[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Rolling right into the weekend, and this set of GameSetLinks appears to be a little heavy on the indie side - it's headed by something on the indie film side of things which is still fascinating to translate to what's happening in independent game media.

Also in here - totally retro Guitar Hero geekouts, NPR on indie, Dylan Fitterer on surfing with audio, a postmortem of a moody title with plenty of zombies, and much more.

Ka ka ka:

Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily » Sundance Film Festival Director Geoff Gilmore Talks ‘Evolution vs Revolution’
Running an independent-minded festival, it's interesting to see the trials and tribulations of the leading indie film fest outlined like this.

TRUE CHIP TILL DEATH » Chipstar Heroes unite
'With all the hype around Guitar Hero and Rockband (following the successful trail of the “DDR-type” games), the oldschool machines feel kind of left out of the loop.' C64 _and_ Amiga versions, natch.

My NPR piece on independent videogames - The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety on Variety.com
Another indie piece, by Variety's Ben Fritz, no less. And Dark Room Sex Game ahoy!

Charge Shot!!!: BestRideEver: A Talk with Dylan Fitterer
Neat new site has a pretty fun interview with the Audiosurf creator on music, games, and all things inbetween.

Zombpocalypse Postmortem - Buro-kun Developer Blog
Nice postmortem of a VERY individual, oddly atmospheric indie title.

IGN: Ten Trends That Are Saving Videogames
Indie games (with a prominent IGF mention) being one of them, hurrah.

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

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Nintendo of America, Square Enix, N-Fusion Interactive, Redtribe, and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include:

Gamasutra.com - Game Industry Jobs

Nintendo of America: Web Marketing Producer
"[The Web Marketing Producer] works with management team to define marketing requirements and budget, requests assets, determines content matrix, manages interaction with I.S. department/internal designers/legal department, and manages web design/build-out/user testing/project launch/post-launch duties with outside agency partners and / or the NOA web production team."

Redtribe: Tools Programmer
"Redtribe is a successful independent game studio based in Melbourne, with a reputation for delivering projects on time and on budget for world-leading publishers. We are looking for an experienced programmer to join our core technology team and help develop our new production pipeline. The ideal candidate would have several years' experience in the games industry and have an excellent understanding of game production systems and tool development."

Square Enix: Software Engineer
"Square Enix is building a studio from the ground up. We are making an action-oriented original IP game here in sunny Los Angeles. We are looking for motivated master programmers to lay the foundation for a solid development team. How often do you get a chance to make sure that a studio starts off in the right direction? How often do you get to be one of the starting members, but also have medical insurance? This is a rare opportunity to have the creative control of a start-up but the backing and funding of a major publisher."

N-Fusion Interactive: Game Animator, Game Programmer
"Established in 1998, N-Fusion has just finished its first next-gen title and is currently staffing up for solid growth. With the heart of a gamer and the mind of a publisher, we have what it takes to keep moving up in the competitive world of interactive entertainment. We're the largest next-gen developer in New Jersey, a location that offers the best of both worlds: a serene, beautiful working environment that's only a short drive from New York City and the ever-beautiful Jersey shore."

SeriousGamesSource - Serious Games

Ngrain: Lead 3D Artist
"Ngrain is an award winning company delivering interactive 3D task-based training solutions to the defense industry. We license our breakthrough graphics technology to leading organizations across multiple industries and application areas. Resellers offer Ngrain solutions globally, and strategic partners include Microsoft, Intel and Adobe."

GamesOnDeck - Mobile Games

Controlled Chaos: Senior Programmer
"We are looking for people wanting to build something big and have a voice on how they want to do business. If you have a great work ethic, a great attitude, and a love for games, then you can be part of our team. Applicant should have a knowledge of console development, preferably Xbox360 and Wii. A knowledge of or great desire to work with mobile technology, namely iPhone."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

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

[Eidos has revealed its intentions to make iconic Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft more "female-friendly", but is that really what the franchise needs? In this opinion column, Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander tackles the issue -- and why Lara's much-critiqued sexuality is largely a straw man.]

By now you've probably heard somewhere or another that Eidos would like to make the Tomb Raider franchise and its heroine more "female-friendly."

"Female-friendly" is a well-intentioned but faintly gruesome marketing phrase that's come to be perceived as shorthand for "let's make everything pink so women will buy it."

It's almost inherently offensive -- so in order to treat this concept of a female-friendly Tomb Raider fairly, the phrase first asks us to get some words out of the way.

As a female journalist in a majority male industry, perhaps I'm owed a deck in the face from Gloria Steinem when I confess that, whenever we as a society discuss gender issues and "what women want," I get a pang of concern for the men.

I'm probably spoiled having grown up in this era instead of in a previous one, but I don't like that we're allowed to discuss what's "female-friendly" -- and yet, generally feel comfortable already assuming what's "male-friendly" (guns! explosions! boobs!), permitting girls' club attitudes while boys' clubs are conceptually frowned upon.

The "female-friendly" idea also assumes that all women are interested in the same ideals. But, semantics aside, I think it's clear what Eidos is trying to do here.

Bombshell Background

Longstanding, iconic heroine Lara Croft has a reputation as a bombshell -- okay, okay, sex object.

She's perhaps the game biz's most famous piece of eye-candy, and somehow over the years she's become iconic of the concept that 18-year-old boys drool over pixelated boobs. It's easy to see how this has made some women feel as if Tomb Raider games are not "for them."

But when it comes to why women don't feel comfortable with this or that video game, it becomes necessarily a far bigger issue than just one character's physique.

Lara could receive an extreme makeover and appear triumphantly on the set of Oprah, and yet it'd still unlikely be some magical cure for female perception of the brand -- and it might even alienate existing fans, which won't help their ends.

Eidos is forced to re-evaluate the franchise's appeal because Tomb Raider: Underworld posted disappointing sales. It may also be that Eidos would like to clean lingering skeletons -- such as this poster girl for teenage gamer boy fantasies -- out of its closet in order to pretty up for a strong buyer, but that's only speculation.

Releasing a title in a franchise that's felt if not a bit checkered, perhaps staid, for years during a packed, starkly hit-driven recession holiday would suggest that weakened sales are to be expected no matter how great this installment is.

That Tomb Raider is in need of an update may indeed be an idea with some merit behind it. But the go-to idea that making this larger-than-life heroine look mundane and conservative will make her appealing to more women is probably more than a bit flawed.

Impossible Realism

People often point out the implausibility of Lara wearing hot shorts in the snow, or having bare legs when she plans to be climbing stalagmites or obelisks or something.

Well, game characters have worn implausible clothes for ages -- none of the FFVII crew bundled up in the North Crater, and Solid Snake didn't mind lying belly-down in the snow at Shadow Moses.

