakuza 2 for PS2, almost completely ignored thus far due to format: 'Yakuza 2 (Ryu ga Gotoku) is the best narrative game I've played this year, by a wide margin. Better than GTA IV and way better than MGS4.'

Black Company Studios » Blog Archive » Fustian Future
'That being said, I’m always torn on the unionising issue. It’s been done to death on the TCE forums, and very little new gets said about it.' I think these were pretty much the grounds under which it didn't make it, although it's certainly a shame in some ways.

YouTube - Player One - Space Invaders (1980)
Whoa, a hit Australian single inspired by the arcade game, from 1980? Via ALitel.

T=Machine » Cultural differences: game developers vs web developers
Super-analyze-y comments based on an Andrew Chen post that is also interesting.

:: G A M E H O T E L ::: DIE SHOW
A Zurich edition of GameHotel with Derek Yu, Chris Hecker, Keiichi Yano, and some other neat folks, just happened, completely missed this.

Tiny Q&A: Zombie BBQ's Gammick and EnjoyUp - Tiny Cartridge
'If you’ve accidentally glanced at Tiny Cartridge for even a second, you know that we’re fascinated with Gammick/EnjoyUp’s Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ.' Bizarro DS title alert!

The Triforce » Blog Archives » Gaming in The Clinton Years
'NAVGTR — The National Association of Videogame Testers and Reviewers, a grand name for what seems to be two middle aged men who apparently spent the nineties misjudging videogames in the name of artistic progression — have stuck up hundreds of these.' Whatever happened to their video game cruise with Cloris Leachman, anyhow?

VGPC.com Blog: A Tale of Two Personae
'Dickens uses the line to contrast the times in London and Paris, London was doing well and Paris was not. The same can be said of Persona 2 and Persona 3.'

Where’s the Money In Casual Web Game Development? - GigaOM
A few good numbers - via Wonderland.

Gamestop.com - Buy Calvin Trucker's Redneck Jamboree - Nintendo Wii
OMG, and it's being made by French Canadians (Humagade) - check out the game descriptions for more boggle.

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

[Over at sister online worlds site WorldsInMotion.biz, Mathew Kumar is still having a fun ol' time analyzing online games for the WiM Atlas. Here's his overview of Wizard101, as developed by KingsIsle Entertainment, a distinctly Potter-esque teen and 'tween-targeted magic-themed virtual world.]

Name: Wizard101

Developer: KingsIsle Entertainment

Established: September 2006

How it Works: Wizard101 requires the download of a client -- the initial download is of a 8mb installer. Navigation and gameplay are accomplished via mouse and keyboard input.

Overview: Wizard101 is an online virtual world with a 3D client. The title allows users to customize outfits and accessories for their wizard avatars, play puzzles and mini-games, adopt magical pets, and learn from seven different schools of magic -- collecting cards, which can then use to engage in card duels alongside and against other players.

Payment Method: Wizard101 is free to play, but also offers a subscription, starting at $9.95 for one month's access, allowing access to more areas and features. Lower rates are available for families and/or longer term commitments.

Key Features:
- Teen/Tween-orientated 3D client-based virtual world
- "Harry Potter"-esque theme
- Collectible card game battles
- Customizable avatar, pets
- Safe environment with moderated chat (free text chat only available to subscribers with parental permission)

Wizard101: In-Depth Tour

I've struggled with how to start this section of the Atlas entry for a while, probably because I've found it so easy to keep dipping back into Wizard101 to explore it some more -- for a variety of reasons, but as is the format I'm not going to discuss the game's positives and negatives until we get to the conclusion.

However, I will make a fairly strong statement to start this off with. Wizard101 is very much an "MMORPG" rather than a virtual world. The distinction is loose -- we have a lot of trouble with that on Worlds in Motion! -- but sometimes it makes sense to separate them out. With Wizard101 the reason I want to make the distinction is that the game is very much based around playing a character who fights enemies and goes on quests to level up (and vice versa), rather than any concept of creating a community.

In fact, sometimes when I think about it (personally) I consider the distinction to be that in MMORPGs you can often spend most of your time playing alone in the world, where virtual worlds tend to "force" some socialization upon you (usually because they're so boring without doing so). Wizard101 offers instantly such a list of things to do it makes me think of World of Warcraft before I think of anything else.

Ahem! But moving on. Wizard101 isn't especially clear on its website, but to play you have to download a client, from which you play the game. The download is quick, but if you're used to playing MMORPGs the experience of starting the game up each time is familiar -- you usually have to spend a while downloading the latest patch before you can finally run it -- but once you're in everything is pretty streamlined.

After creating my character using the game's very cute Q&A style character creator (it made me think of playing Ultima games "back in the day", which may or may not resonate with you) I ended up with an ice mage called "Scot Frostglen" (you can't create your own name, instead selecting from a small amount of possible names, which can be mixed and matched.)

Scot headed off on his adventure -- which borrows heavily from the Harry Potter mythos, lets not beat around the bush, here -- and quickly learned how to fight with enemies, which involves a turn-based sort-of "card-battle" system.

I don’t consider this an especially important quibble, so I'll place it here rather than in the conclusion, but I was disappointed with the card-battle system. Perhaps incorrectly when I saw it -- you use a series of cards to cast spells, summon monsters, etc. -- that it would be a rather deep system, if not Magic: The Gathering then at least the Pokemon CCG.

Alas, it was not to be. Turn-based battles pan out like they do in nearly any RPG (especially those of the Japanese persuasion, though Wizard101 couldn't be further from a Japanese game in aesthetic) with cards really only limiting your choice of what you can do each turn. Summoned monsters last a turn and everything you do costs mana (which we'll discuss in a minute).

One interesting thing is that as you run around the world you can see everyone who is involved in a turn-based battle (there aren't instanced) so can join in at any point -- notably, whether you'd like to or not (it doesn't make sense to run through the middle of someone else's battle, though, so that's my bad, really).

As a result, the game has a strange sort of dynamic. Characters are split up into classes that roughly mimic the usual MMORPG archetypes -- ice wizards are (supposedly) tanks, fire wizards damage dealers, etc. In the turn based format (and, admittedly, in the still early stages of the game that I am playing) it doesn't seem to entirely make sense, nor do the other players seem to be making much of it (ice wizards should, I guess, be spending most of their turns "aggro"-ing enemies, but that's kind of boring).

As everything you do costs mana, you have to replenish it regularly, something which is, unusually, done by taking part in minigames. These games are largely fun and well put together, but in the context just seem like a timesink. You can replenish you mana by running around and collecting glowing orbs in the world's safe zones, but that's more tedious (unless you manage to pick up a lot while running errands anyway.)

In my time playing Wizard101 I've explored a few zones, fought a lot of battles, collected a lot of loot and beat several quests, but what's interesting is that as a result I didn't do a lot of interaction with other players, bar some occasional battles together. There are a lot of players in the world -- it's obviously popular -- but everyone seems to be doing their own thing.

Wizard101: Conclusion

I have to say that Wizard101 is easily the most impressive kid-orientated virtual world that I've played in my (admittedly short) time investigating them, and it's no surprise. Most virtual worlds are browser/flash based, and that can't compete with the simplistic (but well designed) 3D graphics seen in Wizard101.

It doesn't need a recent PC to run though I'm sure as a client download it is costing itself a few accounts here and there, but might not even need them. As a very impressive 3D MMORPG designed for Western kids from the ground up that's also free-to-play (dare I say this, but a lot of Asian MMOs still seem to be losing something in translation when they come across) it's no wonder the world is so packed. Every time I've played the world has been swarming with players.

The interesting thing is that in a social/community orientated MMO that would be fantastic, and I'd be really excited. The MMOs I've played that were social/community orientated -- Dizzywood, that sort of thing -- are enriched by other players who are excited to meet you, talk with each other…

But in Wizard101 there is absolutely none of that. I'll make no secret that recently I've been playing Warhammer Online, another world that I recently read criticism of being a "lonely" world, but there (admittedly a world very much for adults) I was, thanks to innovations including public quests -- having a brilliant old time fighting alongside other players to get things done -- with a lot of chatter about how do do the next quest or beat the next bad guy. Wizard101 is in comparison an entirely silent world, full of players all acting to solve their next quest on their own.

The "traditional" way to fix this from MMO makers is to make the end-game content far too hard for any player to beat on their own, or just unnecessarily grindy. I haven't seen anything close to 10% of Wizard101's content so perhaps later the quests are clever enough to make players engage with each other, but to the point where I've played it really isn't.

Perhaps it's simply a case of the restrictive chat system. As is so often the case with child-orientated MMOs, your natural method of speech is to select from set phrases, unless you get permission from an adult. Except, in this case, you not only have to get permission from an adult but pay for a subscription too.

Despite this complaint, Wizard101 is very, very playable. I could waste hours just levelling up my wizard and purchasing him the latest gear/spells, and even if the game does use the comic sans font for nearly everything (yuck!) it does have a lot of crossover potential for more than just kids to play it.

Wizard101 is successful at being an MMORPG, and it looks likely to be a very successful endeavour for KingsIsle Entertainment. It's probably the perfect example of how free-to-play can work, actually -- the core game is so fun from the get go I imagine most players want to pay for it just to unlock the extra possibilities on offer.

I'm not sure there's that much to learn from Wizard101's example -- other than to launch with a very polished product with a lot of content -- but that probably won't stop me from dipping in every now and again.

Useful Links:
Wizard101 Wiki
Wizard101 Central (fansite/forum)

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

[What the heck do game designers do, again? DoubleSix (Geometry Wars Galaxies, South Park XBLA) creative director Jim Mummery examines why the designer isn't the "king" or "rock star" of game development - but nonetheless has a vital role to play.]

We work in an industry in which, it would outwardly appear, the designer is king. Only a designer would get their name before the title of the game or have a credit that reads: "A Game By." They are the new rock stars who conjure the entire game fully-formed from their amazing minds all by themselves. All hail the games designer, for without them, surely we would have no games. Right?

Wrong.

But I'm getting ahead of myself -- let’s jump back in time to a strange land.

In The Beginning

In the games industry there was a time, long ago, when games were made by coders – just coders. They knew what worked, how they worked and no one else was needed. They programmed, they made the assets, they built the game. Small pixel stickmen ran and jumped over small pixel spears. The games were simple, times were good.

Then games became successful, and so became competitive, and so it was deemed that they needed to look good. So artists were summoned, artists who could work in the medium of D-Paint and turn pixel stickmen into beautiful animated sprites.

The battle between what looked good and what worked began (and still continues to this day). These coders and artists, both of whom knew how to make games, both of whom had clearly defined roles, worked together (albeit grudgingly) and the world of games became a happy and productive place.

Until games became even more successful and even more competitive and so the games had to become more complex; more in-depth. There was simply much more to do, more code, more art. The coders were too busy, the artists were too busy. Someone was needed to do the odd jobs, the little tasks, putting the pick-ups in the game, spawning enemies, making the coffee…

This little guy worked with the other more talented people, the artists and the coders, he helped them out but more and more, the things that needed changing in the game were the things he was doing. The game looked great and worked great but the publisher didn’t like the little things, like where he had put this enemy or that power-up.

And so the publisher needed him to make changes. The little guy didn’t mind, he could fix that, he would make a difference. He began to feel important -- at least when he wasn’t getting the coffee.

More and more his relationship with the publisher grew, after all they were talking all the time and lo, they coined a term for what they were fixing: gameplay.

Birth Of The Designer

The fateful day came when they found something he couldn’t fix with the simple tools he had been given. Egged on by the publishers, he turned to the others, the ones busy doing the real work and asked for better tools, for more enemy types, for less coffee making. With no time to argue, they gave him what he wanted and when he saw the difference he’d made, he realised what an unadulterated genius he was…

Thus the designer was born.

Okay, so writing fairy tales is an easy way to fill space -- but what’s my point?

As ‘designers’, we came to this party last. Everyone else here has a defined role; we exist only because coders and artists were, for lack of a better term, too busy. Some designers even claim to know games better than anyone else -- but this is obviously a fantasy.

These days, anyone who enters the industry (coder, artist or designer) has had similar game-playing experiences; they all know games and what they like in the games they play.

The big difference is the coder can program (it’s a small word for making worlds) and the artist can draw (not literally -- hell, these days half these guys can’t even sketch, but the stuff they can do in Maya and Max will make your head spin). They would not need us except for the fact someone needs to do the ‘other stuff’.

Luxury Of Time

There is a misunderstanding that a designer is someone who mysteriously understands how games work and knows intuitively what is needed to make them good. All gamers know this on some level -- and we, the game developers, are all gamers.

The only reason designers often have the answers when others don’t is that we have the luxury of time to think about it. That being said, due to the industry’s history and because of the fact that everyone, no matter what their role, understands games, the designer can never be ‘the guy with the knowledge’ -- or, at least not the only guy.

He works with people who, like him, live and breathe games. His role is to support them, not dominate them. To work with them to create games they all want to play, to create a game that belongs to them all. As a result, the designer is the collector of ideas, opinions and feedback. The conduit for what the team believes.

The thing is, listening is harder than not listening; it is easy to walk over anyone with an idea. It takes far more effort to convince them of your way of thinking (in fact it is often impossible) and harder still to know when to climb down and accept theirs.

It is his job to take all their passion and filter it; find which ideas fit together, which don’t, which are ideas that the publisher will buy into and which ones aren’t.

The game does not form complete from out of his tiny mind. It is formed by the varying talents of the team and the by the happy accidents that occur along the way.

So where does that leave us?

Designer, Not Director

First, let’s get rid of the idea of the designer as the director of the game. Games are made by teams – one guy cannot do it alone (with a few brilliant exceptions).

The designer is part of that team and because his job (the scripting, the documentation, tweaking game-play and making the coffee) is reliant on everyone else – it is his job to listen to what they have to say and find a way to make as much of it work as possible.

He is a listener and communicator. His job is the flexible one. His tasks can stretch to fill the available time. Theirs cannot.

Design works best when it’s finding solutions to problems that cannot be resolved elsewhere, solutions that fit within the restrictions created by budget, timescale and the other disciplines.

At its best, design is about technical pragmatism and team co-operation rather than selfish and singular idealism.

A case in point: say our designer needs a new tutorial element for his game. The game has evolved into much more than was originally conceived (thanks mostly to the enthusiastic involvement of the team) but he now has more to teach the player than he did before.

Currently, all he has are load of static screens with images and text but, whilst they are clear and concise, they just don’t get the message across. Players read them but do not take it in. It’s not enough. The game is well into development and there is no time for any major changes.

Ultimately, if he’d thought about it earlier, he’d have asked for a playable tutorial but the game didn’t need one then and, now it does, he doesn’t have the assets to make one.

What does he do? First things first – he has a quick discussion between other members of the team, in this case the other leads, the artist responsible for level building and the coders in charge of the front end and scripting.

Very quickly, everyone agrees that a playable tutorial is the obvious choice. Why didn’t we do that in the first place? Static screens were never a good idea! Our designer looks down into his shoes and mumbles something about how everybody else does it.

Quickly the conversation moves on to what would be needed if a playable tutorial was put into the game.

The level artist is first to point out that if the level requirements are kept simple, he can build it very quickly. So they find a theme the artist is a) interested in and b) he is sure he can build as quickly as possible.

Next, the front end coder is equally enthusiastic and can easily change the front end to accommodate the tutorial level and allow more text to be shown on screen during gameplay.

Lastly, the scripting coder says that as soon as he has a list of requirements, he should easily be able to provide the parameters the designer needs to build the tutorial scripts he needs.

But our designer knows that ideally, tutorials don’t progress until the player has proven they’ve understood the instructions. The gameplay is usually held up until the player does what they’ve been told. Despite everything the team has given him, he won’t have the tools to enforce that kind of control and so will have no way of knowing whether the player has understood the tutorial.

However, the designer knows the game’s scripting system well enough to know how it can be manipulated. If he simply breaks the tutorials up into multiple levels (and therefore multiple tutorials) – all with on-screen instructions – he easily has enough tools to give each tutorial a very focused, very specific, very simple goal that will allow the player to demonstrate what they’ve been taught.

Working in this way, he can script the tutorials so that the player would have to understand the objective of each tutorial to unlock the next one. Each lesson leads neatly onto the next. Since the tutorials are optional, the player is never prevented from playing the game and if they fail the objective they can always replay the tutorials again if they want to.

Problem solved.

To clarify, the idea of the playable tutorial (the obvious solution) could not come from the designer alone since at that point he did not have the tools to make it possible nor could he assume the team had the time to give him those tools.

The solution came from the team as a whole (more specifically from the people who would actually have to do the work) and from the real world constraints laid upon the game at that point in development.

So far, so obvious, right?

Except who is making this game? Is it our designer – the rock-and-roll visionary – or is it actually the entire team working together to make the best game possible? We'll explore this in the next installment.

[Jim Mummery is a small man who cannot code or draw and he lives at the mercy of people who can.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Time to pile on the GameSetLinkDump once more - this time with a couple of under-the-radar games/game compilations that I found at the weekend while checking out the insane amount of titles debuting now and in the next few weeks.

I think Majesco's smart use of the Jillian Michaels license (she's the trainer on The Biggest Loser TV show) is perhaps the most interesting, because that game is going to sell, regardless of whether it's high quality or not - and I'm genuinely not sure whether it is or not.

But I hope titles like this aren't going to be further reasons to keep people tied to first-party Wii games due to their guaranteed quality.

Anyhow, onwards to links:

L’art pour L’art it…Is? « (mashedmarket)
'I’ve realized that this sometimes all-consuming obsession is a bit stupid, because I’ll be damned if there’s anything wrong with storyless video games.'

Knocking off Games for Windows | Procedural Dialogue
'As you can clearly see up close, developer and publisher Clear Crown Studios (a small local outfit, as it turns out, just south of San Francisco) simply listed itself and the game title at the top, using the same layout, color scheme, and a similar font to the Games for Windows strip.'

Women left on sidelines in video game revolution - Los Angeles Times
Another good Alex Pham piece - even despite a quote or two from me.

Programme 08 - Playful: Game Design London, 31st October 2008
Interesting abstract UK con thing - the Europeans seem to do these better in the game space.

The Indie Game Magazine
Nice idea, not really a full physical mag, but a Magcloud print-on-demand or download on demand type thing, I believe.

Amazon.com: Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2009: Video Games
This is very interesting - Majesco have got exactly the right license (it's selling super-well for those bored with the Wii Fit pack-in game), but some reviews seem to indicate it's unresponsive and a bit annoying, oh dear.

Dare to be Digital 2008 - Game Download Page
The excellent UK student game competition puts all its games up for download - not under a login wall like last year (yay!) Via Kumar.

Crispy Gamer - Column: Press Pass: How Hype Helps (and Hurts) High-Profile Hits Lots of alliteration, good quotes by industry journo types.

Gamestop.com - Buy Pac-Man Power Pack - Playstation 2
Didn't know about this Pac-Man 3-pack on PS2, cheap multi-title PS2 bundles are great for families and Xmas.

Byte Me: Inside Digital Gaming - 92nd Street Y - New York, NY
New series of talks about games in NY, good cross-cultural stuff going on here - Costikyan and Zimmerman kicking things off.

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

[Here's a new report from Game Developer Research, which Gamasutra editors Eric Caoili, Chris Remo and I also work on. Our research is useful for those in the game industry looking to get actual, empirical info on game development and publishing - if a bit out of the 'pocket money' price range for many GSW readers to purchase, heh. Still, interesting to see growth patterns...]

Game Developer Research has revealed the results of its second ever Game Developer Census, surveying all companies working within video game development and publishing in North America.

The census has revealed a 12 percent year on year increase in U.S. employees, with 44,400 now working in the industry in America, up significantly from 39,700 in 2007.

Canadian companies also saw an increase in staffing and number of studios, with total employees up around 17 percent -- to 9,500 from 8,100. In total, the North America industry increased in size 13 percent, from 47,800 to 53,900 staffers.

Some of this North American increase appears to relate to a filling-out of major next-gen game staffing, but much is due to the continued funding for MMOs and online worlds.

Thanks to the success of products such as World Of Warcraft and a continued growth in free-to-play game worlds, venture capital funding into game-related online companies has increased significantly. While the effects of the current financial crisis and credit crunch could manifest itself in the longer-term, there are no current signs of it in the aggregate numbers of people employed in game-related sectors.

In fact, there is still much vibrancy, and almost 48 percent - around 21,200 - of those working in the game industry in the U.S. do so in California – according to Game Developer Research’s estimates. Washington is the second most-popular state for game employment, with over 4,700 employees, and Texas is third with 3,300.

In total, seven states (California, Washington, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Florida) have more than 1,000 game professionals working in them, with states like North Carolina and Maryland close behind.

Not included in the current Census estimate are game tools companies, game contracting/services companies, external PR, marketing, legal, and other business services, and liaison or licensing divisions at larger media companies. Game Developer Research putatively puts this figure at around 18,000 across North America.

The Census report lists more than 650 companies alphabetically by U.S. state and Canadian province, along with generalize contact addresses, website information, estimates of employee numbers and details on their market specialties (from casual gaming, online gaming, mobile gaming and serious gaming to PC, handheld or console gaming).

The report is intended to be a valuable tool for game industry trendwatchers, contractors, service companies, and other entities wanting to acquire accurate information to reach out to the North American game market as a whole.

“We’re delighted to present our second Census report, showing a notable increase in the amount of professionals employed in the game industry. With industry revenues at an all-time high, we believe that we’ll continue to see a vibrant market for those employed in the art and science of gaming.” said Simon Carless, publisher of Game Developer Magazine and director of Game Developer Research.

For more freely available information, including sample data, or to purchase the complete Game Developer Census 2008 report, please visit the official Game Developer Research website.

Purchase of the full report includes both a 170-page in-depth report with listings by U.S. state and Canadian province, and a separate Excel document featuring the full, comprehensive data set in sortable and exportable form.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Our sister site GamerBytes has been interviewing some interesting console digital download developers of late - here, Ryan Langley chats to Joju Games studio manager Juan Gril about working with Nintendo, gameplay ideas, and why holding the Wiimote like a shopping cart made amusing sense to them.]

With each coming week, we're seeing more and more games announced for WiiWare - sometimes releasing the exact same day.

This week, we got the first look at Mart Racer from Joju Games in the form of a video trailer, so we contacted studio manager Juan Gril to discuss how they became Wii developers, what their previous work and credentials were, implementing online play in a WiiWare title and much more.

GamerBytes: Please introduce yourself and your company. Who are Joju Games?

Juan Gril: My name is Juan Gril and I'm the Studio Manager at Joju Games. I've been doing online and casual games for 10 years now. I started Joju back in 2005, after working at Yahoo! Games for 5 years.

I wanted to create a studio that focused on creating simple and fun games for people like me who weren't interested in playing 3-in-a-row games, and didn't have time to play AAA games. It turned out that there were a lot of us out there, so it has been a good run so far.

GB: You've just announced Mart Racer for WiiWare. What was your inspiration to make a game where you run around a supermarket?

JG: I think it came from two different places. On one hand, a recurring theme in our games is humor. We wanted to come up with something that was funny and really different from themes you usually see on videogames.

On the other hand, the first time I grabbed a Wiimote instinctively I grabbed it with both hands like a bar. That made me start thinking on a game where you would maneuver it as you would be grabbing a bar.

GB: How does the game work? Is it first to get all the required items, or are there actual tracks involved as well?

JG: You can play the game alone, or with 3 other people. There will always be 4 contestants; AI will fill the the spot for the rest of the players. The premise is pretty simple: everybody gets a list of 6 items they should collect, and run to the cashiers before anyone else does.

The 6 items are spread around the supermarket, but they only re-spawn every 1 minute. So after the first few seconds you either need to decide to wait until the items re-spawn (that would be the bad strategy), or decide to steal items from others (that would be the good strategy).

So one thing you could do is to grab plungers and throw them to your opponents. If you hit somebody, they'll be knocked out for a few seconds, and that's when you can run to their card and automatically steal an item from them. There are 6 different power-ups you can use in the game. Some of them are for attacking other people, and some others are to protect yourself from their attacks.

GB: Does Mart Racer use any Wii Remote functionality?

JG: Yes. We let you pick what type of control you would like to use. We have the Wii Style mode that let's you tilt forward to accelerate, tilt backwards to brake, twist to move left and right, and tilt backwards and twist to drift (drift is pretty useful to make turns without losing speed).

However, we are also including a Classic Control mode. We realize that the tilt is not for everybody, and we have tried to balance the game out so you don't get an advantage using one type of control over the other. I actually play with the Wii Style mode all the time and I can beat people who play with the Classic Control Mode.

Interestingly enough, we found that people who don't play video games can get a grasp of our game thanks to the Wii Style mode, so we are hoping Mart Racer is the type of game that can be as inclusive as possible.

GB: What made you decide to go to WiiWare?

JG: Nintendo has been really good to us. They were the first console manufacturer to open their doors to us. They saw we've been trying to make different and innovative games for years, and they said "yeah, you guys are ready to start making games for consoles". Their premise is pretty simple, you guys make the games, you know what you are doing. And I think we are starting to see the fruit of that premise with the recent releases.

We were one of the first developers to get in the program. But we didn't want to release a title on launch date just for being first, we figured this is our first console game and we wanted to have all the features of a game we would like to play. That's why we are just getting ready by now.

GB: How many levels does the game contain?

JG: The game contains 12 supermarkets. Each one has its own theme and soundtrack. In single player mode you unlock the supermarkets as you win. When you go into Wi-Fi Connection, the more supermarkets you unlocked the more options you have for choosing what supermarket you want to play online.

GB: Do the playable characters all control differently, or have different stats? In the character select menu you can switch the position of your characters. Does this effect the game at all?

JG: We decided to make it more of a personal, visual choice and keep the game to be more casual in that sense. The position selection has been more of a choice to allow people to decide what sex should be the lead and what sex should be the sidekick.

You appear to use plungers as projectiles. What do they do to your opponents? (I think this one is explained in the how to play question, but let me know if you'd like me to expand it here)

GB: You've previously worked on a lot of 2D Flash titles for Comedy Central and MTV. Mart Racer is your first independent project. Has it been a difficult change from PC to console? Was it difficult to become an independent Wii developer?

JG: I think it has been quite challenging. The biggest challenge we faced was to learn how to go through the process of making sure that every detail of the game is compliant with the requirements Nintendo has. We had to keep attention to detail as much as possible. The other big challenge has been the online functionality. Thankfully we did made a couple of right decisions and it's coming along really well.

And yes, being an independent console developer is a huge challenge. But I think the audience we make our games for is definitely playing downloadable console games, so I think it has been a good decision to focus on them.

GB: Mart Racer supports online multiplayer for up to 4 people - something that tends to be missing from a lot of WiiWare titles. Is fitting the game under the size cap and fitting in online infrastructure a difficult task? Were Nintendo give you any additional support for this?

JG: The size cap fortunately hasn't been that big of an issue for such as small team as ours. We focused more on making a fun multiplayer game than producing a lot of assets (I hope we made the right decision!). Making the online part of the game usually takes a lot of time, and it was the case for us too. Right from the beginning we made the decision that we wanted to create a multiplayer game, so being able to have a fun game to play with your buddies was the #1 priority, then assets.

Nintendo tech support team is fantastic.

GB: Does online support Friend Codes? What games modes are supported online? Are there any online leaderboards?

JG: Yes, we support Friend Codes. You can either play with anybody online, or search for friends. We don't have leaderboards for this title.

GB: Will the game be getting a worldwide release, or only in America?

JG: We are planning to launch as soon as possible in the Americas, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand. We hope the game does well so we can launch in Japan as well.

GB: What downloadable games, for any of the three consoles, have impressed you the most? Any classic titles you would like to see show up in the future?

JG: I'm fond of classic titles, but frankly I usually play more new games rather than a good classic game. I feel this year it has been a pretty good year for console downloadable games.

I love Gyrostarr, Braid and PixelJunk Eden. I liked Groovin' Blocks and Echochrome. I've heard good things about the Art Style series and World of Goo, but I haven't started to play them yet.

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

Some marvelous new links here, headed by What They Play's look at, like they say, sex, violence, ratings and game design - all of which tend to be of interest to GameSetWatch readers on any given day.

Yet also in here: weird PlayStation 1 games, the indie video goodness of Bytejacker, 'morality and gameplay' in the Bring Down The Sky expansion for the excellent Mass Effect, and a few other things besides.

Vulcan mind meld:

What They Play - Sex, Violence, Ratings and Game Design
It's interesting that What They Play is talking about sexual content on a family site, but I see the point - education, rite?

Takashi Tezuka - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Random thing I just noticed: 'Tezuka's wife was the inspiration for the Boo, a ghost-like enemy in the Mario series. Like Boos, she is often shy but one day became very angry at him for spending too much time at work.' Wow, so the Boo is a quality of life parable?

YouTube - I Heart Geeks! (DS) - Trailer
Atari is distributing this CDV title in the U.S., seems like an Incredible Machine-type thing in association with... Marc Ecko's game company? Wha?

ferricide: 'gamestown'
Our own Christian takes a look at the weeeird PS1 games he picked up in Japan. They're weird, folks. And cool.

IndieGames.com - The Weblog - Bytejacker Episode 13
I hadn't been paying total attention for some reason, but Bytejacker is an awesome indie/downloadable game review show with really high production values. Bravo.

1UP: Top 5 Religions Offended by Video Games
More short, sweet goof-offs from '2008's SeanBaby', Mr. Sharkey.

