Time to load up with a second part of the Tokyo Game Show snaps. While you'll find plenty of pictures of megabooths and their smiling attendants on other blogs covering the show (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that!), I'm generally trying to keep it more specific and quirkier for you good GSW readers.

For better or worse:

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

[Reporting from Tokyo Game Show, I took a look at the fortunes of the major console creators -- is TGS a bust or a boon for their fortunes in Japan and worldwide? Straightforward opinions and show floor impressions ensue...]

Looking over the 2008 Tokyo Game Show, one of the main factors an interested onlooker might consider is how the console manufacturers are handling the show. Both Microsoft and Sony, currently dueling for position in the worldwide market, sought a strong showing at TGS.

Sony needed to convince consumers that its recent loss to the Xbox 360 in the monthly Japanese sales charts was just a one-off. On the other hand, Microsoft needed to convince the assembled masses its momentum in the territory was not a flash in the pan. As for Nintendo -- well, we'll get to them a little later.

On Microsoft's Showing

Let's start with Microsoft. It laid out its agenda in John Schappert's first-day TGS keynote, which we've already covered at some length here on Gamasutra. The Halo 3: Recon announcement was important for the world stage, if not as much for the Japanese market. But on the show floor, its key titles were surprisingly Japan-centric and well-received.

Much of this has to do with Square Enix's high level of support for Microsoft's console, with The Last Remnant and a beautiful-looking Star Ocean: The Last Hope both playable at its large booth. Then there's Final Fantasy XIII, this year confirmed for Microsoft's console but nowhere to be seen. And with Namco Bandai's Tales Of Vesperia the key recent hardware-mover for the company, Xbox 360's Japanese support is becoming wide and surprisingly deep.

Take Capcom's Resident Evil 5, for example, a massively important title, and the first series entry on a Microsoft console. In addition, Koei's Gundam Musou 2 will also be appearing on the Xbox 360, and From Software's Ninja Blade looks particularly promising.

Street Fighter IV also made a high-profile appearance at Microsoft's booth in lush form, and the niche shooter community is starting to become heavily supported thanks to titles such as Raiden IV and Death Smiles.

Relatively few of these titles are guaranteed to be Microsoft-exclusive over time -- most of the larger ones are likely to appear on PlayStation 3 at some point. But as the company has found, getting companies to launch their former Sony-only franchises on Microsoft's console as well is a massive equalizer for consumers -- as demonstrated by Namco's revelation that Tekken 6 will appear on Xbox 360.

And the firm is still producing Xbox 360 exclusives to help differentiate its console further. Some are with niche developers on the otaku end of the chain.

But those that exist higher up the ladder, such as Ninety-Nine Nights II, confirmed at the press conference, may be further reasons for Japanese consumers to get excited about Microsoft's console. The care given to resurrect Japanese retro titles on Xbox Live Arcade is well-appreciated, too.

One probably wouldn't argue that Microsoft is winning the battle in Japan. Rather, the company has muscled its way into a significant install base worldwide -- and now Japanese companies are releasing their expensively-produced titles across multiple platforms out of global necessity. It's definitely getting Microsoft somewhere.

On Sony's Showing

Sony held no press conference to showcase its titles, but its show-floor presence is imposing and impressive, with LittleBigPlanet the key title with which it's hoping to impress the Japanese public this holiday season.

The company's worldwide devotion to the game's Sackboy protagonist is advertised by a massive globe featuring him, as well as a large puppet version of the character interacting with the presenters of the theater show at the TGS Sony booth. Plus, of course, there's a LBP-specific PS3 hardware bundle debuting this holiday season in Japan.

It will be interesting to see if the title resonates with the Japanese, given the paucity of Western experiences that have sold significantly well in the territory. However, if anyone has previously managed to make the transition, it's been Sony. For example, mascot-style platformers such as Ratchet & Clank have sold well in Japan (possibly thanks to extra eyebrows).

Browsing Sony's brochure for the show after visiting its booth, it is notable that Western titles such as Resistance 2, Killzone 2, SOCOM: Confrontation, and MotorStorm's sequel are given high billing, appearing as double-page spreads up front in the brochure ahead of many notable Japanese titles.

Why so? Well, with so many third-parties going multi-platform with major titles, Sony may want to accentuate its exclusives above otherwise great games that are now multiplatform -- even if the exclusives may not be spectacularly suited to the Japanese market.

This is significantly different to the approach taken by Microsoft, which is happy to make noise about projects that are coming to the Xbox 360 for the first time.

Extrapolating on these trends, Sony seems to be building its exclusives much more for the larger world market, in particular the the North American and European territories that share similar tastes to one another, compared to Japan -- which does not.

This observation may be unduly inflated by the fact that there seem to be major Japanese-created exclusive titles that are in development but are simply not yet ready to be revealed, save a few outliers like Level 5's White Knight Chronicles, From Software's Demon's Souls, and the thus-far PS3-exclusive Yakuza 3.

And let's not forget the PSP, which features some strong, quirky first-party titles like LocoRoco 2 and Patapon 2.

Few high-end PS3 third-party titles are showing outside of Sony's booth, but there is a gigantic number of PSP games elsewhere on the show floor, from Dissidia: Final Fantasy to Level 5's new game Ushiro, with the portable system seemingly rivaling the DS in its quantity of high-profile Japan-centric releases.

On Nintendo's Showing?

Nintendo has of course historically chosen not to exhibit its hardware or first-party games at Tokyo Game Show, often preferring to hold its own events (such as the now-defunct SpaceWorld of years past), as it did when announcing the DSi earlier this month.

Nintendo's worldwide hardware sales dominance is not currently in doubt, even with some regional variance (the PSP is performing very well compared to the Nintendo DS in Japan at the moment). The company's lack of presence notwithstanding, there is a plethora of Wii and DS titles on show, notable at this relatively "core gamer"-focused event.

And with announcements such as No More Heroes 2 timed for TGS, Yuji Naka's charming recently-announced Let's Tap for Wii, and Phantasy Star on DS just a few of the show floor standouts, there is plenty of third-party goodness to see here for Nintendo's consoles -- not least of all Monster Hunter 3, which moved from PlayStation 3 to Wii after its initial announcement. Youch.

Plus, for the first time I can recall in recent memory, there are Nintendo characters on the TGS show floor. They may have just been Animal Crossing-, Pikmin-, and Mario-themed plush toys made available for sale by a third party in the merchandising area, but hey -- it's better than nothing, right?

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

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

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

The goodies in this latest version include two physics-based puzzlers and three platformer with different themes - avoid losing all your lives, kill yourself and travel back in time repeatedly.

Game Pick: 'World of Goo' (2D Boy, commercial indie)
"The award-winning World of Goo is finally out for the Windows platform, with a WiiWare release coming next week. 2D Boy's debut release has been getting plenty of rave reviews, and with all the good reasons - fun, engaging, charming and addictive."

Game Pick: 'Tumbledrop' (dock, browser)
"A physics-based puzzler created by Hayden Scott-Baron, a character artist whose work can be seen in the recent WiiWare release LostWinds. Much like Gabriel Ochsenhofer's Totem Destroyer, the goal of the game is to get the pink star down to the island in each stage without dropping it in the sea."

Game Pick: 'Karoshi Suicide Salaryman' (Jesse Venbrux, browser)
"A Flash implementation of the popular platformer series, where players must once again find unorthodox methods to assist our suit-wearing protagonist commit suicide."

Game Pick: 'Love' (Fred Wood, freeware)
"Not to be confused with Eskil Steenberg's similarly-titled MMO, Fred Wood's twenty-level platformer is now available as a free 30 MB download - no strings attached. If you love (no pun intended) frustrating platformers in the style of messhof's Punishment series then this is the right game for you."

Game Pick: 'Temporal' (Oren Bartal, freeware)
"A time-bending platformer in the style of Braid and The Adventures of P.B. Winterbottom. The game involves guiding a confused robot from one room to another, with subtle instructions on solving puzzles provided by a talking technological processing unit."

Posted by timw 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.]

The ability to save is a given among modern video games, but there doesn't seem to be a save system that can satisfy everyone. As players, we want to be able to save and resume our games at any point. For many, even save points are too restrictive; PC gamers are used to quicksaving, which allows the player to save every five seconds in fear of failure.

And that's the downside of saving, really. While it means that players can exit the game without losing progress, it also means that player failure — as well as player choice &mdash holds less weight. Playing Half-Life 2 can turn into an exercise of frequent quicksaves, where taking too much damage or becoming overrun can be reversed by loading the save made just seconds before.

In this environment, messing up doesn't matter for longer than five seconds, and important decisions can be trivially reversed, meaning that there's little consequence for poor strategy and little impact for momentous decisions. Imagine the cliche where a protagonist is presented with two identical allies, and must shoot the impostor. There's little urgency in the situation if the player knows she can just quickload if she makes the wrong decision.

Checkpoint-based save systems seem like an attempt to address this, but they really just make mistakes and choices more inconvenient to reverse at the cost of limiting the player's ability to save and exit the game at any time. Persistent-world multiplayer games often address the issue by eliminating saving and permanent death altogether, but this is hard to apply to most single-player games.