Indeed, many a shirtless muscleman has braved monsters and elements for over a decade, facing nothing more than a chuckle and "that's video games for you." The argument that "we don't want to desexualize Lara, we just want her to be realistic" doesn't hold water.

Most women are smart enough to know that Lara is a video game character and not a real person. Maybe her body proportions are unrealistic -- but, uh, the fact that she leaps across chasms in the Amazon, balances on hairline ledges and discovers mysterious artifacts with ancient powers is acceptably grounded in reality?

Lara's physicality was palpable in Underworld. It had much less to do with how her body looked, and much more about how she used it, with sound design and character modeling that captured the precariousness, the breathlessness, of her acrobatic feats.

Personally, not once did I sit there feeling bad because I don't look like her, and I don't like the idea that women are so fragile that sexy fantasy women should never be allowed in video games -- especially when we allow sexy fantasy men.

Perception And Judgment

I don't believe that women have a problem with Lara, other than that we've been conditioned to blame her. I think it's Lara's social context -- Lara's perceived audience that makes them feel unwelcome.

And once again, this comes down to the longer-term history of the video game industry, which marketed itself for years as a toy for teenage boys, and now will probably take years more to get rid of that stigma.

You can even say it's the fault of society, fond of judging which kinds of things are "for girls" and which kinds of things are "for boys", that makes women feel like they ought not to try something like Tomb Raider.

Maybe it even makes women feel like they are "supposed to be" insulted by Lara, even without having taken a look at their own feelings around the issue.

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that when it comes to the relationship between women and games, much broader things need to change than the long-established aesthetic of Lara Croft.

A Real Reinvention?

"We need to look at everything, as we develop the next game," Eidos CFO Robert Brent said in a report in the Times Online. "Look at how Batman changed successfully, from the rather sad character of the Michael Keaton era to the noir style of The Dark Knight."

Such comments are actually heartening; many early comic book superheroes were vague, justice-oriented concepts at their inception and then gained greater complexity and wider appeal through repeated reinvention.

So sure, media coverage around this Lara Issue has focused heavily on her body and what the desires of a female audience might be.

But it's clear that Eidos will only refresh the franchise successfully when they focus less on guesses about what appeals to women and more on what could make Lara more than superficially appealing -- period.

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

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

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

The delights in this edition include a triple-nominated 2009 IGF finalist, an offbeat side-scrolling beat 'em up, a uniquely different exploration game with minimal aesthetics, and a physics-based action game from the developers of Puzzlegeddon and Fret Nice:

Game Pick: 'The 24-Hour Police' (Desire Factory, freeware)
"A 2D side-scrolling beat 'em up in the style of the Final Fight series, where players step into the shoes of a vigilante cop on a mission to take down the local mob boss and his henchmen. This translates to three stages' worth of goons who can be punched, kicked, thrown, or shot at, as you make your way towards the final showdown with the leader of the criminal organization."

Game Pick: 'Mirror Stage' (Stephen Lavelle, freeware)
"An exploration number where every stage is divided into small areas, featuring a variety of objectives that usually requires highlighting all rooms or stepping into a certain spot to clear the level. The game is available for both Mac OS X and Windows platforms."

Game Pick: 'Walkie Tonky' (Pieces Interactive, freeware)
"A physics-based action game where players get to guide a giant robot around a city and engage in the act of smashing buildings, vehicles, and all manners of defensive measures that the Earthlings have set upon you."

Game Pick: 'Osmos' (Hemisphere Games, game demo available)
"In this serene and elegant orbital osmosis simulator, players navigate through an indigo sea of wandering motes, absorbing smaller bits while avoiding collisions with larger motes. The triple-nominated osmosis sim from Hemisphere Games, which now has a demo version available, is in the running for the 2009 IGF Technical Excellence award, Excellence in Design, and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize."

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

[Mister Raroo's latest regular GameSetWatch column considers the positive and negative aspects of digital distribution - where, naturally arguments for and against are made by an angel and devil sitting upon his shoulders. Can the angel and devil reach a consensus, or will Mister Raroo have to listen to their squabbling to no end?]

Is there really anything to debate here? It’s obvious that Mister Raroo loves digital downloads! Look at all the games he’s purchased from the Wii Shopping Channel, Playstation Store, and Xbox Live Arcade. In fact, he probably plays those games more than any of his disc-based games.

No more driving to the store to buy games. No more game cases cluttering up his shelves. No more having to get off the couch to change game discs! He has completely stepped into the digital distribution era!

Oh come now! Mister Raroo’s got some hang-ups about digital distribution. Remember all those digital duds he bought? Does Heavy Weapon ring a bell? Or how about RoboBlitz? They’re just sitting neglected and taking up valuable space on Mister Raroo’s Xbox 360’s hard drive. In an ideal situation, those games would be eBay fodder. But, oh wait! Mister Raroo can’t resell games that he’s downloaded, can he?

Let’s not forget, Devil Raroo, that digitally downloaded games are usually significantly cheaper than disc-based games. Together, the two “duds” you mentioned cost $25, which is less than half the price of most new Xbox 360 discs. Sure, it’s unfortunate that Mister Raroo wasted $25 on games he doesn’t play (knucklehead!), but that’s his fault.

Every Xbox Live Arcade game has a demo, as do some Playstation Network games. As for Wii…? Well, you’re on your own in that department, but in this day and age it’s not hard to go online and read impressions and reviews.

I’ll agree that Mister Raroo is sometimes an idiot when it comes to buying games he shouldn’t waste his money on, but there are times when the demos can make games seem more tantalizing than they actually are. You buy the game and—poof!—you’re stuck with a disappointment.

And publishers sure do what they can to make digitally downloaded games a breeze to purchase. How many times does a message pop up in the middle of a demo prompting you to buy the game? If the demo is halfway decent, it can be hard not to accept the offer and purchase the game on the spot, especially when the price is often deceptively unclear.

“Deceptively unclear?” I assume you’re referring to the use of “points” instead of actual monetary units for games downloaded from the Xbox 360 and the Wii. I’m surprised you’re not fond of that, since it is indeed devilish of Microsoft and Nintendo to substitute real money with points. Get it? “Devilish”? Haha! Ahem. Getting back on point, I'll admit that purchasing games via digital distribution can sometimes make it feel like you're not spending actual money. After all, there is no physical transaction taking place and you’re often spending pre-purchased points instead of dollars.

Dropping 400 points on a game feels far less significant than spending five dollars. But all the same, unless you have only a juvenile grasp of monetary and mathematical understanding, there is no deception in the fact that you are spending actual money. You do have to spend money on points in the first place, after all.

Oh, Angel Raroo, you and your rosy outlook sicken me! You hit the nail on the head with why points are used instead of dollars: they make it seem like you’re not spending real money. Of course, companies like Microsoft may argue that points are a way to bring global consistency to their digital marketplace so as to avoid having to come up with new prices for each county and their own unique currency, but that’s poppycock.