The European Innovative Games Award for 2008 [PDF]
An interesting, if slightl obscure German award: 'Besides "Sharkworld" by Ranj Serious Games (Netherlands), "Rider Spoke" by Blast Theory and "Heavenly Sword" by Ninja Theory (both UK), German entries "Crysis" by Crytek, "PES 2008" by Konami Digital Entertainment, "Blake White" by Games Academy, and "Somersault" by Enter-Brain-Ment made it on to the list of nominees. Also, "The Graveyard" by Belgian Tale of Tales, "Swinxs" by Swinxs (Netherlands), "Wii Fit" by Nintendo of Europe (Germany) and "Remote Impact – Shadowboxing over a Distance" by Distance Lab (UK) managed to become part of the short list.'

Grand Text Auto » Morality and Gameplay in “Bring Down the Sky”
On the Mass Effect DLC: 'More troubling, however, was the morality embedded in “Bring Down the Sky.”'

Crummy.com: I've made no secret of my distate for the ridiculous...
Categorizing the Mega Man bosses by type!

Wieden+Kennedy /// Portland · SPORE ATTACK!
'W+K and EA rolled out Will Wright's much anticipated game launch last month with a multi-city "War of the Worlds" attack pattern.' Via Brandonnn, again!

Photos: Robo Japan 2008 ::: Pink Tentacle
Robots are games too!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[One of the reasons I love having Editor-At-Large Chris Remo working with us at Gamasutra is that he, well, knows stuff about games. And this means we get neat interviews like this, talking about the live-action festooned, semi-gonzo update of the C&C Red Alert series.]

After lying dormant for several years, the long-running Command & Conquer real-time strategy franchise got a revival from EALA's RTS team with the high-profile and well-received Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars.

Now, the team is days away from shipping Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the latest entry in the series' zanier alternate history spinoff line -- which hasn't seen a new title since 2001's Red Alert 2 and its expansion.

C&C3 re-established the franchise's trademark live-action full motion video cutscenes, which we recently quizzed the developers about, and for Red Alert 3 EA has built a rather insane marketing campaign around them.

We sat down with EALA senior producer Amer Ajami and producer Greg Kasavin to discuss Red Alert 3's development, including the series' heritage, challenges in simultaneously creating PC and Xbox 360 versions, the history of the RTS dev team, and why the game is influenced by Red Alert 2 more than the first game.

Did you develop the PC and Xbox 360 versions in parallel?

Amer Ajami: Yeah, and by the same team.

Greg Kasavin: This is the fourth game that we [the RTS team] have released on the 360. In the 360 market for RTS, we've been growing, and not just because of the work that this team has been doing, but you look at what else is out there with what Ubisoft is doing, what Microsoft is doing. Clearly that market is... it is certainly not as big, but it's constantly growing year on year.

How these games generally perform at retail?

GK: They do well. We're not supposed to quote our internal sales figures, but the NPD data is out there. Certainly, we wouldn't be working on them if they didn't do well. And EA holds higher standards, a different definition of what successful sales are than most other companies. So, they do very well.

And it bears mentioning that in Europe, and in Germany in particular, the C&C series is huge. I don't know that the average Command & Conquer developer can readily articulate why.

I suspect that it has a lot to do with the PC platform remaining so strong there.

AA: Correct. And, interesting enough, Russia is now a big emerging market for C&C. I was there earlier this year and the following that we had was kind of surreal.

GK: They knew the most about the game. At the [press] event they would follow up and know all the details and everything.

So they still sell better on PC then?

AA: Again, without quoting actual data, we do sell -- I don't want to say significantly better on PC, but -- well, certainly with every release, the 360 catches up with the PC, but the PC is still the lead platform from the sales perspective.

What about as a development platform?

AA: Yeah, also from a development perspective. Although this is the first time that we actually took on the development of the 360 internally. When I say internally I mean the actual PC team. All 360 SKUs that we've done for our previous RTS games were also developed by an internal team, but one that worked alongside us. This is the first time that the PC team was responsible for both platforms. Greg, was essentially the producer in charge of the 360 SKU.

It seems like there'd be two challenges. One is that the series goes back so far on the PC as compared to the console; does that create marketing or awareness issues? Then there's interface -- I've played recent C&C games on console at press events, but when I buy my own copy, it's the one with the mouse. Do you battle with that?

GK: With regard to the game itself, we think it stands on its own, even though there's a "3" in the title. Basically, the setup is that it wipes the slate clean, and it's this new world that the characters enter into. We think it's a pretty fun, weird, and crazy place. It's a deeply strategic game. You are not going to win just by throwing one type of tank at the enemy; you have to think about what you are doing.

But at the same time it's got, we think, a really appealing premise to it. There is nothing that necessarily feels PC about it. It seems like it's just as accessible of a concept to whichever audience enter.

So as a player, if you are amenable to the control, you are not going to have some weird historical barrier.

GK: Right. And as for the controls, that was our big goal with the 360 version of the game, to come up with a control scheme that lets you accomplish the things that we wanted to accomplish on the PC front.

This was to be able to micro-manage battles effectively and to be able to pull different types of forces into and out of battle and switch their weapon types, and be able to do all these types of things quickly without struggling.

We came up with a variety of ways to make that happen in a way that the average player is going to be able to execute on the 360 just as well as on the PC. I think the high-end tournament-quality player is still going to be superior with PC controls. But for someone like me -- I've been playing RTSs for years and I consider myself an intermediate player -- I am not going to win any tournaments, but I can hold my own. I am basically as proficient on the 360 controls as I am with PC.

Hopefully, people will find that these controls deliver on that. The controls that we released in [Command & Conquer 3:] Kane's Wrath for 360 were sort of a step in the direction the RA3 controls were taking.

AA: It was a test bed for the RA3 controls. It was developed by the team largely through the feedback through Greg that we essentially gave to the team developing Kane's Wrath to see if it was viable.

It's interesting that you chose to call it Red Alert 3. It's similar to Bethesda with Fallout 3. Red Alert 2 came out seven years ago. You've got to assume a sizable chunk of the players may not have played the previous ones. And yet you still have the confidence to say, "It's that series and I am going to put a number on it, and that's it."

GK: I know what you mean. There's an interesting phenomenon with that. It happens with movies also sometimes, like Spider-Man 2. It has a much bigger day at the box office than Spider-Man 1. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense. You'd think that the audience would be limited to whoever saw the first one, but there is some kind of groupthink around it and even people who haven't played Red Alert might talk to their friends.

AA: They know somebody who has played Red Alert. Conversely, if you had played the first two there is a lot there to appreciate.

GK: Yeah, as long as there is the impression that it's not going to be this continuation of some complicated story that you have to have played the other two games to even understand. We definitely didn't want to that going into it, especially since Red Alert 2, is, what, seven years old now?

But a lot of people on the team hold Red Alert 2 to be pretty sacred among real-time strategy games. So we definitely wanted to live up to a lot of the cool ideas in that game.

You were telling me before that Red Alert 3 derives more from RA2 than RA1. Can you elaborate on that?

GK: From my point of view, I think Red Alert 2 had a more defined tone, period. Red Alert 1 took itself pretty seriously compared to Red Alert 2. Red Alert 2 had something really, really special about it. You can go back and watch the cinematics right now and there are still just as great today, apart from the compression quality.

AA: Even fictionally, it didn't seem like Red Alert 1 knew what kind of game it wanted to be. In one cinematic, they had Kane, who is a staple of the [main] Tiberium franchise of the C&C games.

Yeah, I remember that.

AA: Red Alert 2 was the game that said, "You know what? This is our own branch. It's not related to Tiberium or C&C except in name." In that sense, Red Alert 3 is a continuation of that tone, rather than of RA1.

GK: And it lends itself overall a feeling to the game that is pretty unique. There are plenty of serious war games out there that are heavy, whereas something like this has much more of that graphic novel, over-the-top action feel to it that pokes a little bit of fun at itself, but in hopefully a pretty clever way. It's just more distinctive, and hopefully will be more memorable to players than another serious World War thing that weighs on them.

It's almost hilarious the extent to which you guys have been highlighting the insanity of the game world in the marketing. When you're conceiving the fiction, do you ask yourselves, "God, how do we top this last ridiculous thing?"

AA: It's not so much pressure, it's just not putting... Often times, when we worked on previous games, especially the Lord of the Rings games, there are a lot of limitations that you have to stay within. Working on this one, it was the first game in a long time where, really, that limitation wasn't there. Those handcuffs were off. It was more a sense of, "What can we do?" rather than pressure that we have to make this as crazy as possible.

GK: At the same time, you'd be surprised from seeing the end result how conservative we can be in terms of the internal logic of the world -- just making sure that within this everything is sensible.

So you ask yourself, "Would somebody really need war dolphins with sonic disruptors [an Allied unit]?"

GK: Yeah, exactly. It was really important to us to make at least the three factions feel very cohesive so that they don't seem random. All the units in the faction feel like they belong to some particular ideology that's interesting and at least vaguely plausible and likable. Depending on which side you're playing, the other two guys are the bad guys, but we wanted players to be able to feel good about all three of these sides. They all have cool characters.

Was that a challenge with the Japanese faction, since there was no existing Red Alert faction to draw from?

GK: Yes, though with that faction, we had so many cool places to dig into, so many pop culture allusions. And we have a lot of people on the team who love giant robots or anime. Those influences all went into a big melting pot and hopefully we came up with something that doesn't feel slapdash. It still feels very cohesive, but it's pop-culture inspired.

AA: At the same time, if you look at the history that the Red Alert franchise concerns itself with -- alternate versions of World War II -- the only major world player that Red Alert 1 and Red Alert 2 didn't explore was Japan. Of course, Japan was a huge part of World War II.

It felt logical as well to include them into the game and use them as the vehicle with which we drive a lot of our experimental gameplay, such as transforming units. It's stuff that we wanted to do in the game, but we really didn't want to affect the Soviets and Allies too much. Those are two factions where fans of the series would have felt disillusioned if we transformed them too much.

GK: They have really well-established gameplay.

So how long were you guys in development?

AA: Well, we officially started on Red Alert 3 about 18 months ago, about March or April of 2007, though a small group of the RTS team initially did a little bit of pre-production on RA3 back in late 2004, early 2005.

As the second team was working on Battle for Middle Earth II, they found out what they wanted to find out about RA3, and then they rolled on back into BFME2, and here we are years later.

We primarily have one main RTS team, and then we splinter off smaller groups of that to fulfill whatever needs the company asks from us [such as expansions].

It seems like the EALA RTS team has gained some prominence in the last couple years. When did it form?

GK: It was for [Command & Conquer:] Generals, right?

AA: Well, even before that, we have certain team members who have been around since Red Alert 2 [released in 2001], and even before that, with Nox [from 2000].

GK: Yeah, it's basically spun off. I don't know how best to put it, but some of those guys do hail back from the Westwood days. There are definitely connections. The guy who's our story and cinematics producer, Michael Pedriana, he hails back from those days. He worked on Red Alert 2, and it was very important to all of us to capture that same type of spirit and tone with the cinematics of this game. He came from those days and knew what that was like.

AA: The majority of the team's DNA comes from Westwood Pacific originally, and then it became EA Pacific. But, we do have some actual Westwood employees still working with us -- one of our senior modelers worked on Command & Conquer 1, back in '95.

GK: That's a guy who dates back to Dune II -- one of the six Dune II programmers. It's incredible.

It seems that EA is putting increasing focus on Command & Conquer as a franchise compared to how it was for a few years. A lot of the properties that EA picked up in the late 90s or early 2000s, especially the old school PC studios EA picked up, are not very prominent anymore. What gives you guys this kind of focus?

GK: What came to mind for me immediately is the success of Generals, although for a lot of hardcore C&C fans, the debates kind of rage on as to whether Command & Conquer: Generals is really a true C&C game or not, because it did a lot of things differently. But it was a successful game and many would hold that it's a really great game. And I think that kept Command & Conquer on people's minds.

AA: And I would argue the hardest core C&C fans hold Generals and Zero Hour to a much higher standard than all the other C&C games.

GK: That's true. Zero Hour is considered one of the best Command & Conquer games from a competitive standpoint and everything. Just gameplay-wise, it did a lot of cool things. So, I think, that helped make the reception of Command and Conquer three much more favorable up front. Because people were like, "Oh cool, it's the guys who did Generals, and Generals is awesome." Then, in the end, Command & Conquer 3 had to stand on its own legs now.

AA: I think the &C franchise would have been successful even had there not been this gap. If you look at the reasons why there was a gap between Generals and C&C3, we had this opportunity as a company to work on The Lord of the Rings movie license. We're all C&C fans, but a lot of us at the time were also hardcore Lord of the Rings fans, so we really jumped at the opportunity.

That took the team essentially offline for three-plus years from doing C&C games, because we did two mainline Lord of the Rings games. We did one for the Xbox 360. We did an expansion pack. So now, when we got those out of the way, it was time to kind of go back to our roots.

C&C: Generals was my first game in the industry. And the engine that was developed for that game was also co-developed by the guys at Westwood Pacific in Irvine, California and the original Westwood team in Vegas. And at the time that we were working on C&C: Generals, the Vegas team was working on the original iteration of Command & Conquer 3.

It's actually funny. If you look at all of the different iterations that C&C3 went through, it's like the third or fourth iteration of the game was the one that was finally released.

GK: If Lord of the Rings didn't exist, C&C3 would have probably come sooner.

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

Time to round up some of the best features and original pieces posted on big sister site Gamasutra and our other sites over the past week or so - and there appears to be plenty of neat stuff in here.

Some things I particularly liked - the feature analyzing 'Missing Gamers', as well as Matt Matthews' super-detailed NPD analysis and Jesse Divnich's database-trawling fun, plus our reports from the Unity conference in Denmark and the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO unveiling right here in the Bay Area.

Here we go:

Gamasutra Features

New, Better, More: Epic's Cliff Bleszinski on Designing Gears of War 2
"With Gears Of War 2 just around the corner, Gamasutra talks in-depth to Epic design director Bleszinski about the franchise's evolution, game prototyping, and expanding game narrative."

Game Law: So, What's the Dealio?
"In his latest column for Gamasutra, veteran game lawyer Buscaglia discusses developer and publisher contract negotiation shenanigans - urging an 'eyes open' attitude from the developer end."

Building Social Communities For Your Game: A Primer
"How do you create game ecosystems? Guitar Hero community creator Ryan references Halo 3 and Spore to show how data-rich websites and social features make games successful."

What Gamers Want: Missing Gamers
"Following Gamasutra's look at Family Gamers and Silver Gamers, we turn to a vital demographic - 'Missing Gamers'. What do adults who are no longer gamers want from today's titles? We find out..."

NPD: Behind The Numbers, September 2008
"Gamasutra's in-depth NPD analysis returns with a deep dive into September's U.S. numbers - exclusively revealing the full top 20 games, tie-in ratios, and plenty more on key hardware and games."

Gamasutra Originals/Others

Erickson: Star Wars MMO Akin To Multiple Full-Length BioWare RPGs
"EA BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic is trying to solve the problem of story in MMOs by employing twelve full-time writers to flesh out the universe -- lead writer Daniel Erickson tells Gamasutra why, explaining: "[EA has] come to me and said, 'Your budget is what?!' but nobody has ever said, 'Why are we doing this?'""

Atari's Harrison: Democratizing Development Is An Industry Must
"At the Unite 2008 developer conference in Denmark, in a roundtable discussion with developers and members of the press, Atari president Phil Harrison has been speaking to Gamasutra in more detail about his vision to "democratize development" by using tools such as the low-cost Unity game engine."

Riccitiello: Prioritizing Profits Can Be 'The Beginning Of An End'
"When it comes to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band rivalry, EA CEO John Riccitiello finds it "fun for people," and talks to Gamasutra about what gives music games competitive edge -- and then segues into discussing the danger of getting hooked on the "drug of profitability" above all other considerations."

GCG Readers Design Jumpless Platformers
"Gamasutra sister educational site GameCareerGuide, which runs a weekly game design challenge, has named the top three submissions to a recent challenge, in which the task was to design a platformer with no jump button - also asking readers to design a new lemming for the classic game Lemmings."

The Divnich Tapes: Which Genres Provide Male-Only, Female-Only Protagonists?
"In a Gamasutra-exclusive market analysis, EEDAR's Jesse Divnich follows up yesterday's analysis on games featuring playable female characters by looking at games that limit players to only controlling male characters or only female characters."

BioWare, LucasArts Talk Design, Chastise MMO Genre In Old Republic Session
"In a Gamasutra-attended Q&A session following the announcement of BioWare and LucasArts' Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, lead designer James Ohlen, BioWare Austin VP Rich Vogel, and studio co-founder Gordon Walton discussed solo-ing and story for "BioWare's biggest game"."

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

[When game journalists pluck out that juicy quote for an incendiary headline, it can have wide-ranging impact -- but unfortunately it's not a simple problem. In this opinion piece, Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander addresses the dysfunctional relationship between game journalists, the industry and the audience they both serve.]

Video games have the potential to be a plodding, tech-focused industry, and while there is certainly a broad and nuanced consumer base for them (broader than most realize), those who read internet game journalism still represent a fairly niche portion of the audience. We're not accustomed to being buzzworthy or sexy, the way, say, celebrity gossip, fashion or the film biz is.

And yet, we'd like to be a little more buzzworthy, in general -- we've got the hot-looking (albeit digital) icons, we've got the big explosions, the talent, the high action and the tearjerkers. Why can't we have some sexy headlines, too?

It's a reasonable thought; I agree with the sentiment that the industry needs more celebrities, more champions, more people that can really stand at the forefront of things as beloved ambassadors -- as Cliff Bleszinski says in today's Gamasutra's current feature, "visionaries." We've got a few of those, of course, but generally those folks don't talk to the media much. They tend to be "Wizard of Oz" personas behind the scenes, don't they?

Failing actual celebrities, we often make "controversial" figures out of just about anything we can get our hands on, ready to seize on vague quotes to create an imagined feud, ready to populate and respawn relatively tame challenges or dissensions from industry people to craft them into maverick media stars.

Imposing Our Personal Narratives

Though the quote didn't make it into my final interview stories, I remember that during my talk with EA CEO John Riccitiello recently, he noted that "people wanted to impose their personal narrative" on his company's bid to acquire Take-Two, imagining a contentious war of egos, fierce verbal exchanges and slamming boardroom doors, an out-and-out, one-on-one testosterone battle between Riccitiello and the (rather generative!) Strauss Zelnick. Though I'm sure Riccitiello would not have told me if it'd indeed been that way, he maintains the negotiations were professional, civil, and essentially uneventful -- but that doesn't make good headlines, does it?

People want to impose their personal narratives on a lot of things, and often the media caters to this wish -- they do it with politics, business, art and film, whatever you pick. And "the media" is often criticized (as if "the media" comprised some nebulous, single-headed monster) for its steps over the line between sensationalism and its duty to the truth.

This leads me to a recent Edge story about Deus Ex. At PC game blog Rock Paper Shotgun, veteran game journalist Kieron Gillen was the first to discover:

"The forthcoming issue of videogame bible Edge has a large feature on Eidos Montreal’s development of Deus Ex 3. To tease it, Edge Online runs a short story with the headline “Deus Ex was “Kinda Slow” Says Deus Ex 3 Dev” before offering a quote from Lead Designer Jean-Francois Dugas: “There weren’t enough exciting, memorable moments. It was aimed more towards a simulation rather than a game experience.”. Internet explodes. It is only part of the story. In a literal sense."

In other words, the "kinda slow" line was out of context and dredged out of an interview with a plethora of much more relevant quotes, or at the very least, quotes that could have been taken out of context to precisely the opposite effect. And yes, this happens often in media -- but on the internet, news stories can provoke widespread reaction. And that reaction can impact people's relationship to their work at best -- and their game performance and their job status at worst.

Why This Happens

We live in a world where blogs, forums and Digg influence game-buying habits as much as, if not more than, "proper" media. When a journalist takes something out of context to grab a headline, that angle on the truth is free to proliferate across amateur sites and aggregators even further out of context -- in short, it becomes a game of Telephone, where the end result could theoretically turn out so divorced from its source that the source can no longer be found.

For example, Kotaku -- which, in my experience usually aims to be more responsible about context and sourcing than it's often given credit for -- picked up Edge's headline, and Luke Plunkett was apparently so worried about inappropriate reader reactions that he qualified the statement with plenty of context -- in italics, even! But even despite this, a good portion of Kotaku's audience is unlikely to read the whole post, and the editorializing will take place in the comments anyway.

So yes, I do think Edge crossed a line. I think it was poorly done of what's normally a very high-quality site. But while I could sit here and self-righteously excoriate Edge for being irresponsible, unethical, hit-driven, traffic-obsessed, blah blah blah, and all the things it seems knee-jerk to do, it's unfortunately not that simple.

Joined By Challenge

Both game developers and game journalists have a couple key things in common: First, serving their audience is their job, and if they do this well, they will be successful. Both game development and game journalism are highly competitive, even saturated -- developers must do their best to ensure that their game is the one that the average consumer drops $60 on this month, and game journalists must do their best to ensure that their site is the one that garners the biggest piece of the Web traffic pie.

As an aside, though the word "traffic" gets thrown around often whenever someone criticizes game journalism, it oversimplifies things; not all journalists are paid on the traffic they do, and not all sites have a direct correlation between traffic and money. It depends on other factors of a media company's business models. But the point remains that a web site that nobody reads won't be around for long; a writer who doesn't get read isn't going to have a job for long.

And this is the era of New Media. While journalists are busily aiming to score proper interviews, do research, cite their sources and observe embargoes and all those fussy details -- you know, journalism -- blogs not only have more freedom to make entertainment more important than ethics, but they also frequently have a devoted community around them that enjoys being free to speak back. So news sites like Edge (and like its competitor, Gamasutra) face stiff competition in attaining an audience's attention.

Not an excuse, I know; that's just business. And sensationalism is hardly a new issue. But I think we've got something a little different here in the games biz, something unique to us, that makes it complicated.

Consumption Culture

It seems situations like this might occur less often if we didn't have a larger culture within the gaming audience wherein we have, as I recently wrote at length, become extremely demanding in a fashion that borders on entitlement.

Our hit-driven business has created among the consumer culture an environment where each new event is required to be more exciting than the last, and the hype cycle breeds such high expectations that chronic cynicism and negativity is an inevitability. I mean, here we are, talking about how inappropriate it was to bait explosive audience reaction -- regarding what's really a vague, tepid criticism of an old game. Take a wider-lens view, and that "kinda slow" quote is hardly incendiary at all -- why is it such a big deal?

Here's another thing journalists and game developers have in common: They feel, quite a lot of the time, that they will never be able to please their audience no matter what they do.

We won't be able to make audiences happy, so we'll stand for just being able to hang on to their attention. Somewhere in the world at this very moment, game designers are putting heads together trying to puzzle out just what tactic they can try to make players engage with their next game for longer than they did with the last one. At the same time, a game publication's brass are discussing with their editors how they can boost reader retention.

If neither of them can cater to the consumption habits of their audience, they won't last -- especially in an oversaturated space where there is plenty of competition. And so to align with the audience's consumption habits, both games and game journalism are forced to align with the culture of their audience -- a culture that wants celebrity, wants controversy, wants things to buzz about, and, unfortunately, wants things to complain about, to take up arms about, to band together over.

Chickens And Eggs

And certainly, one end does perpetuate the other. Has the audience been trained to expect disappointment, to have minimal attention spans, by the hype-driven (and thus continually disappointing) game industry? Have the mechanics of games themselves engineered a culture that demands logically-placed, tiered rewards interspersed with occasional, unpredictable conflict?

Has the audience developed its resentful mob mentality by being told what they do and don't want by a slate of envious, immature game journalists whose largest qualification is that they are more obsessive enthusiasts than those for whom they write?

Journalists and developers will say that they've become whatever it is they've become because of turning backbends to please an unpleasable audience; the audience can just as easily say they've been made what they are by the media they consume.

I have in the past plucked out what I think is the juiciest headline quote from an interview I've done. And I confess that my standards for juiciness have at least a little to do with an awareness of what people will click on. I like to think I'm responsible about it, but I'm pretty sure Edge didn't think it was being irresponsible with this Deus Ex quote either.

As a matter of fact, I wonder if I might not have zeroed in on the exact same headline. I can't say for sure.

It's a slippery slope with no clear source of blame. In the dysfunctional family circle of game industry, game media, and game consumer, anyone can always point the finger to the left or to the right of themselves.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Some more GameSetLinkDump, then, with a tremendous amount of goodness to get through, starting out with a pedometer that's also a role-playing game. I know there's My Weight Loss Coach for DS, but there it would be great if there was something quirkier and more grind-y in the West for RPG idiots, maybe?

Also in here somewhere - details on the making of odd '80s adventure title Amnesia, national gaming day at libraries, the Mother 3 handbook, and plenty more.

Is he dead, Mr. Spock?

Trends in Japan - CScout Japan Blog » Bandai RPG Pedometers animate your steps
'Bandai will soon be releasing two new hybrid pedometer games to keep you entertained while racking up the miles as you go about your life.' Wish they did English language pedometer games, besides Pokemon - or do they?

YouTube - Little Big Planet: Love and Marriage (Engagement Proposal)
'How I asked my GF to marry me in Little Big Planet. My (now) Fiancee was playing the level. She was so shocked she kept playing and knew i was filming. Afterwords we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring.'

Back of the Cereal Box: The Legacy of W.A. Stokins
A good, handy Sheng Long round-up, guv'nor!

Mother 3 Handbook - The English gamers' guide to the world of MOTHER 3
Crazily beautiful fan service for a game that, what, won't get released in the States ever? Sigh. Via Brandonnn.

ASCII by Jason Scott: Amnesia, Forgotten and Remembered
Super-neat find - the original manuscript for '"Amnesia", the text adventure that was written by Thomas M. Disch and released by Electronic Arts in the mid-1980s.'

I Love Libraries - National Gaming Day @ your library
'On November 15, 2008, libraries across the country will participate in the largest, simultaneous national video game tournament ever held! Kids will be able to compete against players at other libraries and see their scores in real-time online while playing at their local library.'

The Making of…Deus Ex Machina | Edge Online
'I decided the time had come to go for it. Deus Ex Machina was either going to be my Orson Welles landmark or my Orson Cart disaster.'

The work of play - Los Angeles Times
Good mainstream piece on games, salaries, California.

Live from IndieCade Opening Weekend: Moments of Bliss | IndieCade
Glad to see the fest went well for them, hope it continues!

play online - 360, PS3 : Dave Talks Golden Axe
Parallel universe Halverson strikes again: 'Regarding many of the “reviews” on Sega’s Golden Axe: Beast Rider: Be wary. The majority of these people (can’t call them critics) either didn’t complete a fraction of the game, don’t understand game design, or just plain suck at games.'

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

[In the first of a two-part series discussing the Wii, designer Brice Morrison first concentrates on the positives of Nintendo's breakthrough console to ask - in its two years since launch, what has the machine done for the biz, and what is its legacy to games?]

Almost two years since its launch, the Wii has certainly made a splash in the games industry. Though not a godsend, as I will discuss in a later article, the Wii is responsible for many uncanny feats.

It is incredibly fun, sure enough, but the pioneering console's reach goes far beyond the enjoyment of swinging the Wii remote. What else has it done? In what ways has the Wii affected game players, the games industry, and games as a medium?

You Don’t Press Buttons? Let Me Try...

Without a doubt, the most influential change of the Wii is its effect on the demographics of the video game market.

In the days of old, video games were made for “gamers”. These core gamers were quite homogeneous; most of them were boys and young men who played video games anywhere from 10 to 30 hours a week.

They were familiar with the usual franchises: Halo, Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, and they knew them in depth. They suffered from genre addiction, where players become incredibly skilled at a particular type of game by having their finger reflexes burned in, sequel after sequel.

Developers created the same game over and over again with more difficulty and complex gameplay in order to satisfy these core gamers.

Today, the people who are likely to buy games are vastly different from the people who would have bought games several years ago. Nintendo called their shot in the dark the “blue ocean strategy“: searching for people who didn’t currently play games, but who would play if given the right interface.

Nintendo recognized that many potential customers didn’t come to the party simply because they didn’t like the house’s welcome mat. They weren’t giving games a try because pressing the buttons was too complicated.

Before Nintendo’s newest generation, many had never played games for that reason alone. They now enjoy the simplicity of swinging the Wii remote, an action more closely resembling the activities they are familiar with.

This shift, caused by simplifying the connection between the game and the player, is hardly new; a similar explosion occured in the home computer market three decades ago.

Early in the 80’s, personal computers were only used by specialized techies who enjoyed working from the command line, since having to type all of your commands was too difficult for the majority of consumers.

It wasn’t until the Macintosh appeared in 1984, with a graphical interface and mouse, that it became accessible to the average consumer. The ugly welcome mat was replaced, and everyone was able to join the party.

It is worth noting that it has not been the Wii alone that has allowed this movement (though it is arguably the largest proponent). Casual games such a Bejeweled were around on the internet long before the Wii, entertaining everyone from the core gamer to the 35 year old woman who never touched a console in her life.

But these games were largely underground and from independent developers, away from the cutting edge of the games industry. To have one of the big three consoles (the other two being Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox) go after casual and mid-core gamers aggressively was the final thrust that resulted in a monumental shift in the market.

Mom Doesn't Want To Fight Aliens?

So now that all of these new casual gamers own a Wii, what will they play? Mom and Pop don’t seem eager to get in on a Halo deathmatch. So what do they want?

This is the second major effect of the Wii: the broadening of the types of games that can now aspire to be successful. Nintendo chose to position the Wii (along with the handheld Nintendo DS) as a console that was different from the others. On the Wii you’re more apt to find games that are about more than the simple fun of violence and gore.