However, there is a rare approach that allows saving at any time while also making the player's choices and actions important and irreversible. It's the approach taken by TaleWorlds' recently-released game Mount&Blade, and it can be used in any game that would benefit from stronger consequences for a player's actions.

The Leftovers of War

Mount&Blade is a game that simulates medieval warfare in the fictional but magic-free land of Calradia. In an open world, the player character can recruit huge armies, trade goods, and engage in battles with up to 100 combatants on the field at once. The game has detailed mounted combat and a deep combat and character advancement system. The world would not be as immersive, though, if not for the game's save system.

When the player creates a new character, she has an option of two save systems. One is called "Realistic! No Quit Without Saving!" In this mode, the game is automatically saved after most events and when the player quits. Upon returning to a character, the saved game is loaded. It's impossible (or at least difficult) to load a save to reverse a mistake or choice.

This approach isn't unique, of course. The Wizardry series, many Rogue-like games, and recent indie game Depths of Peril offer similar options, among other works. However, Mount&Blade is special because it allows major player failure while not erasing the player's progress when failure occurs.

In Mount&Blade, failure is common. If the player character falls in battle, entire armies can be lost, and towns can be razed by bandits. Failing to complete a quest can lower the PC's reputation or alienate team members, and characters remember and comment on failures in battle. Death, however, never occurs. When the PC's entire army is defeated, the PC is captured, and must escape or bribe her captors to be set free.

This means that the player must think carefully about her strategy and her decisions, because they will have lasting consequences. The player will never lose hours of game time, though, because the player character never dies. She may lose money, followers, and reputation, but those can eventually be recovered, and earned experience and learned skills persist.

Victory is Yours

This is where the balance of Mount&Blade is struck. The player can fail, placing the PC in a very unpleasant position, and can greatly affect the game world with her choices. However, the player can never fail badly enough to earn a final "GAME OVER" with no way to recover.

In Depths of Peril, failure is no big deal. If the PC dies, she's resurrected in her covenant base with only a small cost of experience and power. This means that death holds little weight in the game. There is an overarching game of covenant rivalry, but it is very long-term compared to typical gameplay. Therefore, the "no quit without saving" technique doesn't help with the issue of making player choice more significant.

On the other end of the spectrum, Wizardry 8's Ironman mode emulates the saving system of Rogue-like games, which is fiendishly cruel. Not only are these games difficult to begin with, and not only can you not save, but character death results in the deletion of the saved game. Yes, this makes the player care about her choices, but at the cost of high difficulty and frustration. Some players enjoy the challenge, but most would find it unforgivably harsh.

Mount&Blade's approach results in a game which challenges the player and punishes failure, but doesn't ever erase hours of progress by deleting saved games. This helps with making the game world seem more real; just as in real life, mistakes can happen, and choices are irreversible. Each decision the game offers feels important, even with the game's lack of a set storyline and open world.

This technique can be applied to any game which provides a wide degree of player choice. Saving periodically and prohibiting reloading in the middle of a play session means that the player's actions and decisions can't be undone. However, to avoid alienating players who aren't seeking a cruel difficulty level, the negative consequences of failure can't be game-ending. A game could put "dead" characters in the hospital for a length of in-game time, or have the characters captured like Mount&Blade does. Games without combat will have an easier time of this, as character death can likely be eliminated entirely. However, players' actions should still have meaning, and mistakes can be punished in other ways.

Mount&Blade's approach to saving and failure would be appropriate in any game which aims to make players carefully consider their decisions, and where the gameplay is not so much a skill challenge as an experience in crafting a unique story. It focuses the freedom of an open-world game so that each action feels important and permanent.

[Gregory Weir is a writer, amateur 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)

['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 we take a look at the latest installment in Gearbox's World War II series, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway.]

Brothers in Arms is a series I've always enjoyed, thanks to its mix of first-person action and strategic gameplay. Being able to order squads of infantry to suppress and flank opponents in order to get the drop on them was always satisfying for me, and I enjoyed that change in formula from the rest of the run-and-gun shooters that were prevalent at the time.

What made the series so different for me was the requirement to stay hidden to survive. Most shooters you can run and strafe to kill enemies, but not Brothers in Arms. You had to crouch behind cover and choose your spots carefully to kill the enemy. A full-frontal assault was suicide.

Since the original game came out in 2005, much has changed in the world of shooters. Specifically, Gears of War popularized the cover-mechanic that many shooters are now using. As is natural with any good series, Gearbox has attempted to adapt the Brothers in Arms series to these new changes by adding a cover system.

However, instead of adding to the experience of the game, I found this cover mechanic to detract from the core gameplay that made the original game so much fun. It isn't because a cover system was implemented; rather, it's how the cover system was implemented in this first-person shooter.

Design Lesson: Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway implements its cover system using the third-person perspective, which changes how players approach the combat situations in the game and makes the game feel more disjointed.

The problem with going back and forth between a third-person and first-person camera is the transition between them. If you pop the camera to the new view instantly, the player may have a tough time grounding themselves into exactly where they are standing and which way they are facing. Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway gets around this by interpolating the camera between the two views.

This makes the transition a little better to stomach. However, while I knew exactly where I was at all times I found myself playing the game very differently than before. Being in third-person means there is no more aiming down the ironsights of the gun. Most shooters today have ironsights, and firing down them is more accurate but usually harder to see.

Instead, you get a zoom while behind cover, which gives you all the benefit of ironsights without any of the penalty. That may seem great, but it fundamentally changed the way I attacked many combat scenarios.

Normally, in the original Brothers in Arms I would use one team to suppress the enemy so they wouldn't move from their cover. Then, I would move to the flank with the other team and pop out and kill them rather easily. Usually I would go into ironsights quickly, to get a couple accurate shots off, then go back to hiding behind cover.

In Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, I could easily pick off guys from a far distance thanks to the third-person view of the enemy and the perfect crosshair. So, instead of constantly flanking enemies I found myself going to cover and using my rifle zoomed in from behind cover to pick enemies off.

If I was having trouble, I would use the squads to suppress the enemy, so I could advance alone. Rarely would I actually attack the flank with the squads or even on my own. Instead, I just aimed for the little bit of head that popped up and moved closer if necessary. This took away some of the strategy that I enjoyed so much in the original, and it's due to the fact that aiming and shooting in the third-person perspective was far too easy.

Another issue with the changing camera perspectives is the fact that the game wants you to be at cover at all times. If you are not at cover, you are most likely going to die fast. So, the majority of the game you are actually in third-person not first-person.

You can actually determine what view you are in by what your actions are. If you are moving, you are in first-person most likely. If you are in combat, you are in third-person. Since most of the game has you in combat (this is a shooter after all), you probably will see more of the third-person view than the first-person. By implicitly separating actions with views, the game feels disjointed at times.

It makes me wonder why even include the first-person perspective. It adds little to the game, if the game is best played from third-person. It doesn't make the game more immersive, since you are constantly being pulled out of the characters eyes when you go to cover. The ironsights don't add more to the game, because you won't use them that often.

To me, third-person is the wrong way to go for this series. It has always been about the visceral nature of war, and I feel that is best expressed through first-person in most games. The original games proved the formula works very well.

A cover system is important, but it's possible to implement that cover system in first-person. The core strategy for winning at the game would not have changed if this were the case. The aesthetic feel of the game on a moment-by-moment basis would have remained unified and also matched the previous games in the series.

In my mind, this would have been the better approach. The game felt too much like I was doing my own thing and the squads were just there along for the ride, than being an integral part of gameplay. This makes the game feel like other World War II shooters and not like a unique franchise.

Changing camera angles on a regular basis is not a good idea, in my opinion. Find the best perspective for your game and go with that the whole time if possible. Sure, it makes sense to go third-person for the vehicle level, but don't change camera perspectives on the player every 30 seconds. Hopefully, the next installment to the Brothers in Arms series can fix this flaw.

[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 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

While I'm running around to various appointments, keynotes, and other strangeness at Tokyo Game Show, I have been taking a few pictures of the show, which I shall be apportioning out regularly until, well, there are none left.

This batch mainly covers the business day at the show, plus a quick run around the various keynotes on the first day. Shazam:

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[If there's one thing to be said about Gamasutra's Chris Remo, he knows his game beans, and I really enjoyed this chat about Far Cry 2's multiplayer, which really has been underdiscussed to date. Look out for a follow-up interview with LeBel about Halo multiplayer which is v.interesting, too.]

Much of the attention placed on Ubisoft Montreal's upcoming Far Cry 2 has revolved around the game's open-ended single-player campaign, including its dynamic narrative system, but it's also shipping with an ambitious multiplayer level-editing component on both the PC and console SKUs.

Aiming to streamline the team's own level design tools into something flexible, powerful, yet still accessible, has been a challenge to the team, and the goal has ended up driving many aspects of the main multiplayer modes' design.

To gain insight into the development process behind that side of the game, we sat down with Hardy LeBel (Halo, SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy SEALs), Far Cry 2's senior multiplayer designer.

He discussed the intricacies of transposing the single-player game's feel onto a multiplayer environment, how it's harder to design a map when you have to worry about the sun setting dynamically, and why it's more fun to design a level than a gametype.

What were your goals for the multiplayer component?