The Playstation Store uses actual monetary pricing and there’s no confusion there. And, for the record, Microsoft’s points are especially confusing. You’d think one point would equal one cent, like it does on the Wii. But no, it’s more confusing than that because each Microsoft point equates to 1.25 cents. That means an 800 point game is actually… let’s see… carry the one… here we are, $10. I’d wager that the funny math of “points” has brought in more money than a one point to one cent ratio would have.

Well, I can’t help you with your lack of mathematical ability, but I can at least point out that digital distribution has allowed for a resurrection of many of the types of games that would never have been green-lighted for a retail release.

As amazing as Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and its sequel are, would either game have ever seen the light of day as anything other than as bonuses tacked on to full-priced game? Doubtful. However, we have seen a modern renaissance of many “lost” genres of games. Digital distribution has given developers the ability to create smaller-scale games and expand their creative visions in ways not permissible with larger releases.

Let’s not forget that the same scenario you’re describing has also allowed some developers to quickly shovel out crap easier than ever before. For every good game available for download, there are plenty of terrible ones. Did anyone really need Pong Toss on the Wii, for example?

And, as with games in retail stores, digitally-distributed games of dubious quality often have the same price point as the excellent games they compete with. Microsoft recently announced they plan to remove games with poor reviews and performance from their online storefront, but I don’t know if that’s quite the right solution.

Like I said before, it’s up to gamers to do their homework by trying out a demo or reading up on impressions and reviews before paying for a game. Thankfully, purchasing a crummy game via digital distribution is a lot more financially forgiving than doing the same from a retail outlet.

Sure, you might be out $10 if you download a bad game, but that’s a lot better than the alternative of $60. And with the rise in episodic gaming, developers have the ability to not only have the ability to provide a gaming experience that can be purchased in installments—allowing for gamers to bail out if the game is not to their liking—but many nagging issues can be addressed and improvements can be made with each subsequent episode.

Angel Raroo, again your sunny disposition disgusts me. Episodic gaming may allow for developers to improve a game with each release, but will most of them take the effort needed to do that? I have a feeling that most of them will be lazy and just siphon out a completed game in chunks in order for it to count as episodic.

Or, on the flip side, developers might delay the subsequent episodes for who knows how long, leaving gamers with an unfinished product. Plus, when tallied up, the price for each particular episode of a game can equal or even surpass the cost of a full-priced retail game. Episodic gaming sounds good on paper, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

You have to remember that episodic gaming is, in many ways, still in its fledgling stages. There are already some companies that are doing things right. Telltale Games, for instance, not only gives a discounted price for gamers that subscribe to a full “season” of episodes through their website, but at the end of a season the company will mail subscribers a disc that contains all of the episodes -- as well as bonus content for just the price of shipping.

I understand that Telltale’s practices are not yet the norm for the industry, but they are blazing a trail that I hope other developers and publishers take note of and follow. Sending a disc-based copy of the game is not just a great way to thank loyal supporters, but it provides them with a hard copy of the content as well.

Hold up just a minute, Angel Raroo. You just brought up a crucial point. With the transitory nature of digital files, what’s going to happen to my downloaded games when my computer’s hard drive crashes or the next generation of home consoles are released?

For the time being, I can most likely re-download games free of charge, but will I be able to do so years down the road? What if ten years from now I want to play Castle Crashers but my Xbox 360’s hard drive has crashed? Will my digitally-downloaded games transfer to the next Xbox system? Don’t tell me that I’m going to have to repurchase games I’ve already paid for.

I’m no fortune teller, but I think it’d be foolish for a company such as Microsoft to make a move that would alienate its loyal user base who purchase and play games via Xbox Live.

When the Xbox 360 was released, gamers were permitted to transfer their Gamertags from the original Xbox, so I’d imagine that they will be able to do something similar when the next Xbox hits store shelves. Besides, I’m sure by that point there will be plenty of new digitally-distributed content for gamers to purchase, so Microsoft won’t need to make gamers repurchase games they bought for the Xbox 360.

You’re forgetting that companies love money and consumers are often stupid enough to purchase games they’ve already paid for. Just look at Mister Raroo’s collection. How many copies of Pac-Man or Super Mario Bros. does he own? It’s pathetic. Why should Nintendo include free NES games in Animal Crossing games when people will pay five bucks a pop for them on the Virtual Console?

When the next Xbox comes out, all Microsoft will need to do is offer the same catalog of Xbox Live Arcade games and there will be plenty of gamers who will pay to buy them all over again, especially if there is “new” content like a slight graphical upgrade or a handful of new Achievements. People like to spend money and they need little incentive to do so.

I’m going to remain more optimistic. Digital downloads are still a relatively new and developing form of distribution. Naturally, it’s going to take some time and a lot of trial and error before digital distribution becomes more standardized and widespread. Nobody can necessarily predict what will happen in the coming years, but I think it’s clear digital distribution is not only here to stay, but it may very well become the leading way in which publishers will sell games to consumers.

The days of having to preorder games and drive to a brick and mortar establishment to pick them up on release day may soon be behind us. Even now gamers can purchase digital equivalents of disc-based games through outlets like Steam and the Playstation Store.

I’m still not convinced. I have no doubt that digital distribution will become even more commonplace than it is now, but I don’t foresee discs going away any time soon. Have you tried downloading a retail-sized game from the Playstation Store? It takes forever!

You can drive to the store, buy the game, and play a good chunk of it by the time the download is finished. Also, as long as people continue to be happy to be pay through the nose for unnecessary downloadable content and add-ons, I refuse to concede that digital distribution will become the be-all, end-all it could be. I do think things will get better, but there are still too many problems with digital distribution for me to fully embrace it.

Phew! All this discussion has me tired out. Let’s tell Mister Raroo to go get us something to drink while we kick back and enjoy some video games. Let’s play Burnout Paradise. I just downloaded it last night from the Playstation Store. It was so nice to download it from the convenience of my house. No driving to the store, no dealing with pushy clerks. Digital distribution is awesome!

Downloaded it? You fool! I went to my local game store and bought a used copy of the game for even cheaper! What are you thinking? Even with heading out to the store I was probably back home enjoying the game before your digital copy was even halfway downloaded. What do you have to say about that?

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

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

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

This week's top story is our interview with Craig Forrester, creator of the popular XNA Community game Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp. Originally a Nintendo DS homebrew title, it's made its way onto the Xbox 360. We discuss the time and effort required to bring it over to XNA.

Outside of that, this weeks XBLA's releases are The Maw and possibly FunTown Mahjong (read that article for the whole ridiculous antics behind this).

The PlayStation Network got its hand with Magic Ball, a new take on Breakout; and GTI Club+, a remake of a classic Konami racer that Gamasutra publisher Simon Carless is quite fond of. WiiWare got the latest game from High Voltage Software, Hot Rod Racing, as well as Family Glide Hockey.