It should be realized that the Wii could have just as well been marketed as a hardcore system, just as the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

They could have created the Wii, motion controls and all, and still had the same types of difficult games. Games that required dozens of hours and intense practice to complete. Games with the same action and fighting themes as before. Games that were made for the hardcore gamers of the last generation.

Luckily, they didn’t. Nintendo decided to differentiate. Instead of making the last generation of games more difficult in order to satisfy hardcore gamers, they struck out for new territory and went after the non-gamers.

And because those consumers are now ready to play, other more interesting titles are marketable. Games like Big Brain Academy and Wii Fit can now be pitched as possible commercial successes.

Now that consumers are ready and waiting, game designers can aspire to create the games that will feed this new market of consumers who want more than entertainment, but rather want to improve their lives.

Dissolution Of The 'Gamer'

The Wii has already changed many aspects of the games industry for the better. But it has also paved the way for immense change in the future of games.

“In the future there will be a TV in every home,” said Charlie Gordon, hands clasped on the side of his podium. The crowd, without a second thought, laughed at him.

If Charlie had been speaking in 1990 and instead claimed that “In the future, every single person will play games,” he would have likewise been laughed off the stage.

Heck, if you would have told me as soon as five years ago that my family, wonderful people who live on a farm in southern Virginia, would one day own a game console, I would have called you crazy. But now they own a Wii. And so do many others like them, people who had never played games before.

The shockwave that the Wii has sent out is continuing to gain steam. As more and more people play games, the term “gamer” will fade into the past. When describing themselves, no one says, “I am a television-watcher,” or “I’m a movie-goer”.

Instead, a person is more likely to tell you what kind of TV and movies they watch. The fact that they watch them at all is a given. Now that games have become more accessible, so too will they follow suit.

Broadening Of The Purpose

The other long term effect the Wii will have on games isn’t necessarily a prediction, but rather a simple extension of the current trend: the functions that games serve in our society will continue to expand.

When games were exclusively for young boys, games were about entertainment, and rightfully so. But now that we have adults, mothers, fathers, and senior citizens playing games, interactive software is becoming much more than entertainment.

A 72 year old woman doesn’t play Wii bowling just because it’s fun; she also plays it for the exercise. Players of Brain Age aren’t turning down a movie or a trip to the ballpark to try the game, they view it as an investment in their mental health. These are noble goals that were never possible when core gamers were just looking to kill some time.

Over the next few years, games will continue to change and redefine how we think of them, likely moving further and further from entertainment. In fact, we may have to come up with a new name for them.

The Future Looks Bright

The execution of their console by Nintendo, the marketing, the design of the controller, and the software titles have all worked together with one goal in mind: get people who have never played games before to give it a try.

Truly, the mid-core and casual games market is an exciting one. As a game designer, it is a relief to finally be able to talk seriously about games that are more than entertainment and be able to expect profitability.

Such designs were once constrained to nonprofit art, but can now be embraced and rewarded. This, my friends, is a very good thing.

[Brice Morrison is a game designer who has been developing quirky titles since he was in middle school. Before taking a job at Electronic Arts, he developed several successful independent games such as Jelly Wars, an action adventure franchise, and QuickQuests, a casual MMORPG.

While at the University of Virginia, Brice founded Student Game Developers, an organization which continues to produce games every semester and open the doors to the games industry for students. His blog at BriceMorrison.com discusses games in a broader context and how they can be more than simply entertainment.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[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 release update from the prolific dessgeega, an isometric shooter by Sigma Team (of Alien Shooter fame), a life simulation game, an innovative tower defense game, and a Breakout remake by nekogames.

Game Pick: 'Mighty Jill Off - Jill Off Harder Edition' (dessgeega, donateware)
"Not an entirely new game, but an enhanced version updated with reworked tile graphics and a second tower to conquer - although you will need to beat the first level in under twelve minutes to unlock this extra content."

Game Pick: 'Theseus - Return of the Hero' (Sigma Team, freeware)
"A game by Sigma Team that uses the updated Alien Shooter engine, recently released as freeware. This isometric action game features ten playable stages, in which some are actually rescue missions instead of the standard alien genocide fare."

Game Pick: 'Kudos 2' (Positech Games, commercial indie - demo available)
"A sequel to one of Cliff Harris' earlier commercial releases, which has been described by some parties as The Sims in 2D. There are plenty of improvements over the original, although the artwork by James McKelvie has to be the main draw of this life simulation game."

Game Pick: 'Immortal Defense' (RPGCreations, commercial indie - demo available)
"Rarely does a developer spends an entire year updating their first commercial venture instead of concentrating on the next release, and allowing players to access one-third of the full game in the demo seems illogical but the critical acclaim for this innovative tower defense game has paid off in spades. One review even went as far as proclaiming it a better game than Portal and Bioshock - a shocking revelation indeed."

Game Pick: 'Nekogames Kuzushi' (Yoshio Ishii, freeware)
"A Flash banner game created by the developer of Cursor*10 and the Hoshi Saga series. This Breakout remake turned sideways consists of a single area filled with blocks for the player to destroy, although the concept isn't exactly a new one as Firestorm Productions released a similar freeware title called Poing PC some time back."

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

Thank you all for your kind feedback in my last column. I guess I'll keep this sucker on rolling, then, and cancel my previous plan to start covering the illustrious history of ferret magazines instead. Sorry, Simon.

As I've discussed earlier, this isn't such a merry holiday for US print mags, most of which are peaking just a wee bit above 100 pages even though the number of games they're expected to cover continues to balloon. They're doing the best they can, though, and I'd like to take a look at the holiday editions I didn't get around to last week -- including Game Informer, which I continue to foster a love/hate relationship toward.

Game Informer November 2008

Cover: Dragon Age Origins

The postman kind of mangled my copy of GI this month, leading me to wonder if the magazine was suddenly using cheaper, flimsier paper. It isn't -- I compared it with early-'08 issues and it's the same. Just a perception, I guess. (GI is the winner in page count this month with 144, which beats EGM by a country mile.)

Never have the two directions GI pulls itself become more obvious than in this cover. GI's the only mag to actually put a picture of Jonathan Blow right on Page 1, for example, to say nothing of giving him two pages of interview text. It's arguably the best thing in the mag this month; Blow is a handsome lad and he speaks intelligently. There are one or two nitpicks I could bring up, but the fact is that I don't see any other print mag tackling the guy and his game with nearly as much gusto.

The cover feature, meanwhile, is GI's other face -- the face of game PR, page scans on forums, and instant obsolescence. The text is nothing IGN couldn't do -- it needs editing, is written awkwardly, and has passages that go on for several lines without actually stating anything, like some parody of a 19th-century lecturer. I'm know I'm far more critical of GI's x-clusive covers than those of any other magazine, but if you've got over triple the circ of your nearest competitor, you got higher standards to fulfill in my mind. Where's the thought and insight that I just saw in the Braid interview, not to mention the rest of the news section?

The Left 4 Dead piece, meanwhile, is far nicer -- despite what the cover suggests, it's much more Valve history piece than L4D preview, and it's nicely laid out and interesting to read even if you know all the players already. Very Edge-y.

Official Xbox Magazine December 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Fallout 3

OXM does for Bungie what GI did for Valve this issue, and the result's even more impressive because they're covering a story -- Bungie going independent -- that I think not enough industry watchers realized the full impact of. It's got quotes from rival developers and everything. Brilliant! The Fallout 3 review gets more pages (and has a similarly lovely visual design -- I think I see why OXM gives its designers full bylines alongside the writer these days), but this was the highlight for me.

Play November 2008

Cover: Street Fighter IV -or- Bionic Commando

It's not mentioned on the cover, but Play seems to have a "girlzzz in gaming" theme going on this issue -- there's a profile of ladies around the industry that prominently features the Frag Dolls (most recently seen in mags on the cover of Future's PCXL one-off?), a review of a book called "Porn & Pong," and another piece on "Game Widow," a book written by the wife of SOCOM's lead designer.

The SFIV cover piece is pure passion and pure Play, in the good sense of the term -- in-depth and filled with neat trivia. The Bionic Commando counterpart is pure Halverson and pure Play in the other sense of the term -- filled with Dave talking about himself and writing one-liners like "100% pure, game and player. This is what it's all about" which sound straight out of 1994-era GameFan. They both have their charms, really.

If you want pure, refined Halverson, though, flip directly to his review of Golden Axe: Beast Rider. My favorite line comes right at the end: "If you love [the game], buy two for yourself and one for everyone you know as Christmas presents, whether they have a console or not, to assure we get another." If it's got boobs and/or a jump button, Dave loves it. And I love him.

PlayStation: The Official Magazine December 2008

Cover: Prince of Persia

Can I take the time to mention that Future is awesome for printing PTOM in such thick, heavy, fancy-feeling paper? This issue's 112 pages and is still way thicker and sturdier than GI at 144. It demonstrates that someone at Future cares about more than the bottom line when it comes to print.

The cover piece is incredibly text-dense, backed up by some neat visual aids, like the full spread devoted to the "anatomy" of the Prince. I usually hate vertically-oriented spreads, but this one was done right. It reminds me of me 'n Gary's old Newtype days, pieces like these. Besides that and a horror-game roundup, this mag is almost all reviews.

[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 (2)

Steaming straight into the weekend with straight-ahead intent, this GameSetLinkDump extravaganze is headlined by InfiniteLives' Jenn messing with a Lovecraftian Virtual Boy game that I, also, had no freakin' idea existed - and this comes from someone who bought (but has not yet affixed) a 'Miskatonic University' license plate frame.

Also hanging out in here - the LA Times on game schools, a good iPhone game store piece from Kim, a video series touches on the tortuous-ish history of games and IP/patents, Joust 3D rears its pretty head (I heard it got canned partly because it had glider-quality uber-physics insanity controls, I believe), and plenty more.

Rainbow connection:

Majoring in video games - Los Angeles Times
Super well-researched piece on game degrees from Alex Pham.

Finalists - joystick - E4.com
'In alphabetical order, these are the top ten games submitted into the Grand Master Flash competition, as selected by our expert judging panel.' All playable and pretty interesting.

Ascii Dreams: Review: World of Goo
Yep, as Riccitiello fanfic. The weirdo.

Xbox Live Arcade Sales, 2 Weeks Ending 10/11/08 | VG Chartz.com - Video Game Charts - Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Wii, PS3, Xbox360, DS, PSP, PC
New update! Some interesting stats here (Braid still doing 5k a week?), and they are, at least potentially, much more reliable than VGChartz' WiiWare ones, as I've mentioned previously.

Mine!...Gaming and Copyright | ON Networks
History of patents and IP in games, from a pretty interesting web-only video game show I had no idea about - via Alex.

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure: iPhone Games Market: Promised Land or Cesspit?
'While at TGS, I had a lot of hallway & dinner conversations about iPhone games, with people weighing in on whether the iPhone Appstore was the promised land (a la XBLA circa 2005) or whether it was going to rapidly turn into something less than that.'

Infinite Lives » Games I’ve never played: Lovecraftian, stereoscopic FPSes
'The ill-fated Virtual Boy did, indeed, have exactly one 3D first-person shooter, and it took place in Innsmouth, and in it, you actually shot freaky fish people.'

brandonnn.com — RJDJ Takes Me Into The Rainbow Vein
Wow, amazing music-generating iPhone app.

gone is gone: Joust 3D
Is this the first video to surface of this online? (This and below via Brandonn too, just catching up!)

Media Molecule - we make games. » Blog Archive » LittleBigBang : The Evolution Of LittleBigPlanet
'Here is a video which gives some insight into how Little Big Planet ( and Media Molecule! ) evolved from next to nothing into what it is today! This was generated from our source control repository using a awesome tool called codeswarm.'

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

['GDRI Wisdom' is a bi-weekly column presenting highlights from select interviews with overlooked game developers of years past, as seen on Game Developer Research Institute (GDRI).]

Jim Reichert is an inventor and rapid prototyper whose work has been featured in Disneyland's Innoventions Dream Home and the Microsoft Home of the Future. He also worked at Microsoft Game Studios, doing games such as MechWarrior 4, MechCommander, Crimson Skies, and Links 2001.

But early on in his career, Reichert worked as a programmer at Sega Midwest Studio (aka Sega Midwest Development Division), a little-known Sega studio that was located near Chicago. Only two games developed by the division were actually released - a conversion of the Neo Geo game World Heroes and NHL All-Star Hockey '95, both for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

Fortunately, GDRI got to catch up with Mr. Reichert. We asked him about World Heroes, Sega Midwest itself, and even an unreleased 32X game.

GDRI: Tell us about developing Genesis World Heroes. Was a lot of time and effort put into doing it? Why was an American division of Sega tasked with converting a Japanese fighting game?

JR: Well, as I was only the developer of the game, I can't really answer the question as to why an American development house was asked to do the port. As for myself, I'd never really heard of the game, and I was simply happy to enter into the game industry at the time -- I wasn't about to ask probing political questions.

It was funny; the original "wunderkind" who was supposed to do the port, a British guy named "Steve," turned out to be all talk. But before he "left," he managed to bilk Sega Midwest out of a fair amount of money (he got a car as part of his deal). Ultimately, I came in to restart the port from the ground up and had very little time to do it. Thankfully, another guy at Sega, whose name was John [Walsh?], helped out with certain parts.

It was actually quite a feat to get all of the 8 characters, plus the end boss, in the game -- with all of the animations. Back then, cartridge ROM was expensive!

Yeah, World Heroes (even the original) wasn't anything to write home about. I had to squeeze 82M into a 16M cartridge. The source code was in assembly with absolutely no documentation. There were no testers. There was no one to help me port the artwork.

Anyone who owns this little turd can fire it up again, just to type "JJJ" as the 1st place high score initials -- and have an Easter egg to throw tomatoes at (my portrait). Take that, SOA corporate!

[ED: You do not have to have the 1st place high score for the "JJJ" trick to work.]

GDRI: So did you have the source code from the original game to work with?

JR: I already answered that. "The source code was in assembly with absolutely no documentation." What that basically means is that I had a file that looked like several hundred pages of:

0F77:0000 B8790F MOV AX,0F79
0F77:0003 8ED8 MOV DS,AX
0F77:0005 B409 MOV AH,09

Essentially, it was likely that I was working with a post-compiler assembly dump. I'd worked in assembly before, but on a different chipset. I guess you could say I had only the assembly to work from, not the source and no access to the original authors. Basically, the game was written from the ground up by me, a novice at 23.

GDRI: We talked to Jim Rohn last year, and he said, "There were a lot of confidential, in-house developments that I don't think I can speak about." Are you willing to talk about them?

JR: I'm not sure what Jim Rohn was referring to about the in-house developments, but I think he was talking about office politics, incompetence, and SOA's capital "disappearing." At one point, we had an art director who knew absolutely nothing about art. I think there was some nepotism going on at high levels. He forbade artists to learn 3D Studio until he'd learned it first (he wanted to make himself indispensable). So me being the rabble rouser that I am, [I] learned 3D Studio on my own and taught it to the artists behind his back. The artists rapidly eclipsed him in skill, and he was basically driven out based on his incompetence.

Overall, the "trench forces" at Sega Midwest were incredibly gifted, but all their talents were wasted on incompetent leadership. Still, amid all the BS, we turned out two fairly decent games at a time when the market was evolving very quickly. We probably could have made a go of things if Sega hadn't blown its console strategy.

GDRI: There was a segment on an episode of a show called Rox featuring you at your job at Sega Midwest. Some footage from a 32X game called Aftershock was shown. Was an actual game being worked on? It looks more like a "proof of concept" to me.

JR: Aftershock got beyond the proof of concept stage, and we were developing the game when I left. I remember that Aftershock got rave reviews as a product pitch at SOA, but by that time, Sega Midwest had pissed away so much money (with little ROI [return on investment]) that nobody trusted them with SOA cash -- and Sega itself was totally floundering (32X?!?).

It was too bad because that game actually had some legs, and the whole studio was excited about it -- and I was the lead designer. I still have all the videos and game assets associated with it -- I even have a cartridge with the prototype on it. We had a professional cartooner design all the characters for the game, and the images were completely awesome.

GDRI: Could you tell us what Aftershock was about? What kind of game was it?

JR: Essentially, it was Jungle Strike set in a post-apocalyptic world where you could fly, drive, and cycle around.

I'm looking at the Aftershock pitch folder, and here's the "high concept"-- a game industry term used to describe a short paragraph that can be related in a minute or less.

"A combination of aerial assault, ground combat, and cinematics bring a compelling storyline to life in the post-apocalyptic world of Aftershock. Lead your team of skilled mercenaries through the ruins of L.A. in a desperate search for the source of the mutant infestation. It's a race against time as you infiltrate enemy strongholds, collecting weapons and power-ups in preparation for the final conflict with an evil tyrant."

Of course, that's just the pitch. There's over 30 pages after that, of flowcharts, illustrations, and story. The folks at SOA were pretty enthused because we had an amazing artist on staff who was a brilliant comic illustrator, and we were going to leverage the 32X's video playback capabilities to do some amazing cinematics.

Looking back over the documents, it's still a game that looks like fun. But as with anything from the 90s, perhaps it's best left in the past!

(EDITOR'S NOTE: More from this interview can be found at the GDRI website.)

[Game Developer Research Institute is a website dedicated to finding out more about game development companies and people in the industry.]

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

[Perhaps it's heartening that Republican presidential candidate John McCain used a video game to demonstrate his position against pork barrel spending -- but designer Brice Morrison explains just why McCain's Pork Invaders "fails miserably" -- and what the candidate should've done instead.]

The 2008 Presidential race is at the top of the news headlines, with all eyes on Obama and McCain, all ears to the issues. In this particular election, I've been pleased to see the willingness of both campaigns and the nation as a whole to embrace technology, from the YouTube debates to Obama's extensive website which debunks myths and rumors generated by bloggers.

Both candidates' teams have done exceptionally well in coping with new technology in an effort to woo a population that is more connected than ever before.

One of the efforts by McCain's team to reach voters was a game for voters to play called Pork Invaders. It is a classic Space Invaders-style arcade game, where the player moves around on the bottom of the screen while enemies float up above.

The player can fire bullets at the enemies and destroy them, earning points. In this particular version of the game, the enemies are pigs (representing porkbarrel bills that spend taxpayer's money needlessly), and the bullets that the player can fire are vetos (representing John McCain, in office, vetoing the bills).

Unfortunately for both the McCain campaign and game developers interested in social change, the game is nothing short of an embarrassment to games as a medium. It does nothing to expand on its blindingly clear initial message: McCain hates pork barrel politics, and he intends to fight against them when elected to office.

Okay, so we get it. Thanks for sinking a good chunk of change into developing this game, since the message "John McCain thinks porkbarreling is bad" is clearly beyond the scope of written text. The game was likely an attempt to reach younger voters, but that logic goes nowhere if the game does nothing to convey its message.

Backing Up Social Messages With Gameplay

Games like this upset me, because they both reflect and perpetuate a lack of understanding of the capabilities that games have to convey experiences, teach players, and change minds. These are the kinds of games people think of when developers try to talk about games for social change, games for education, or games as art. No wonder no one takes them seriously.

Pork Invaders is a terrible game in that it fails to present a coherent system. The game attempts to use arguably the least-important aspect of games -- the graphics -- to make its point. The Space Invaders controls, enemies, and movement are left intact -- in essence, standing silent -- when they could be used to share an experience with the user about John McCain.

Imagine if what was done in Pork Invaders was done in another, better-understood medium. Take the recent Batman film, The Dark Knight, exactly as is, except replace Batman with John McCain. Then replace the antagonist, the Joker, with a pig-man named "Porkbarrel". And the movie unfolds in the City of Taxpayer's Dollars.

Obviously, this is completely ridiculous.

But this is exactly what Pork Invaders does. The developers took another game, whose mechanics had nothing to do with government spending, and painted over the graphics in a sad attempt to convey a political message.

In attempting to express through a game what could have been expressed through an ad slogan, they wasted both time and money while failing to take advantage of the interactive medium they chose. It would have been better for everyone to cut out the middle man and simply write the message that the game is circuitously trying to convey.

Looking at the game's main menu, you see evidence that not even the developers think the game is worthwhile. Before starting, the player has the option to select between "Play" and "Get the facts".

Clicking the latter link will take you to another page, where you can read about McCain's plans for reform. Giving the player this choice essentially positions the game as a waste of time, something that you do for a few minutes until you decide to become an adult and read some actual information.

The Kind Of Game McCain Should Have Made

Games are the best medium for conveying real life experiences, because they have the option of choice. The player can choose what to do, and the system will respond. Any life experience can be described by this model, and so there's no reason why such a medium couldn't be used to convey a message much more powerfully than text.

"Experience is the best teacher", says the proverb. Truly, most people's opinions and beliefs are shaped by their experiences, McCain and Obama included. What if you could experience the same life events that lead the candidates to hold the views they currently do?

Instead of hearing the candidates spout their views, why not go back to the events that caused them to develop the views?

Imagine this: A game where you are playing as a United States Senator. In the first stage, you visit your home state and speak to constituents. You learn of their hardships and their struggles, and you agree to do everything you can to help them. In the second stage you return to Washington to vote on several bills. You refer back to the requests of your constituents and make your decisions, and bills are passed.

However, as the game goes on, the budget begins to run low. You go back to your constituents, who are still eager for change, and unfortunately need to tell them that the money simply is not there to help them. Your constituents are irate. You head back to Capitol hill to review the bills that have been passed, only to discover that while they may have had good intentions, many of the funds were spent unnecessarily.

In short, through playing the game, you have an experience that awakens you to the real life dangers of porkbarrel spending.

This is just a quick example, but it's still more compelling than Pork Invaders. I'm not privy to the exact experiences that McCain would say caused him to develop the views of his platform, but those experiences would provide a starting point for building a game that does more than spout a slogan. It could actually change people's minds.

Games That Already Do This

The ReDistricting Game, a browser-based game developed by a joint effort of University of Southern California's game design and political science departments, is a game about the effects of altering lines that define voting regions in order to manipulate the results of elections. It is a magnificent game that has thankfully garnered much media coverage in a short period of time.

Why does The Redistricting Game get a stamp of approval while Pork Invaders fails miserably? The former is designed from the ground up for one purpose: to have the player understand the effects of gerrymandering.

It uses the rules that govern the game's system to convey a difficult concept, one that few people would understand after simply reading about it, and helps the player understand by giving them the experience of having it unfold before their very eyes.

While everyone has learned about gerrymandering in school, few people would claim to actually understand how it makes a difference. Thus, the game goes above and beyond written text and teaches through experience.

Pork Invaders, on the other hand, presents no semblance of porkbarrel politics in its gameplay. The attempted message and the game itself are completely unrelated.

Games For Real Change

I hope that we see more and more games for political issues, and I hope that those funding them become more and more aware of their ability to influence voters.

If games can be used to convey experiences, a world where the average voter can tackle even the most complex issues may not be far away. But to get there, game developers need to understand exactly where the compelling powers of games lie: in their gameplay.

[Brice Morrison is a game designer who has been developing quirky titles since he was in middle school. Before taking a job at EA, he developed several successful independent games such as Jelly Wars, an action-adventure franchise, and QuickQuests, a casual MMORPG.

While at the University of Virginia, Brice founded Student Game Developers, an organization which continues to produce games every semester and open the doors to the games industry for students. His blog at BriceMorrison.com discusses games in a broader context and how they can be more than simply entertainment.]

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

Heading blissfully forward with the GameSetLinkDump - and there's actually a surprising amount of good randomness this week - the attached picture is the fun, devious concept of an intentionally corrupted, gradually graphically destabilizing Super Mario Bros ROM. Can you complete it before it becomes unplayable?

Also in here - the PixelJam guys vs. Sarah Silverman, IFComp reviews times infinity, homebrew DS goodness, GAMBIT's Phorm, and plenty more besides.

Telling no tales:

Comedy Central: Games - The Sarah Silverman Program: Cookie Party 2 - Info
Totally cute promo game done by the indie kids at PixelJam - via Brandonnn.

sardius_: glitch, please
'The king of all corrupted Mario hacks is still Proceduralglitch3.nes, though. I don't remember who made it, but I got it off of an old thread at selectbutton.net. It turns Super Mario Bros. into a race against impending and inevitable doom, as levels will gradually become more and more corrupt over time.'

GAMBIT: Updates: Introducing Phorm!
'Phorm is the first game where players create their character using free-form modeling.'

IF Competition: General Reflections and Favorites « Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction
Wow, gigantic, scarily big round-up - here's everyone else reviewing.

Joystick Division: Video Game News, Views and Reviews - Post-GameCyte/TriplePoint Roundtable
Milking it much, guys?

Ludus Novus :: Necropolis
'Necropolis is a game about Ms. Lilian Trevithick, lady adventurer and radical steam technician, who has come to the infamous Necropolis of Ao in search of adventure. She descends through 25 procedurally-generated levels of traps and treasure to achieve her goal.'

Gaming by the people, for the people - Citizen Gamer- msnbc.com
'I checked out 29 of the community games in the beta and, of those, I’d say maybe seven were worth paying actual money for.'

Multiple:Option: UZA: The First Journey
'UZA: The First Journey is an arcade action game similar to Robotron/Geometry Wars.' Oo, please enter IGF Mobile with this, plz.

Achieve360Points.com - Live Score Tracker - Xbox 360 Achievements
As Danny points out - these achievements are bananas (B A N A N A...) - 35 points for pressing pause?

Play This Thing! | Game Reviews | Free Games | Independent Games | Game Culture
'Fraid is a quick parodic riff on Jonathan Blow's brilliant Braid. It features completely impenetrable "puzzles" that you essentially "solve" by doing random things until something happens, along with vaporous story text with the illusory feeling of literary depth but that ultimately means nothing.'

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

[As mentioned in the recent GameSetLinkDump, here's a brief write-up on the Nite To Unite event, which is probably one of the lower-profile industry events from a public perspective, yet still raises a great deal for kids' charities - bravo, all participants.]

The ESA Foundation's eleventh annual Nite To Unite For Kids was held in San Francisco on Wednesday night, and Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto was on hand to receive the 2009 ESA Champion Award.

The charity event at the historic Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, which includes a dinner and a silent and live auction, is run by the ESA Foundation, the Entertainment Software Association’s charitable arm.

Nite to Unite for Kids has raised an impressive $11 million for children's charities since its inception in 1999, through a combination of donations from game industry companies and individuals of all kinds -- showing the potential of the game biz for giving back to the community.

But the excitement was perhaps centered around Nintendo's Miyamoto, on hand in San Francisco to receive an award that had previously been given to notables such as Electronic Arts’ Bing Gordon, Nintendo of America's Howard Lincoln, Sega's Isao Ogawa, and Sony Computer Entertainment’s Ken Kutaragi.

He was introduced by Nintendo Of America head Reggie Fils-Aime, who chose to honor the legendary Nintendo designer by explaining what Miyamoto-san meant to him personally.

Fils-Aime explained that his first console was a Super Nintendo, and the first game he owned Super Mario World. Working in marketing at Pizza Hut at that time, he became completely enthralled, managing to complete the game with 99 lives.

Then came The Legend Of Zelda: Link To The Past, and Fils-Aime praised the title's creative genius, saying that to him, "That game was like another child... that game was like a second job."

He then related an anecdote about his 6-year old son playing Zelda at the same time as he did, and the circumstances whereby his son took over Reggie's save -- poised at the last boss in the game -- and beat it.

"I was so pissed," Fils-Aime joked, but he explained that he felt his personal gaming story was just one of the millions that Shigeru Miyamoto has inspired, and ended by simply saying of the Mario and Zelda creator: "There is no-one like him."

Miyamoto then took the stage to a standing ovation from the assembled industry vets, and said in English, "I am very honored," before gratefully receiving his award and giving a brief translated speech in Japanese.

As he explained in starting, "All of us have grown up seeing how our video games have touched the lives of children and whole families."

Indeed, he commented of those currently creating games, "I often hear that a lot of those people played Super Mario Bros, and that's why they joined the industry and started making games."

Miyamoto believe that it's an exciting time for the games industry, since "we're seeing new genres being born every day."

His mind was particularly on his new title, Wii Music, and though he joked, "I'm not here to do any PR for Wii Music" -- getting laughs from the audience -- he did say that he was excited about the title introducing children to the "future that they may potentially have with music."

In fact, Miyamoto said that he hopes, in a few years, to see professional musicians who were introduced to the profession with Wii Music, in a similar way to Super Mario Bros inspiring game developers.

He concluded that it's the job of developers such as him to create games that enchant the world, and for children, to "see what we can do to put smiles on their faces."

Also during the evening, an enthusiastic live auction helped to increase the charity giving. Some of the most enthusiastic bidding went to a meet and greet session with teen pop stars The Jonas Brothers, as well as a spring training visit to the Seattle Mariners baseball team, donated by owner and one-time Nintendo lawyer and chairman Howard Lincoln.

There was also a host of silent auction items to help with the event's charity goals, spanning everything from UFC posters to a Metalocalypse Adult Swim cartoon show prize package (intriguingly donated by Konami).

This regular event continues to fulfill a vital charity function, and it's likely that the ESA Foundation will update in the near future with a final tally from this year's Nite To Unite.

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

[Every week, Gamasutra sister weblog GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley will be summing up the top console digital download news tidbits from the past 7 days, including brand new game announcements and scoops through the world of Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and WiiWare.]

Last week was slow, yet not. It's surprising how little Xbox Live Arcade and WiiWare news popped out, while the PlayStation Network got the lion's share of announcements and revelations. Doesn't happen too often.