Hardy LeBel: Our overall goals for multiplayer in Far Cry 2 were to take the elements that we saw as very successful from the single-player and fold them into the multiplayer action setting.

But we wanted to do it in such a way where it was going to be fun and it was going to be engaging, but it was also going to be a very robust and flexible experience -- so that it would really work with player-generated content in the editor.

In other words: Make something that was fun to play, make something that wasn't brain surgery, necessarily, so that the players could really experiment on their own using the editor and the tools that were available to them in there.

What do you do with the editor that is unique?

HL: What we're doing with the editor and what really stands out is the fact that it really is one of the most flexible level-editing tools and powerful editing tools that has ever been released to the public at large.

Obviously, Quake has a very powerful set of tools, no question about it, but this is really a next-generation toolset with the mesh editor and the lush graphical content and the sheer density of the natural settings and the lighting options and the weather options. Really that's what moves the bar forward into next-generation territory.

When you talk about the mesh editor are you talking about the terrain?

HL: That's right, yeah. The terrain editor -- the underlying mesh that lets you control height.

Is the tool basically the same on console as on PC?

HL: Yes it is. The tool is actually sort of a subset of the full set of development capabilities that we actually use in the Dunia engine. That's what we were using to actually build the game -- the single-player and multiplayer side.

And the development process was a very careful consideration of how to take those same incredibly powerful capabilities that we have and figure out how to make it accessible to a broader audience and not necessarily have to train them as a level designer at Ubisoft to be able to produce good results.

On that note, are you also going to have traditional modding support on the PC? Have you thought about that at all?

HL: We'll see. It's a little premature for us to make decisions about that. We're excited to see what people do with the tools that are out there right now but the future is wide open, I would say, if that makes sense.

Have you got a lot of pre-fabs in there? Is there any geometry-level editing going on? What's the scope of what you can do?

HL: Well, there's the basic underlying mesh editor and then there's an entire library of all of the building pre-fabs that we actually use for the single-player and multiplayer level of design.

So, you're not actually editing the geometry of the physical objects, but you can take them, rotate them, combine them in any way that you want to, interpenetrate them or position them -- things like that.

There's a nice suite of tools that lets you parse the library in a really quick and intuitive way. So, you're not actually editing the physical mesh of the objects themselves or part of the underlying 3D geometry, but you can take our entire toolbox of toys and play with it however you like.

You were mentioning lighting options and different things like that. What sort of presentational stuff do you have going on there?

HL: Well, the multiplayer game actually supports a full range of day/night settings -- a full 24-hour day/night cycle. It's a little bit truncated. In other words, the timescale is not real life. It's actually happening at a faster scale.

You can also set the weather. What we're using is a dynamic weather system in the game that takes in atmospheric considerations and condensation factors and time of day and then generates realistic weather based on all those parameters that get fed into it.

So, really, what you're doing when you're editing a map or playing in a multiplayer mesh, is you're seeding the dynamic weather system and saying, "I would like to see weather that would be based on these parameters."

What other kinds of parameters?

HL: Oh, like I said -- condensation and wind factor, and time of day is part of it.

I'm curious about designing multiplayer with that in mind. I've talked to [Far Cry 2 creative director] Clint Hocking about how the single-player side is such a procedurally-driven, systemic design. How do you apply that to multiplayer? That's not traditionally the kind of stuff multiplayer is about.

HL: No. That's true. That's absolutely true.

For us on the multiplayer side, really, creating the multiplayer experience for Far Cry 2 has been an incredible growth process, a real learning process. To be honest, I'm a longtime multiplayer designer myself -- I worked on a bunch of different multiplayer offerings.

A lot of the techniques and a lot of the types of things that I would do to make multiplayer levels work and be successful in previous titles just don't work because of the systemic process and, frankly, what the engine is capable of -- like the high dynamic range lighting and the weather factors and everything else and the sheer density of objects that you actually put into the environment in the game.

A lot of stuff that I would do to make a multiplayer level in a competitive product successful, I couldn't do here because you just can't use a lot of the same kinds of cues and the same type of techniques.

So, it really has been a huge learning process down to the point where, at one point we were playing on a map and nobody could see anything because it was too late in the day. It was too damn dark. We realized that we literally had to change the orientation of the map 90 degrees so that the setting sun was still peeking over the hills and casting enough light so that you'd be able to find your way through the environment, otherwise the shadows were just too dark. (laughs)

That's so funny because usually when you think of multiplayer maps, everything is so baked in there. You've got skyboxes and static lighting, and everything is so defined.

HL: Well, that is true. Yes, that is very true. Interestingly enough, and I'm sorry to get all designer-y on you here, but what's interesting is that a lot of the best titles and real next-gen titles are based on taking and combining certain random elements together.

So, more and more, game design is more about saying: OK, rather than you experiencing the exact same sequence every single time, it is about taking and combining random elements in different ways so that each time the player plays the experience is fresh and interesting and it has more vibrancy and is more alive.

On the multiplayer in Far Cry 2, faced with those kinds of challenges -- the dynamic weather systems and all those other elements that we were getting from the single player side, I felt pretty comfortable trying to shape an experience that was going to be fun and interesting for the player. I was trying more to create a framework for them, something that they could enjoy, more than I was trying to create a very specific sequence, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

HL: It's not meant to be as super hardcore as something like Quake. It's really meant to be more like: here's this suite or this broad palette of fun things that you can play with.

In some ways it's the anti-Quake. Someone shoots you and you're slowing down, and you're pulling a bullet out of your arm, and fire is spreading across the grass -- it's almost like a distilled version of what the single player is. Quake is more of a glossy experience in gameplay terms -- very precise, every microsecond counts.

HL: Well, it is. And, for us, on the multiplayer side, there was a real challenge, because the single-player side is meant to really immerse you and make you feel like you're there. You know, you're in Africa.

But I've said this to Clint -- Clint Hocking, the creative director on Far Cry 2. After the game starts, and there are the sound effects and the lighting, I've had moments where I really feel like I'm in the jungle, and I'm kind of pushing my way through the bushes.

But, the truth of the matter is, as we started to play with this very, very realistic setting, and very, very realistic weapons, and stuff like that, it's not that much fun to just get killed.

You have to dial that back a bit for multiplayer.

HL: Yeah, absolutely. Finding a balance that would have its own unique spirit and be fun to play, but still borrow some of the elements that were really working for the single-player and put them to use for ourselves, was a really big part of the challenge.

You mentioned the self-healing. You know, the single-player guys have a much more complicated set of rules about how you can heal, and when you're allowed to heal, and stuff like that, which suits the single-player game.

For us, by contrast, in multi-player, we really wanted to make it a bold, dynamic choice. You can heal yourself completely, at any time, but to do that, you actually have to do one of those elaborate self-heal animations, where your camera view goes off of your opponent, and you're quite vulnerable. You're literally sort of sitting there helpless.

It's more of a pure gameplay mechanic, straight-up risk versus reward, as opposed to a more immersion-driven event.

HL: Correct, absolutely. And so, it varies from the single-player experience, but, what we found is this really fascinating thing, where, you're in there, and you're fighting, and then you're really strongly compelled to take cover, and heal yourself. And so, making that balance between their realism, and their immersion, and what we wanted to create, as a fun playground, was an interesting challenge.

Do you have a lot of sort of unusual objective-based modes in this game?

HL: We don't have a lot of unusual objective-based modes. We have two. One is Capture the Diamond, which is our wrinkle on Capture the Flag. We're imagining that it's conflict diamonds. It's such a theme, throughout the entire game. The leader of the UFLL, and the leader of the APR, are the faction commanders in the multiplayer game. It's the same actors, and the same characters, coming over your headset, and giving you orders.

There's another unique game type, which is Uprising, control-and-conquer gametype. There are three strategic points on the map, and you have a commander on each side, and the commander is the only person who can capture the point.

One of the reasons that we stayed away from really complicated or esoteric game types goes back to the editor. If it was rocket science, to kind of make game types, or really make them work on the levels, we thought that that might be overly complicated for people who are just getting into the editor, trying to make their own stuff.

So, our gametypes are very object-associated. Obviously, the flags and control points are items you can place in the editor. We feel that once players experience those and start to mess around with them, they'll discover their own combinations, varying the game rules and the map design and the level placement to make their own kind of fun.

Did you guys look at Halo 3's Forge editor or gametype options? I suspect Forge is more limited than what you're doing.

HL: It is, in a way, more limited than what we're doing. I know that, on the editor side, they were trying to pay attention to all the kind of competing products that were out there.

But our impulse, our goals, were really driven by taking the Dunia tool set and the editor in terms of the professional development tools. Finding a way to make that transparent and accessible to as many people as possible, and kind of calibrating that, was the goal.

The way that theirs breaks down, is that their map editing tools are extremely limited, but their gametype editor is very extensive. Your balance seems like the exact opposite of that. Is that accurate?

HL: Correct. Yeah. That's exactly right.

Did you feel that it was important to be conservative with the modes so that you weren't introducing too many potential variables?

HL: Yeah, that's kind of a way of restating what I was saying before. We didn't want to make it too complicated to author unique game modes. And to be honest, and I know this is going to sound heretical considering my background [on games such as Halo], but speaking solely for myself here, I'm not as big a fan of modifying the game rules.