Here's the top news in the space:

Xbox Live Arcade

The Maw And Funtown Mahjong (maybe) Now Available On XBLA
The one-eyed purple beast of the apocalypse makes its way onto XBLA. And in another example of not knowing what's coming out, possibly FunTown Mahjong. Some 5th Grader DLC too.

GamerBytes Interview: From Nintendo DS To XNA Community Games -- How The Cookie Crumbles
We interview Craig Forrester about his recently released XNA game Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp, and its history of originally being Nintendo DS homebrew.

Try Defense Grid: The Awakening Right Now On PC
The upcoming Tower Defense game for the XBLA has released a demo for the PC version -- try before you buy!

Try Out Puzzle Quest Galactrix Via Online Demo
Another PC demo released for upcoming XBLA and PSN title -- give Puzzle Quest Galactrix a shot now.

PlayStation Network

EU PSN Store Update -- Magic Ball and An Explosion Of PSN DLC
Creat Studio's Magic Ball is released, and about a year's worth of High Velocity Bowling DLC released along with it.

US PSN Store Update -- GTI Club+ And Magic Ball
People in North America now get a chance to drive around in a remake of a classic Konami racer, and smash down pirate ships Arkanoid style.

First Footage Of NHL Arcade Revealed
Title says it all -- watch big-headed hockey players slip over banana peels.

Flower Out On February 12th
The PlayStation Network's wind simulator is only three weeks away.

OutRun Online Arcade Not Coming To PSN In America
If you love OutRun and live in America, you're going to have to grab it on XBLA.

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update: High Voltage Hot Rod Show And Family Glide Hockey
High Voltage Software's latest foray onto WiiWare is now up, along with a lower-budget rendition of air hockey.

EU WiiWare Update -- Lonpos
One of the Japanese WiiWare launch titles finally makes its way to Europe.

Hudson Announces Pop'em Drop'em SameGame
Hudson continue their market flood on WiiWare with a new rendition of SameGame.

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

[We're talking to this year's Independent Games Festival finalists, and this time Eric Caoili interviews 24 Caret Games' Matt Gilgenbach about Retro/Grade, a rhythm game and shoot'em-up -- played in reverse -- which is nominated for the Excellence in Design and Audio awards.]

Far from a traditional shoot'em-up, Retro/Grade has players guiding their spacecraft in reverse through stages where the action has already played out.

To prevent damage to the space-time continuum, players dodge lasers returning to the enemies that fired them, while also positioning themselves to "catch" their own reversed shots. Power-ups enable players to temporarily restore the flow of time and correct their movements.

Retro/Grade features rhythm game elements, in that the timing of all the shots are based off beats in the music. Players also have the option of using either a keyboard/gamepad setup or a guitar controller, the latter control scheme allowing players to quickly maneuver their ship through different lanes by hitting corresponding frets.

We spoke with 24 Caret Games' co-founder, game director, and gameplay programmer Matt Gilgenbach about Retro/Grade, nominated for both Excellence in Design and Excellence in Audio awards at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website).

Gilgenbach discusses how the team stumbled upon the game's novel design, the differences between its two control schemes, and the need for publishers to fund innovative, low-budget projects:

What kind of background do you have making games?

Matt Gilgenbach: I’ve been working in the game industry for over five years and have worked on titles for Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3, PSP, GameCube, PC and Mac.

Before co-founding 24 Caret Games, I was the lead gameplay programmer at High Impact Games, where I worked on Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters and Secret Agent Clank. I also worked at Heavy Iron Studios (THQ) as a gameplay programmer on several licensed games.

How did you develop the idea to present a shoot'em-up in reverse?

MG: When we started 24 Caret Games, we wanted to put together a demo in order to get interest from publishers in our company. We were working on something that we’d like to make into a full game, but after almost two months of development, it seemed like the budget required to make it would be too high for it to be successful as a downloadable title in the current marketplace.

Right now, it seems like few indie downloadable titles sell over [100,000 copies], which means that if you want to stay in business, you have to have a very conservative budget. It was a tough decision, but we decided to go back to the drawing board and work on something that stood a better chance of keeping the company afloat.

On our initial demo, we implemented a debugging mode for backing up time in order to repeat sections and fine tune gameplay. My co-worker, Justin Wilder, had the idea that it’d be really cool if we could actually play our game in reverse. I couldn’t think of a way [for that] to work with the gameplay we had, but when we decided to start over, I thought about how to make a game that could be played in reverse.

The idea of repeating predetermined actions is a bit tough to make interesting. I thought the best way would be to constrain the movement of the player character as much as possible because trying to match an arbitrary position in space would be very difficult. As well, I saw that this would make a great rhythm game since we’d need a good indication of timing.

Making it a reverse shoot’em up met all the constraints. As well, in many rhythm games, the visuals are pretty dull, so we thought making the reverse space battle would be cool for any onlookers as well as the players.

In the more difficult modes, you increase the number of space lanes and enemy fire. Did your team explore any other changes to provide more challenging levels to advanced players?

MG: We’ve been very fortunate to get many volunteers from friends and family who are at all different skill levels to focus test in order to help balance the game. One of the main design goals is to make the game accessible and enjoyable to everyone regardless of skill level.

There are a few rules right now that I’ve developed for each difficulty level. They are a work in progress, but currently the rules are as follows. For easy, all the lasers fall on quarter notes, and the patterns are all very simple and repeat often in order for the player to get the hang of them.

For medium, the patterns are more complicated and have less repetition, and there can be lasers on the offbeat, but no eighth notes together. For hard, there are eighth notes together, but always in the same space lane. The hard patterns have little repetition.

For expert, we have eighth notes in different space lanes and some tricky patterns involving the player needing to change lanes rapidly. I’d like to add another difficulty, but I haven’t quite decided where it should go in terms of the difficulties we already have to create an experience that everyone can enjoy.

For a shoot'em up, Retro/Grade's music is, at least in its gameplay trailers, a lot more subdued than the songs you'd find in other titles in the genre, like say Gradius. Could you share how your team came up with the game's sound?

MG: It was difficult to come up with a style that we felt would work well as a rhythm game. Since this is an indie title, we don’t have the resources to license music from [insert your favorite artist here]. However, since this is a rhythm game, we needed to make the music stand out and be something that gamers would enjoy.

We thought it would be cool to do a chiptune/8-bit influenced soundtrack because it matched the retro feel that we are going for and would be appealing to gamers. However, we wanted to take advantage of the high quality sound hardware and not alienate younger audiences that missed out on the 8-bit generation, so we didn’t want something that is pure chiptunes.

We were fortunate enough to be able to contract Skyler McGlothlin, one of my personal favorite musicians, to do the original music and sound effects. It’s very difficult to describe to someone what you want music to sound like, but we did our best to give him an idea of what we were looking for, and he really blew us away with the songs he delivered. I often find myself listening to the MP3s of our soundtrack.