This week, you'll be able to pick up Portal: Still Alive on Xbox Live Arcade. If you've never played the Orange Box versions on the console or PC, you'd be silly not to download this. Cheaper than the PC version, too.

Last week on the PlayStation Network, we got SOCOM Confrontation. New and old players alike are enjoying it quite a lot -- though it seems that it's going through a few problems right now. Hopefully everything settles down once the weight gets taken off the servers. The 500MB instant patch didn't help either.

On WiiWare, you've got Tetris Party -- apparently a great new addition to the platform -- and The Incredible Maze, a game that nobody had heard of before today.

This week, we're also starting a new set of columns - the monthly wrap-up of the best games for each downloadable service:

Xbox Live Arcade

This week on Xbox Live Arcade - Portal: Still Alive
2007's PC game of the year is making its way to the Xbox Live Arcade this week. If you never got the chance to play this game, I'd suggest you do so now.

Gamerbytes Interview - NinjaBee On A Kingdom of Keflings, Boingz and Doritos: DOD
We get the chance to chat with indie downloadable game aficionados NinjaBee about their three upcoming titles for WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade.

PlayStation Network

NA PSN Store Update: Confrontation, No Booty
It's been a long wait, but the PlayStation 3 was able to become a Navy Seal in the multiplayer of SOCOM: Confrontation. People have been having quite a few problems getting online, I hear -- hopefully that gets fixed. Unfortunately, Age of Booty was not released - instead, delayed until November for PSN users.

TGS 2008 - Gamersyde Gomibako and Flower Gameplay Videos
Gomibako aka "Junk Tetris" was a hit at TGS last week, but there was little to no media for it anywhere. Video ninjas Gamersyde get some videos on the sly - check it out.

PomPom Games Announce Astro Tripper For PlayStation Network
From the people who brought you the Mutant Storm series on Xbox Live Arcade comes Astro Tripper - a grand rethink of their classic PC title, and exclusive to the PlayStation Network.

Guest Analysis: A Curmudgeon's Review Of Qore - Episode 05
This months Qore review by guest analyst Matt Matthews discusses Fallout 3, Resident Evil 5, and Dead Space, as showcased by Sony's official online video magazine.

High Velocity Bowling Becomes What It Should Have Been
Remember High Velocity Bowling? The developers sure do - they're bringing a giant update to this title soon - including online play and Trophies!

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update - Tetris Party, Mega Man 9 DLC and... The Incredible Maze?
Tetris Party bursts onto the scene with online play and a flurry of gameplay modes, while The Incredible Maze sneaks in on the side, unnoticed by the masses. Not our fault - they didn't tell us they're even making the game!

The September Wrapup

Every month, we'll recap the top games for each console for the previous month, with review round-ups galore. This time, we have a look back at WipEout HD, Shred Nebula, Mega Man 9, Strong Bad, Duke Nukem 3D and more.

The September Wrapup: What You May Have Missed Out On XBLA?

The September Wrapup: PSN Gets Wiped Out On Classic Titles

The September Wrapup: WiiWare's Strong Mega Bomb

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

['Roboto-chan!' will again be a fortnightly column by the indomitable Ollie Barder, who has returned from the blinking LED encrusted future to warn humanity about the inevitable robot apocalypse. This column covers the problems surrounding making a Macross game and how the series has thus far been portrayed in a functional sense.]

Firstly, it's nice to be back writing this column again. I've looked on from afar and wanted to take the reigns again several times but real world requirements dictated otherwise. I hope to resume the column on a regular fortnightly basis as well, so at least the wonderful Game Set Watch readership can once again have their robot gaming fix.

Anyway, what with the latest TV series, Macross Frontier, finishing a scant few weeks ago and the new PSP game Macross Ace Frontier being released recently, it seems that now is a good time to talk about a series that has often been given a somewhat unfortunate gaming treatment.

Of all the mecha franchises out there Macross is one of the most badly represented. This isn't because developers want to sabotage the series but more down to the fact that each Macross game is actually comprised of three disparate gaming genres all vying for dominance via one control method.

To clarify, Macross is a series based around love triangles, giant aliens, music and, of course, planes that can transform into large robots. Naturally, each game focuses on these variable fighters, which results in a game that has to offer control for each of it's three modes; fighter, GERWALK and battroid.

To say that that this is a pretty tough undertaking isn't in any way an understatement. It's actually, almost utterly impossible.

With that, let's get on with the column...

The annals of Macross gaming are pretty extensive but this column will only be covering the more recent 3D efforts. This is not to say that the older 2D shoot-em-ups aren't worthy of discussion, as the PC Engine versions were developed by none other than NCS who created the incredibly influential Assault Suits series, but that the problems with the various modes of transformation only reared their head once greater functional (3D) scope became available. As such, I apologise that this is a somewhat of a selective breakdown rather than anything exhaustively thorough.

It also goes without saying that I won't be covering the numerous Robotech games, not out of blinkered otaku tendencies but because the faults that befall the newer Macross games are equally present in the Robotech editions (in some instances, even more so).

So why is it so bloody hard to get a variable fighter working in-game? Well, it's down to the aforementioned three modes that they can transform between; fighter, GERWALK and battroid.

Fighter mode is basically a plane so any functional tenets from flight simulators are an easy match. Battroid mode is your nimble Japanese mecha and, as this column has shown, that genre has a lot of reference material already. Switching between these two modes would be do-able and wouldn't require a complex control scheme, however there is one more mode left.

GERWALK, a wonderful acronym that stands for: Ground Effective Reinforcement of Winged Armament with Locomotive Knee-joint. Basically, it's a halfway house between fighter and battroid. To explain, the legs come down and the arms pop out but the main body remains that of a plane. Interestingly, the mecha designer responsible for the variable fighter design, that of Shoji Kawamori, actually came up with this mode first. On a skiing trip he noticed how jumpers legs dangled in mid-air and wondered how that would work on a plane. GERWALK, as such, is the crux of the variable fighter's capabilities as it allows the high speed pursuit of fighter mode but also the VTOL capabilities seen in battroid. This is also where the functional problems start.

With this extra mode sandwiched between fighter and battroid, the controls have to offer a new disparate control scheme. At worst this means that each mode ends up with a massively different set of control inputs, making the learning curve suitably counter-intuitive.

Macross Digital Mission VF-X (PlayStation)

This is where the 3D games start; with UNiT's abortive VF-X games. The first game was set around the same time frame of Macross 7, so the roster of available variable fighters was pretty extensive. It also featured, for the first time ever in fact, a fully transformable VF-4. Something had never been since it was introduced in fighter mode way back in Macross Flashback 2012. All in all, it was shaping up to be every Macross fan's dream.

Then it got released.

After multiple agonising delays, VF-X hit the shelves. It had a wondrous opening FMV with Fire Bomber singing Try Again and animation by GONZO. The front end was stylised a la Macross Plus and then the game started. Oh...dear.

The first problem was that because this game was in 3D the developer, UNiT, couldn't resist showing the animation sequence for each transformation. So you'd have the controls wrenched from you as your variable fighter transformed. Thankfully, you were invulnerable during this phase but comedically this oversight could be used to break the game until it was made farcically easy.

The second problem was a mixture of a badly implemented GERWALK mode and a neutered battroid mode. In the case of the latter, battroid mode was unable to fire missiles, which whilst inaccurate to the anime was also functionally frustrating and limited the usefulness of the mode.

GERWALK was a mess though and sat between the two other modes, meaning that the player had to toggle through each mode rather than select them individually. The reason why it didn't work was down to the means in which your variable fighter gained and lost height. Thrust for the other modes was almost reversed in GERWALK, in that in order to gain height you had to pull down on the d-pad. On its own, it made sense but between the other two modes it just jarred. Couple that with the surreal choice to have the player strafe in GERWALK when not applying thrust and then allowing them to turn once the boosters were activated, meant you often over shot your target. The camera also had a habit of looking straight down in GERWALK, which was almost inevitable as it was tied to the player gaining altitude.

All in all, the first VF-X game was a pretty rocky start to the 3D generation of Macross games.

Macross VF-X2 (PlayStation)

This was a direct sequel to the original VF-X and whilst UNiT were still onboard it was clear that Bandai was ghosting a lot of the development. Overall, VF-X2 was actually pretty decent. The camera got a re-working allowing the player to track targets despite their actual orientation and a more consistent control configuration.

GERWALK still caused problems however, as it had certain additional functional nuances that jarred with how the other modes worked. Admittedly, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the hellish nonsense seen in VF-X but it was cumbersome enough to avoid using the mode most of the time. Battroid mode also still couldn't fire missiles, bizarrely.

All that aside, VF-X2 was pretty compelling and visually it was a massive improvement. This was also one of the first Macross games to see a potential Western release but due to the complex rights issues associated with Macross outside of Japan (courtesy of Robotech), it never made the jump. There is a limited edition demo available, featuring a playable VF-5000B, but it goes for crazy money these days (if you can find it).

Separately, VF-X2 actually played an important narrative role in the Macross saga as a whole. Set in 2050, it laid the groundwork for the formation of privately funded military organisations, such as SMS in Macross Frontier occurring 9 years later, due to the inherent corruption of the government military. It also had a similarly fantastic opening FMV.

Macross Plus Game Edition (PlayStation)

By this point Bandai had probably had enough with UNiT. So they looked elsewhere and found Shoeisha. Weirdly, they went with a dedicated Macross Plus tie-in rather than a series catch all. Of all the series Macross Plus was one of the least successful in Japan and considering the difficult rights issues abroad, the game would never have been able to be released anywhere else but Japan. Still, they went ahead with it and the result was moderately impressive.

It's also worth pointing out here that Shoeisha flat-out cheated in terms of offering the full gamut of variable fighter control. The game was actually split into two parts; aerial missions and ground based missions. In the aerial missions you played with fighter mode and in the ground based missions you played with battroid. So where were the transformation capabilities seen in the VF-X games?

Well, these had been relegated to quick time events. Specifically, when a missile volley was headed your way you would get a prompt to press X this would then kick off a cutscene of your variable fighter transforming into another mode and dispatching the missiles. Technically, GERWALK was present as a mode in this game but not one you could directly control.

It was a shrewd move as it meant the other two modes received a far more cogent functional treatment. It also looked rather lovely and what with Yoko Kanno's seminal orchestral score playing in the background, it felt more inline with the host work.

Macross M3 (Dreamcast)

After the previous Macross game, you'd think Shoeisha were onto a near winning formula and wouldn't drastically change their approach. Wrong. Macross M3 was close to a carbon copy of VF-X. In that it allowed the player to transform into any mode during gameplay, rather than separating the modes out in different gaming segments.

It almost worked as well. The transformation was handled on the d-pad and movement on the analogue (something Artdink shrewdly copied on the recent Macross Ace Frontier but more of that later) and a simpler approach to acquiring a missile lock (you just held down A when the enemy was in your targeting reticule and at the appropriate range). However, the camera setup was appalling as it placed the variable fighter squarely in the player's field of view making it very hard to track targets. GERWALK also received its perennial functionality, with different controls for that mode and an inability to look up. Battroid mode could fire missiles though, so that was at least something.

This also had a wonderful opening FMV and filled in the gap on Max and Myria's history prior to Macross 7. It also featured a slew of the more esoteric variable fighters that hadn't been seen in animated form. Anyway, M3 sealed the fate of Shoeisha's involvement with the Macross franchise and this was, thankfully, the last game they did.

Choujikuu Yosai Macross (PlayStation 2)

This is when things started to change for the better. Bandai approached SEGA AM2 for starters, which can only bode well. This was down to SEGA having access to the tech behind the popular Aerodancing games and Bandai hoped that having that arcade flight simulator would work well with Macross.

It worked very well in fact, SEGA's Macross game is to date probably the most accomplished of all the dedicated Macross tie-ins. Unlike the games that preceded it, AM2 picked a base mode that the other two hinged off. Due to the usage of the Aerodancing engine the main mode was that of fighter, so the base dog fighting combat worked beautifully.

However, all was not sublimely wonderful. Even with the flight simulator focus, GERWALK did still cause problems. Requiring a mysterious new control configuration for gaining and losing altitude, one that wasn't used in the other modes to boot. Battroid mode also lost its ability to fire missiles, again. That being said, the game did play well for the most part and some of the final missions were suitably epic.

Bizarrely, a far bigger roster of variable fighters was planned (namely those from Macross Plus and Macross Zero) but these were pulled prior to release. This may be down to the narrative focus being on the original TV series and movie, as such the added continuity was probably deemed too confusing.

Another Century's Episode 2 and 3 (PlayStation 2)

Now I've already covered the first two games in this column but whilst the ACE series isn't solely dedicated to Macross it did offer some of the best variable fighter controls yet seen. Like the AM2 game that preceded them, both ACE 2 and 3 had a specific mode focus. Instead of being based on a flight simulator engine, ACE was always based around mecha combat. Unsurprisingly, the variable fighters had this imposed on them as well. The result was a far better approach to GERWALK mode and a seamless control configuration for all three modes.

In ACE2 the emphasis was more on the mecha combat and whilst fighter mode didn't get used it was a tad clunky. This was also true for all the transforming mecha that had a flight mode attached to them. In ACE3 this changed and a new more responsive flight mode was offered. This had a better camera setup as well and generally improved the variable fighter handling, as fighter mode became more viable.

Ultimately, what made the handling work was that GERWALK was treated as a similar mode to the other two. Admittedly, the games were still weighted towards the mecha end of the spectrum but GERWALK was finally viable. It was faster than battroid but slower than the fighter, it sat between the two as a stopgap offering further graded functionality.

Specifically, GERWALK acted as the VTOL jack-of-all-trades it was always intended to be. Battroid mode was meant for the heavy mechanical take downs and the fighter as a way to cross the huge mission areas quickly. GERWALK sat between the two and aided the mid range combat in a beautifully organic fashion, as it had enough potency and speed to keep the enemy at bay without ending up as a massive mechanical target,

On their own, the variable fighters depicted in ACE were a finer and more accurate representation compared to almost all that had preceded it. This was down to From Software's expertise in the mecha genre more than anything else.

Macross Ace Frontier (PlayStation Portable)

So where does this leave us? It's clear that approaching Macross with more its mecha in mind is obviously the better route to take but is that all? Well, Artdink have made a name for themselves recently with their Gundam Battle franchise (also covered previously in this column). Their focus and tech is very much suited for handheld mecha games but could they pull it off with a mecha that has two other disparate modes?

In short, yes. They pulled it off quite well in fact, almost too well though more of that later. Remember the usage of the d-pad in Macross M3 to change modes? Artdink used something similar for Ace Frontier by having the analogue nub select each mode specifically (so no cycling through the modes basically). They also retained the camera viewpoint seen in VF-X2 and Macross Plus Game Edition. All that aside, like the ACE games, the game's focus is very much on the mecha. This means that GERWALK acts as a halfway house between the too modes.

However, Artdink took it upon themselves to create two new problems with GERWALK mode. In the original anime, GERWALK mode can skim across vertical surfaces due to it's VTOL configuration. Ace Frontier offers this functionality, which probably sounds fantastic but ends up being very not. To clarify, when you're in an enclosed space and switch to GERWALK you often end up attaching to a vertical wall. This plays merry havoc with the camera and can cause the player to actually get stuck on geometry. Not entirely brilliant that. Secondly, GERWALK mode has a bizarre way of losing altitude The X button normally generates an upward thrust in GERWALK and Battroid modes, but to go downwards you have to double tap the X button and hold. In a frenetic dogfight it's not uncommon to yo-yo in terms of your altitude when in GERWALK. Not exactly great that.

The above probably sounds more damning that it is but GERWALK is still causing problems but more down to Artdink's zeal at trying to replicate functionality that nobody in their right minds had tried to do previously.

For a PSP action game though, Ace Frontier puts a lot of games to shame (especially the earlier console iterations listed above).

Dedicated to all pioneers...

I've probably been a tad disparaging throughout this edition of the column and whilst these faults are very much present in the games I've covered, it is by no means the direct fault of the developers themselves.

They're doing their best to reproduce something that is purely aesthetic. Ichiro Itano's mecha choreography has a lot to answer for, both good and bad (again, I've covered this before in the column). The issue here is that everyone has forgotten where the variable fighter came from; that of gangly ski jumpers and the thought of "what if a plane had legs?".

Well, not so much forgotten but conveniently omitted I suppose. After all, how many decent 3D arcade helicopter games can you think of?

[Ollie Barder, formerly a freelance journalist, is now a senior games designer at doublesix. He also spends a sizeable amount of time playing robot games and dusting an ever growing collection of Japanese diecast robot toys.]

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

Ah yes, a few more GameSetLinks, posted during (or shortly after) my attendance at Nite To Unite, the ESA's kids charity event in San Francisco.

I gather that Shigeru Miyamoto is being honored with the 2009 ESA Champion Award, so it'll be interesting to see what he says (for I believe he will be present).

In the meantime, here's some intriguing links, spanning everything from an Echochrome analysis through new indie games and IGN's new casual game site.

Gung ho:

Consumer CULTure : Retro Remakes
'It’s Robotron without the guns, only instead of saving the last human family - you’re collecting meaningless junk and being constantly bombarded with meaningless adverts for even more meaningless junk whilst you play.'

War Tw@Eurogamer Expo 2008 : Retro Remakes
'Eurogamer is also proud to support Pixel-Lab’s Indie Arcade at the Expo, showcasing 10 of the best titles in independent PC game development.' Oo, more Top 10 indie-ness, this time at the London expo.

Kloonigames » Blog Archive » Pirate Fishing
'The game was made back in 2006 and I’ve been keeping it as a backup if I ever for what ever reason won’t be able to do a game that month.' Hee, cheat!

Video game censorship and the art of horror | NEWS.com.au
Yahtzee: 'If we willingly delude ourselves that video games are just for children and banish everything beastly and unwholesome, we miss out on something important.'

The Pretentious Indie Gamer Scene » Blog Archive » The Notorious P.I.G.: Indie As F*ck
Increasing indie rap wackiness: 'You wanna be my shorty? Why don’t you come talk to me after you’ve beaten Cave Story.'

SEGA America Blog | PlaySEGA is Live - Read All About It!
'PlaySEGA is a new site that allows SEGA to put a new spin on web games, and offer some cool perks to go with it.' Avatars, rings to collect in-game, interesting.

Mediapost: News Corp.'s IGN Rolls Out Greenpixels.com
'News Corp.’s IGN has quietly rolled out Greenpixels.com, a new content Web site geared for the fast growing universe of casual gamers, which includes a substantial number of women.'

Steven Poole: Puppet play
'Echochrome’s protagonist is one of these mannequins, hinting perhaps at an allegory of the relationship between player and game.'

Noby Noby Boy, then and now... - Tiny Cartridge
'Showing off a spectacularly weird game is one thing; but then he scrapped it and switched it out for a completely different game design that is also weird, but in a different way.'

The Future of Reading - Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers - Series - NYTimes.com
'Increasingly, authors, teachers, librarians and publishers are embracing this fast-paced, image-laden world in the hope that the games will draw children to reading.' Via VirtualPolitik.

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

[Our own Christian Nutt dissects what went wrong with E3 and posits that the return to form sought by the ESA for next year's show might not have the intended effect -- or, at least, laments crawling crowded hallways once again.]

So, E3 is changing again. Today, the ESA confirmed that E3 is largely returning to the format it had from 1995 through 2006: a big, brash show, with lots of people crawling the halls.

Now, it's hard to predict whether this will invite a full-on return to three-floor steel booths dripping with schwag and staffed by out-of-work "models", but that's the way it feels from a glass-half-empty perspective.

Over the years up until 2006, E3 got gradually more ostentatious -- and, from a business perspective, untenable. The press and others doing business at the show viewed it as something to suffer through: the crowds were ridiculously large and largely unconcerned with doing anything besides ambling through the spectacle and scoring some free T-shirts. So getting from appointment to appointment was a journey through a human obstacle course.

The show put on by publishers -- like NCsoft, which was fined in 2006 for exceeding decibel levels and making it difficult for Sega to conduct closed-doors meetings in its own, adjacent booth -- ultimately became essentially ridiculous.

And at some point, a cadre of powerful publishers got together and decided that it wasn't worth spending millions of dollars every year to hand GameStop managers inflatable rubber rafts from atop metal edifices in which nobody could hear themselves think.

The Gizmondo E3 booth, circa 2005, is reliably rumored to have cost $5 million. In the style of a Hollywood B-movie backlot, it was done up like a town, a Mayan temple, and who-knows-what else, and crawling with scantily-clad women, it was a symbol of what E3 had become by that point: a big spend with no substance.

Rumors pointed to EA and Nintendo -- at first -- backing out of the spectacle and the competition. E3 2006: too expensive, too loud, not doing its job. Finito. But now it's back. Why?

When the news hit, Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander remarked, "I don't get it; when it was noisy people complained, and when it was quiet people complained."

It's true. Though it was exceptionally easy to get business done at this year's E3, nobody seemed to like it. The repudiations of the new format came harsh this year, from powerful figures in the industry like EA CEO John Riccitiello saying "I hate E3 like this," and Ubisoft president Laurent Detoc calling the show "terrible."

Perhaps even more importantly, there was a suggestion that, behind the scenes, retail buyers didn't bother to attend the new show, making it all press, no business.

Without a robust business aspect, E3 loses even more of its draw for publishers. And without the glitz and the glam, the mainstream press (particularly TV) didn't bother turning up -- another big problem for publishers seeking to expand their audiences.

But what's annoying, if not outright worrying to me, is that the format sounds more or less like it's returning to the E3 of old. If we needed the E3 of old, it wouldn't have died.

I'd like to think that, this time, with a little perspective, the publishers can work together to stop the arms race of more and more ostentatious booths... but it's hard to believe that would happen. That's not how these things work.

And with an "expanded" audience of tens of thousands of T-shirt-grabbing hands, it's very possibly going to be as loud and as difficult to deal with as it was two years ago. The thing is, there's the GameStop Expo now. This does a great job of showcasing games to retail staffers of the largest specialty retail store. Who else makes up the "expanded" audience the ESA is talking about? Anybody care to enlighten us?

Anyway, the point is -- we're just going to enter into another cycle of E3 waxing and waning if it returns to the way it was. Especially if the business people have been permanently scared away. Especially if the show doesn't re-attract the media attention it squandered. Especially if the publishers spend money and don't see a return on it. Especially if nobody can get anything meaningful accomplished. Especially if publishers continue to resist making important product announcements at the show, afraid that their games will be lost in the din -- a din which will no doubt increase next year, no matter what.

My wish is that the organizers had taken the same tack that's been working so well for CESA and Nikkei BP's Tokyo Game Show: two business-oriented days limited to press and businesspeople, and two public days, which charge admission, and are open to all.

At this year's TGS, not even two weeks ago, I was able to get all of my appointments accomplished without a hitch, and was able to skip the crowd-surfing misery of the public days completely. Everybody, it seems, was happy. Why wouldn't it work in the U.S.?

Let in the press and businesspeople the first two days; let in the "expanded" hall-filling audiences, if not the "true" public, come Saturday and Sunday -- and let the TV crews know the Navy SEALs will be rappelling from the roof on those days.

E3 2009 doesn't feel like a solution -- it feels like a regression. It may be a mark of desperation, because it's obvious that things didn't work this year.

Or maybe I should quit complaining -- because maybe everybody actually knows that, and instead of repeating their mistakes, they'll evolve the way the show is handled, and business (and pleasure, for the crowds) will be able to get done. But all I can think about now is spectacle, distraction, and the inability to get between South Hall and West Hall in anything under 20 minutes.

The best thing about the return to the old format (or a close one) is that game developers -- largely shut out of the new-form E3 in 2007 and 2008 -- will once again be able to evaluate the work of their colleagues and competition before it's released. Otherwise, I don't see much of a silver lining.

My fear is that this move is what it appears to be -- the organizers of E3 having no idea what to do with the thing, but acting because they have to act. As with the Santa Monica E3 of 2007. As with the quiet LACC E3 of this year. Each year we're told that after careful consultation, the current iteration of the show is the result. And each year, since 2006, nobody likes it.

Will anybody like next year's show?

(Title photo from Mulling it Over on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license)

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This time, in honor of the debut of the game's sequel, Emily looks at the original version of unconventional life sim Kudos. ]

Positech's Kudos is a game of social interaction and self-improvement. In subject matter, it's a little like The Sims, except in that the player controls only one avatar, and does not get to design the layout of her house.

But play entails many decisions about how to allot time and money: should we buy a bike? take Italian lessons? go to the opera? And these feed into larger goals: what career do I want to have? How in-shape do I need to be? Which friends do I want to cultivate?

The avatar starts at age twenty. You get to play until she's thirty, and then a curtain drops: whatever you've accomplished by that time is it. Plausibly enough, many of the best jobs are hard to reach in that time period, especially if you make some false starts.

On my first play-through, I got my player educated enough to take a job as a biologist, but the jump to the next level -- as a senior botanist for a major pharmaceutical company -- would have required that I raise her intelligence farther than I considered achievable, given her starting abilities. So I gave up on lab science and had her embark on a new career as a chef -- but she never had adequate people skills to rise really high in that field, either.

There are some implausible pieces to the way the simulation is constructed. Among other things, your character lives in such a high crime area that you are likely to be both burgled and mugged several times a year, until you acquire a dog to protect your home and take kickboxing or kung fu lessons. (Once you have enough fu, you can perform citizen's arrests. Listen for the combination of fight noises and triumphant battle cries.)

Despite these quibbles, though, the bulk of the simulation is effective. The strength of Kudos is the realism of some of the large-scale social dynamics at work. You keep your friends by spending time with them, but these interactions are only satisfying as long as there are things that both of you want to do.

As you become wealthier, more of your acquaintances also tend to want to go out to expensive restaurants or throw wine and cheese parties. If, at the age of 28, you decide to scrap your reasonably prosperous career and aim for an ultimately even more fulfilling one, and that requires you to start over with a job at $16,000 a year, your friendships are going to take the hit -- because you can no longer afford to do the things that the people in your current social circle like to do.

Another part of the simulation is the focus on your ability to bring people together and form new friendships. Your friends appreciate you as a social hub figure if you're always throwing delightful parties at which they get to hang out with people that they like.

Also unfortunately true to life is the way that it can be tricky to maintain friendships with people who are very unlike the rest of your social circle. They're never happy around your other friends, so you have to go out with them solo -- which is fun, but makes them much more demanding, time-intensive friends to have.

If (as happened to me once or twice) these friends only ever want to go on expensive jaunts to the opera or to French restaurants, they can become extremely high-maintenance. From a gaming point of view, they're not worth keeping. In real life, decisions like that are more often accidental than intentional, but the factors at work are the same.

Yet despite all this focus on social dynamics and friendly interactions, Kudos ultimately plays as a cold and rather lonely game, and one in which it's difficult to care about any of the other characters besides oneself.

Part of this has to do with the simplicity of character profiles. Everyone you know is made up of a handful of likes -- ranging from "beer" to "opera" to "gossip" -- and you throw your most successful parties by inviting people to activities that feed their likes, alongside other people who like to talk about the same things.

There is a large range of possible social activities implemented in Kudos, but that range is still small enough that over ten game-years of play, the whole process becomes very repetitive: you have a certain posse that you can invite to a Mexican restaurant, and another group that likes to come over for an evening of video games, and just occasionally you can mix things up a bit by throwing a dinner party yourself.

But what people like is constrained, never changes, and never admits the possibility of new fads. Your friends never reach the point where they like each other, and you, so much that they'd be happy to go out for Chinese instead of Mexican if it makes a new person feel more included. They never become so close to you that your friendship becomes a semi-permanent institution, rather than a chance byproduct of proximity.

Which brings us to the second point: the other characters are largely represented as selfish, tactless beings. Though some have a positive effect on your confidence or mood, their few lines of dialogue are often off-putting.

This comes to play especially when you try to spend time with a character (such as a friend of a friend) who is more cultured or intelligent than your avatar: your invitations can get such pointed responses as "I think you've mistaken me for someone less popular" or "That doesn't sound like an intellectually stimulating evening, does it?"

In game terms, that's supposed to tell the player to spend some more time reading 19th century novels from the bookstore and watching the art channel on TV, in hope of becoming sophisticated enough to appeal to these acquaintances. But in story terms, it's hard not to be repelled. I might get a higher social score by earning the privilege of friendship with these characters, but why would I want to? Why wouldn't I, in practice, run the other direction from these self-absorbed snobs?

In fact, the fictional aspects of the game frequently subvert the message of the mechanics. Mechanically, from the point of view of score, it's valuable to spend time with the (supposedly) cultured and clever, going to expensive restaurants and other venues that raise your character's status. But the fictional dressing of these activities hints that this is shallow behavior and that the people involved are unpleasant beings.

(Kudos doesn't seem to take seriously the possibility that some of the people who go to French restaurants, or host wine and cheese parties, are doing so because they actually take pleasure in the food and want to share that experience; these are framed chiefly as gestures of pretention.)

Even an invitation to a close friend can be met with a frank, not-especially-tactful rebuff like "We do that way too often for my taste." In gaming terms, I understand the point of this: the player is intended to invite friends to a range of varied activities, rather than settling into a routine of one constant kind of interaction.

From the story perspective, though, it's bracingly cold. And when you do go out with friends, they may decide they like you less if you happen to be unhappy on the evening in question. Now, I concede that Eeyore-like personalities get wearing after a while, but my avatar wasn't in a constant sulk; surely my closest friends might try to cheer me up on my occasional moody days, rather than retracting their friendship?