What I tend to find is that that fragments the overall player community. People are like, "Dude, we don't use that gun," or "We use special rules," or "We play some small in-house variant of the game."

It's like the handball house rules on a school playground.

HL: Yeah, exactly. Handball rules on a playground. For me, what I prefer is to understand the rules broadly across the board, and to try to have people be comfortable engaging with those rules and playing with them. And honestly, it's more fun to author a physical space, like a level, than it is to author game rules.

It's just more fun to sit down and make hills and draw rivers and draw bridges than it is to kind of place spawn points and hook up all sorts of complicated game rules. Even though you can have a big impact on the final product in that way, it's just not as much fun. [laughs] So, I don't mean for that as a knock on the ability to author game rules or customize them. But, my own personal preference is to definitely go in the opposite direction.

I was a fan of the original PC Far Cry, and it's been interesting seeing the Crytek guys do a successor [Crysis] that goes in one direction, and then you guys do a successor in a different direction. They're somewaht divergent design attitudes, both are which are taking from the original focus on open-ended environments.

HL: Yeah. It's true. The divergence and the thinking process of the single-player guys -- how they've approached the product that they're trying to make -- is interesting. I find it fascinating to sit there and listen to them talk, to goad them a little bit into talking about the topics that they're passionate about.

For me, looping it back to multiplayer, it's been an incredible learning experience. Working on multiplayer maps in Halo, working on multiplayer maps in SOCOM, and then coming to the kinds of challenges that we're faced with this engine, with this technology and system -- honestly, it's been a whole new learning experience to try to make next-gen multiplayer just faced with some of the graphical challenges.

The story I told you about the shadows -- fascinating, right? You don't have that problem on a Halo map. [laughs] What happens when the sun's setting in Halo? It doesn't. It doesn't happen, it doesn't get too dark. But in this case, it does.

The dynamic fire is another interesting, highly tactical, element. As we were designing the maps, we were trying to figure out how to use fire -- one of the signature pieces of technology in graphics in Far Cry 2 -- and how to integrate it so that it was meaningful and interesting, because it is such a dynamic element. You may or may not see big fires on the map, and making it so that it factors into the gameplay in interesting ways is really cool.

As an anecdote, we were playing against the Frag Dolls [Ubisoft-sponsored gaming team] at one point. They had come in to playtest the game and give us some feedback.

We responded as a team and we went running around the corner of a building, and the map that we were playing on -- one whole side was on fire. The whole thing was on fire. We were kind of standing there thinking, "Oh, crap. Okay, we're going to have to go the other way!"

Learning how to use that as a tactical element -- to block off portions of the map, to set fire breaks that will help you defensively or prevent vehicles from getting through -- it's just been a whole new layer of my own understanding of taking those dynamic elements from a lot of single player development and folding them back into a multiplayer setting.

I heard a story from the development of the single-player where some tester lit the grass on fire, and hours later, the game ended because the end boss died in the fire, miles away. The fire eventually got to his compound, or wherever he was, and killed whatever NPC you've got to kill at the end of the game. They couldn't figure out what happened for ages. Obviously they made it so that can't happen anymore, but that points to an interesting and uncommon style of game design -- sort of reminiscent of Fallout, where you could just go kill the last boss immediately if you knew what to do.

HL: A little bit, yes. I think it was the success of Grand Theft Auto and those games that showed you the incredible power of a procedural approach, exposing the player to those kinds of procedural systems and letting them do whatever the hell they wanted to in those sandbox-style games.

But, that being said, something like Call of Duty is really not procedural, at least from my perspective.

It's is in the Valve on-rails vein.

HL: Yeah. It's an amazing rollercoaster ride where the ups and downs of the pressure and the drama are so perfectly timed and scripted that at the end of the single-player campaign it's like, "Woo! That was a fun roller coaster!" It's just so super fun! There's that complexity of creating the sandbox experience versus the more intricately-scripted single-player thing, or even finding a balance between the two.

It's a big design debate.

HL: Yeah. It really is a big design debate and I think to a certain extent it has to do with your exposure to one school or the other. One of our level designers on the multiplayer side had a lot of experience as a single-player level designer and was absolutely frustrated by the randomness.

He was saying, "Ahh! This is driving me crazy!" He was used to having much more finite control, and over time had to learn to deal with that randomness and embrace it and shape player behavior as opposed to dictate player behavior. Finally he was onboard and became a master at it, no question.

It's definitely a learning experience and for some people it's almost like a religion: "I hate it! I'm against it!" So, I think, from a pure development perspective, it comes down to your exposure to it and how well you can develop an understanding of the techniques on the other side and really use them to your own advantage.

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

Editors at our big sister site Gamasutra (OK, including me) are crawling the halls of the Tokyo Game Show this week -- attending keynotes and sessions, interviewing members of the Japanese development community, and scoring the hottest of hot scoops.

The show runs until Sunday, October 12, and with the first day wrapped, we've compiled our first salvo of on-location coverage. Conveniently collected for your consumption:

Announcements

Microsoft Announces Halo 3: Recon, To Debut Late 2009
"During Tokyo Game Show, Microsoft announced Halo 3: Recon, a new Bungie-developed 'standalone expansion' which uses Halo 3 as a basis for an all-new campaign and multiplayer experience due out in Fall 2009."

TGS: Microsoft's Schappert Reveals Tekken On Xbox 360, Nov. 19th Xbox Live Update
"Microsoft Xbox corporate VP John Schappert announced a robust line-up of Japanese-developed Xbox 360 titles including a Tekken entry, promised a November 19 debut for the new Xbox Live interface, and teased the new 2009-due Bungie-developed expansion Halo 3: Recon."

Grasshopper Announces No More Heroes Sequel
"Cult Wii title No More Heroes is getting a sequel, following a surprise announcement by Grasshopper Manufacture CEO Goichi Suda (aka Suda51) at the Tokyo Game Show. The sequel got the greenlight in part because of its warm reception in the West."

TGS: Square Enix's Wada: Japanese Industry Has 'Lost Its Position'
"At the Tokyo Game Show on Thursday, CESA chairman and Square Enix president Yoichi Wada presented a passionate keynote, suggesting that the Japanese game industry has "lost its position" as the leader in the global marketplace, and offering some possible solutions."

Stage Shows, Luck Ceremonies And DBZ: Inside Namco-Bandai's Press Event
"Gamasutra attended Namco Bandai's press event at the Tokyo Game Show, which featured an Afro Samurai stage show, among other presentations -- and learned the company's already announced most of its major 2008 titles, save for a We Ski sequel and a new DBZ game."

Interviews

TGS Exclusive: Yuji Naka's Prope Making a Sonic-Like Action Game
"Gamasutra spoke with famed creator Yuji Naka, programmer for and creator of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games, who revealed that his company is currently working on a Sonic-like character action game."

Interview: Koei's Matsubara Talks Tecmo Merger, Dynasty Warriors Expanding West
"At the Tokyo Game Show, Gamasutra talks with Koei president Kenji Matsubara about specific business advantages of the company's merger with Tecmo -- and Koei's plans to expand the popularity of its Dynasty Warriors franchise in the West, potentially using licenses or more Western-specific material."

TGS: Marvelous' Hashimoto: '2D Requires Sacrifice'
"Vanillaware, maker of Odin Sphere, is currently developing a high-res 2D game, Oboro Muramasa. Publisher-side producer Yoshifumi Hashimoto describes how making this sort of game requires 'lives and sacrifice.'"

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

['Diamond In The Rough' is a new column by Tom Cross focusing on an unusual innovation that a game makes on an old, tired aspect of game design -- one that might get overlooked, because the game is not otherwise remarkable or is hindered by major design flaws. This week, Tom explores the possibilities for meaningful and deep narratives in Clive Barker's Jericho.]

It’s often hard to say exactly why most video game stories are terrible. There are so many reasons — overwrought acting, nonexistent acting, nonexistent characters, hideously clichéd characters, and finally, settings and plots we’ve seen a million times — that when a game actually has a good script, or actors, or story, we almost don’t know what to do with it. How do you say something is good, when so much is bad, and for what reasons is it good?

One way to identify a good story (or at least slightly better than the rest of the pack) is to carefully examine its integration with the gameplay, and the integration of the story in general (and the gameplay) with the in-game implementation of the story (dialogue and other expository devices).

A popular storytelling method that forces this kind of integration is that adopted by the Half Life series, Clive Barker’s Jericho, F.E.A.R. (mostly), Bioshock and others. Still, it’s apparent that this kind of forced perspective is not necessarily a foolproof way to insure a story and game that actually communicate and interact naturally with each other.

F.E.A.R. is a perfect example of this. Despite the fact that the game advances the plot through events witnessed by the protagonist (in-game conversations, during dreams, or through other paranormal encounters), F.E.A.R.’s plot and dialogue are stapled onto the gameplay in an inelegant and forced fashion. It’s almost as if Monolith created a stripped-down game with amazing shooting, time-slowing, and squad AI, and then realized that they had to find a way to justify all of it in their game.

What they produced was far from exciting, original, or even legitimately creepy. There are games that aren’t horror games per se (Drake’s Fortune, Tomb Raider, Half Life 2) that achieve a much more tense, creepy, and atmospheric experience than F.E.A.R. ever did.