What other music styles did you experiment with?

MG: For the demo we submitted to the IGF, we didn’t have time to create original compositions, but before we contracted Skyler, he was nice enough to give us permission to use tracks from his first album called “Are You an Axolotl” (released as Nautilis).

The style is a bit hard to communicate because it’s quite unique, but I think it would be best described as IDM or glitch. Unfortunately, the intricate drum rhythms made it difficult for the less rhythmically inclined players to place the beat. We decided that to reach the largest audience, we’d need to carefully compose songs that would be easy to follow the beat.

Why did you decide on a horizontal-scrolling shooter, instead of a vertical-scroller? Wouldn't it have more resembled the familiar layouts of music games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band?

MG: Most new displays for both both PC monitors and TVs are widescreen, so we wanted to take advantage of the additional screen real estate. Scrolling the gameplay horizontally on a widescreen display gives us almost twice the space. The extra space allows us to have bigger and better implosions, [and makes] the timing information easier to discern from the positions of the lasers.

You have a normal control scheme for game controllers and keyboards, but you also have a rhythm game control scheme for guitar controllers? Could you talk about how the game play differs with the two control schemes?

MG: I’m a huge sucker for peripherals. I have about every ridiculous peripheral made including the Onimusha Katana Blade Controller, Steel Battalion’s massive simulated cockpit, and The Maestromusic’s conducting baton. The only problem is that often these cool peripherals only work for one game. Although our gameplay differs from guitar-based games, I thought it’d be fun to give people the option to use their peripherals on a different title.

The two control schemes we support are a shooter mode and a rhythm mode. The shooter mode is simpler because you just move the ship up and down and there are buttons to fire and to use your power ups.

The rhythm mode allows you to jump to one of the five space lanes based on which button you press. The rhythm mode is supported on gamepads as well as the keyboard, but since there are five fret buttons, it is a good fit for the guitar controller.

The game is designed so there isn’t an advantage of one control scheme to another -- it just comes down to personal preference. Since in shooter mode, the ship can only move up and down one lane at a time, there’s a limit to how fast the player can move between several space lanes.

However, which space lane the player needs to be in doesn’t have too much of an effect on the difficulty when using the rhythm mode scheme, so allowing the gamers that play with the shooter scheme time to go between lanes doesn’t make the game any less enjoyable for people playing with the rhythm mode control scheme.

Were there any other elements from shoot'em ups, rhythm titles, or any other games that you tried to include, but decided that they got in the way of Retro/Grade's accessibility?

MG: I’ve played percussion since elementary school, so I wanted to support drum peripherals somehow. I tried mapping the controls in several different ways to different drum peripherals, but it didn’t pan out. I’d rather not support drum controllers if it’s not going to be enjoyable.

Were there any elements that you experimented with that just flat out didn't work with your vision?

MG: I tried to make the premise more detailed with a bunch of silly jokes, but putting a bunch of text at the beginning really made it slow for people who just want get to the game.

I’ve done two or three passes on the epilogue (the training mission for a game in reverse) to pare it down to the bare minimum to get people up to speed on the mechanics. I realized that people playing a demo just want to get to the gameplay and see if they enjoy it.

Going forward, perhaps I’ll be able to work more humor in between levels, or at the very least, provide some supplementary materials on the web for people who really dig our game.

What sort of development tools did your team use?

MG: We use Maya for 3d modeling and Visual Studio for coding.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

Ideally, we would have started on Retro/Grade as soon as we formed the company. However, that would have been difficult since the core idea came from something we thought of while working on our initial idea. We also spent some time early on looking at doing projects for other people, but we didn’t find anything that was a good fit for our strengths as a team.

What do you think of the state of independent game development, and are there any other independent games out that you currently admire?

MG: I think due to the rising costs of development for the average game, independent games are emerging as the main source of innovation in the industry.

Last generation when there was more titles being developed (all with significantly smaller budgets), publishers were willing to have a few risky titles in their portfolios on the chance that one would become a smash hit. From an economic standpoint, it doesn’t make sense for a large publisher to gamble $10-20 million dollars on something that is experimental.

However, passionate individuals are more than willing to bet on their ideas because they believe in them. This is the independent spirit that drives people to create some really amazing games that push the envelope of games as an artistic medium.

In particular, I admire the work of Jason Rohrer. He created Passage, which despite running at a resolution of 100x16, manages to create more real emotion than many of the big budget games with the most realistic graphics. I haven’t found someone to play Between with yet, but I’m excited to play it and will be rooting for him at the IGF.

One thing about indie games that I find pretty unfortunate is there is no publisher that focuses on funding innovative, low budget projects. The problem with self-funding projects is that if a studio’s first indie title flops, they may not be able to afford to create another title.

There are many reasons why an indie title can flop that aren’t a reflection on the skill of the developers. Perhaps a similar product came out at the same time and stole some of the spotlight away. Maybe word of mouth didn’t travel fast enough to keep the developer afloat. Or perhaps the harsh economic climate caused the developers to run out of money before the game was completed.

I would think that it could be quite profitable for a publisher to fund innovative, low budget XBLA/PSN/PC downloadable titles and take some of the risks away from the game developers.

Obviously, the small developers would be trading risk for a share of the profits because the publisher would have to amortize the games that weren’t profitable with the proceeds from the games that were. Maybe that would take some of the indie spirit away, but it seems like a business model that could be mutually beneficial to all involved.

As well, it could help push the medium forward by helping new ideas turn into fully-realized games that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day.

I imagine that no major publisher would be interested in having a division that focuses on indie games because they would much prefer to devote their resources to their large financial risks, so they don’t have the bandwidth to put people on these smaller projects that could be profitable, but are a small fraction of the company’s revenue.

Perhaps one of the smaller publishers will move into this market and provide developers with financing, QA, localization, a small amount of marketing and put their games on all the popular digital distribution channels.

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Zooming into the weekend, the GameSetLinks hath returned, with up front, a mysterious, now indie creator in Japan giving some rather handy tips on how to strike out on one's own.

Plenty more in here, though, with the Game Studies web zine returning with more smart articles, plus an awesome 1UP retro Konami music interview, plus Guitar Hero research, game journalism cheek tongue interfacing, IC's Sheffield ruling the waves Hirai-style, et cetera.

Forgive us:

Japanmanship: But more, much more than this…
Useful practical notes for the independent creator from the ex-pat in Japan.

Game Studies - Issue 0802, 2008
Aha, a new instalment, with World Of Warcraft talk and other neat semi-academic pieces - via Juul.

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : An interview with Konami's Hidenori Maezawa, pt. 1
Absolutely excellent set of retro interviews with VRC6 guy - pt.2, pt.3.

insertcredit.com: 'Playstation 3 official leader of game industry, I am official leader of game journalism'
Sheffield is king! Long live the king!