It turns out that there is a way to buffer this reaction a little. At least, my impression after a bunch of experimentation is that if you drink alcohol on your outings, your friends are less likely to notice that you are unhappy, and less likely to judge you negatively as a result. But this is another message that makes me question the worldview implicit in the mechanics of the game.

In the end, a full play-through of Kudos left my avatar lonely and withdrawn, focusing more and more on her work (which at least offered reliable prospects of advancement) and her dog (whose love was unconditional) rather than her fickle, self-absorbed friends. Trying over again with different characters and different initial personality traits did not seem to make matters any easier. It may be that I just haven't worked out the right strategies to win -- but it says something that Kudos also manages to make winning look unappealing.

If the message of the original Kudos is supposed to be that social advancement pursued as a status game is empty and leads to unhappiness, then I guess it works. However, the new sequel promises significant updates, both in graphical style and gameplay, so those interested in this type of game might want to check it out nonetheless to see what has changed.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

Posted by Emily Short at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Time for a few more select GameSetLinks, headed by another fun hiphop and gaming-related link-list from Examiner.com - although one that curses my hero Parappa The Rapper, so must presumably be completely wrong.

Also hanging out in here - the disturbingly graphic Bayonetta, silly Halloween costumes, some Rockstar Vancouver shenanigans you might have missed, how physics in games matter, and plenty more good stuff.

Enjoy the silence:

Video Game Examiner: Best (and Worst) Hip-Hop-themed video games of all time
'Being the hip-hop purist that I am, I’ve always hated PaRappa the Rapper. I saw it as a stereotypical, exploitation of hip-hop that had no redeeming merits to the culture.'

virtualpolitik: Meaningful Play, Day One: Art without Beauty
Good write-up of a conf we missed - def. read Ian Bogost's comments on art-games.

Gametrailers.com - Bayonetta - TGS 2008: Gameplay Revealed Trailer (Cam)
Good Lord, I missed this - Platinum's female-led Devil May Cry-ish blaster is superduper iffy.

Wired: Games Without Frontiers: 'Pure' Shows Off Fun of 'Artistic' Physics
'Painters use colors and texture to create moods; authors use words and imagery. But action games? They use physics.'

Vintage Computing and Gaming | Archive » VC&G’s Halloween Video Game Costume Ideas (2008)
Wow, incredigeek.

matthughson.com: Radical Changes
'Vancouver has a massive game development community. If you happen to walk past the Radical offices last Thursday afternoon you might have seen some subtle hints left from our competitors reminding us of this very fact.' Cheeky.

Kotaku: 'New Xbox Experience: Community Games And The New Xbox Experience'
Interesting video about what's going to be an Xbox 360 highlight, most probably.

Games Media Awards 2008: The Winners in Full Gaming Industry | Press Release by MCV
Aha, the results of this 'interesting' thing - funded by buying seats at the event and sponsorship from the firms that journos cover, it's not exactly impartial, but it's still better than nothing at all, right?

Tech Report: E for All // Current
Alex Litel claims of an interview embedded within this video: "'You're stricken with Malaysia' says one of the Frag Dolls on Far Cry 2 at E for All."

Why is everyone saying "fail" all of a sudden? - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine
Claiming that Neo Geo title Blazing Star is the slightly oblique meme originator here, interesting - via Waxy.

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

[Sister site WorldsInMotion.biz has been finding out about the relatively un-noticed market of prepaid online game cards in U.S. physical retailers like Target. It's much bigger than you might think, with claims here that the sector is set for an estimated $100 million in revenue this year - pretty intriguing stuff, going back into meatspace to help the kids pay for games online.]

GMG Entertainment is a publisher of "digital currency cards" for online gaming/entertainment companies, working with major U.S. retailers such as Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Safeway, and has just announced a new range of pre-paid virtual item cards to be sold exclusively at Toys "R" Us.

The cards are individually branded with titles from GMG partners, including AdventureQuest, Cartoon Doll Emporium, Gala-Net, Stardoll, WildTangent and Zwinky, as well as a new partner, WeeWorld, allowing children to take the card and then enter the code in the online game of their choice, giving them in-game currency or items.

The announcement was made today by Rob Goldberg, founder and CEO of GMG Entertainment, and sister site Worlds in Motion talked to Goldberg to discuss the company's entry in to the space, the unusual way that retail buying works, and the potential of pre-paid cards for both retailers and publishers.

How did the pre-paid card business start to take off in North America?

GMG started in the marketing services working with retailers -- specifically Target -- but around the same time as that, well, it's not very well known, but it's Target who actually brought the idea of the pre-paid iTunes card to Apple and sold them on that.

The first iTunes cards were co-branded and were exclusive to Target. In terms of retailers in North America who were focused on pre-paid cards for digital entertainment, Target were ahead of the curve.

So a few years ago that led to their head of digital entertainment, Tim Pechmann, looking for additional cards to sell. He tried the eMusic card, the Rhapsody card, none of those sold particularly well, until Nexon met with him and offered him the same kind of prepaid cards that they explained were selling so well for them in China and the rest of Asia. After a little research Target decided to sell those cards too.

Now, there's an interesting fact about these cards. Retailers love them over any other product they have in their store, because the cards themselves don't take up any inventory.

They're not activated until they're purchased, so they don't sit on the balance sheet of the retailer. They feel like "free money" to retailers. So it's a very positive business for retailers to get into, and it really lowers the bar for any retailers who are unsure about it, they don't need to worry about losing money on it.

So, Target and Nexon. The only advertising that they did for that card was on their website, and yet in-store, it did exceptionally well. I can't quote the revenue, but it did very, very well. So Target looked around for other companies to buy cards from.

Now, a very common part of retail is that the buyers are moved around the company constantly. So the DVD buyer from Target was promoted to diaper-buying, because it was a bigger category. So it's not like the gaming buyers at Target have years of experience buying games and know every new trend. They don't know free-to-play or microtransactions; they may not even have rudimentary gaming knowledge or experience.

Even with this kind of lack of knowledge Target were trying to get into the space. It's almost certainly the only time in history that a seventy billion dollar company has been cold-calling companies asking to sell their product.

Most of the comments Tim got back were along the lines of "we're a digital company, we can't get into the physical space," "if you do it for me maybe we'll think about it," that sort of thing. As GMG had been working with Target, I got a call from Tim to help find these companies and bring them to Target.

As we started to walk through this possible business, we realized that a couple of things. First of all there was a potential for huge growth; not just because of the retailers who were excited by these cards but by how much the digital entertainment companies were growing; not just in company size but in userbases.

Secondly, we returned to the fact that buyers very often didn't know about the industry they were buying from. The person who replaced Tim at Target had been buying country music before that; the games buyer at Walmart used to buy jewelry.

We saw that we could be the intermediary there -- we could use our expertise in both aspects to help both sides, and thought it sounds cliché, help grow the business for everyone. It's not as simple as just "place the cards in a store and they're a payment method." We look at them as a wonderful opportunity for brand building for the digital partners.

The really big untapped market for these digital media companies is gift giving. No matter how much someone loves an online world no one is going to say "hey, merry Christmas. I logged into your account and gave you 25 bucks." Not to mention the impulse buy.

Something I don't quite understand here is the idea that retail buyers don't understand the industry they're buying from. How does that possibly work?

Welcome to retail! The short answer is that it often doesn't. But I wouldn't say they always have no knowledge.

It's not as if they rotate all the buyers on a regular basis and all of a sudden you have five new people on a buying team none of whom has any experience. One of the ways it is made to work is that there is a chosen vendor for each category who is the "category captain."

So for example, GMG is the category captain for Target, Best Buy, GameStop, the entire Blackhawk network which includes stores such as Safeway and Toys "R" Us, and the role of the category captain is to provide industry analysis and data to the buyers. So for example the category captain for home video at Target is Fox, and for cereal it's General Mills at Walmart.

So what that vendor's responsibility is to provide that buying team with industry analysis, overviews… One of the things that we make sure to do as category captains is not just push our own views, but to show them why this business makes sense, whether it’s a demographics fit or any number of different things that could help the retailer.

That's what we do to try and work with this system, but to be honest, for the first six months in any new category a buyer tends to have no idea what they're doing. But you know, it's their job, so they do learn it, get good at it, and then get promoted… Out of that category to something else they don't know!

Why did you decide to offer individual cards for each IP?

For a number of reasons. People have said to us "what happens if some universal gaming card puts you out of business?" and we say there's already a universal gaming card -- it's called a prepaid Visa. If people really want to get their cash onto the web you can buy a prepaid Visa at millions of outlets across the country.

What we have seen -- not only from our digital and retail partner side but from our consumer side -- is that the individual cards are very positively received, even just down to consumers enjoying the collectability of them, because we refresh the art periodically.

In addition, we have the ability to do a lot more when the cards are individual -- for example, with Zwinky, when you bought a card you also received your choice of a free super power. That's the kind of value you can add when you're doing a specific unique branded card, rather than when you have a card that merely acts as a payment method.

Eventually there will be some value in the universal gaming card, but we think the space is simply too new. There needs to be a lot more education of the consumer to understand the value of these cards and what that kind of card could and couldn't do.

How popular have the cards been so far?

I estimate this year that you'll see EA enter this space for some of their games, and a few other big names are absolutely interested. In fact we're in final negotiations with a couple of recognizable names.

We tend to estimate the size of the total prepaid gaming card business when we do our numbers, and this year we're looking to something between $75-100 million dollars in sales across North America. We see that going to $250-300 million in 2009 and being in the region of a half-billion by 2010.

We see this market growing dramatically in the next two to five years.

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

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

It's incorrect to think that the Mystery Dungeon games are the first exposure to Japan of roguelike gameplay. It wouldn't have made sense for Compile Heart to release Rogue Hearts Dungeon (a remake and expansion of Rogue itself) in Japan if (a few) people hadn't been familiar with the original game. The Mystery Dungeon games do appear to be Japan's primary exposure to the genre, however, and have been a surprising influence.

Besides the many many games ChunSoft's made in the series, one occasionally finds other games that seek to duplicate its successes (and failures, too). The Izuna games are an example of this. And while it's hard to be sure, it's possible that the Super Famicom game Monstania is another. This is a look at that game, or more accurately a look at the English version, produced by famed translation group Aeon Genesis.

Monstania is an anime-inspired, character-centered soft of game, along the lines of Grandia but a bit less developed. The story is nothing to really write home about, but no matter. We're interested solely on its essentially-roguelike tactical gameplay, so I won't waste another word on it.

They discarded just about everything random about Rogue other than to-hit rolls. It's all painfully static: areas are designed instead of random, all monster encounters are set, there is no exploration, there's no money or shops, and there's very little loot-finding within an area. The characters don't even earn experience points. Instead, they just gain a level at the end of every area.

There are a couple of places where you can pick from one of two routes to take depending on how you answer conversations, but it's still rather little variety for such a chaotic genre. One of the best things about roguelikes is that you can have fun with them even after you win; here, other than seeing the other story paths (which can be done in one additional playthrough, and isn't even worth it), there's really no reason to play it more than once. Monstania is, sad to say, pretty disposable.

The game may not seem awfully roguelike at first, because its interface is kind of weird. Instead of moving directly, you use left and right to turn, and forward and back to move. (There is an option for direct movement on the options screen, but since the game doesn't use a diagonal constraint button like Mystery Dungeon does, it can be difficult to move where you want.)

By the way, this is an isometric game, and while you can move on diagonals, you can't move or attack straight u/d/l/r. You usually control two characters at once in this game, but only one can act per turn; the other will simply sit there, or follow the other. You can switch between them at will, and your main character can also sort of tie the other one to him to follow behind.

Ultimately, the two-character thing provides most of the game's interest. If the characters are split-up then it takes a turn to connect them, but once joined they can be moved at once. Every turn a character doesn't act he regains one Ability Point (AP), but if he's the follower when the two are joined then he can both move and regain AP at the same time. Understanding this is important to playing the game well, due to the fact that characters don't heal naturally as they do in most roguelikes.

A character must use a healing move, which consumes both a turn and some AP, to get hit points back. Every character has an ability called Recover that restores about half his hit points, and some characters can also heal the partner, but restoring AP usually relies on using an item (which are in very short supply) or relying on resting. Joining characters allow one to both rest and flee from monsters at the same time, which is quite useful.

The other interesting strategic aspect of the play is in the special ways the monsters move. Several of them have special movement quirks, including a good number that move at half-speed, which is less unbalancing here than in other games because a character needs to spend extra turns doing nothing to regain AP, and thus, HP. One particularly interesting monster type hops around as a chess knight. In the two areas I've seen them appear, it's easy to get swarmed if one doesn't recognize their movement strategy (which is quite rapid), but once their trick is determined it's relatively easy to shut them down.

But despite how cool these things may seem, it's difficult to really recommend Monstania. One fairly severe flaw in the game is that most of the time, the monsters are idiots. It's not uncommon for them to take paths other than the most direct way to the players. Indeed, the game is designed around this, often throwing enough monsters at the player that he'd be in hot water if they were to all suddenly realize the shortest path between points is a straight line. The AP system means that, at most, the player needs six turns without doing anything to heal for half his maximum HP.

Getting enough breathing room to heal up is often just a matter of running away for a few turns. And in those areas where you have a missile-using character helping you, making short work of even bosses can be simple, a matter of shooting until he gets close, running until he loses the scent, and repeating. I believe that bad AI doesn't necessarily harm a game if it's designed around it, but compared with Shiren's simple-yet-effective monster algorithms, it does seem inexcusable that Monstania's developers couldn't implement smarter opponents.

Difficulty is a mixed bag. Many areas are remarkably, even laughably easy, but every so often the game will throw in a devilishly difficult area. The first of these puts the player's two characters against two strong golems in a confined area where the AI doesn't have much chance to screw up. These places are where the game is most interesting. At its best, the AP rules, the joined character movement and difficult adversaries make it feel almost like a puzzle game. Actually, since all the areas are pre-made scenarios, levels are handed out after each level, and nearly all equipment is handed out at the end of battles so there's no opportunity to vary a level's opening state, that's perhaps the best description for Monstania.

What I'm about to say is perhaps needlessly reductive, but I think it's true in the general case: the big thing about the Japanese game industry is how they're willing to take a game concept further into the abstract, making the game less realistic in order to fit in a new play mechanic. This is just way Monstania abstracts roguelike games down further than Shiren (which already abstracted them a bit).

But roguelikes aren't typically abstract games, because they lean on the conceit that they're simulations, that they're presenting a Gygaxian playing-out of the possibilities of a situation. When you allow only one character in the party to act in a turn, when you allow the players to tie them together arbitrarily, when simple movement may or may not restore energy based on whoever's leading, and when monsters bumble around instead of relentlessly chase the player, that takes away from the simulationist aspect of the game.

JRPGs these days push ever further into unrealistic, abstract concepts. It seems like every one of them has its own new flavor of points to introduce to the world. (What on earth are "job points" supposed to measure?) At the best, this results in interesting play unburdened by concerns of realism. At the worst, the game becomes disconnected from the real world, and it's difficult to relate to it. Monstania demonstrates why roguelikes aren't helped by this approach.

[@Play celebrated its second birthday in August. Since it started, its update schedule has wavered between once every two weeks and monthly. There are still a good number of games to cover, but it's getting harder to write about them.

Because of this issues, and to assuage the massive guilt I feel whenever a column is late, @Play is officially moving to a monthly schedule for a while. To make up for it, I'm beginning a new column here on GameSetWatch, beginning in approximately two weeks. See you then.]

Posted by John Harris at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

[Every week, Gamasutra's sister iPhone site FingerGaming, headed up by Matt Burris, sums up the past seven days' releases and news for Apple's nascent - and increasingly exciting - portable games platform.]

This week's notable items in the iPhone gaming space include ngmoco's plans to publish three iPhone titles, a free preview for music-based rhythm game Thumstruck, and the release of the Ultima-styled, turn-based RPG Perilar.

Here are the top stories:

ngmoco to Publish 3 New Games
"There’s new content over at ngmoco that shows them publishing 3 new, upcoming iPhone games... One game, which you may have heard of, is (the pictured) Rolando. Hand Circus announced today their highly-anticipated platform/adventure game will be published by ngmoco today."

Thumstruck Free, Rhythm Game, in App Store
"Resolute Games has a free preview release of Thumstruck Free (Free), which showcases an upcoming music-based rhythm game for the iPhone/iPod Touch that 'allows players to physically touch the music' according to their CEO, Chris Przybyszewski... In Thumstruck, you match colored balls with their corresponding colored lines, timed to the music which is provided by Ardent Records band, Skillet."

Perilar, Turn-based RPG, in App Store
"Originally the game is available as a Java-based computer RPG which is free and can be played on Windows or Mac OSX, but Mark has ported it over to be played on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Perilar is a homage to classic computer RPG’s such as the Ultima and Might and Magic series, with old-school gameplay mechanics, graphics, and strategies."

Finger Gaming Review: Plank
"Even though there are a plethora of match-3 type of games already in the App Store, Plank’s uniqueness, riveting gameplay, and polish makes it worth checking out. Tilting the device to move marbles around on a plank, and a shake to destroy marbles on the bottom row, is a great way to utilize the accelerometer and breathe some fresh air into the popular match-3 genre of puzzles."

Spore: Origins Price Drop to $7.99
"Originally being sold for $9.99, Spore: Origins ($7.99) from EA Mobile joins many other big-name games in dropping their price to $7.99. Although many are now finding $5.99 to be the new sweet spot. With gamers now setting the market prices based on demand (or lack thereof), we’re now seeing things start to balance themselves out in the App Store."

Cube Runner 2 Now in App Store
"The sequel to the incredibly popular Cube Runner has shown up in the App Store, Cube Runner II ($2.99). You can still get the original Cube Runner for free, but this new version from Andy Qua has a slew of new features and gameplay modes, such as Time Trial where you not only have to avoid blocks but tilt your iPhone/iPod Touch forward or backwards to speed up and slow down and beat the best time. There’s also a built-in level and object editor to make your own courses to play and share with others."

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

['The Interactive Palette' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Gregory Weir that examines the tools and techniques of the digital games trade with a focus on games as art, using a single game as an example.]

Musical composition has a technique called theme and variation, where a musical theme — a sequence of notes, chords, or rhythms — is repeated throughout a piece with variations, inversions, and embellishments. Variations serve both as a demonstration of the composer's prowess and as an exploration in depth of a specific theme. The most famous example of this technique among layfolk is probably Bach's Goldberg Variations.

We see a similar technique used in video games. Many games, especially those focused on puzzles, start with a simple concept and complicate it by embellishing and expanding that initial idea. Lemmings is a classic example. The game begins with simple introductions of the various "skills" that the player can assign to the lemmings, then gradually adds hazards and obstacles until the player is navigating truly complex levels.

This technique of increasingly complex variations is useful enough to be presented as a design pattern, a specific, repeatable approach to a commonly encountered situation. As Staffan Björk and Jussi Holopainen have pointed out [PDF], a creative task like game design is less-suited to the solution-based approach used in other software design patterns. Instead, game design patterns serve as a template with certain advantages and consequences. By looking at 2D Boy's recent (and excellent) game World of Goo, we can see how this pattern works in practice.

Going Up

The "theme" for World of Goo's variations comes from an earlier game by the same designer, Tower of Goo. The concept is simple: create a tower from a lattice of "goo." Build it as tall as possible, dealing with realistic physics simulation of the springy, wobbly goo.

World of Goo immediately elaborates on this, and be warned, spoilers are coming. The first variation is the addition of a specific goal: the pipe at the top of the level that the goo is trying to reach. Starting from this basic framework — the player has goo, and must take it to the pipe — the levels begin expanding on it by making the original concept trickier. What if the pipe is across a gap, necessitating a bridge? What if the player doesn't have enough goo to reach the pipe, requiring that she awaken sleeping goo first?

This is the first step to variation: adding complications. By keeping the gameplay mechanics the same, but introducting additional constraints on the player, the depth and versatility of the mechanics are revealed. This is essentially an exercise in making the game more difficult, but if the progression is properly balanced, then players will have mastered the necessary skills for previous levels and won't feel overwhelmed.

Some Balls Are Prettier Than Other Balls

World of Goo doesn't leave it at that, though. Early on in the game and throughout the chapters, the player is introduced to new types of goo, from the green goo that can be reused to the red goo, which is flammable. These new goos provide the player with new options. Floppy goo bridges can be supported by balloons, and spiny goo lets structures cling to the environment for added stability... or transportation.

By elaborating on the starting theme, Goo's variations let the player incorporate new actions into the existing game world and mechanics. In apparent opposition to adding complications, adding new options typically makes the player's job easier. Insurmountable obstacles can now be surmounted, and previously tricky tasks are made easier. However, the player now must keep more things in her head at once. If new elements are introduced too quickly, the player won't have had time to fully understand and internalize the last addition before the next one comes along.

Complication and elaboration act in tension here. Satisfying gameplay flow can be maintained by slowly ramping up the difficulty with complication until it's quite tricky, then tossing in a new elaboration on the basic concept. Because the new possibility is unfamiliar, the difficulty should be reduced to accomodate the player's learning before beginning the slow ramp up. By progressing in this way, the game can present levels that would have been utterly intimidating at the start of play, and have the player regard them as tricky but approachable challenges.

20% More Infinite in All Directions

World of Goo also occasionally throws a curve ball. In some levels, there's not even an exit pipe. Sometimes the goal is not to build a tower up, but to knock it down. Sometimes goo is only tangentially involved, but the basic control scheme and concepts are the same. In these instances, the basic premise of the game has been subverted, but it's still recognizably the same game.

Inversion or subversion is the most extreme form of variation. It may seem strange to throw away the very basis of the game, but often the fluff surrounding the core gameplay can be just as interesting as the core gameplay itself... at least for a little while. Turning the game upside down like this can give the player a much-needed break from similar levels or give her new insight about the primary gameplay mechanics through their absence.

In World of Goo's structure of variation, the initial premise is alternately complicated by adding new obstacles and elaborated by providing the player with new abilities through goo. This generates a classic stair-step or zig-zag difficulty curve, which keeps the player both challenged and interested. Periodically, to break up the steady climb, a level is thrown in which subverts the theme by replacing the basic premise. The result is a gameplay experience which encourages the player to keep playing to see what new goo or level structure is coming next, and discourages boredom by preventing the player from anticipating the next twist.

End of the World

This design pattern, variation on a theme, doesn't automatically work. World of Goo has a simple-yet-deep premise, which makes it possible to generate a wide array of variations. The technique requires a "theme," or core gameplay mechanic, which is both versatile and emergent. That is, it must apply to a range of situations, and it must have interesting properties which are natural consequences of the basic rules.

Myst-style gameplay wouldn't be able to take advantage of this pattern because each puzzle or puzzle group's solution is discrete, not applying to the next obstacle. Diablo's gameplay, as another example, is not emergent; there are few interesting consequences of that game's simple melee/ranged combat system.

World of Goo is perfect for this technique, however. Its premise of building to reach a goal is versatile because it can apply to building up, down, or sideways, to closing distances and to filling spaces. The premise is emergent thanks in part to its origins in mass-and-spring physics. A long bridge will dip, an imbalanced tower will fall, and a dropped lattice will bounce due to the original physical properties behind the basic concept. This results in interesting consequences of the premise that can be exploited to add complications, elaborations, and subversions.

As a point of comparison, Lemmings offers a similar, and similarly versatile, premise: get a certain number of creatures from a starting location to an exit. The emergence here comes from the creatures' mindless and predictable behavior as well as the destructable terrain of the levels. Complication is provided by walls, pits, gaps, and traps, while elaboration is seen in the wide array of skills available to lemmings.

World of Goo, beyond offering gorgeous graphics and inspired sound design, has a deceptively simple premise that lends itself well to the variation design pattern. The competing forces of complication and elaboration give it a fun and engaging gameplay flow. The same design pattern is applicable to any game premise which can be used in a wide range of situations and has interesting consequences. The technique will lead to a gameplay experience with a unified feel and an engaging difficulty progression. Like with the Goldberg Variations, audiences will keep paying attention to see what happens next.

[Gregory Weir is a writer, game developer, and software programmer. He maintains Ludus Novus, a podcast and accompanying blog dedicated to the art of interaction. He can be reached at Gregory.Weir@gmail.com.]

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

[Our own Chris Remo has been looking closely at one of the key holiday releases, Lionhead's Fable II for Xbox 360, and in this in-depth analysis piece, he looks at why real estate and sex are the perhaps slightly bizarre cornerstones of the fascinating title.]

When I think about Fable II, I think about real estate and sex.

That's not to say the game's mechanics surrounding those elements define the game, but I'll focus on them here because they are areas not commonly explored in the actual gameplay mechanics of most fantasy-set action RPG.

At least, they aren't often included with this kind of impressively egalitarian scope. With remarkably few exceptions, all property that seems like it should be ownable in the game can be purchased, be it a private home or a place of business. This includes a castle.

And matching that breadth, so too can you marry or engage in (strictly off-screen) intercourse with nearly any non-quest-related NPC with whom your sexual orientation and gender are compatible; each citizen is classified as straight, gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and nobody in Albion has passed a defense of marriage amendment.

All About The Humping?

Developer Lionhead Studios (and, one suspects, designer Peter Molyneux in particular) very much wants you to be aware of its sex-related feature set: the first item I encountered for sale by a merchant was a condom. Not long afterwards, my dog excitedly guided me to some buried treasure, and then panted and wagged his tail happily as I dug up another prophylactic.

Propositioning partners basically involves performing a bunch of wordless, amusing social gestures in front of them until their social meters indicate they're willing, and then inviting them to your bed. Marriage proposals are similar, with a wedding ring icon on the "love" meter indicating when they will acquiesce to your proposal.

Those condoms come into play when you do the deed. There's a binary choice of protected sex or unprotected sex each time; heterosexual couples can bear children.

Essentially, every non-quest-related interpersonal interaction you will ever have with other human beings in Fable II is predicated on acting like an idiot in close proximity to them for a few minutes.

The expressions are well-animated and amusingly voice-acted, and it's fun to learn more of them over the course of the game, but the mechanics behind them are so transparent that they become nothing more than a means to an end, which doesn't feel like what the game intended.

That's the downside of giving you so many options when it comes to personal things like marriage: the overall impact is dulled, because they have to be replicated systematically for everyone in the world.

Wives Vs. Dogs - A Contrast

Even after I was gone for ten full years undertaking a grueling quest of world-changing importance, having returned physically bulkier and extremely scarred with all my hair gone, my (lesbian) wife simply greeted me with one of her usual exclamations of, "So nice to have you home!" and another token gift of a health potion.

(Quite some time later, she abruptly divorced me for no discernable reason.)

My dog, on the other hand, seemed genuinely thrilled to see me again, and I was informed he had been loyally visiting the location of my departure with the firm conviction I would return. It resonated with me much more strongly, and as big a proponent of procedural and systems-driven mechanics as I am, it did say something for the storytelling usefulness of individually-crafted content.

It helps that the dog actually is a genuinely enjoyable component of the game -- Molyneux's pre-release hype of canine companionship panned out. The dog helps you find useful things, joins into your fights, sticks by your side, endears himself adorably to townsfolk, and generally acts like a dog.

That's one big advantage the dog has over human interaction: while the game's human interaction is perhaps necessarily abstracted, the dog's role is a lot closer to depicting reality.

One of my favorite moments is Fable II is when I start running and my dog follows suit, overtaking me and anticipating where I might be going, as if we're having an impromptu race. It feels real in a way the game's systems-driven human interaction doesn't.

The Real Estate Boom

So as it turns out, it was the real estate mechanic that became a major drive for me to acquire wealth and fame in the world of Albion, possibly superceding the critical quest path in that regard.

"BUY THE CASTLE AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS," (caps original) a giddy Molyneux screamed at game journalists in a note included with the review code. Intrigued by his exhortation, I made it an unofficial goal to do so. One of the first things I did after reaching the game's first major town was to spend more time than I want to admit working as a blacksmith (a golf swing-like mini-game) until I had enough money to buy the blacksmith's shop.

Businesses will generate income, while homes can be inhabited or rented out, so the more property you own, the more money you can make to acquire more property.

You earn even when you're not playing Fable II, but as far as I can tell you make 12 times as much when the game is on (paid out every five minutes, as opposed to every hour when it's off, based on my calculations -- yes, I calculated it), so I admit to pulling the NES-era shenanigans of leaving my console running overnight.

It became almost an obsession of mine to buy every building possible. I think I must have done so, or at least gotten pretty close, because at one point, totally separate from any quest-based objectives, I received an Xbox 360 achievement that declared me Queen of Albion, apparently by default because I owned so much of the kingdom.

Like many other parts of Fable II, the property mechanic works into the morality system. In addition to the customary good versus evil duality, there are also things like karma, and attractiveness, and how much you are feared.

When you buy a building, its asking price will be affected by how the current owner feels about you, and you can affect regional property values by committing crimes or going so far as killing homeowners. When you own property, you can raise or lower rents or prices, which then affects your karma.

Conclusion: On Fable & Fallout

Though I've only played through Fable II once so far, I plan on playing through it again with the intention of creating a considerably different kind of character, with a different public perception -- the game gives me the impression that is quite possible.

I'm curious to see the comments on Fable II in contrast with those on Bethesda's upcoming Fallout 3. Both are Western-style RPGs (that is, they put an emphasis on player-driven, rather than tightly-directed, character definition and development) that purport to be heavily about moral choice and living worlds.

Both seem to want to coax similar feelings out of their players, but they are wildly different in their execution. Fallout 3 is darkly tongue-in-cheek, has a vast sprawling nonlinear world, uses a pretty in-depth shooting system, and (as far as I know) doesn't do much with sex and real estate.