To focus on the diamond in the rough of this particular article then, is a puzzling process. On paper, Clive Barker’s Jericho would seem to fall into many of the traps that F.E.A.R. fell prey to. Jericho follows an elite paranormal fighting unit as they attempt to stop a primeval, unstoppable monster (one that predates humans, or any other life on earth) from being unleashed upon the world. Jericho team is made up of all of your favorite, tired clichés: sexy pale goth women, a muscular Hispanic man, gruff white leader, a strange southern priest, and several other paper cutout characters.

On top of that, the world of Jericho is a brown one (whereas F.E.A.R.’s was gray), full of blood, four letter words, and xtreme moments. Much of this “in your face” attitude is delivered by your squad mates, most of whom are voiced by actors competing for hammiest actor of the year award. Their dialogue and banter are packed with lines stolen from movies like Aliens (in fact, I’d say that most of them are stolen from that iconic movie, which has given so many mediocre games their “character”), and you’d be hard pressed to believe that someone who writes books for a living came up with this stuff.

Yet even as you blink in astonishment at all of the places where Jericho happily embraced mediocrity, you’ll be surprised by its commitment to telling a complicated and sometimes unusual story, one that features more character development than most games, squad-based or otherwise.

This kind of character interaction and development is made possible by frequent and surprisingly interesting in-game character interactions. Characters will have arguments, learn secrets about each others’ pasts, and come to new conclusions about each others’ motives and history. At one point, one Jericho member shoots another team member because he believes he is leading them to certain death.

In other words, characters don’t just comment on an unfolding, static plot, they make it themselves, at least partly, by interacting with each other to further it. They don’t just describe, they act, creating new momentum and changing the objectives of the game by what they say and do to each other.

When one character shoots another, your response is bound to be different from what you feel about standard window-dressing “banter” between stereotypical characters in squad shooters. It’s both much more believably intense—these characters have shown their differing mindsets, and are already under immense stress—and means that the characters will have believable reasons for acting very differently than they have up to that point.

Impressively, the developers tried to make the squad character-switching mechanic part of the story. Basically, the squad leader dies, but his spirit lives on in one (at a time) of his team. As you enter each team member’s body, they’ll have different reactions to your presence. One dislikes the feeling immensely, one tells you she trusts you because you saved her life when she was in jail, and others have their own reactions.

The amazing thing is, these reactions never feel forced. Since each character has already been established with their (admittedly ridiculous) banter, it doesn’t come as a surprise that they each react strongly to your presence.

The detail poured into the creation and fashioning of your team extends to other characters as well. Enemies (and a few allies) all have back-stories, and these stories are just as much a part of the narrative as those of team Jericho. One early ally has a secret past with Rawlings, a priest on your team. Her quick and brutal death understandably shakes him, giving his character even more depth and believability.

It’s really surprising how even badly-written characters can be interesting and worthy of empathy, just because they’ve been woven into a larger narrative fabric. It’s telling that so many games (aside from epic RPGs) feature so few main or influential characters. No one has the time or will to create an interesting, believably interrelated world of characters.

The lesson is that plot can’t just be integrated with action, it has to feed into action and take its cues from action—the two have to be connected systems, not just very parallel ones.

The importance of Jericho’s accomplishments can be seen when compared to another game that utilizes a similar storytelling technique: Oblivion. Never once in Oblivion did I feel that the characters I was watching interact actually cared for or hated one another. Their relationships were sketched out by the script to a degree, but not convincingly. Even the main characters, voiced by big-name actors, had trouble selling themselves to me.

Monolith’s F.E.A.R. (to pick on them again) is another game that pretends to meld gameplay and story. Your super-soldier has a few encounters with talking NPCs, but when it comes down to it, the gameplay, dialogue, and story could belong to separate games. They don’t need each other to reasonably exist, as one could argue the gameplay, dialogue and story do in Jericho.

This is a problem one sees cropping up in many games. When you’re dealing with a story and script as anemic as Oblivion’s, or as generic and derivative as F.E.A.R.’s its hard to create interesting and believable interactions between characters. It’s just as hard to do so using the hilariously clichéd denizens of Jericho’s world.

It’s impressive then, to play Jericho and watch the trials of this group of soldiers, far from the normal world, coming to grips with new situations, and new realizations about their comrades. Think what an experience it could have been if the rest of the game had been of the same quality.

Posted by Thomas Cross at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Starting to update from Tokyo, and I have to say the TGS Business Day keynote from Wada was really eye-opening - don't often see such high-profile Japanese creators talking about issues.]

At his Gamasutra-attended keynote at Tokyo Game Show on Thursday, CESA chairman and Square Enix president Yoichi Wada presented a passionate keynote that addressed the problems of the Japanese game industry head-on.

The executive suggested, in particular, that the country's game biz has "lost its position" as the leader in the global marketplace, and offered some possible solutions for all developers.

In terms incredibly blunt for the director of a Japanese industry association, Wada explained of the local game industry, "We do have issues that we are confronted with. ...We have not been tackling these issues into a straightforward manner."

(He noted that his abstract talk would be difficult for the Japanese-to-English interpreter -- which indeed it was -- but managed to explain adeptly why Japan needs a public "knowledge foundation" to really move forward.)

"We have not ignored these issues," Wada noted, but opined that the American and European markets "have developed very quickly" in recent years, and the Japanese market has not kept up. Game companies are in good shape financially in Japan, but not as successful overseas, apart from select titles.

Wada acknowledged that the "cost has become very high" to develop next-gen titles, but that being a worldwide concern, it is not necessarily the problem. Rather, it's the lack of "hubs" and open communities in Japan that is preventing the industry from moving forward. The CESA chairman believes that, with work, "we can catch up once again."

"Why has the Japanese industry lost its position?" he asked, adding, "I as chairman of CESA shouldn't be saying this, but it's true."

He explained that historically, most of the game console manufacturers were Japanese, and hardware/software alliances were strong. So originally, the "hub" was the Japanese hardware producer such as Nintendo or Sony, and all the game creators interacted through that hub.

Nowadays, not only is Microsoft an exception in terms of hardware creation, but there are many other hubs and communities that have been created.

For example, Wada pointed out that the PC industry has many communities, including the mod community, which helped to create Counter-Strike by having an open exchange of tools and ideas. He noted that such a mod scene doesn't exist in the same form in Japan.

In addition, Western conferences such as GDC are important in allowing creators to communicate with each other directly and in person, Wada said. The CEDEC developer conference is trying to do much more, but "we in Japan are not very adept at making good use of these conferences."

He also pinpointed cross-media collaboration with the film industry and working with universities to educate game developers, as well as middleware and tools companies, as further hubs and communities that users can learn from and be clustered around. Again, he stated that the game business in Japan is "a very closed industry," and having more open networks is key to moving forward.

Wada pointed out that this problem is "not limited to the game industry," but rather structurally to the entire Japanese nation. He went on to look at possible solutions -- mainly an opening up of attitudes.

He specifically referenced the potential "psychological resistance" of the Japanese developer to achievement based on "standing on the shoulders of giants," -- that is to say, using external tools and building on top of them.

The CESA chairman attempted to psychologically define and split out the technical and creative parts of game development, and a key point was to be that overly rigid definitions of roles and a lack of willingness to use outside technology are hobbling Japanese companies.

He referred to "creative engineers" as the idea people might be aiming for, and said once again that "inconsistency in terms of systems" is what is holding the industry back in Japan.

The Japanese development industry tends to want to reinvent technology every time it develops a game. That's a major flaw, Wada claims, noting the belief of Japanese developers that "standardization of the interface can be seen as standardization of content." That's just not true, he argued.

In conclusion, Wada recommended that more translation of relevant content is needed, and that both the Japanese industry and government need to take active steps to further promote communities and hubs based in Japan, with further open collaboration and technology sharing needed.

"Unless we change ourselves within the next few years, maybe there will be no expectations for the [output of the] Japanese gaming industry," he warned. But he was also hopeful, adding, "We still have sufficient time to recapture this leadership."

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

[Game video pastichers Mega64 continue to make large slices of the Internet happy, but they don't get interviewed nearly enough. Therefore, Brandon Sheffield chatted to them and Leigh Alexander helped cut it up into something that wasn't completely random - though perhaps we must share the complete transcripts at some point, because it's... interesting! Anyhow, onward.]

The creators behind Mega64 first gained underground acclaim with its San Diego public access TV show, before its video skits were released on DVD through the publishing arm of equally random community site SomethingAwful.

With a practically anarchic glee, Mega64 has since branched out to help publishers and events promote (or is that just make fun of?) its events, producing several video skits for Ubisoft titles, for the Spike TV VGAs, and for the 2007 and 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards at GDC -- including that famous Miyamoto sketch.

But the promotional angle still seems to work just fine for Mega64, in part because they still create plenty of original material for their website, and because they've never surrendered their surreal vibe. we asked Mega64 co-creator Rocco Botte about how he balances entertainment humor with advertisement.

"I think basically, we're just captivated by anything that just seems like it's going to be fun to do," Botte says. "We look at what makes a funny subject matter for a video, and that's what we go towards."