Aion Gives NCsoft Triple Crown | Korea IT Times
With an oddly sandwiched interview with me about my judging for the Global Online Game Awards in December.

Alex Litel's Lackluster Emporium: What is games journalism?
Silly, still linking it.

guitar hero: a research blog: interview tidbits: on musicality in Guitar Hero and Rock Band
Kiri Miller, whose research we've featured on GSW a few times, has some good audio snippets about Guitar Hero as a cultural movement.

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

['The Interactive Palette' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive 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. This time - a look at the use of scale in Katamari Damacy.]

The narrative of most video games is one of increasing power. The player begins the game weak and unskilled, and gradually gains experience and abilities over the course of gameplay.

Typically, games start off relatively easy and become more difficult, with the hardest part of the game being the end. In some games, like roleplaying games, this character growth is explicit, represented by increasing statistics. In others, such as many arcade games, there is only the player's growing skill and experience.

Nowhere is the process of increasing character power made more concrete than in Namco's Katamari Damacy. The game begins with the player character smaller than an apple, rolling up tiny object into his ball, or katamari. By the end of the game, the player character is pushing a ball bigger than a city and tearing up continents.

Pac-Man

Katamari Damacy has essentially the same gameplay as Namco's most famous product, Pac-Man. The player overcomes navigational difficulties to collect a large number of mostly identical objects.

When a certain number of objects has been collected, play progresses to a different arena. Their settings and aesthetics are different, but the feeling of collecting "stuff" and the flow of an efficient path is shared between both games.

The biggest gameplay difference between the two games is how challenge is added. In Pac-Man, the player must avoid and neutralize malicious ghosts. If she is caught by the ghosts too many times, the game is over. In Katamari Damacy, the player is constrained by a timer and the scale of her character. Collecting objects increases the size of the player's ball, and the bigger the objects, the bigger the ball must be before the player can collect them.

It is the sense of scale, however, that truly sets the games apart. When playing Pac-Man, later levels mean faster and less vulnerable ghosts. The game is harder, but it is essentially the same experience. With Katamari Damacy, on the other hand, there is an immediate and dramatic difference between the early game and the late game. Because the objects being collected are recognizable, the player can see the difference between collecting a toothpick and uprooting a skyscraper. The ball itself even handles differently; the larger it gets, the slower and more ponderous its motion becomes.

This dramatic sense of scale greatly enhances the player's feeling of progression and accomplishment. By making the player feel increasingly powerful, the game heightens the emotional impact of advancement. The player's excitement over her progress causes her to become more invested and immersed in the game.

Techniques

Katamari Damacy achieves its sense of scale in several ways. The first is by using clear objects of reference. Second, it provides continuity as the player's ball grows. Finally, the player's sensory experience changes with the game's scale.

Katamari Damacy's setting provides it with clear objects of reference that help the player quickly and easily gauge her size. The game is set in a stylized version of the modern world, populated with many objects, from dice to people to cars to houses. These simply-rendered objects immediately provide a cue as to the size of the player's ball. Imagine if the game were set in a fantasy world. The modern player does not have a firm grasp of how big a castle or dragon should be, so scale in this hypothetical Katamari Fantasy would be much more vague.

Likewise, if Katamari Damacy's portrayal of its setting was more realistic, then there would be a wider variety of each type of object, and fewer objects scattered about. There would be several subtly different sizes of car and more variation of houses, while the ground would no longer be littered with neat rows of tulips or clusters of teddy bears.

Another valuable technique that Katamari Damacy uses is continuity of scale. Over the course of a single level, the player's ball grows from a few centimeters to a few meters or more. Objects that were once so large that they didn't register in the player's attention gradually become small enough to absorb. Because this process happens continuously, the player can say, "I recognize that tree; a few minutes ago, I was rolling among its roots."

The developers could have made each size class a seperate level, with one level where the player is the size of an orange, and another where she controls a katamari the size of a beachball. In this case, the player would still have an intellectual awareness of growth, but she would lose the visceral feeling of gradual growth, and the retrospective ability to see the now-tiny place where the level started.

The third technique for highlighting scale is the change in sensation associated with the change in size. A small katamari is nimble but light, able to turn on a dime but liable to be bounced around by larger objects and unable to roll over obstacles with its momentum. A large katamari is the opposite; it's slow and massive. At its largest, a katamari is hard to turn and slow to accelerate, but once it gets going, it plows through or over everything in its path.

In addition to this tactile sensation, there are effective visual cues to size. Each size milestone is associated with a woosh and a zoom out. This presumably serves to mask certain graphical anomalies related to the disappearance of small items, but it also is a compelling message that the ball is indeed getting larger. At the end of a level, when the katamari is as huge as it will get, the camera pulls out far, and the level is obscured by clouds or fog, highlighting the extreme size of the ball.

Applying Scale

Obviously, not every video game has a protagonist that grows extremely in size. The techniques for scale that Katamari Damacy uses cannot be directly applied. However, as previously discussed, most games have a gradual increase in power over the course of a level or the entire game. This increase in power can be highlighted in the same way that Katamari highlights its increase in size.

Katamari Damacy contains objects that serve as size reference points. Other games can use similar reference points. A combat game where the protagonist becomes more skilled with a gun can have easily recognized enemy archetypes. At the beginning of the game, enemy footsoldiers can be a challenge; by the end, the player is skilled and equipped enough to handle special forces. Half-Life does this well; headcrabs are initially a dangerous threat, but they eventually become tiny and simple-to-kill in comparison to the huge alien grunts.

Katamari Damacy's continuity of scale can be adapted by enforcing a unity of setting on games. Players can be shown familiar landmarks, which they return to repeatedly through the game with increasing abilities. If the player is able to return to easier areas of the game, she will have a more concrete idea of how far she has progressed.

Finally, the progression of a character can be shown through the feel and look of the game. Controlling a more powerful protagonist should be a different experience. Knytt Stories is an excellent example of this. The game begins with a slow, not-too-nimble protagonist, but as the character Juni gains abilities, she becomes faster, more agile, and simply feels more fluid. This is more than just the acquisition of a hookshot to bypass a barrier; a late-game Juni feels different from an early-game Juni.

By taking lessons from Katamari Damacy, developers can create game experiences that better portray the experience of gaining power that is essential to so many video games. When a player feels herself becoming more experienced or capable, she will have a stronger emotional reaction to the game and will feel more invested in her actions. When a protagonist is powerful, it should feel powerful to control. It's one thing to read that a character is level 20, and another for it to feel 20 times as strong as it used to be.

[Gregory Weir is a writer, game developer, and software programmer. He maintains Ludus Novus, a podcast and accompanying blog dedicated to the art of interaction. He can be reached at Gregory.Weir@gmail.com.]