Fable II is often joyfully goofy (though it has its darker moments), consists of locations connected only by a fast-travel system, features streamlined and button-mashy combat.

In my gaming fantasy land, I'd actually like to see a convergence of the two: a more Bethesda-influenced Fable game, retaining Fable's bright, inviting color palette and unique/social economic mechanics, but set in a truly open world rather than a disconnected one.

Oh, and please put the next one on the PC, so I can just point at the guy I want to select rather than make vague suggestions to the game's slightly-too-context sensitive targeting system.

But for now, despite some elements that lay its video gameness a little too bare Fable II is an extremely playable, and impressively unique, expedition in an inviting fantasy world.

Posted by Chris Remo at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Time for a little more GameSetLinksDump, of course, and scratching around GSW's multifarious RSS-ness, I think the Backstage.com articles on the game biz (from an actor's perspective) are an interesting outside-industry angle on the whole caboodle.

But also in here, there's my ears bleeding from Beat 'N Groovy on XBLA, the gorgeous video for the Love indie MMO, subscriptions vs. free to play, RTS goodness, and quite a few other things.

Do do do:

Backstage.com: 'The Biz of the Buzz'
Interesting stats on voice actor pricing: 'Actors' work in video games is covered by the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The unions' Interactive Media agreements are almost identical, offering the same pay rates ($759 for day performers, $1,920 for three days, and $2,634 for weekly work) and same provisions.'

N+ Levelpack 3 is out! | metablog
'This one features levels from the original N, reworked and restyled for N+, in the form of: 150 singleplayer, 50 co-op, and 50 race. So the three level packs give you 675 new levels total.' Love it.

IDIOT TOYS: Tech news for the bored: Gadgets with FACES #81: A rocket about to eat space tourist Richard Garriott
Yikes, the gadgets with faces series gets scarier and more game-related, thanks to Zorg from UK Resistance.

World Exclusive: Love, The First Video | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
This looks quite wonderful - hope he's far enough along to enter the IGF.

YouTube - Beat'n Groovy: We Two Are One
XBLA version of Pop 'N Music franchise = fiddly (no custom controller), and oh my god cheesiest soundtrack ever. This is one of the least fromage-y songs. Seriously, I bought the thing.

Game Tycoon » Blog Archive » Wisdom, Deferred
'When I first joined the XBLA team, the conventional wisdom was that most games would take six to nine months to go from greenlight to launch. Today, it’s clear that the range is much wider — anywhere from four months for simpler ports (developed by experienced studios) to well over two years for an original game like Castle Crashers.' I still think there's too much concentration on complicated stuff like multiplayer modes which some games don't benefit by. But i'm oldschool.

Backstage.com: 'And Then They Thought About Game'
From the same series on games and acting: 'For instance, when Keaton voiced the character of Ryu in Ninja Gaiden II, he looked to the films of Akira Kurosawa for inspiration.'

The Forge · MMO Subscriptions vs. Free to Play
This is ankle-deep in an ongoing discussion, but Matt Mihaly has lots of good points, so what the hey.

Crispy Gamer - Column: Rush, Boom, Turtle: "For the love of God, Montresor!"
I see nobody linking this, which isn't surprising, because it's an RTS column, but hey, it's pretty neat.

Tokyo/Tokyo Game Show, October 2008 - a set on Flickr
Didn't get a chance to do more galleries on GSW, feel free to peruse other arcade, TGS, random Tokyo pics.

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

   

I picked up Mort's latest DVD in the mail a day or two ago -- this one a full collection of FORMAT, a British fanzine devoted to the ZX Spectrum that ran from 1987 to 1998. It's great stuff. I've gotten heavily into collecting local computer user-group newsletters and the like lately -- all that laser printing, local advertisements, and flamewars waged with the user group two towns away make for tremendous reading if you're as nerdy as I am.

FORMAT I'll discuss later, because there's 132 issues to read and I'm busy with work and preparing for a weekend vacation, but there was a bonus included with the disc: the first two issues of Load Runner, a British comic published on a biweekly basis by ECC in 1983.

I have never read a British comic magazine that wasn't Viz, but this 40-page title is familiar enough -- a collection of small ongoing stories, none running over five or six pages, with a few text articles thrown in here and there. (If you remember The Adventures of GamePro, the Load Runner comics are very similar in size and storytelling style.)

The difference with this comic is that everything is themed after the home computers, making Load Runner both extremely dated and extremely valuable as a historical curio. Remember, this was a time when computers were seen as "the future" (exactly what kind of future, nobody had fully worked out yet) and half a dozen 8-bit PCs were vying for consumer dominance. The results are just as chaotic as the local marketplace at the time.

The running features in Load Runner include:

- Load Runner itself, the tale of "Byte Killer" Mike Roman (a repairman whose work chiefly involves gunfights with rogue department-store robots) as he's captured by a computer and thrown into a constantly shifting virtual world.

- Time Plan 9, a hard sci-fi photo comic starring a schoolkid whose new computer (an Apple II with its nameplate rebranded "Akron 90") takes on a mind of its own and hatches a mystic plot of some sort, much to the consternation of his computer-hating mother.

- Andy Royd -- The Dominators' Rogue Star!, my personal favorite. A sports comic with a loopy sci-fi plot grafted on to it, the series is set in 1993, by which time pro soccer is played by super-powered robotic footballers and the game's purely a matter of technical engineering and managerial strategy. Andy is an athletic superstar whose body was rebuilt after a tragic "Computa-Kart" accident, and now he's posing as a robot on the Dominators' team. Can he save them from relegation and foreclosure?

- Countdown to Chaos, a serial novel about a passing comet throwing the world's computer systems haywire.

- The Adventures of ROM and RAM, a humor comic about two mouse-sized aliens posing as computers in order to spy on Earth.

- Trumbull's World, a story set in a vaguely Max Headroom-like place where the titular programmer has found the secret to interstellar travel and throws his kids into virtual-reality to escape government hitmen.

- The Invasion of the Arcadians, about an arcade game that brainwashes kids and turns them into roller-skating punks with mohawks (really).

All this is interspersed with the usual sort of "How they use computers at Heathrow / how they use computers on the farm" features you can see in any computer mag of the era.

I can't find any information on how long Load Runner lasted. The last issue I can find evidence of is the ninth. If anyone has an idea, let me know, because I really want to find out what happens to Andy and if they accuse his manager of cheating once he's unmasked as a human being. This is what game mags need more of -- speculative sci-fi sports comics. (Sentences like the one I last wrote are part of the reason I am no longer running any print magazine.)

[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 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Time to round up some of the top items we've run this week on big sister site Gamasutra and our various other sites, which seem to be on a bit of a post-TGS roll in terms of content.

Some of the more interesting links include some chats with EA's John Riccitiello, a good Mick West tech piece on debugging your game, a fun ode to short dialog, talks with the Fallout 3 and Skate producers, and quite a few other things, to.

Here's some links:

Gamasutra Features

New Tricks: Scott Blackwood Talks Skate And Skate 2
"EA Black Box's Skate has dethroned the long-running Tony Hawk franchise in sales, and with a follow-up imminent, Gamasutra talks to exec producer Scott Blackwood on design and tech fundamentals."

Debugging Memory Corruption in Game Development
"In an in-depth technical article, Neversoft co-founder Mick West discusses memory corruption in games, pinpointing the symptoms, causes, and solutions for many game glitches and crashes."

Building A Great Game Team: Measuring Progress
"When building a great game development team, how do you keep everyone on track? Game HR veteran Marc Mencher continues his current Gamasutra series, discussing progress, goals and rewards."

Space Adventures, Haunted Houses, Intergalactic Gaming: Richard Garriott Lives Large
"Ultima creator Richard Garriott is currently part of a mission to the International Space Station -- and we talk to him about his training, the Tabula Rasa tie-in and inspirations for future titles."

Ode to Short Dialog: Reconsidering the Sound Bite
"Big Huge Games narrative designer Schneider steps up to discuss why you should keep dialog short and sweet in games, arguing: "the sound bite is more poetry than prose -- and poetry is a powerful thing.""

Falling Into Fallout 3: Director Todd Howard Talks Scope And Evolution
"With Bethesda's much-awaited Fallout 3 done, Gamasutra talks to game director Todd Howard to discover how the company has managed the franchise's evolution, from game world through rabid fans."

Gamasutra, Other News/Highlights

Interview: EA's Riccitiello On Having Faith In Mirror's Edge, Grasshopper Manufacture
"EA CEO John Riccitiello talks to Gamasutra about creative risks; having "Faith" when he disagreed with his team on Mirror's Edge (he wanted a third-person game), why he "agonized a little bit" over the new Grasshopper/EA Partners deal -- and why he ultimately went with it, also commenting on Brutal Legend's "creative risk"."

Interview: Turbine Talks Multiplatform Initiatives And The Future Of PC Retail
"Just after opening a West Coast studio, Turbine CEO Jim Crowley tells Gamasutra about the LOTR Online maker's "very significant console initiative," why PC's growing weakness at retail "is not a platform issue; it's a distribution issue," and how Turbine will continue to address PC gamers even as it pursues a multiplatform strategy."

Gamer's Bill Of Rights Revised, Stardock Elaborates DRM Stance
"Publisher and developer Stardock has released an update to its Gamer's Bill of Rights, a ten-point list of PC gaming consumer principles it first announced in August. Included in the report is a two-page explanation of the company's stance on digital rights management."

GCG Readers Invent New Ways to Use Guitar Controller
Readers of educational site GameCareerGuide.com have come up with new non-musical ways to (theoretically) use the Guitar Hero guitar peripheral as a controller. The ideas are the results of the site’s weekly Game Design Challenge.

Interview: Riccitiello Hates DRM, Respects Protesters, Tackles Controversies
"Just when it seemed anti-EA sentiment was finally fading away, Spore's DRM controversy hit, the company killed Tiberium and the Take-Two deal came apart. CEO John Riccitiello tells Gamasutra about the "minority" of DRM-haters, why the company will kill one title per year "forever," and the role of ego in the Take-Two fight."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Bell, Game, and Candle' is a regular GameSetWatch column by writer Alex Litel, discussing stuff that happens in the game business. This time - a conversation probes advertising, relationships, and the non-gamer's perception of games and gamers.]

A few days ago, I was ambulating about a metropolitan hotel after hearing word of an advertising summit (my curiosity especially peaked following a Mad Men binge) and noticed an eight-foot-tall hovering, cerulean being clamoring claims that he is “an advertising legend” to the concierge. This occurrence terrified yet intrigued me; I felt I had to talk this person.

Upon closer examination, I noticed a proximate nametag that said “Cory Van Starsdale” and “Massive Inc,” the in-game advertising subsidiary of Microsoft. I thought to myself, “Hey, I have found the topic for the next ‘Bell, Game, and Candle,’ which means I do not have to actually play a game.” Still slightly quaking, I approached Cory and asked if he would agree to an interview. I thankfully received a rather enthusiastic “yes.” What follows is a transcription of our discourse.

Hello there. Would you like to start by introducing yourself?

My name is Cory Van Starsdale, and I am an immaculate world-renowned world champion visionary of vision.

Would you care to qualify that statement?

I am a world-renowned world champion visionary of vision. I invented and won all the Olympics; set the records in all of them. To this day, my records have not been broken.

When was this exactly?

The 1999 Newark Fall Olympics.

No such event occurred.

While, I was terribly drunk—but I believe it started with an N or some letter or number.

I am pretty sure you get disqualified for alcohol use.

No, it was before any of those rules were implemented. It was one hell of a cosmopolitan shindig. Just for example, during track and field, we athletes were snorting lines that went on for meters and meters. Even beyond the athletics, I shook up the Marketing and Nomenclatural Olympics. I am really, really, really blessed, Alex.

The Nomenclatural Olympics?

Yeah, the only training that you really have is when you are in the womb, and one has to put the pressure on their parents to come up with an awesome name. I think I should that names altered through the legal system are disqualified. Would you like me to explain the Marketing Olympics, which I have revolutionized?

Please do.

First, it was sometime in November 2002, and I was driving across the Brooklyn Bridge banging some tunes from Justin Timberlake’s award-winning multi-platinum 2002 solo debut Justified when I was bobbing my head to “Rock Your Body.” This was a fantastic, classic song that just mesmerized me when I noticed the refrain of “I wanna rock your body/Please stay/Dance with me” could totally be transformed into “Centrum Silver’s gonna rock body/A to Zinc/Centrum Silver.” I called up Justin Timberlake’s management, and they instantaneously agreed to this amazing idea. Then I just shouted out, “Cory Van Starsdale, you are an absolute genius!” Then someone behind me shouted back, “Cory Van Starsdale, you just won the Marketing Olympics!”

I never saw or heard this.

Domestically, Wyeth is not really interested in the cougar demo for some bizarre reason, so we are saving him stateside for about twenty years. But the campaign ran overseas and it was an astounding success. It was a win-win situation, sales of both the Centrum brand and Justified increased tenfold in Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Then in 2006, I broke the Marketing Olympics world records—all of them. I was just brainstorming really creatively while strutting down the street, and I just came up with Jimmy Kimmel Live: the Hot Wheels Quest for Zardoz. Like instantly, I just came up with it. I just had to shout out, “Cory Van Starsdale, you are an absolute genius!” Then some guy walking adjacent to me shouted, “Cory Van Starsdale, you just won the Marketing Olympics and broke all of the records ever!” I was flattered, flabbergasted even.

Now, how is it being the CEO of Massive?

That is rather assumptious to speak of my occupation instead of myself.

I don’t think assumptious is a real word.

It most certainly is. I never speak in improper language; I am formal to the utmost degree. And yes, I am the Chief Executive Officer of Massive Incorporated, which is subsidiary of Microsoft focused exclusively on game aurification. You can think of Massive as essentially being the gaming equivalent of script doctors.

But unlike script doctors, Massive’s work is exclusively after the release.

As I have just said, Massive Incorporated is the gaming equivalent of script doctors because we both improve on the quality of products—we are a game aurification firm. For example, we made Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 into an absolutely tremendous work when we added the sequence where you make extremely passionate, libidinous love to Norman Mailer on a blazing rooftop.

I must have missed that. What would such a sequence been an advertisement for?

The aurification was paid for and co-created by the Midas chain of automotive repair shops.

I am afraid I do not see the connection.

How could you not? It is extremely salient, Alex. Let me put this is the barest, most minimal of terms: Norman Mailer is wearing a Midas jacket, and the player gets rid of the fire by using a muffler.

How would that come across to the average player? I don’t see how anyone would see it.

All of the work that Massive does is taken from the lives of other people. My creative process is to actually transcend the Terraplane and look at life with eyes of your target demographic. I saw the perspective of a twenty-three-year-old St. Louis man stuck at the auto repair shop reading on Gawkthamist about these twenty pages of sex letters that Norman Mailer on his iPhone.

How do you know that the man plays games?

My guidance from the Terraplane is incapable of errancy. My vocational adventures are always, always, always informed and absolutely advantageous. In the end, I can say with confidence we outdid BioShock.

Speaking of BioShock, what did you think of that game?

Personally, I found BioShock to be extremely objectionable. I mean, these kids that played the game are going to have the idea that injecting needles into your arms will give one special powers ingrained because the protagonist Jack, who is a two-year-old that is physically in his twenties or thirties and whose mom was a prostitute. This problem would have been easily solved had the creators chose a more socially responsible route of having the player get powers from Vitamin Water or Gatorade or Powerade or Kool-Aid or Sobe.

Why and how would kids be playing BioShock when it carries a M-rating and probably would go over their heads?

Just like how the pornography industry denies that teens somehow manage to get a hold of their products, the game industry denies this. It as if they expect me to find an abundance of folks in the San Fernando Valley that say, “I don’t make porn, I make cinema that just happens to have gratuitous sex.” Unlike the United Kingdom, the area is not predominantly British. Or that children will just avoid Leaving Las Vegas: The Animated Series if it was sandwiched between Spider-Man and My Little Pony on the Saturday morning CBS lineup. Let us just ignore I just said that. Also, I read Atlas Shrugged and everything else from Ayn Rand when I was I the first grade. I read it hundreds and hundreds of times during my elementary school career.

Really, wouldn’t that be an anomaly?

Not at all, I actually started an Objectivists Club when I was in the third grade; we had around fifteen members. My best friend at that time, Rick, had a shrine devoted to Rand in his room right next to hundreds of posters and pictures and general paraphernalia of Kenny Loggins and Daryl Hall. But what might be an anomaly is the fact that I have actually been funneling Q3 bonuses to the Nader campaign. Their immediate tribulations will be offset by the forced entry of responsibility into all industry.

Isn’t that illegal? And those certainly are two diametrical ideologies, when did this epiphany that led the shift of belief?

Campaign finance laws do not extend to extraterrestrials. I don’t think they are opposing at all, and I think there is a complete opportunity for common ground. You could perhaps dub it an “ethical post-economy.”

Wouldn’t that entail an abandonment of a monetary system?

On my home planet, all financial transactions occurred psychically—it really is an ideal system. From my empirical experience, humans are unfortunately unable to communicate in such a manner. If I had the ability, I would love to elevate Earth communication to immaculacy. So, this common ground will still remain indebted to tangible money but, like, be amalgamation of self-interest in altruist—something you could perhaphs dub “post-interest.”

Speaking of aspirations, do you have any sort of “dream project”?

What does “aspirations” mean? I have never heard that word before. Is it, like, Klingon or Australian or something?

”Aspirations” is the plural of “aspiration,” which is essentially like a desire or an ambition that you want to achieve.

Oh, I know what that word means. Actually, I have not just one but two dream projects. First, I would like to bring together Soulja Boy and Ricky Gervais together for a FIFA 2010 advertisement to be filmed on Sealand, with the ulterior motive of mending relationships and reclaiming the territory for Britain—and I could write article that I could later sell the movie rights for. And second, I would like to make a game based on John Updike’s fantastic, fantastic novel The Witches of Eastwick with a soundtrack of Jake Holmes covers by Ani DiFranco. I know that it does not strike as remotely malleable, but I assure you that it definitely is. It was our favorite book, and I read it every week to remind myself of her. We even got matching John Updike tattoos.

I’m sorry to hear about your loss.

Oh, oh no no no no, no one died but she did break up with me. She gave this false excuse that she was unable to grasp my interdimensional wandering, and it left her feeling cold and distant, but I know that our intrinsic energies were meant to be fused together. It is a false excuse because of the aforementioned connection of our intrinsic energies and I actually taught her how to transverse without leaving anything out. So, she totally grasped everything. She dumped me for some tool in real estate, and they have assimilated into Jack Johnson’s barefoot entourage. I mean, this guy has completely indoctrinated her and she is completely utilizing the skills I taught her.

How long ago was this break-up?

Two years, five months, thirteen days, twenty-two hours, six minutes, and nineteen seconds ago.

You must have been going steady for quite a while for a relationship to impact you like this.

Yeah, four weeks.

You have at least tried to hop back on the dating scene, right?

Yeah, but I do not feel the transcendence of the dimensional realm as I did with Jess. I mean, when I am at bars, speed dating events, parties, what have you, it feels like I am actually there.

You realize what you are saying does not make the slightest bit of sense, right?

No, it makes perfect sense.

Thank you for giving up a few minutes of your time to talk.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. I just have to say something. Jess, baby darling, I just want you to come back. Those millions of times we spent together were galaxies beyond the subsisting energy plane of luminescence.

Who are you talking to?

The camera you are recording this interview with.

There is no camera. I am only recording this interview auditorially.

Oh, in that case, could you slice the reeks of desperation from this interview? Such a thing would be massively appreciated.

Sure. Again, thanks for your time.

As I was exiting the hotel, a Wesleyan undergrad (the rather posh attire and general intoxication were a giveaway) approached me and explained, “Our obsequious inclination to commercialize quandaries is to detriment of New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Minneapolis, Colorado, and elsewhere.” I have not the remotest clue what he actually meant with his words, but they sounded half-profound.

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

Posted by Alex Litel at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

With Utah-based independent studio NinjaBee (Band of Bugs, Cloning Clyde) having recently announced Boingz for WiiWare, Ryan Langley of our sister console downloadable game site GamerBytes caught up with the team to discuss the game and their two other upcoming titles, city-building title A Kingdom for Keflings and the adver-game Doritos: Dash Of Destruction.

Gamerbytes spoke with Boingz team lead and NinjaBee president Steve Taylor, lead designer Jeremy Throckmorton, and art director Brent Fox.

Topics of discussion include the genesis of the various games, their inspirations and influences, and the development disparities between WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade console distribution platforms, among other things.

A Kingdom for Keflings [for Xbox Live Arcade] is a very different game to what you've made previously. What is the objective for the game?

Steve Taylor: It’s definitely off the beaten path in comparison to our other games, and really to most games available today. That said, the objective isn’t too different from most city building games: to manage your resources in order to build a kingdom for your inhabitants, the Keflings. It’s just the way we get to that objective that’s a bit different than others.

What was your inspiration for the game?

ST: It stemmed from a game-in-a-day prototype I did years ago for a simple city management game that focused on what the inhabitants of the city were assigned to do.

We redesigned that basic concept a couple of times, and Jeremy suggested the avatar-based approach to controlling the game, as opposed to the “hand of God” approach that most management games take. From there, it sort of grew into what it is now, an avatar-based city building game with a big focus on working with the inhabitants directly.

Is there any sort of random element in the game, to change the experience for each player?

ST: Well, the game was designed to be fully customizable and therefore a different experience for each player.

For starters, the world is laid out slightly different each time a new game is started. From there, players have the choice of building things following the tech tree straight down or completing quests given by the Mayor which open up more blueprints on the tech tree and gives rewards such as upgrades.

Some crazy user content has been seen in LittleBigPlanet and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Have you and your testers made some pretty bizarre town designs?

ST: The weirdest thing I’ve seen is a soccer pitch built by one of our designers. He created goal posts out of banner towers or building walls and then proceeded to play soccer by kicking the Keflings around. That definitely made for an interesting multiplayer game!

How does the multiplayer work? Does a second player work within your instance of your town? Can a second player earn new parts while they're not in their own town?

ST: Up to four players work together in the same kingdom, and everything stays inside that world. If a player leaves a multiplayer game and starts his own single-player game, that's a separate world.

We designed multiplayer to be a cooperative experience, and it works really well in that way, but I have the feeling that some games will be a groups of friends competing to see who can collect resources the fastest and jokingly tearing down each other’s buildings.

Doritos: Dash of Destruction

It's been almost a year since Doritos Dash of Destruction was announced for Xbox Live Arcade through the Doritos Unlock Xbox Competition, where a competition winner got to have his game created for XBLA. Where is it currently?

ST: A lot of hard work and thought has been put into the game during the past year. For a sneak peek at how the game’s coming along, check out some of the documentaries Doritos has done at UnlockXbox.com.

What is the premise of the game? How do dinosaurs deal with Doritos?

ST: The premise is simple: dinosaurs are still alive and their favorite snack is Doritos chips. The Dinos are on a rampage to hunt down as many Doritos-carrying trucks as they possibly can, while all the Trucks want to do is to make their deliveries and avoid becoming dino-chow.

Have Doritos or the contest winner had much of an impact to the game since the initial prototype?

ST: Definitely. Mike (the contest winner) has been on many conference calls and e-mail threads and he even made a couple of trips to our studio to work out game design and other details.

Xbox Live Arcade has seen an adver-game with Yaris, and it wasn't well-received. How are you making sure that you're not falling into the same trap?

ST: For starters, I assure you that many people are asking this same question frequently, and we are not lacking for detailed feedback from many invested individuals. Honestly, our best tool in this area is letting people play the game frequently and incorporating feedback as much as possible.

When should we expect this game to release?

ST: Due to the risk of getting eaten by dinosaurs, I’m afraid I can’t say.

Boingz

What is Boingz? Where did this idea come from?

Jeremy Throckmorton: Boingz is a physics-based platform/puzzle game built around elastic characters the player can stretch, bend, and flick about.

The idea came after some thought about what would be a fun game to play on the Wii. Stretching and flicking things has always been fun; I imagine the first rubber bands created were used to flick at someone. The Wii Remote gives players a great interface for this sort of gameplay.

Boingz is based around a pretty simple story: The Boingz were captured in a strange storm and scattered about an alien world. Lucky for them, the storm left gateways to their home scattered around the alien world as well. So your job as the player is to solve the puzzles and help get the Boingz back to their home.

What are the gameplay mechanics?

JT: Throughout the game, players control individual Boingz, guiding them to work together for a common goal and rescue themselves from their current predicament. Through the Boingz characters, players can interact with the world by moving elements or holding them in place.

What makes the game unique?

JT: The control and feel of the Boingz is a unique experience in and of itself. One of the goals we had on this project was to make sure the characters were fun to play with separate from any of the goal-oriented gameplay.

We also designed the game so players can't really fail or get stuck. You won't ever have to restart a level because you screwed up.

After working on Xbox Live Arcade for many years, you've made the jump over to WiiWare. What made you decide to work on the Wii?

Brent Fox: We are always looking for a new challenge and making games for the Wii seemed like a very natural fit for our team. It’s been fun to design a game around the unique controller. Nintendo has found a way to reach many non-traditional gamers and by making a game for the Wii we are also getting our games in front of a new set of people.

Has it been a difficult transition? What has been the most difficult hurdle to overcome?

BF: We have some really smart guys on the team so the transition has been pretty smooth. Each console has its own challenges but our biggest challenge was getting everything in the game to behave the way we wanted it to and to develop the physics engine just right.

What has it been like to work with Microsoft with XBLA and Nintendo with WiiWare?

BF: Outpost Kaloki X was our first opportunity to create and publish our own game on a console and we have to thank Microsoft for involving us so early in the process. We had a good enough experience then that we have continued to make XBLA games. A Kingdom for Keflings will be our fourth XBLA title, and I’m sure it won’t be our last. We certainly haven’t run out of ideas

Nintendo has also been great to work with. We’ve actually been working with Nintendo on the Wii for quite some time, just trying to find the perfect game for the platform. Nintendo’s approach with its developers is very hands-off, which has allowed us to make the game we want, and we absolutely love this kind of creative freedom.

Your previous work on XBLA has all been self-published. For Boingz you've teamed up with RealNetworks. How has it been working with a publisher in the digital space, particularly one new to game consoles?

BF: We teamed up with RealNetworks on this game specifically because they seemed as though they would be a good partner and they were very interested in our concept. They have been committed to making a good game and have put a lot of support and effort into this game. The results for Boingz have been really positive. Other than naming the game, we had a lot of creative control and that was very appealing to us.

Everything Else

You're now working on Xbox Live Arcade and WiiWare. Any chance that you'll come over to the PlayStation Network as well?

BF: This is certainly a possibility. We’ve made PS2 games in the past and we always welcome the opportunities and challenges of a new platform.

GB: When should these three games be coming out?

BF: We haven’t announced any release dates for these games yet but you should look for announcements of specific dates very soon. I would watch for Boingz first and the others won’t be far behind.

Any hints as to what else you're working on at the moment?

BF: These three games have kept us really busy but we do have other games in the works. As we finish up our current games we will be able to devote more attention to these other games, most of which still need to spend a little more time in the oven.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 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 punishing platformer in the style of Matt Thorson's Jumper series, a mash-up remakes competition entry, a unique puzzler, an experimental game, and a neat production inspired by an early Commodore 64 release.

Game Pick: 'Meat Boy' (Edmund McMillen and Jonathan McEntee, freeware)
"A challenging platformer created by the developer of Gish, Aether and Coil. The story tells the tale of our nimble protagonist who embarks on a quest to save his love, Bandaid Girl, from the clutches of the evil Dr. Fetus."

Game Pick: 'Snakoban Dash' (Tom Beaumont, freeware)
"A puzzler designed by Tom Beaumont as an amalgamation of Boulder Dash, Snake and Sokoban. The objective of the game is to push blocks onto their designated areas, all the while trying to avoid getting trapped in an inescapable position."

Game Pick: 'I Wish I were the Moon' (Daniel Benmergui, browser)
"A short puzzle game designed by Daniel Benmergui, where five different endings can be achieved by taking pictures or manipulating objects on screen in a specific order. Dan has been referred by at least one commenter as the South American equivalent of Jonathan Blow, and it'd be interesting to see what this promising developer comes up with next."

Game Pick: 'Building Houses with Side Views' (Peter Boon, browser)
"A simple Java-based puzzler with a novel premise. Players build houses using basic square blocks as construction pieces, but the building only has to look correct from three different angles. The game is a lot easier to play than to explain actually."

Game Pick: 'This Game is Wizard' (James Dewar, freeware)
"A one-screen platformer created by James Dewar of Square Earth Games, where players assume control of a wizard who has to find a way to reach the exit in each of the thirty-eight levels included."

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

In an exclusive pair of excerpts we grabbed from David Edery and Ethan Mollick's book 'Changing The Game: How Gaming Is Transforming The Future Of Business', the duo examine how web-based games such as The ESP Game and Fold.it can be used to get humans to process important data sets -- for free!

The book, which has an official website with more information about it, discusses "...how leading-edge organizations are using video games to reach new customers more cost-effectively; to build brands; to recruit, develop, and retain great employees; to drive more effective experimentation and innovation; to supercharge productivity... in short, to make it fun to do business."

In addition, its introduction notes of the wider field of games used for non-entertainment purposes:

"Companies of all shapes and sizes have begun to use games to revolutionize the way they interact with customers and employees, becoming more competitive and more profitable as a result. Microsoft has used games to painlessly and cost-effectively quadruple voluntary employee participation in important tasks.