Balance, Botte says, simply comes down to choosing what's funny, "major in stupid," or seems fun to do. "The stuff just floats to the top that way and we just go with whatever happens," he says.

The transition from simply following the funny to monetizing their skits came "probably a year" after Mega64 began, Botte recalls. He and co-creator Derrick Acosta set it up as a public access show, but found they found they gained steam quickly on the internet, thanks to the rise of video.

"Then after about a year we would get emails from game companies to see if we wanted to do stuff for them," he says.

Botte says that he, Acosta and a third team member, Shawn Chatfield, are now able to work on Mega64 full time. "It just fell into our laps," Botte says. "It wasn't anything we were really striving for. We were just having fun and filming it and that was pretty much it."

Botte says the inspiration for much of their parody humor comes from just playing through games, whether old or new.

"We're really fascinated by some of the social situations in games," he says. "Like, we just did [a video about] Assassin's Creed recently and we all enjoyed that game. I mean, it's a perfectly fine game."

"But just this guy walking through a crowd and touching everybody on a really personal level was just so funny to us, because, like... who does that? It's not even a matter of, 'Well, wouldn't that be wacky?'"

Botte distills the humor approach to one key idea: "There's just things you don't do socially that happen in video games and it's accepted as normal, and we try to find those little things and exploit them."

The Mega64 team, then, is positioned alongside popular webcomic artists Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade, who're able to mock the small foibles and failings of games in a way that even their developers appreciate -- rather than criticizing or dismissing, it's pointing out the moments of humor even the game's creators may have missed.

"Typically developers are flattered for whatever reason," says Botte. "Even when we rip them apart, they're pleased to be part of it... Sometimes we hear from developers that are totally unrelated, that I don't know."

Mega64, whose videos are primarily improvisational, often does on-location scenes with unaware participants who don't know they're on a hidden camera. Botte says they attempt to differentiate each skit enough so that they don't run out of locations where it'll still work.

"There's one mall, though. It's the mall that we filmed our Dead Rising skit in, and we walk in and we're surrounded by security now for whatever reason," says Botte.

"They must have a really good system going there or something. I'll walk in during the Christmas season just to do some shopping, and I'll seriously see guards just at every corner just watching me. I don't know how they do it, but that mall figured it out. Nobody else has."

But even if the unwitting citizens of San Diego, where much of the team's work is filmed, still haven't caught on to the Mega64 formula, does the team still have broader concerns about fan fatigue and staleness?

"Like I said before, we're not really interested in doing the same thing over and over," says Botte. "Some of our stuff may come across for some people, I guess, as the same thing over and over -- I don't know. But when we go out and film, it never feels like we're doing the same thing twice. We consistently find different things that'll challenge us or just, we'll have fun creatively, however."

"We change it up enough to where it's never really dull for us. We enjoy it. I don't think we've ever filmed something and just gone, 'well, all right, it's done, let's get our paycheck.' We always have a good time."

But even if it's not about the money, humor is challenging enough when there's no business obligation there. Is it difficult for the team now that they're being paid, and does that create pressure?

"Actually, in the beginning... there was a little worry of that," Botte admits. "Like, 'Oh, well, now that the pressure's there, are we going to be doing stuff because we creatively are into it, or are we just pushing for a paycheck?'"

But despite initial worries, Botte says he found the team works best under pressure, having produced what he considers their best work under tight time and budgetary constraints.

"I think that, for whatever reason, we work really well with limits versus no limits," he says.

Not only that, but the distinctly lo-fi style of Mega64's videos is part of their charm. Says Botte, "People always ask us, 'What would you do with an unlimited budget?' We would keep it the same, probably. I can't see us going all out."

Though of course they play a key role in the industry, marketing and PR teams in general aren't widely known for being the most genuinely creative, culturally underground sorts. But Botte's been surprised by how positively such teams have received Mega64's work -- whether or not they "get it."

"I've learned to just roll with it," he says. "There definitely have been times where I felt like there [have been] marketing people I've talked to before that had no idea what's going on, but they still laughed. I don't know if they were just lying and went with it -- I don't know, and I don't want to know!"

Because those customers often come back, Botte adds. "There are people we make stuff for that I'm like, 'Well, we'll never talk to them again, look what we made.' And they'll be like, 'Let's see this other thing!' It's like, 'Are you serious?'"

In fact, Botte admits the team often pushes the envelope deliberately -- and is surprised to so rarely be rejected. Botte can recall one example, though, of a wild pitch that didn't quite find its mark.

"We were approached by an oil company because they were going to sponsor a certain video game, a racing game, and they said, 'Do an ad for us, you guys seem like you know what you're doing.'"

"We had this concept that was I think one of us pours their oil on Dale Earnhardt's grave, and he comes back to life and plays Burnout or something."

"And they were like, 'Well, we found somebody who will work cheaper and they have better ideas, so we're going to leave.' If you don't want Dale then you don't want me -- that's the boom that I've lowered."

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

[From time to time, Gamasutra Editor-At-Large Chris Remo makes a neat post on his weblog. At which point, we steal it -- with his permission, folks -- and crosspost it here. This one is about the odd story of a homeless game designer -- outsider game design in full effect.]

This man wants to become the best game designer ever.

As such, he’s making a game. He is also homeless, buried in credit card debt with nearly no money to his name, and living out of a shelter, equipped with nothing but a computer and a copy of Game Maker 7.0. As he states in his blog profile, “I hate working!”

At first, it is difficult to know whether to believe his claims, this being the internet. A bit of investigation reveals that he asked on the GameDev forums, “Is it possible to design and/or program games, while being homeless?” In that post, dated September 5, he noted he was “losing my place of residence soon.” Two days later, he created his blog. In the inaugural post, he says, “I’m broke, homeless, and I don’t have a job,” and lays out his plan to develop his own game, without necessarily getting a job dedicated to “making someone else rich.”

He also welcomes monetary donations, explaining, “I’m broke niggas. I’m broke.”

Early on, I fluctuated between being belief and skepticism. These days, the default reaction to this sort of thing is that viral marketing is afoot, but it seems too self-contained to be that. His GameDev posts don’t promote or link to his blog in any way, not even subtly, nor do the scant few other posts I was able to dig up elsewhere, all of which seem to be earnest game development inquiries.

The game was originally a platformer entitled The NeoVerse, and included moving platforms, the ability to swim “exactly like it is in Super Mario,” and a rocket launcher. This game seems intertwined with another idea, “a blend of old school Castlevania 2D type of game with Super Mario RPG,” which eventually became more focused on the platforming elements and was redubbed Me Vs. My Robots.

Simultaneously, he began work on a new design, Pocket Dungeon: an “old school, Gauntlet style game. 2 buttons. I don’t know how many levels. 16 X 16 bit tiles for everything.” As he notes, “I wanted to use 8 X 8 but Game Maker wouldn’t let me zoom in to make levels for 8 X 8 tiles).”

While developing these games, he maintains a separate blog, The Five Minute Game Review (on which he alternates excoriating and praising indie games), and applies to various Chicago-area development firms such as Day 1 Studios. He also claims to have had a meeting with one Michael Mendheim, whom Google reveals to be the creator of Mutant League Football.

Mendheim declined to hire our man as a producer. “He doesn’t want to RISK the MONEY on an unproven designer,” it is explained. At that point, he is about to lose his short-term lodging with an ex-girlfriend (this does end up happening a few days later), and his already dire finances are getting worse.

“He cares a lot about money,” the designer notes ruefully about Mendheim, who he calls “friggin’ Jew.” He understands Mondheim’s stance, but doesn’t respect it. (”Fucking poor black people,” he exclaims in a later post describing a sleepless night at the shelter. For what it’s worth, the ex-girlfriend is black as well.)

Thanks to the increasing number of details specific to the Chicago area video game industry scene (a scene of which our man apparently has a low opinion), I was becoming more convinced of the veracity of the story.

After following the saga for a few weeks, I did some slightly more in-depth Internet Detective Work and found evidence that jibes with the various scraps of personal information that can be inferred from throughout his blog. (I’m choosing to keep my methods and info unpublished for privacy reasons.) I contacted him via email as well, but was told, “I’d prefer to not answer any questions until after the game is finished.”

In late September, The NeoVerse and Me Vs. My Robots get shelved and all attention is turned to Pocket Dungeon. The game is given a release date of February 28, 2009.

Along with updates regarding his living situation, our designer includes notes on Pocket Dungeon’s progress, sometimes in the context of his own design evolution. “I usually don’t like putting in items in games that don’t affect the enemy in any way,” he writes. “Take, for example, the raft. You can only use it in thick water. If there’s no thick water, than having that weapon equipped is useless. I’m not a big fan of that. In my younger days (not spent in a fucking homeless shelter), I would make it so that you can use the raft to wack people with it. That was an idea I had.”

The game’s influences begin changing. It is described as a meeting of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Diablo, and Zelda. “That probably sounds confusing and unlike anything you’ve ever played,” he says. “And, it is.”

“I don’t want to overhype anything,” he adds, “but I will make the most unique indie game EVER.”

An earlier post extolls the virtues of games being stripped down to their basics, but by this point the ambitious design calls for a total of 350 weapons (of seven types), as well as 100 each of armor, head gear, amulets, and rings.