Posted by Gregory Weir at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[In the third of a series picking out the most notable Game Developers Conference 2009 lectures, sister site Gamasutra examines the Game Design Track, with newly added talks from the World of Warcraft: Wrath Of The Lich King, Mass Effect 2, and Warhammer Online creators.]

Game Developers Conference 2009 (organized by Gamasutra parent company Think Services) is set to take place in San Francisco's Moscone Center from March 23 to 27, 2009.

With nearly 280 sessions now confirmed for GDC 2009, we'll be taking a track by track look at the conference's line-up over the next few weeks.

Third on the list is GDC's Game Design Track, which will help attendees "understand and exploit the possibilities of new technologies," and also explore the "challenges and ramifications of the interaction between new technologies and established techniques."

Notable highlights thus far announced for this track are as follows:

- The 'Cruise Director of Azeroth: Directed Gameplay within World of Warcraft', Blizzard Entertainment's Jeffrey Kaplan explains the guidelines and philosophies directing the creation of World of Warcraft content, and will also provide an informative look at the popular MMORPG's "quest system and how it has changed over time, with Wrath of the Lich King being the latest evolution."

- Project manager Corey Andruko and lead technical designer Dusty Everman will present a highly anticipated session on "The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware's Mass Effect 2." The two will examine major issues encountered while building the original Mass Effect, and will share the sequel's new level-creation process.

- Mythic Entertainment's ribald Paul Barnett will share how his team managed to take a beloved franchise like Warhammer and "convert it into to an MMO that's fun in its own right", as he recounts humorous anecdotes from the Warhammer Online developer's process of 'Making an MMO Based on a Beloved IP (Without Pissing Everyone Off)'.

- Last year's Game Design Challenge champion, Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky, will compete against two as yet unrevealed combatants in 'The Game Design Challenge: My First Time.' The contestants will pitch a game concept that brings the themes of sex and autobiography together, providing for a session full of "extremely innovative and uncomfortably revealing design thinking."

- In his 'Vast Narratives and Open Worlds, Part Deux -- Big Huge Problems' session, Ken Rolston -- lead designer of the recent Elder Scrolls games -- will talk about his new open-world RPG with Big Huge Games. Along with BHG's lead designer Mark Nelson, he'll discuss the "unique and varied challenges associated with designing a vast open-world game, how to avoid them, and what to do when they inevitably occur."

In addition, a number of other already announced lectures are notable highlights in the Design Track:

- In 'Player's Expression: The Level Design Structure Behind Far Cry and Beyond?', Ubisoft's lead level designer Jonathan Morin will share "proven design tools to support extensive player’s expression," as well as "examples on how to use those in the future to expand beyond what was done on Far Cry 2."

- Lionhead Studios's Peter Molyneux will display visual and playable examples for a range of both successful and failed ideas from his studio in 'Lionhead Experiments Revealed', depicting "cutting edge technology from several different disciplines."

- In 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band', Harmonix senior designer Dan Teasdale looks to inspire designers to "subvert the yearly franchise excuses that kill design innovation, and strive to push forward on innovating in their own titles, regardless of development time, franchise, or mechanic."

The full Game Design Track line-up to date includes many more notable lectures and roundtables, including discussions on breathing life into open worlds, camera-based gaming, screenwriting techniques, and many more.

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

[In an excerpt from new book Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts, an exhaustive Chronicle Books-published history of the veteran game company, author Rob Smith takes a look at Habitat, the innovative, ahead of its time 1980s-era virtual world that Lucasfilm Games made for the Commodore 64.]

Research & Development: Habitat

A couple of years into the [Lucasfilm] games group's existence, a sense remained that their work was all a big experiment.

Indeed, the entire Computer Division could be seen as an experiment, as it researched high-end digital-editing technology for implementation in all aspects of filmmaking. Still, the charter early on from Lucas was to be innovative, and that meant unique research projects within Lucasfilm Games.

Habitat (known as "MicroCosm" until trademark issues prompted a name change; earlier iterations were "Lucasfilm Universe," "Lucasfilm Games Alliance," and "Lucasnet") stands out today as an astutely forward-thinking project. It was philosophically in tune with what gamers wanted, and was technologically about ten years ahead of its time.

The Commodore 64 computer had a foothold in the U.S. home-computer market, and a 300-baud modem was the latest add-on gizmo that had captured the attention of hardcore enthusiasts.

To support the launch of the modem by ensuring that content was available, Commodore had invested in an online company called Quantum Computer Services. Commodore approached Lucasfilm Games in a search for content that could run through the online company's QuantumLink service.

Customers were paying online service providers such as CompuServe $12 an hour to access the fledgling network (and even $20 an hour for access during peak daytime hours). Q-Link, as it was known, undercut that price to around $3.60 an hour by renting out spare, unused server space during low-usage times.

Through this partnership a deal was hatched to produce an online game, with Lucasfilm Games creating the front-end game -- Habitat -- on the Commodore 64, and Q-Link producing the back-end, server-side software.

"We knew it was going to be hard, but we knew that connected storytelling was fundamentally where games should and would go," says Steve Arnold. Designer Noah Falstein had been working with one of the team engineers, Chip Morningstar, on the game concept. To capture the broadest reach of potential customers, they settled on a familiar modern day setting.

Development began in 1985 and sketched out a virtual world where each player had an in-game "avatar" -- a word defining a player's online representation (and still used today). These characters could interact with other players, connected in a massive online world composed of 20,000 "regions" -- essentially individual screens connected to as many as four additional regions.

Even within the company, explaining this brave new frontier of interactive entertainment wasn't easy: its concept simply hadn't existed up to this point, and so artist Gary Winnick created a storyboard to illustrate the idea in pictures.

Despite the apparent advantage of not having to program artificial intelligence for in-game characters, given that all the players were real people, creating rules for player interactions required the developers to broach subjects never before considered in game design.

Remarked Chip Morningstar in a long treatise on Habitat's creative process: "A special circle of living Hell awaits the implementers of systems involving that most important category of autonomous computational agents: groups of interacting human beings."

The team needed to ask innumerable questions about what was allowed and what rules or laws governed player interaction; for example, if you permitted an action like taking an object from another player, what happens when one character takes an item and runs or logs off?

To find workable answers took trial, error, and incredibly creative thinking—and also required a significant beta test among the Q-Link users.

The game debuted internally at Lucasfilm Games at a company meeting in early 1988, with Gary Winnick creating in-game avatars that looked like George Lucas and Steve Arnold. Only 500 disks of the beta software for this superbly innovative project were made available, and they were quickly snapped up by Q-Link users.

Chat rooms were the major entertainment source over these 300-baud modems, and the Rabbit Jack's Casino program proved popular among the 50,000 Q-Link subscribers. Some 15,000 Rabbit Jack's disks had been distributed to the subscriber list and players of that game accounted for about three percent of the total system usage.