Medical schools have used game-like simulators to train surgeons, reducing their error rate in practice by a factor of six. A recruiting game developed by the U.S. Army, for just 0.25% of the Army’s total advertising budget, has had more impact on new recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.

And Google is using video games to turn its visitors into a giant, voluntary labor force -- encouraging them to manually label the millions of images found on the Web that Google’s computers cannot identify on their own."

The book's authors, which include Gamasutra/GameSetWatch contributor and Microsoft Xbox Live Arcade staffer Edery, particularly recommended these intriguing sections of their new title, dealing with the last of the three examples mentioned above:

The ESP Game

It turns out that there are many areas where human intelligence is still superior to computing power.

For example, computers are very bad at identifying images, which has become an increasingly important problem as millions of new photos and illustrations are uploaded to the World Wide Web each year.

Luis von Ahn, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, developed The ESP Game to help solve this problem.

In The ESP Game, two anonymous players are matched online without any means of communicating with one another. Both players are shown a random image (for example, a flowering plant under a clear sky) while a clock counts down two and a half minutes.

The players must then type words that describe the image, such as "plant," "flower," "pretty," or "sky." When both players have typed at least one word In common, like "sky," they both score points and a new picture is shown. At this moment, the players have helped teach the computer that this picture contains a "sky."

This goes on until the players have run out of time. In an interesting twist, sometimes pictures get recycled by the game after they have already been labeled once.

When this happens, the old label (i.e. "sky") is no longer accepted by the game, so players must come up with a second or third word to describe the picture. In this way, the game forces players to give each picture a more detailed description.

The ESP Game is undeniably addictive. Many people play for over 20 hours a week, and over 20 million labels have been harvested in just a few years; the equivalent of several million dollars of free labor.

Professor von Ahn estimates that just 5,000 people playing The ESP Game for a month - a tiny number, compared to the active populations of many gaming websites -could label every image on the Web.

In fact, Google found the ESP Game to be so useful that it licensed the game for its own use, as the "Google Image Labeler."

The ESP Game is just one of a variety of "games with a purpose" developed by Professor von Ahn. Peekaboom refines the data gathered by The ESP Game by encouraging players to identify the parts of a picture that are associated with a given label.

For example, two players of Peekaboom might be shown the picture of the flowering plant under a clear sky. The first player, seeing the label "sky", might correctly click the blue region above the flowing plant.

The second player must then guess the correct label, solely by seeing what region of the picture was selected by the first player. If the second player guesses "sky," both players score points.

The techniques pioneered by Professor von Ahn may soon be applied to many other real life problems. For example, the Transportation Security Administration has expressed interest in creating a game where "bags are screened at the airport and sent over secure networks to multiple players who help determine the contents of each image.

This could imply a major gain in security as an aid in the baggage screening process: instead of a single officer looking at each bag, multiple people could see each bag, having a higher chance of finding potentially dangerous objects.

Fold.it And Distributed Innovation

Distributed innovation games take a different approach to gathering information than human computation games.

Whereas human computation is powered by large groups of people playing a game as frequently as possible, innovation games are designed to identify and bring together those rare individuals who can creatively solve very difficult problems. In other words, human computation games are about manpower; innovation games are about brainpower.

Fold.it is an example of an innovation game - one that might soon help develop new treatments for disease by exploring the secrets of protein folding.

Proteins are the molecular structures that drive most of the important functions in living beings; their shape determines how they interact with other substances. A particular shape might make a protein effective at clotting blood, while a differently-configured protein might prove effective at neutralizing the HIV virus.

Unfortunately, determining the ideal shape of a protein can be very difficult. Even a small protein with less than 100 chemical components could have a huge number of configurations - about 3^100, to be precise.

There are algorithms that can be used to determine whether one protein shape is better than another, but taking advantage of them requires computers to test billions of possible shapes for each protein, which requires massive amounts of computing power. So Fold.it takes a different approach to the problem, capitalizing on people's spatial awareness and problem-solving skills to achieve what computers cannot.

Fold.it turns protein folding into a game, where the goal is to score the greatest number of points by identifying the optimal shape of a protein. Using a colorful graphic interface, players push and pull pieces of a protein into various shapes, trying to maximize their score by eliminating chemical incompatibilities.

A team-based component of Fold.it ensures that players will work together to solve particularly tough problems. And Fold.it's designers can create protein puzzles for any purpose, such as the best configuration to treat a particular cancer, and then have the players try to solve it.

One of the fascinating discoveries to come out of Fold.it is that the best solvers of a particular problem may not be the people you'd expect. In the words of Fold.it designer Seth Cooper, "Some of the top scoring players are biologists, but the people who are really doing well and consistently winning don't have any biological, or even academic, background at all."

Unlike a human computation game, distributed innovation depends on finding the best people to solve a particular problem, no matter who they might be. Indeed, most players of Fold.it give up quickly and move on, but those who stay tend to be quite talented, and many become addicted to the game. And the Fold.it team has every intention of leveraging the efforts of those talented players for the benefit of humankind.

They plan to create games that will help design biofuels and vaccines, and express the hope that someday, an innovation game player will win a Nobel Prize for the work they did while "playing around."

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

The weekend is here, and unfortunately, quite apart from more borderline adult DS games in Japan (the latest example pictured, I even did some slight pixelation to feel more comfortable about posting it), there's also a disturbing set of calls to action from indie developers in this set of links.

Specifically, both Kudos 2 creator Cliffski and Multiwinia developers Introversion seem to be having trouble getting word out about their indie titles, and are appealing to their audience to get more interest in their general direction. It's a shame, but hey, maybe if I mention it it'll help a bit, huh?

Tech no tronic:

Cliffski’s Blog » Getting the word out
'Getting heard about when you are a small PC developer is a nightmare. Many websites are console only, some cover just a few ‘Triple A’ pc games, and most of them have the attitude that it’s their job to cover the games their readers are currently interested in.'

Canned Dogs » Blog Archive » Soon you can spank naughty girls on the DS
'5pb. has announced KimokawaE!, a new game for the DS where you have to discipline girls from the underworld so as to help them adapt to life in the human world.' Sigh, Japan.

Idle Thumbs: A Weekly Video Game Podcast
The rather smart erudite-ish game site is now a game podcast, starring Gamasutra's own Christopher Remo and friends - this URL is Remo describing, linking to it.

PRNow: Rad Girls Licensing to be Exclusively Represented by Fog Studios
The sometime game development agents move into, uhh, semi-horrific reality TV stars.

PR: Dream Arcades Taps Into Fun with the Octane 120 Beer Arcade
'We designed the Octane 120 to feature everything that a gamer could possibly want in a home arcade racing cabinet, including a beer tap, PC and PlayStation 3 compatibility, and a whopping 120' projection screen,' says Michael Ware, owner of Dream Arcades.

When has a video game ever made you cry? - Citizen Gamer- msnbc.com
MSNBC still supporting indie games (in this case Indiecade) with lots of editorial - neat.

Llamasoft Blog » nice little job we just did
Jeff Minter on using his tech in Space Invaders on Xbox 360: 'This was a really nice project for us to do since it not only allows us to keep the wolf from the door somewhat between our own game releases, it also allowed us to use the latest generation of Neon tech, which is considerably more advanced than the old stuff used in the x360 visualizer and Space Giraffe.'

Defcon :: View topic - Save Multiwinia
Uhoh: 'Nobody is playing the demo of Multiwinia. There are a number of theories as to why this might be, but we think we already know the answer – very few people have heard about it, or have seen enough reason to try it.'

Ads in flash games - The Gameshelf
Interesting, sharp post on game advertising: 'Web ads are an attention tax levied on the people who don't care about them very much.'

:: Temple of the Roguelike - Roguelike News, Reviews, Interviews and Information :: » Blog Archive » Cyber burglar in the matrix
Oo, 'Decker' - cyberpunk roguelike alert!

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

['The Game Anthropologist' is Michael Walbridge's regular GameSetWatch column looking at gaming communities and subcultures. This week, he analyzes how Mega Man 9 doesn't only represent the distant past, but how far we've come, and what's changed about all gamers.]

Okay, so I've gotten to play Mega Man 9 a bit and I think the game is a great specimen, gaming's first meta-period-piece. Some people call Upton Sinclair's The Jungle a snapshot of culture and a piece of history, but not a very literary or entertaining read. It maintains its importance as a cultural artifact, a turning point, something that matters.

Mega Man 9 doesn't particularly innovate or call itself art or revolutionary, but it is a great piece of our period, something that will help old gamers understand new and new understand old.

The game may not have consciously meant to do that, but it had to be in the developers' minds. The thing I love most is that it manages to display the developers' opinions (or at least, the opinions they're allowed to express) of video games in an open state. What I mean is that, while the message Mega Man 9 sends is not readily apparent to those not critical of games, it's not exactly invisible.

Mega Man 9's differences aren't limited to its place in time and its salute to the past. It is also a carpet ushering in the era of the new. It's similar to the first 6 editions, but should not be properly regarded as part of the old series. It's paying respects to gaming's past, while admitting that we've moved on.

The first difference is the required integration into current game systems. This includes a traditional Mega Man menu with "Go Back To Live Arcade" written on it and a save feature that doesn't feature passwords, but simply a hard drive. These are simply requirements, though; the game itself doesn't necessarily have to be different based on this. But it doesn't end there.

The level and boss designs in Mega Man 9 are very different, and so are the ways you beat them. The levels are shorter and the difficulty concentrated. In the original Mega Man games, the difficulty was smooth and buttery. Here, it's chunky and not evenly spread. In a Mega Man level, there is only one objective: get to the end. It was always hard, but here it's a different kind of hard: single, isolated points of concentrated insanely stupid challenge.

There are basically two kinds of levels:

1. Easy, then a difficult miniboss (or series of bosses) battle in the middle, then a moderately difficult section to finish. (Magma, Concrete, Jewel, Hornet. Concrete has 3 elephants instead of a singular mini-boss.)

2. Easy, then an extremely difficult section filled with difficult-timed jumps and plenty of instant-killing pits or spikes. (Tornado, Splash, Plug. Galaxy Man is this pattern, too, though his level is much easier than the other three of this type).

The bosses are different, too. Previously, the bosses would follow set patterns. Here, the bosses follow patterns, but they change depending on your position. In Mega Man 3, Snake Man ran back and forth across the screen no matter your position.

These bosses will stay on one side if that's where you are. The bosses are thus more difficult because their A.I. is improved. They go from being wind-up clocks to responsive, auto-attacking land mines. Their attacks are based on your position.

But here's the catch: they still do the same amount of damage. They have to run into you about 8 or 10 times and then you're dead. And there is no power slide, no chargeable mega buster as introduced in Mega Man 3 and Mega Man 4; nothing to help compensate for the increased dodging difficulty. I wonder if dodging some of them is almost impossible. Hornet Man is extremely difficult but possible to avoid, but I just can't dodge Magma Man at all.

Yet, Magma Man is one of the five bosses I've defeated. And I didn't beat him by using a secret weapon, a gaming feature that can only linger in the past. I beat him by using screws I'd collected over my lives to purchase energy tanks. I kept refilling my life, and then I beat him. It takes a while to earn those tanks, but I got them.

Mega Man thus goes the way of the future: it turns out you really can just muscle your way through the game as if it were another Xbox 360 game with regenerating health and save points. The achievements, awards, and time attacks are there to give you bragging rights and assure you there's still a reward. If you want to see the content, the story, the world, that option is surely open to you.

Games can be difficult; that is allowed. However, to see every part of the game's content, including the ending, is guaranteed as long as you put in the time. That's now considered a right in the games of today, a right that was never demanded in the '80s or even the '90s.

Yes, it's difficult. Sure, you have lives, sure, the save points aren't as convenient as most modern games are, and sure there are extremely difficult bosses, jumps, and landings, but really, Mega Man 9 isn't a remake of the past; it's a tongue-in-cheek admission that we've moved on while maintaining respect for the path paved before. It's "what happens if we make the past meet the new?"

The story at the beginning has a key line from Dr. Light that prefaces Mega Man's design philosophy: "Be careful, Mega Man, you haven't done this in a while." Almost none of us have, and it may be that we will never do so again.

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Long-time GSW friend Joel Reed Parker from Game Of The Blog will pop in from time to time to comment for us, and this one is worth pointing out because it's about a charity game pack that has been woefully underpromoted.]

I recently picked up an Xbox 360, mainly due to the recent price drop, and also because it’s been out long enough that there are enough cheap games. X-Men: the Official Game used for $4.99? Jumper: Griffin’s Story for only 10 bucks new? I’m sold!

While searching around for other great buys, I remembered last year’s ESA Holiday Bundle, with 3 games for 30 bucks. As described by the Best Buy website, it “contains three amusing game titles: Cars, Fuzion Frenzy 2 and Open Season” and mentions that “each game provides fun challenges for players of varying skills and preferences .“

For some reason, I contacted Dan Hewitt at the ESA to see if there would be another one this year. Unfortunately, I got this response: “Joel, thanks for writing…because it is such a commitment from the ESA, publishers and participating retailers, we only sell the game pack every two years. Thus, it won't be on store shelves this holiday season.”

He also sent me a link to a press release that points out that last year’s bundle raised 2.6 million dollars for various ESA Foundation children’s charities.

Ingrained mentally to the prospect of a bundle-less holiday season, I was of course surprised to see a banner on Xbox Live promoting a “Family Game Pack”, a new Xbox 360 game bundle, this time benefiting Children’s Miracle Network (take that, ESA Foundation!).

Clicking on it, I found that you can download a free gamerpic, theme, and video for the retail bundle, but the description of the actual product was pretty vague:

"Every year, Children’s Miracle Network hospitals treat 17 million children for every disease and injury imaginable. Download this theme to show your support as 100% of Microsoft’s net proceeds from this Family Games pack will go to support local Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals."

I had to go the almighty internet to discover more. Even then, the first link only brought me to various online sellers. It turns out that the three bundled Xbox 360 games this time (all fairly kid-friendly, if not highly rated) are Sonic The Hedgehog, Shrek The Third (based on a movie so stupid and offensive to the soul that I demanded and got my money back at the theater), and Viva Pinata: Party Animals.

Again, the price is $29.99 (of course this means my local GameStop is selling it in-store for $34.99*) and it’s available for sale right now. [UPDATE: Dreamy McWhertor from Kotaku tells us that it's been adjusted to $29.99 both online and in stores, according to his multifarious sources.]

Eventually, enough searching brought me to the press release on the official Xbox page, but even then it wasn’t easy to find from the front page.

Basically the point of all this is cheap games, great charity, terrible promotion -- buy it now even if you don't know any kids that would enjoy this or you're not me. According to the aforementioned internet, two of the games have easy Achievements points, and the Sonic game has a train-wreck-in-slow-motion appeal so there’s truly something for everybody.

-Joel Reed Parker
GameOfTheBlog.com

[*I e-mailed Children's Miracle Foundation, Best Buy, and GameStop asking about this but got answers from no one. GameStop has done this before, they sold both Raw Danger and Fire Pro Wrestling for $19.99 when they were MSRP'ed at $14.99, but doing this with a charity item wouldn't be quite right.]

Posted by joelp at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yeehaw, time to get even vaguely up to date with GameSetLinkDump goodness, kicking off with the latest iteration of the Toronto-based Artsy Games Incubator -- which, as ever, is resulting in a bunch of games that I want to try out for size.

But yet, that's not all, with Japanese Sense Of Wonder Night write-ups, more LittleBigPlanet mod goodness, Flash shooter tutorials, the goodness of critics, and rather more things than the Earth hanging out in here.

Go go gadget linker:

Artsy Games Incubator » Blog Archive » Round 3, Session 4 Recap
Completely awesome project - get artists to make games - continues.

The Ambition of the Independent Video Game « (mashedmarket)
'Originally extolling the virtues of the short story, Steven Millhauser’s New York Times piece struck me as a manifesto for independent video game developers. I’ve reproduced Millhauser’s work below, substituting “independent video game” and “Triple-A game” for ”short story” and “novel,” respectively.'

YouTube - Little Big Planet - To Zanarkand Theme - リトルビッグプラネットβ　ザナルカンド
Japanese LBP players, with some kind of curious Victorian mechanical music player effect featuring the Final Fantasy X music. This is why LBP is awesome, folks.

Natural Selection 2 News: Videocast #5
Oo, really nice real-time lighting.

Daedalic Entertainment: Publisher Branches out into Film Production with New Documentary Gaming Industry | Press Release by MCV
Documentary about the making of a German eco-thriller game, and called 'An Inconvenient Game'? Uh, wacky.

【TGS2008】Inside-Games.jp covers Sense Of Wonder Night
Nice to see the Japanese media checking this out too - nice write-up, too, though you get me opining on the mic at the bottom.

Kongregate relaunches Kongregate Labs
Flash tutorials on making a shooter, sponsored by Scion, interestingly enough.

Blog - Infinite Ammo
Aquaria co-creator Alec Holowka has new Winnipeg studio, doing GAMMA 3D game, 'Paper Moon'.

【TGS2008】- pic of the Sense Of Wonder Night crowd
The guy closest to camera was hanging out with Keita Takahashi - doesn't he look a lot like the King from Katamari? Or is it just me?

If critics did more championing and less obsessing over details - The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety on Variety.com
Good discussion of Leigh's review of the new Silent Hill for Variety, resulting feedback, why being Debbie Downer isn't always right.

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

[Am delighted to reveal the full judge line-up for the IGF this year - as you can see, lots of smart indie and indie-friendly folks who will be helping to judge the competition - and there's not long left to enter, developers.]

The organizers of the Independent Games Festival have revealed its full list of judges for the 11th annual version of the competition, with a host of top indie/mainstream creators and media helping to decide this year's winners -- also reminding of the imminent November 1st deadline to enter the IGF Main Competition.

Games selected as finalists in the Main Competition (due November 1st) or Student Showcase competition (due November 15th) will available in playable form on the 2009 Game Developers Conference show floor. Entrants will compete for nearly $50,000 in prizes, including awards for Innovation, Excellence in Design, and the coveted $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the IGF Awards, held in March 2009 during GDC.

Over the past few years, the Independent Games Festival has helped guide the rise of the indie game scene by honoring and popularizing the best and brightest independent developers and their games. Former IGF honorees include Braid, Everyday Shooter, Audiosurf, Castle Crashers, Darwinia, and World of Goo, to name but a few.

The full judge list for this year's IGF competition is as follows:

- Jonathan Blow, Number-None (Braid creator and previous IGF honoree)
- Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games (author, columnist and social game developer)
- Raigan Burns, Metanet (IGF winner and N+ co-creator)
- Tom Buscaglia (IGDA board member, indie-friendly game attorney)
- Russell Carroll, Reflexive/GameTunnel (Wik maker's indie marketing expert, indie website EIC)
- Heather Chaplin (veteran game journalist, Smart Bomb co-author, PBS contributor)
- Jamie Cheng, Klei Entertainment (Eets creator, Indie Games Summit speaker)
- Mark Cooke, Grasshopper Manufacture (former Nihilistic staffer, long-time IGF judge)
- Brian Crecente, Kotaku (Gawker-owned game weblog's chief editor)
- N'Gai Croal, Newsweek (Level Up blogger)
- Mark DeLoura (former Game Developer magazine EIC, industry veteran)
- Phil Fish, Polytron (Fez and GAMMA co-creator, IGF award-winner)
- Kyle Gabler, 2D Boy (Experimental Gameplay Project contributor, World Of Goo co-designer)
- Kieron Gillen, RockPaperShotGun (PC Gamer contributor, Phonogram graphic novel author)
- Chaim Gingold (Spore editor design lead)
- Chris Grant, Joystiq (EIC of leading AOL-owned game blog)
- Kyle Gray, Electronic Arts - Tiburon (Henry Hatsworth team leader, Experimental Gameplay Project contributor)
- Alec Holowka, Infinite Ammo/Bit Blot (co-creator of IGF Seumas McNally Award-winning title Aquaria)
- Rod Humble, The Sims Label/EA (Head of The Sims franchise, The Marriage art-game creator)
- Soren Johnson, EA Maxis (Designer for Spore, lead designer on Civilization IV)
- Chris Kohler, Wired (Game|Life weblog editor)
- Dave Kosak, GameSpy (veteran IGF commentator, GameSpy journalist)
- Elan Lee, Fourth Wall Studios (ARG creator, 42 Entertainment co-founder, ilovebees designer)
- Tony Mott, Edge Magazine (UK game magazine EIC)
- Petri Purho, Kloonigames (IGF Grand Prize winner with Crayon Physics Deluxe)
- Chris Rausch, SuperVillain Studios (Order Up! creator, Fl0w PSP version developer)
- Brian Reynolds, Big Huge Games (Alpha Centauri, Rise Of Nations designer, former IGDA board chairman)
- Brian Robbins, Fuel Industries (Casual game creator/evangelist, long-time IGF judge)
- Sam Roberts, IndieCade (Slamdance Games curator, indie festival stalwart)
- Chris Remo, Gamasutra (Gamasutra Editor-At-Large, former Shacknews EIC)
- Margaret Robertson, Lookspring (Former Edge editor, BBC columnist)
- Jim Rossignol, RockPaperShotgun ('This Gaming Life' author, Wired contributor)
- Kellee Santiago, thatgamecompany (IGF Student Showcase winner with Cloud, Flow/Flower co-creator)
- Mare Sheppard, Metanet (IGF winner and N+ co-creator)
- Steve Swink, Flashbang Studios (Jetpack Brontosaurus developer, IGF/Indie Game Summit co-organizer)
- Stephen Totilo, MTV News (MTV Multiplayer weblog editor)
- Tim W., IndieGames.com (Independent game website veteran editor)
- Matthew Wegner, Flashbang Studios (IGF/Indie Game Summit co-organizer, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari developer)
- Mick West (former Game Developer magazine columnist, Neversoft co-founder)
- Don Wurster, Gastronaut Studios (Small Arms co-creator, Indie Games Summit speaker)
- Derek Yu, Bit Blot (Aquaria co-designer, TIGSource website editor)

Winners, as picked by the 2009 IGF judges, will be announced on stage at the prestigious Independent Games Festival Awards on Wednesday, March 25, 2009, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The Independent Games Festival Awards are held along the Game Developers Choice Awards, and both award shows are part of the 2009 Game Developers Conference, which also features a two-day Independent Games Summit, with lectures and panels from the best indie developers.

The event's sister IGF Mobile competition is also giving away $30,000 to the top cellphone, iPhone, and other portable device games this year.

More information on this year's Independent Games Festival is available at its official website.

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

[How did Square Enix and Jupiter construct critically acclaimed DS title The World Ends With You? Here's some excerpts from the postmortem featured our awesome sister mag Game Developer, revealing how the team experimented with music game elements and command-based battles before settling on the game's unique stylings.]

The latest issue of sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a creator-written postmortem on the making of Square Enix and Jupiter's The World Ends With You, the unusual 2D Nintendo DS RPG set in modern-day Japan.

These extracts reveal how the two studios behind the project faced the obstacles of early, perhaps overambitious, design goals, but succeeded in creating a new intellectual property -- a fairly uncommon occurrence at Square Enix.

Artist Takeshi Arakawa, graphic designer Tomohiro Hasegawa, and animator Tatsuya Kando -- leads on the project -- crafted the postmortem, which was introduced in Game Developer as follows:

"The World Ends With You was a departure for Square Enix -- a new IP, done in 2D, and set in real-world locations. The game took three creative leads who had never directed a game before, and threw them to the wolves. They learned, as do we all, that it's not as easy as it seems."

Dual-Screen Battles, Or "What's Going On Here?"

From early in development, the game was to have simultaneous battles on two screens, one of the game's most unusual features -- but the practical design implementation of that request was more difficult than expected. Here the team explains:

"The original concept of dual-screen battles came from creative producer Tetsuya Nomura, but it was easier said than done. Fighting battles on the lower screen using the touch panel was our original concept, and turned out as well as we expected. But our biggest headache stemmed from the battles in the upper screen.

"This sped things up and we arrived at the battle system we have today, where the player can simply let the battle progress in the upper screen by itself, or actively fight using the control pad. I regret that we hadn't come up with this solution earlier."

The Management And Development Culture Clash

With two development houses in two different cities, the team suffered a lot of headaches resulting from coordination issues. As the trio of leads writes:

"The game was developed by Square Enix in Tokyo and Jupiter in Kyoto. While we originally commissioned Jupiter as the developer, we wound up with more creative crossover than we thought. The Square-side directors got involved in the gameplay design elements, while Jupiter went beyond the call of duty and assisted with the game planning.

"Geographically, we were very distant as well-it takes about two hours to get between Tokyo and Kyoto via bullet train. It was critical that we met in person, but this ended up costing us time, and it hurt the schedule at every step. We had weekly telephone conferences, but it was hard for us to 'read' each other over the line. Sadly, we were unable to do video conferencing, which I believe would have resulted in a more open, jam-session sort of feel."

Getting To Go Wild With Original IP And Gameplay Concepts

A liberating aspect of development that is unusual in the franchise-heavy Square Enix was the mandate to create a new game in a new setting. The team explains:

"The project began with constant brainstorming and idea-sharing between the three of us. As this was our first game as directors, a healthy dose of paranoia prompted daily brainstorming meetings. These sessions established a strong sense of camaraderie and led for better overall communication, allowing us to constantly meet our deadlines without any serious delays.

"It turns out we were successful -- even a year after the game's Japanese release, hardcore fans are still organizing tours of the real Shibuya to compare it to the game world."

Additional Info

The full postmortem, including a great deal more insight into The World Ends With You's development, with "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" reasoning, is now available in the October 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes Game Developer's annual list of Top 20 Publishers and a fascinating biometrics-sourced analysis of player emotions -- plus tool reviews, special career sections, Matthew Wasteland's humor column, and development columns from Power of Two's Noel Llopis, Bungie's Steve Theodore, Lucasarts' Jesse Harlin, and BioWare's Damion Schubert.

Yearly print and digital subscriptions to Game Developer are now available, and all digital subscriptions now include web-browsable and downloadable PDF versions of the magazine back to May 2004, as well as the digital version of the Game Career Guide special issue.

In addition, the October issue of Game Developer is available in paid single-issue digital form (viewable in a web browser, and with an associated downloadable PDF).

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

Rarely do we at GSW randomly post gloriously silly videos, but at 'kings of the UK game scene' RockPaperShotgun, they've pointed out that the folks at Scottish video maniacs Consolevania have posted a video of 'Kevin Leddins, Nu-Skool Journalist' on YouTube - and I suspect you should probably watch it.

Not previously available (easily) online, the video is actually the first of two profiling the legendary -- and fictional -- avant game journo, who is in no way inspired by RPS' Kieron Gillen. (The second one, which has been available for some time, is the bottom vid on RPS' post on the subject).

Anyhow, if you need to know about nightmares involving Julian Rignall and giant percentage signs, as well as "that androgynous issue in Crash Bandicoot", you'd better tune in:

If you enjoyed that -- and I think it's almost, nearly profound at the same, which makes me N.Barley -- the other vid, which is more about 'indie games' (and Shroud Of Turin-type objects) might be up your alley. Oh, also there's Consolevania Series 4, just debuted. Plz watch now.

[In watching the second vid, indie pretension to the fore, I was also reminded of Mega64's 'I Am Independent' pastiche, which was one of three videos we commissioned them to do for the IGF Awards this year at GDC. Also, please watch the 'Intro' vid again with volume turned up too high and live vicariously.]

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

[Every week, Gamasutra sister weblog GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley will be summing up the top console digital download news tidbits from the past 7 days, including brand new game announcements and scoops through the world of Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and WiiWare.]

Last week the Tokyo Game Show was in full swing, and Microsoft announced a ton of great titles that everyone should be looking forward to.

This week we've got a great selection of downloadable titles too - Age of Booty is coming for PSN and Xbox Live Arcade, PSN gets SOCOM Confrontation too, and WiiWare just got World of Goo - supposedly one of the best WiiWare titles to date.

Xbox 360

Age Of Booty and Crazy Mouse Now On Xbox Live Arcade
Age Of Booty is getting its release this week on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network - a hexagonal real-time strategy game featuring pirates and rum. The most fascinating thing about this game is that the demos for both platforms will feature free online play for the first two days!

TGS 2008 - Microsoft Keynote Notes - Space Invaders Extreme, Arkanoid and More Announced
A number of fantastic titles were announced for Xbox Live Arcade at the Tokyo Game Show - Space Invaders Extreme, Arkanoid Live, R-Type Dimensions, Metal Slug 7 and King of Fighters '98 were all revealed officially.

Microsoft No Longer Delisting Titles, NXE allows you to remove "0" Point Titles
With the upcoming release of the New Xbox 'Experience', it appears Microsoft have changed their mind about removing low selling Xbox Live Arcade titles... for now.

PlayStation Network

NA PSN Store Update - Puzzle Quest, Linger In Shadows and Battle Cars Now Available
There's a big PSN update this week. You can now play Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (with the XBLA expansion free), Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars, and Linger in Shadows.

There's also brand new expanded content for Mega Man 9, and new packages for those who haven't picked up Super Stardust HD. Don't forget - this week you can also download SOCOM Confrontation!

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 Coming To XBLA and PSN?
New leaked ESRB ratings and Partnernet screenshots appear to show that Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 might be making its way to the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.

Prince Of Persia Classic Confirmed For PSN
It's been in the air for some time, but now it appears that Ubisoft's Prince of Persia Classic remake on XBLA will be making its way to the PSN sometime soon.