As it turns out, “Pocket Dungeon” is the name of a Japan-only PlayStation game, so our man’s title becomes The Fire Mage. He’s got a contingency plan, too: if it turns out that’s already in use, it will become The Fire Mage of Azul. Hopefully not, though—as he points out, “that’s kind of a gay name.”

Soon, a blog post announces a return to simplicity and a Diablo-inspired story “along the lines of ‘You’re a hero sent on a long mission to destroy all evil.’” Except that “the story isn’t actually about that at all,” he says. “I want the story to be a bit more personal. But, I also want it to have a run and gun shooter type of feel to it. Needless to say, trying to achieve all of that is gonna be difficult.”

He has espoused something of a manifesto: “I want people to be able to turn off their brains while playing the game. Just like old school games - I want people to just play the fucking thing. You don’t need to sit there watching cut scene after cut scene to explore why you have to collect X amount of bandanas and how it affects the characters feelings. You just pick up bandanas because they’re spinning. And, because you CAN. That’s what they’re there for.

“But, I want to make a deep game. Something that gets people thinking IF they WANT TO. But, the thing is, even if they don’t want to, I still want people to get the message of something deep. While they’re mindlessly playing my game, I want them to get the message that something is going on in a real kind of way.”

It’s a tall order, particularly working out of a homeless shelter.

“It’ll be tough, but I’m gonna be considered one of the best designers ever no matter what,” he swears. “I promise you that.” “I’ll have to make a lot of cuts and I’ll have to work hard,” he acknowledges in yesterday’s post. “But, I’m sure I can do it."

“Or, maybe not. We shall see.”

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

['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).]

Our interviewee in this edition is a bit younger than the people we usually talk to at GDRI. But like Daniel Auld, he was a Westerner working in a strange land.

Meet Steven Dwyer, a native of Scotland. He worked briefly at Osaka, Japan-based Now Production as a game programmer, working mostly on the original Sonic Riders. You can also hear his voice on Mario Superstar Baseball for the Nintendo GameCube.

Now Production ("NowPro") has been a company of particular interest to GDRI. Like the infamous Tose, it has done many games for big name publishers such as Namco and Hudson. Unlike Tose, it has been publishing and developing more and more of its own games over the past decade. But enough about that - on with the interview!

GDRI: First of all, please tell us about yourself (basically anything leading up to your working at Now Production).

SD: Well, it all started back about eight years ago at University. I took up the Computer Games Technology course (with a minor in the Japanese language) at Abertay University, Dundee, Scotland, which at the time was (I believe) the first dedicated UK-based Games course. I arrived as part of the second year of the course, and it was still quite rough around the edges.

However, it was amazing in the respect that a lot of us went from knowing little about programming and the construction of games to advanced theory in just four years. Nearing the end of my time there, I found out about an internship system (the name of which I forget right now) that took a few hopeful candidates and put them in a computing-based work placement in Japan.

Naturally, I felt this too good an opportunity to pass up, and I also felt it was really important to throw myself at as many different options as possible, knowing that no doors would open if I just let things come to me. In the end, I was very lucky to be one of the selected ones to go.

My placement took me to NTT Communication Sciences Lab (a research division of one of the largest telecom companies in Japan), and there I worked on speech recognition in English. The placement was for a full year, and there were a lot of other English speakers around (both Japanese co-workers and others), and I was primarily responsible for using current systems in place to create a version of their program that recognised English speech.

When that year ended, I had the feeling that I wasn’t quite ready to leave Japan yet and while speech recognition was rewarding, it wasn't exactly the field I had been trained in. I therefore applied to several companies in Osaka (close to where I lived at the time) and a few in Tokyo. I wasn't holding out too much hope for a job, as my Japanese skills at the time weren't exactly strong enough to talk about overly complex subjects, but to my surprise, I still received two interviews by interested parties, one being Now Production in Osaka, the other being a Tokyo-based company. I accepted a place in NowPro, when it was offered, as that allowed me to stay close to all the friends I had met in Japan so far.

GDRI: Why did you get into game programming? What kind of games do you like/have you played in the past?

SD: I have played games ever since I got my first LED Pac-Man machine. It was like a big Pac-Man shaped brick with a screen on it. My mother couldn’t tear me away from it and so instead of pushing me out into the sun with all the other kids, she got me a Commodore 16, followed by each upgrade until it became time for me to buy my own computers.

I’ve always loved games, from Dizzy to Mass Effect, long before it came into the mainstream. I'm glad I was one of those 8-bit kids. I'm naturally quite technical, so it seems only natural to me that I wanted to choose programming for games as a career.

I'll play anything except common sports games and first-person shooters without a story. They just aren't interesting to me. Role-playing games of all genres I like especially, whether it be World of Warcraft or Half-Life 2. I’m also a bit of a lore junkie, so anything with a massive universe I adore like Warhammer or god sims like Civilization (where history is its lore). I basically like most of the games that you can define as having a point, rather than just showing off technology with no evolution or just button bashing.

GDRI: Could you describe NowPro?

SD: NowPro has a rich history in the creation of games, their portfolio including titles way back to the NES, I believe. At the time, they seemed to be working on some outsourced projects given to them by larger companies as well as working on a number of their own game projects. The building itself was set on a number of levels in a high-rise, and each floor had at least one separate project running. Everyone in the company was really supportive of a "Westerner" joining the company and on occasion, it did feel a bit like celebrity when people were really interested in meeting me.

I don't have a bad word to say about everyone I met there. The management was more than accommodating. They clearly had the patience of saints, due to my initial difficulty conveying principles and problems in natural Japanese. All the co-workers I had working on the Riders project seemed initially fascinated that I was there, and we had a lot of fun over a year and a half.

Getting used to cultural differences and sharing our love for games and game creation bonded us together, so it turned out to be really fun on a daily basis. Everyone in the company had what may be described as a typical Japanese work ethic, in my opinion, as they were all working really hard to expand the company in positive directions. Everyone's will seemed to be bent to the same goal, and that was making top-notch games. Walking around the building and seeing finally a game studio in action was a little overwhelming at first, but awe-inspiring also.

GDRI: Stories of non-Japanese people working in Japan can be interesting. How did you get hired by NowPro, and what was it like working there?

SD: When I went to NowPro, I had done a little research on the company and was surprised to find that one of my interviewers was the CEO, Toshiaki Awamura, himself. I had the strong feeling that the company was on the cusp of expanding to a much larger global market and as such, they seemed very eager to have me on board on some of their projects.

After the interview, Mr. Awamura showed me their vast portfolio of games stretching back to what seemed to be the dark ages and so with such a rich history, I accepted the place and worked from start to finish on Sonic Riders for a year and a half. I also got involved in other little projects that required some English-speaking talent (such as singing the theme tune to Mario Baseball and localising some things to natural English text).

In a more day-to-day sense, it was good working there. While I worked a lot longer hours than I had been previously used to (it taught me a lot about the pressures of game development), I found it ultimately rewarding. As time went by, my Japanese had improved somewhat, which made social interactions and general day-to-day work infinitely easier. Everyone on the Riders team was very supportive of my work and when the project came to an end, I decided I had reached a place where I had met all the goals I had wanted to achieve and felt it was time to leave Japan.

GDRI: You were involved with the songs on Mario Superstar Baseball (which I guess were reused on the Wii follow-up since you are credited there). You say on your site, "A bit of fun while working in Now Production actually ended up in the final game." Can you elaborate?

SD: I'll be the first to admit that other than a few rounds on the karaoke booths in Japan, I didn't see myself as the next big Pop Idol. But while working on the Riders project, I was called down to help in the creation of the main and ending themes for Super Mario Baseball. While they utilised the talent of people already in the office, they were trying to go for the "sound of a crowd" effect within the songs, and this professional vocal talent wasn't seen as too important (just as well, I thought, as I saw images in my head of TV screens and monitors being shattered by my warbling voice!). Basically, I had to sing a few lines and spent a little while trying to get the others making up the vocals on the track to enunciate their Rs and things like that.

It was a lot of fun. We just let loose and got into the swing of things. When I say I was surprised it was used, it turned out that my voice became used as the main vocal on the track, due to my natural English pronunciation, and it was layered by all the others. I was amazed at how professional it all sounded, and I take my hat off to the audio guys that worked on it. It was a nice break from working on Sonic Riders, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

An interesting point of note is that after its release, it was really weird hearing my voice when going into game stores and they were playing the demo reel. Almost like hearing yourself on tape recordings.

GDRI: Why did you leave NowPro (and Japan)?

SD: Sonic Riders was an exceptionally time-intensive project, and I must admit it did wear me out quite a bit. As mentioned before, I did work some very long hours, but it was ultimately rewarding and did fill me with a sense of pride when it was completed.

Also, after about two and a half years in Japan, I had seen all I wanted to see and had an amazing time that I’ll never forget. As the project ended and we went gold, I decided it was time to return closer to home and look for jobs around there. It was basically a move back to Europe to be closer to family and friends after being almost inaccessible for two and a half years.

GDRI: What are you doing currently?