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update - World Of Goo, Art Style: Cubello
World Of Goo, supposedly the best WiiWare title to date, is now available for download in North America. Also available is Cubello, the latest in the Artstyle line of games.

EU WiiWare Update - Midnight Bowling, Potpourrii
Europe played catch up last week with the addition of some older WiiWare titles making their way over.

High Voltage Software Announce High Voltage Hot Rod Show
High Voltage Software announces a brand new racing game for WiiWare. It's Micro Machines meets Super Off Road meets Unirally, with 4 player split screen multiplayer.

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

[Andrew Doull is an IT manager from New Zealand, now based in Sydney, who spends his free time developing Unangband, a rogue-like game, and blogging at Ascii Dreams. He writes an irregular column for GameSetWatch, and the latest instalment deals with progression in games.]

MTV News' Stephen Totilo recently argued that the defining characteristic of role-playing games is playing a role; and by that definition, included LittleBigPlanet, Guitar Hero and Spore as great role-playing games he had played recently.

I am forced to disagree with Stephen's definition: while semantically correct, he is disingenuously expanding the computer genre to encompass most, if not all games. With the exception of the Eye Toy and 'Brain Training' style self-improvement games, the player is forced to interact with the game through the proxy of an in-game avatar or character. What defines a computer RPG is progression - and at the same time, there is nothing more greatly abused in RPG design.

The grind, the treadmill, leveling up, mudflation, scaling difficulty of opponents, are all tropes of RPG progression. As you can tell from the negative connotations of many of those phrases, few concepts have had more loathing heaped upon them, particularly in the MMORPG space. Progression, in the worst sense, can be the crutch of a lazy designer. Progress Quest typifies the ever escalating scale of identikit enemies and equipment, in which no distinction is attached to the ever increasing numbers.

But the RPG progression is powerfully compulsive and increasingly adopted by other games: achievements feature increasingly in other genres such as first person shooters, unlocking additional weapons, equipment and game types.

What Is Progression In Games?

What do I mean by progression? There are at least two distinct types of progression in computer games, which I’ll label player progression, and character progression (narrative progression is arguably a third). Player progression is the increasing aptitude of the player in mastering the game: whether through learning and understanding the technical rules of the game (surface play) or the implications of those rules (deep play).

Such progression can also be seen via better control over interaction with the game (hand-eye coordination, clicks per second) or rote memorization of in-game patterns (short term and long term memory). Player progression, while a fascinating topic in its own right involving human computer interaction, theory of game design and psychology, is not the focus of this article – instead, the poorer and often abused step-child character progression, is the intended target.

Character progression is the unlocking of additional rules of play, or altering the existing rules, by choices or actions within the game. The most common unlock is the ability: an additional in-game interaction that the player’s avatar can choose to do. But scaling upwards existing abilities is just as common in the RPG space. And sometimes, particular once the whole set of game abilities has been unlocked, or at the conclusion of the game prologue, abilities can be removed – usually through the convention of capturing the character, or having them narrowly avoiding death.

Bound up with the concept of progression, particularly in the RPG space, is choice. As the character progresses through the game, the player may be given the opportunity to choose which of several abilities to unlock or scale up. A fascinating alternative suggested on the rec.games.roguelike.development Usenet group would be to create a game featuring inverted progression: where the player is forced to choose which of a starting complement of abilities to lose as they move forward in the game.

The difficulty with choice is that it makes the game design harder, as the designer is forced to provide alternate solutions or balance game-play for each choice or combination of choices that the player has made for their character’s progression. This can be mitigated by ensuring that the different choices have limited or no real consequences to game-play, simply coloring the in-game aesthetic, but this trade off can make the choices less interesting to the player.

Spore has received much criticism for this decision: while the many in-game design tools allow a fascinating array of different creatures and objects to be created, the vast majority of creative differences have no impact on game-play. Only the mouth part, which dictates whether the creature is a herbivore, carnivore or omnivore, and a limited set of abilities in the creature phase provide real customization options.

Progression With Character!

Character progression can be neatly tied into player progression through the tutorial phase of the game. In this phase, the player is only given a limited subset of the total game abilities, and has to demonstrate mastery of these abilities before unlocking more. The tutorial phase extends until the full set of abilities is mastered: at which point the ‘real’ game begins.

The difficulty with the tutorial phase is that is implies a linear progression of abilities which does not sit easily alongside the choice component of game progression. The tutorial is usually gated, in the sense that the player cannot progress until mastering the ability, which may be outside their game play aptitude – leading to frustration at the tutorial element. And the pacing of the game may be affected, particularly if the tutorials have to be interleaved with the larger game play.

The Zelda series of games are good examples of mixing tutorials and game play elements: it is possible to explore the overworld at almost any stage, but mastering of abilities gained at specific times is required to unlock dungeons which further test these abilities. The whole game design supports this character progression – it may not be appropriate for genres such as real time strategy games or first person shooters, where mixing intense action and tutorials may result in game play pacing problems.

If the elements of the tutorial are interesting enough to be expanded to a full game, it is possible to control character progression through introducing new abilities in later game levels or higher difficulty levels. This divides the game play up into sub-games, each of which is of increasing complexity; allowing the player to master simpler strategies before moving onto the later levels.

Darwinia features this progression technique through each of its levels; and many Real Time Strategy games take this approach in their single player campaigns. The difficulty is to ensure that abilities introduced early are still relevant later in the game, and that the game is still interesting even with the more limited ability sets: otherwise levels will end up with a mismatched difficulty or under utilization of skills learned earlier in the game.

Abilities can be also unlocked once a player has mastered a particular section of the game, to make re-traversing the section less of a challenge. The early 2D Metal Gear games featured this, where an initially unarmed Snake would be forced to evade guards using stealth, but after equipping himself with weapons later in the game, he could shoot his way through the same screens far more quickly.

Item-Actuated Progression?

This is not just limited to geographic traversal: if a player in Resident Evil 4 has difficulty with a particular boss monster, they can purchase a one shot rocket launcher at considerable cost to bypass the monster in question, and in Spore the initial difficulty of fighting enemies in the Space phase is much easier once the player has acquired higher level weapons, made available by defending sufficient attacks at the more difficult early stage of the phase.

The acquirement of abilities can either be directly linked to actions within the game, which results in a puzzle-like structure to game play, where certain prerequisites have to be met in order to open up or make easier later parts of the game, or indirectly, by providing a resource that the player can then spend on abilities directly or indirectly. Classes, talent trees and skills are all mechanisms for controlling character progression in various ways and guiding player choices as to which abilities to acquire or improve.

The class structure is the most limiting framework, where the player makes a single decision, usually at the start of the game, that fundamentally colors the game experience. Talent trees and skills allow smaller, incremental choices to be made - the difference between the two being a matter of degree rather than kind, where talent trees implies a few, spaced out decisions as to which abilities to acquire, and skills implies a more frequent investment of time into the decision making process, with abilities improving on a scalar basis with the occasional break point which introduces a new ability or opens up a new skill.

Divorcing the ability acquirement structure from the game simplifies the design requirements: you are no longer forced to ensure that the parts of the game where an ability is required fall after the parts of the game where that ability is acquired. However, the mechanic for acquiring new abilities becomes more important, and here it is very easy to end up in a position where the mechanism (experience points, money, power ups) is available without bounds in a region, even if a fraction of what is available later in the game.

It then becomes possible for the player to continue to acquire new abilities in a low risk environment by trading off time instead of playing skill: in other words, to grind or farm the game. This implies that you should put a ceiling on the acquisition resource, and regularly change it as the player moves through the game and masters sets of abilities ('Your dubloons are worthless here, you need McGuffins to buy things this side of town').

Spore's achievement system implicitly does this by making the rewards for defending planets different to the rewards for terraforming them: and each reward set makes the particular task that contributed towards it much easier in future. It is easy to visualize a game of tiered abilities where each new tier requires a new resource and only a limited number of the possible abilities can be learned per tier.

Why Do We Hand Out Awards?

But none of this answers why, as designers, we feel the need to reward the player with new abilities moving forward in the game: particularly when those abilities make parts of the game easier or irrelevant. Is the progression of player skill and narrative not sufficient to inspire the player to keep playing the game? Does the game lack depth or complexity that we should trivialize it by making the game easier and easier, as opposed to harder and harder, the more the player plays it?

Or are the rewards we give purely cosmetic, the enemies scaling up as fast as the player does, so that the same sword swing at level 50, despite the gleaming blade, and cacophonous impact, change the world in only the same way that the timid stab of a level 1 character against a giant rat does?

To an extent, we are making the game more complicated, by providing more choices through progression. But when the range of choices are mastered by improved player understanding, is game progression a dressed up Skinner box? I think, and unfortunately many games shy from this, that progression must mean that the stakes are higher as well. You must risk more when you fail, which is why permadeath in roguelikes is such a powerful solution to the progression dilemma.

Of the classic games, Chess and Go don't feature progression in the sense that RPGs do: the one to come closest is Poker, where your stake is built up as you play the game, and those at the table around you withdraw. In the final hands, if you manage to stay at the table, the money you have staked is the highest, the rewards the greatest and the failures the most painful. Mat Williams compares Tilted Mill's new PC title Hinterland to Poker, and although he doesn't say directly, he must have been conscious of this acquisition strategy and how risking all is the direct counter to progression's woes.

[NOTE: Although Andrew's piece reads as a standalone article, it is part of his larger series on 'Designing a Magic System', which you may wish to read after finishing this.]

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

[Our own Chris Remo caught up with the 2D Boy boys at a recent Nintendo press event, and we figured we'd release the interview to (more or less) coincide with the debut of their excellent IGF prize-winning title, which is not to be missed, in our addled opinions, hurray.]

This week, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel -- the two employees of developer 2D Boy -- released World of Goo, the already highly-praised puzzle game shipping out via WiiWare and various PC distribution platforms including Steam.

World of Goo originated in Gabler's college project-impelled Experimental Gameplay Project as Tower of Goo, and ended up winning multiple awards at this year's Independent Games Festival en route to its commercial release.

We caught up with Gabler and Carmel to chat about the game's development process, 2D Boy's relationship with Nintendo, and how the studio's employee structure is based on brain halves.

So do you guys have titles at a two-man company?

Kyle Gabler: Right brain. Big design, art, music, story, basically dumping emotions out.

Ron Carmel: I'm the left brain, and that's programming and production.

KG: Together we make a whole person.

Do you guys have that on your business cards? Left brain, right brain?

RC: Business falls under left brain.

So you're the only one with business cards, then?

RC: I have two, maybe three, left. I slacked on that. There were more important things.

KG: We don't need business cards.

Lean Development

Are you guys officially the entirety of 2D Boy?

KG: Yeah, we're just two people for the bulk of this project. We don't have an office, but we're not allowed to say that, so we just work out of coffee shops and stuff.

Late in the project, we brought in Allan Blomquist, who's this genius programmer who made everything run faster -- he's really good at low-level stuff, like making sure the correct bits get stuck in registers.

Did you guys contract anyone else out for artwork or anything?

KG: The vast majority of work is us. We had a part-time Q/A guy on board for the last few months. Allan, we've already mentioned. We don't speak Spanish, French, Italian, or German, so we had to get a translation company to do that for us.

How long was the develpment cycle? You had the IGF and all that, but how long have you actually been making the game?

KG: A year and a half? That's true, right? Approaching two years?

RC: We've been so busy we forgot to count time, so it's actually a little bit over two years now. We started in August.

KG: No! It's been four months. [laughter]

RC: No, five years. [laughter] It's just magic. It just happened one day.

How did the development process on this work? Do you guys have design documents, or is it just, "This seems like where it needs to go now"?

KG: Design documents are for suckers. It was just really, "Eh, what's fun? Let's do that."

RC: Seriously. When we came up with a concept, we're like, "All right. What are we going to start developing?" And Tower of Goo, which was the original Experimental Gameplay Project game, seemed like people were kind of relating to it in some way. So we were like, "All right. Let's try to base something off of that, " and, "How are we going to turn that into the game? Oh, let's see if we can reach some sort of exit for them to run out of."

From that point on, everything happened as like an evolutionary design. We were still adding new ideas on how to play the game and changing features up until like a month ago.

So there was never a design document. And if there was, now that the game is done is the only time that we could have written it. Things changed; we tried things; we crossed them out.

I understand you guys did all the music yourselves?

RC: It's all Kyle.

KG: Yeah, right at my computer. It's all synthesized instruments. Music is very important to me. A long time ago, I joked it's so hard to get music in games or movies. Like the only way I'm ever going to be able to write music is if I start a company, make a game, and be like, "Oh, I know a composer. It's me!" [laughs] So, that kind of happened.

Do you have any musical background?

KG: Yeah. I've written music since high school. It's just on my computer. I don't have any emotions in real life, so they have to come out in music and video games.

Dealing With Nintendo

How's it been working with Nintendo, as a developer?

RC: For us, it's been fantastic. We've got nothing but great things to say about them. For some people, that's not the typical story.

In the past, not all devs have felt that way, yeah.

RC: They've helped us out with doing a lot of PR. Obviously, being at the [Nintendo] Media Summit is great. One guy there has been fantastic. He's helped us get through the process of getting approved as a Nintendo developer and helping us rush things at the last second for the release. It's been amazing.

Is there any kind of back and forth with Nintendo? Do they have a producer on the project, or did they just trust you to make the game?

RC: They were totally hands off. They saw the demo, the first chapter demo, and they were like, "Yeah. We love it." And basically, they didn't contact us unless we asked them for something.

KG: I think one of our happiest moments was when Iwata and Miyamoto played chapter one, liked it, and said, "Hey, let's make this get on Nintendo." Childhood heroes playing your game -- it was a head-spinning moment for both of us.

I don't traditionally imagine Nintendo and Miyamoto playing, say, Western-developed indie games. It's interesting seeing them doing more of that these days.

RC: I think the only reason they did that was because the little goo balls look like those creatures from "Spirited Away," the Miyazaki film. [laughter]

They were suckered into it.

RC: And they confused us for something truly great.

KG: It looks like a Japanese game. It's colorful. It's playful.

The Goo Trend

There's also the other goo-based game, just called Goo!, that was in the same IGF.

RC: Yes. It's made by Tommy Refenes. He's fantastic. We just hung out with him this past weekend.

KG: He's really hilarious, too.

I've dealt with him online. He's written a number of crazy articles on multi-threading for us.

RC: Yeah, that'd be Tommy.

RC: Goo! is a really impressive game. It's technically marvelous.

The Electronic Arts Days

What were you doing at EA, pre-2D Boy?

KG: I was doing rapid prototyping. Basically, quickly making demo versions in like a week or two to test some new gameplay mechanics so we could find out if a game would be fun, so we don't make a game in two years and find out at the end that the game is not fun.

RC: Kyle basically had the job that every game design student dreams of. To be at a big company, get paid a salary, and come up with cool stuff.

But clearly it was not what you wanted to be doing long-term.

KG: We both just wanted to make our own game. So there's no way to do that, unless you're Kyle Gray, who made [Nintendo DS game Henry] Hatsworth [in the Puzzling Adventure] over there. So we left, and made our own.

Are you familiar with what the former Retro guys at Armature are doing with EA? They're going to be doing a lot of game prototypes and designs, then contracting development out.

RC: Yeah, I read about Armature. When I read about it, I was like, "Oh, they're taking the Experimental Gameplay Project ethos and trying to make a company out of it." I think it's a great idea.

The difficulty that I think they're going to be facing is they're going to need to have a really tight connection between their core group in house and the places they outsource the work to. They need to make sure their creative vision gets transferred properly to the people who actually produce the game.

The thing that made it great for us is it's two people. Every email is just back and forth and so we know that we have engineering and art and vision, everything. It's easy to keep everybody abreast of what's going on. I think it will be a challenge for them. I hope it works for them.

Was it strange to go from being at a company like EA to a point where every department was you guys, or was it totally natural?

KG: It was a relief! I mean, oh my God, if I want something done, I just do it. I think it helps having a small team too, because everything is really cohesive. There is a single vision as opposed to design meetings where we try to decide the color of the UI panel that pops up when you press the X button.

RC: When I worked at Pogo, I worked on small teams as well. There was a designer, artist, and programmer. So going from three to two isn't that big a deal.

The Money Issue

Did it require a lot of financial investment, or did you just start out and say, "Time to make a game, let's make a game"?

RC: The two Kyles, Kyle Gabler and Kyle Gray, gave a presentation about this.

KG: Here's my financial situation. I have $60,000 of student loans. When I left EA, I had $30,000 in the bank, so a net worth of negative $30,000. So, I guess if we can start a company with negative $30,000, then I think everyone should know that it's possible to start a company. You don't have to have money. All you have to do is be stupidly optimistic.

Do you expect to end up in the black?

RC: Our total expenditures for this game, other than like a few thousand dollars here and there in the last month of development and localization and QA and stuff like that, has been our living expenses. So, we've kind of been, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally, eating Top Ramen. And cheap rent and we don't have cars, so the development costs --

KG: I rarely buy new litter for my kitty litter box. [laughter]

RC: So, what it costs to make this game is the couple thousand a month that we each need to live for two years and that's about it.

Did you get any kind of advances, or is everything royalty-based?

RC: We tried to get as much in the back end as possible -- WiiWare's all back end. At some point earlier this year, we signed an agreement for a European publishing deal, and we started getting payments for an advance on that. But at that point, it was already clear that we were going to be OK in terms of going on WiiWare, so everything's going to be fine.

And that's retail in Europe?

RC: Yeah. That's the current plan, that retail is going to take it through. Had you heard about it in a negative way or a positive way?

I just heard someone mention at one point it'll be in a box when it comes out in Europe.

RC: We've caught some flak for that. Gamers were kind of annoyed. Apparently, we had no idea about this, but European gamers often feel like they're getting screwed, because games arrive late and cost more.

When you guys were approaching Nintendo or when they approached you, were you looking at Live Arcade or PlayStation Network or anything? Or did this just kind of happen?

KG: This kind of game would never work on PSN or PlayStation at all. Not at all. We need the pointers. That's why it's on PC.

It's nice that you got the PC release simultaneous.

RC: Yes, same day. A little terrifying. [laughter]

Any idea what is coming next now that you're basically done with this?

KG: No.

RC: My answer is that I want to get bored, because I haven't been bored in a year. I've just been working too much, so I want to just do nothing until I'm bored.

KG: We hope people like it. My biggest fear right now is that we have no marketing budget. I just want people to know and play it. That would make me so happy.

RC: Tell your friends about it. It's the only thing we can bank on. [laughter]

KG: Post it on the message boards.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The second and final catchup session before we return to your regularly scheduled GameSetLinks programming, starting out with some machinima goodness, hurray.

Also hanging out in here in this marvelously random conglomeration -- Douglas Rushkoff's 'Cyberia', Secret Exit's awesome iPhone games, Wipeout HD's insano resolution-scaling tricks, and the Suda51-ish Optron, woo.

Go go go:

Machinima Filmfest 2008 | Announcing the Machinima Filmfest 2008 Nominees!
V.cool, game cinemas still going strong, admittedly as a niche.

ktoormmp.gif (GIF Image, 250x156 pixels)
OMG genius GAF-ish Groundhog Day Vs. BioWare MMO randomness.

Ten Ton Hamster | Your Games. Your Friends. Your Worlds.
Yes, Ten Ton Hammer really has a kids' online worlds offshoot called Ten Ton Hamster. I boggled, too.

Gamasutra - Phil Harrison To Keynote Unite 2008
So Atari is buying Unity then? Rumor start!

The Independent Gaming Source: 'Demake Compo: Results!'
Yep, complete awesome.

Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, by Douglas Rushkoff
Rushkoff's seminal piece of techno-silliness - still exceptionally readable - is now available for free online, has some game-related resonances (Chapter 15 on paper gamers, for example), and is generally worth presuing.

SPiN from Secret Exit Coming Soon | FingerGaming
Man, all the Secret Exit games are looking great on iPhone!

Inside the Digital Foundry: WipEout HD's 1080p Sleight of Hand
'Basically WipEout HD is the first game I've come across that seems to be operating with a dynamic framebuffer. Resolution can alter on a frame-by-frame basis. Rather than introduce dropped frames, slow down or other unsavoury effects, the number of pixels being rendered drops and the PS3's horizontal hardware scaler is invoked to make up the difference.'

Game Center CX’s Shinya Arino playing Mega Man 9. ... - Tiny Cartridge
Haha, totally cool - retro now future.

Optron: Brilliant instrument of noise ::: Pink Tentacle
Visually, looks somewhat hilariously like No More Heroes, heh.

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

['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a message from the future.]

One of the grandchildren is browsing my achievement points. It's a record filled with tens of thousands of entries, an indelible, almost embarrassing testimony to a life spent in games.

She looks round. “Grandpa, what’s your favourite videogame of all time?”

It’s always been an awkward question but these days it’s near impossible to answer truthfully. She might as well have asked about my favourite meal. Who can possibly remember every plate of food they ever sat down to? You know that you ate most days and you know that you must have been nourished to some extent or other, but the details of what was on the menu, how it felt in the mouth, what it smelled and looked like are all lost to time.

After a while games lose their definition in memory too. You know that you played most days and that you must have been nourished to some extent or other, but the details... A few stand out, for sure, but most slip forgotten.

It's been six weeks since I was told that I'm dying.

The problem with death, for the lifelong gamer, is its supreme familiarity. There aren’t hairs on my head to measure the virtual lives I’ve lost over a lifetime of play. So when you’re told you’ve three months at best, it’s easy to be flippant.

In my time I’ve fallen foul of countless mis-timed jumps, stray bullets, car crashes and drug deals gone wrong; I’ve flown fighter jets into solid ground at 300 miles per hour, fallen under the heavy tread of a London bus and watched incredulous as my space ship dissolved in the mute explosion of a sun. The blocks reached the top of the screen time after time.

Playing a videogame is to enter into a state of inescapable impending doom: they are the moments between leaping from the clifftop and hitting the rocks below. Games only become games when you’ve a Game Over screen to avoid. Lives, profoundly perhaps, only gain value when they can be lost.

In a way then, videogames are the ultimate preparation for life’s ultimate event: through them you’ve died a million times.

Yes. Death should be easy: it’s virtually all I’ve ever known.

Except no, of course. There’s no such thing as one life left in videogames. If you’ve got another quarter, you’ve got another chance. There’s always another go, another opportunity to perfect your technique and claw closer to the final prize. There’s always another chance.

Not so for this world, for this body, for these cells. Not so for this man.

I think I’m one of the first generation to have lived their whole life with videogames. From cradle to deathbed, my life breaks down into legion roles, ghost lives led in pixel dimensions. You could write ten thousand obituaries of my life and every one of them would be as true as it is distinct.

A crack sniper who served his country with skill and determination through the Second World War; six times winner of the Le Mans 24 hour; he scored the winning goal in no less than twenty World Cup finals. This giant yellow vegan was relentlessly chased through life by his ghosts. Simon was the finest plumber in all the Mushroom kingdom. A loving father.

But while the lines of identity between virtual and real world experiences have blurred, there’s only one obituary for me that could really be written: gamer till the end. I never served in Dresden; I can’t drive, or kick a football where I want it to go. I’ve never eaten a ghost and I couldn’t fix a dripping tap, let alone rescue a flirtatious princess.

No. I sat and precision twitched in front of screens. I moved light from A to B and back again and played make believe forever.

They say our actions in this life echo through eternity. But what of those actions outplayed in videogame lives? Or does the very fact we acted in virtual worlds and neglected this one echo through the years; save game files a history of mis-spent time, energy and resources. How did my virtual choices shape tomorrow’s reality? Did I simply deplete our resources all the faster, escapism that fueled Armageddon’s engines?

It’s something we rarely speak of: gamer’s guilt. The generations that came before us feared our hobby, its intrusion into our lives, the distraction it brought. Indeed, their damnations made us all experts in defending any and every accusation aimed at gaming.

Now those older generations are all dead their mistrust is gone with them. Everybody plays games and, with nobody left to justify our hobby to, the protestations we learned rote echo as loud as they do pointless.

Did I waste my time? It’s a question you can only truly ask when you’ve no time left to give, no time left to justify. Play is the first step to knowledge and development, for sure, but as you streak into adulthood haven’t all the lessons game mechanics could teach been learned a thousand times over?

Aren’t games, as we defended against time after time after time, simply a colossal waste of time, a leisure pursuit as meaningless as a stack of blank Sudoku? Aren't they little more than a comfortable distraction of consciousness from the grim realities of this world, realities we would have been better off running toward, not from.

And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago.

Back to her question, the one being asked now. I look deep into young eyes, the eyes of a life with all of its cards left to deal.

‘Tetris,’ I murmer. ‘It was my first’.

[Simon Parkin does not, in fact, have any grandchildren and, while he rarely feels it, he’s still in his twenties. Just.]

Posted by Simon Parkin at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[One of my last TGS write-ups, this panel was particularly interesting because it continued the honesty about how Japanese game firms operate worldwide -- and when do you see the bosses of Capcom, Namco, and Square all on the same stage discussing things so candidly?]

As part of a high-profile Tokyo Game Show business day panel, the heads of Japanese gaming giants Capcom, Namco Bandai and Square Enix sat down to discuss the worldwide financial crisis, the increasingly global nature of gaming, and the position of Japanese video game companies overseas, with honesty and candor in full effect.

Following an extremely blunt keynote from Yoichi Wada about Japanese game leaders' faltering position on the worldwide stage (if not the local one), a Nikkei BP moderator sat down with Square Enix's president Wada, alongside Namco Bandai boss Shin Unozawa and Capcom head Kenzo Tsujimoto, and spent an entertaining 45 minutes discussing some of the major obstacles to Japan's growth on the world stage.

The Worldwide Financial Crisis & Games?

Before the worldwide market differences were discussed, however, there was a question on whether the in-progress credit crunch and financial market turmoil would affect the companies the trio ran, whether in Japan or elsewhere.

Capcom's Tsujimoto explained that "we tend to harbor negative feelings and thoughts" towards the current crisis, but people need to find some ways to entertain themselves, especially at times of hardship. Thus, with those current games available at a reasonable price, "we shouldn't be too pessimistic."

Square Enix's Wada agreed that the market for entertainment is rarely curtailed or shrunk, even in rough times, and as long as the industry "keeps moving", things should work out. Namco's Unozawa agreed that things shouldn't be too bad, though he quipped that, for the benefit of the financial press or shareholders, he was "not able to commit to the performance of our company" in any of the remarks he made.

The Nikkei BP moderator then segued into the main topic of the panel, the discussion of Japan and globalization. As he noted, Japan has previously been successful in major areas such as the automotive and consumer electronics sectors. But in some cases -- for example the iPhone -- these areas are becoming more global, and he wondered if Japanese successes were slowing generally, not just in the game market.

Namco Bandai's Global Profile

Namco Bandai's Unozawa spoke on his company, where they are trying to create a "mindset to provide things for global market". He noted that some Bandai TV shows such as Dragonball Z are very successful outside of Japan -- but many of the shows are not.

However, the company has game franchises such as Soul Calibur which now sell significantly better outside Japan -- and Unazawa commented on the need to spend a lot of money advertising titles that might be strong in the West.

Unozawa then showed a graph featuring his company's Japanese, U.S., and European sales numbers for the first three quarters of 2006, 2007, and 2008, something the other execs would repeat for their own firms. His graph showed significant leadership in Japan, and some declines in North America (at least for the quarters surveyed) in recent years.

The executive believes that may related to the company's heavy use of the RPG genre, pointing out that the turn-based game model, where you enter a command and then your characters fight, is now "regarded as a legacy" in the U.S. and Europe. He asked whether Japan developers can (or should) make more real-time games.

He also touched upon the reverse issue, that American and European-made games have not historically sold well in Japan, with very few exceptions, suggesting that perhaps people still remember the bad localization and subtitles of the earlier Western titles released here.

How Square Enix Sees The World

As for Square Enix, Wada agreed that for Final Fantasy, Japan is still the strongest. He commented that, in general, Square doesn't have many titles that sell better outside of Japan than in. Nonetheless, Square's revenues are split 50% within Japan and 50% outside -- but, as the company executive noted, that doesn't really match the geographical size of the market.

Showing his graphs of 2006, 2007, and 2008 revenues for each territory, Wada quipped: "I don't want to explain this!" Square Enix still has the most Japan-centric revenues of the three publishers in the panel, with the others seeing close to 60% or 70% of revenues outside of their native country. In particular, the U.S. sales numbers declined notably from 2007 to 2008 for the company.

However, Wada made an extremely relevant point, suggesting: "If you focus too much on North America and Europe [with Japanese titles], it's like seeing a Western movie featuring someone who is supposedly Japanese, but doesn't look like it at all." And of course, no Western-headquartered publishers enjoy significant market share in Japan right now. Nonetheless, he believes that usability and interface are in many ways universal, and can be worked on similarly for titles worldwide.

Capcom's Worldwide Goals

Finally, Tsujimoto looked at Capcom's graphs for Japan, the U.S. and Europe, with reasonable degrees of stability, except for a major spike in Japanese revenues recently thanks to Monster Hunter. He commented on the success of the franchise in Japan, but agreed that the game could not do quite so spectacularly elsewhere if "just transferred overseas as it is".

Tsujimoto then went on to define some of the major play differences -- particularly that Japanese consumers use public transportation a great deal, so travel time is when you play your games.

As with all of the surveyed publishers, Japanese numbers were more than U.S. and Europe, but the executive noted that, with the release of Biohazard/Resident Evil 5 imminent, there's potential to change that, especially if similarly global franchises can be found.

The Capcom executive also discussed why "there should be more Japanese people enjoying Western games", noting that Grand Th