SD: At the moment, I am working for Blizzard Entertainment's France office in their Customer Service department for World of Warcraft. While this seems like a departure from programming, I decided to take this position as I wanted to try out different aspects of the games industry, and to see how things work. I worked my way up to Senior GM after about two years with the company, and that’s where I am now. At the moment, I am looking at options for moving back to my programming roots.

[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 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, I may be in a small tin object barreling towards Japan as we speak (or a few hours ago, perhaps!), but the GameSetLinkDump must continue, oh yes, headed by a provocative Gamers With Jobs article about girls and girl protagonists in games.

Also clogging up the WWW arteries are a tour of the Stern Pinball factory, still in production today (mm, pinball!), as well as an Artsy Game Incubator interview, Bill Harris on used books and used games, and Tom Chick getting a BIG ROCK BAND 3 SCOOP, oh yes.

And ze linkz:

Beauty and Brutality | Gamers With Jobs
'momgamer' on Heavenly Sword: 'We're used to watching big brutal guys do big brutal things. A big strong girl doing the same brutal things doesn't work quite the same.' Interesting.

GAMBIT: Updates: Introducing Oozerts!
'Oozerts is a self-contained, math-based puzzle game designed for the Nintendo DS that extends the universe of Labyrinth - an online computer game created by The Education Arcade - onto a mobile format.' More GAMBIT neatness.

Fringe: The Hardcore–Casual Debate Comes to Primetime | GameCulture
Really interesting post on JJ Abrams, Fringe, and hardcore vs. casual.

Rumor: Keyboards in Rock Band 3? | Fidgit
Tom Chick is awesome. That is all.

IF Competition Reviews « Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction
Lots of interactive fiction reviews - be sure to read Emily's on her blog, too.

Eegra : Q & A: The Artsy Games Incubator
Awesome interview about a really amazing project - looks like they just created a new set of games.

Dubious Quality: Books, Videogames, and Noses
A great look at real stats on used books and wondering how it relates to used games.

Crispy Gamer - Column: Print Screen: "Porn & Pong": Testing the Limits of Titillation
Reviewing Damon Brown's new book - incidentally, reviews of game book are super-rare on the web, outside Amazon, I think cos of terrible page views.

Highway Games: Guitar Hero game for Arcade use on way
'Unconfirmed reports have surfaced that Raw Thrills have acquired the rights from Activision to release a Guitar Hero game for arcade use.' I'm guessing this might be legit - though have no proof. Via Arcade Heroes.

Stern Factory Tour | Tokens Only
'Stern is the last US manufacturer of pinball machines and it’s amazing to see the process first hand.' Awesome.

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

[Is Madden NFL 09's lackluster launch on Wii a sign that the rebranded 'All-Play' feature was less than successful? Here, our correspondent Matt Matthews compares last year's Madden performance, including exclusive NPD data, against this year's multi-platform launch to show notable 'long tail' possibilities.]

According to figures released by the NPD Group two weeks ago, Madden NFL 09 dominated sales during August 2008. While versions for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 registered healthy year-on-year growth, the version for the Wii languished.

Today, we'll take a closer look at Madden sales in 2007 and in 2008, with a special eye on Wii sales, and make two observations:

1. Flat year-on-year Madden launch sales on the Wii are extremely unusual, especially compared to the other platforms.

2. Despite poor launch figures, the Wii version sold extremely well through the end of 2007, ending the year in a surprisingly strong position.

The Launch Month Sales Anomaly

To put Madden Wii launch figures in context, it is instructive to compare with the situation on the PlayStation 3.

From August 2007 to August 2008, both the Nintendo Wii and the PlayStation 3 tripled their installed hardware bases in the United States. Last year, Sony had 1.74 million PS3 users, while this year, they have 5.26 million. Likewise, the Wii grew from 4.02 million users to 11.86 million.

With three times the owners in 2008 as in 2007, one would naturally expect software sales of an annual franchise like Madden NFL to increase.

And, indeed, sales did increase on the PlayStation 3. Sales were up 91 percent year-on-year, from 336 thousand copies in August 2007 to 643 thousand copies in August 2008.

However, Madden Wii sales were flat year-on-year, at around 116,000 units during both August 2007 and August 2008. So, when targeting a userbase that had tripled in size, EA Sports was unable to demonstrate any growth in sales. Put another way, 1 in 35 Wii owners purchased Madden in August 2007, yet only 1 in 100 purchased it in August 2008.

While the Xbox 360 has been out a year longer than the Wii and the PS3, its software sales increased when the hardware base increased. Microsoft's installed base was 6.23 million systems in August of last year, and that population increased by 75 percent to 10.89 million in August of this year. For that increase in Xbox 360 consumers, EA Sports managed a 12 percent increase in Madden sales to those consumers.

This data fits nicely with Nintendo's claim that it is reaching out to non-traditional gamers, ones who may not know about nor even care for a game like Madden NFL.

However, EA Sports has made at least some attempt to appeal to those users with its All-Play rebranding of its sports franchises on the Wii. Judging from just first-month sales, it would appear that EA Sports must work even harder if it wishes to tap the quickly growing population of Wii owners.

First Month Not the Whole Story

While the lack of growth of Madden Wii launch sales is an important angle, it does not fully demonstrate the dynamics of Wii software sales. Platforms like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 drive huge software sales during a launch month and severely diminished sales in subsequent months.

Look at a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PlayStation 3: it was number one across all platforms in July 2008 -- and out of the top 10 completely the very next month.

By comparison, popular software titles like Guitar Hero and Mario Kart can continue to sell extremely well on the Wii over the course of several months, not just the launch month. In fact, Wii Fit sales have accelerated for the past two months, which is precisely the opposite of how most software sells.

So while first-month sales of Madden NFL are poor on the Wii, how does the franchise tend to sell in the longer term? A lot better than you might have thought.

Below, we graph the total sales of Madden NFL 08 on each platform – the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo Wii – during calendar 2007. The sales corresponding to the August launch are in blue, while the sales from the rest of the year are in red.

Note the following:

- Despite the weak first-month sales, the Wii version of Madden NFL 08 eventually sold nearly 500 thousand copies. (The PS3 version ended just over 660 thousand.)

-After August 2007, the Nintendo Wii version of Madden NFL 08 outsold the PlayStation 3 version through the end of December.

-Sales of Madden NFL 08 on the Xbox 360 and PS3 were extremely front-loaded.

This is a very interesting set of data, because it shows us that a title like Madden NFL can start out more slowly on the Wii, but eventually sell a decent number of copies in the longer term. This has obviously been true for Nintendo's own software, Guitar Hero III, and Rock Band, but difficult to measure for games which don't make the top 10 lists released by the NPD Group.

While the graph above shows how important August launch sales were to each platform, the following graphs make the relationships a bit more explicit.

In 2007, the Xbox 360 version of Madden NFL was slightly more front-loaded than the PlayStation 3 version.

One could say simply that half of Madden NFL 08 sales on the PS3 and Xbox 360 were from August and the rest were from the following four months. On the Wii, August Madden NFL 08 sales were less than one quarter of the overall sales for the year.

This demonstrates just how difficult it is to measure success on the Wii. Consider that the PlayStation 3 version of Madden NFL 08 started 220,000 copies ahead of the Wii version in August, but was just over 160,000 copies ahead by the end of December.

Whither Madden All-Play?

While Madden NFL 08 showed legs on the Wii last year, this year it looks decidedly less successful when compared to the other platforms. In just August 2008, Madden NFL 09 for the PS3 has sold 96 percent of what Madden NFL 08 sold in five months of 2007. If this year's version again sells about half of its copies in August and the rest from September to December, then it will easily hit a million copies.

The Xbox 360 version could hit over 1.8 million copies.

Even if this year's Wii version manages the same kind of long-term sales that last year's version did, it will still be dwarfed by the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions.

It seems unlikely that EA Sports will count its rebranded All-Play version of Madden a runaway success, given the stagnant launch-month sales figures. However, last year's longer-term, low-level sales on the Wii ensured that that version grossed between $20 and $25 million in revenue in 2007.

That's still a profitable venture, and unless Madden NFL sales begin to drop precipitously on Nintendo's console, we can expect to see Madden on the Wii for years to come.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the NPD Group, and especially David Riley, for the data used in this article.

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

I noticed the other day that a project to scan every InterAction and other Sierra in-house newsletter ever published was completed as of July, so I finally downloaded the ones I didn't have physical copies of and gave them a gander. The one you see above is from the summer of 1998 and features a Gordon Freeman who doesn't seem all that terribly alarmed to see aliens and soldiers around the lab.

InterAction holds a special place among fans of old adventure games, being the official mouthpiece of the most prestigious adventure maker in the US. Like Infocom's newsletters from a generation past, they were remarkably laid-back affairs, letting designers talk about their games freely and even addressing tricky issues brought up by pushy fans. Everything from Outpost's blatant bugs to King's Quest IV getting a crappy Apple IIgs port was duly covered and commented on by the company president, although not always to the liking of everyone involved.

Back before the Internet, this is how companies like Sierra gave its audience an inside view of the company. It's nice to see, in retrospective -- and it's a lot more permanent a record of what life at Sierra was like than your typical modern publisher's website, which tends to be extremely corporate and boast forums which shut down the moment something controversial happens.

[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.]