Upon its beta release, Habitat's 500-disk distribution went to users who gobbled enough logged time to account for a full one percent of the entire system usage. Clearly the product spoke the language of early online-entertainment adopters, and this relatively small group of users was spending a vast amount of time exploring and interacting with the world and its people.

It looked like Habitat was a huge hit-in-the-making, and so in the fall of 1988 the beta was taken to a New York nightclub for a launch party as Lucasfilm Games and Q-Link prepared to revolutionize gaming.

But a problem lurked.

Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network's entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack's Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. "The way the system was built, the server software wasn’t capable of hosting that population while still being successful," recalls Arnold.

Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.

From a business perspective, however, Habitat wasn’t a failure. The game was licensed to Fujitsu for use on its FM Towns PC-like platform, and the successor to Habitat was recast (with several of the original planned features now cut) as Corpe Caribe, described as an online Club Med, where it enjoyed some success.

Though Habitat never received a commercial release in the United States, Lucasfilm Games was able to recoup most of its development costs through these side deals. As for Quantum Computer Services, in 1989 -- just a year after working toward a launch for Habitat -- the company changed its name to America Online.

The pioneering work on Habitat by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, the two programming gurus who had built the system infrastructure, earned them a First Penguin Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001.

Conceived by co-worker Noah Falstein, the award [was given annually] "to recognize the courage and bravery of a developer who tested the proverbial waters, uncertain of success or failure. A 'First Penguin' served as a lesson, and inspiration, to the rest of the community over the years."

[Rogue Leaders is available now, and also includes "300 pieces of concept art, character development sketches and storyboards... to showcase the creative talent behind such video game classics as The Secret of Monkey Island Grim Fandango and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, as well as games that were never publicly released."]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Ah yes, the GameSetLinks slight return, and we start off this time with Steve Gaynor's 'getting into the industry' post over at Fullbright, which is correctly, usefully on topic as regards making the jump from interested gamer to actual game developer.

Also hanging out in the melting pot - MSX emulated games making another return to the West, a historical game jaunt in honor of Obama's presidency, Flash game postmortems, Ridge Racer retrospectives, and much more.

Flat Eric:

Fullbright: Informative
Good post by 2K Marin's Steve Gaynor on how he got into the industry - extremely, usefully practical.

How can a game teach a system? (Ethan Kennerly)
An interesting theoretical piece: 'Which games teach systems? And: What systems are they teaching? My experience playing games doesn't touch the tip of the iceberg, but here's a few of my opinions.'

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : MSX digi-distribution to return with international Project EGG site
MSX is obscure, but lots of fun - and also notable: 'We expect to expand our cooperation with D4 Enterprise in many other ways as well, such as the distribution of games for the iPhone/iPodTouch via the Apple Appstore.'

Game Design Reviews: Excit: Post-Mortem
A fun to read postmortem of an Excel pastiche Flash game...

Vintage Computing and Gaming | Archive » The First Black Video Game Character
'In honor of this watershed moment in American history, I thought we should pay tribute to another African-American trailblazer: the first black video game character.'

Retrospective: Ridge Racer Revolution | Edge Online
These Edge mag retrospectives continue to be quite linkable. Shame they're now giving away basically all of their content online, giving me no motivation to subscribe, though.

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

[Leading up to the 2009 Independent Games Festival in March, Eric Caoili is talking with the finalists for the preeminent indie game competition, this time interviewing Kyle Pulver and Peter Jones about Snapshot, a 2D PC platformer with a photography twist and a Yoshi's Island-esque visual style.]

In Snapshot, players guide Pic through a colorful, pastel-hued world in which they can capture objects or creatures with a photograph, then place them elsewhere to reach previously inaccessible areas, complete puzzles, or move around creatures.

We spoke with the game's core team, designer/programmer Kyle Pulver and designer/artist Peter Jones, about Snapshot -- which was nominated for an Excellence in Design award at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website).

Subjects discussed include how the team motivated themselves to complete the project, the designers' thoughts on I Wish I Were The Moon's photo element, and planned features for future Snapshot builds, which include a Portal-esque mechanic that allows players to record and redirect the velocity and direction of moving objects:

What kind of background do you have making games?

Kyle Pulver: Being fresh out of college, I don't have any actual games industry experience just yet. I've been making games in one way or another since I grabbed a copy of Klik and Play when I was 10 or 11 years old. And of course, [I've been] playing games all my life.

I didn't really get into this whole indie games scene until last year when I released Bonesaw: The Game after almost a year and a half of working on it. Since then, I've been just making some small games for the competitions at TIGSource with Everyone Loves Active 2 and Verge.

Peter Jones: I, too, have never really had any actual industry experience, but like Kyle, have grown up on video games. During college, I was involved with some personal projects like Splotch! and Puzmagraph with other students. Since Snapshot was submitted, a friend and I released Memix, a puzzle/memory game for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

How did you develop the idea to add this photography element to a platformer?

PJ: I actually had a really weird dream in October of 2007. I was being chased by this crazy animal, and for whatever reason, with a disposable camera in hand, I snapped a photo of it just as it lunged at me. After I lowered the camera, it was gone.

I like telling people it was this huge bear, but I think if I remember right, it was a squirrel or something like that. After that, I woke up, frantically wrote it all down, and spent most of that morning's Biology class explaining to Kyle how it would make an awesome game (without much resistance).

KP: It really seemed like the perfect idea to pursue. As for being a platformer specifically, I just happen to love platformers to death, and I think Pete and myself both knew that making the game a 2D platformer would be the best bet. I had just finished a rather lengthy platformer game, so that's the genre I have the most experience in.

PJ: That was a crazy dream.

The game has been in the works since November 2007, right? What has the development process been like?

PJ: Kyle and I had used Snapshot as our thesis project at Clarkson University, so we were lucky to have imposed deadlines to keep us on track. Our assignment was to create more of a proof of concept. The idea of moving objects around seemed pretty complicated to us, and we weren't sure how it would translate on the fun scale.

Since the thesis presentation (and graduation!), Kyle and I have been involved in separate projects with plans to pick up development after this year's GDC.

KP: The deadlines definitely helped when we were working on it last year. Either we finished the project, or we didn't graduate. That can really motivate you to work on something. We got a lot done while at school, but since then, it's been tough to pick it back up with both of us going separate ways. The IGF nomination has definitely put us back into the zone though.

Can you tell us about the game's hero, Pic, and his motivations in Snapshot?

PJ: We're still working on the details of Snapshot's story, but I can give you the general idea from a gameplay's perspective. Snapshot obviously revolves around a mysterious camera. Parts of Pic's camera are stolen and scattered around his world.

During his adventure to collect the missing parts, a separate more sinister plot will arise and Pic will find himself in the middle of a conflict bigger than himself.

KP: Whoa that sounds pretty epic. I can't wait.

What are some examples of some of the more clever ways players can move around objects?

PJ: One of my favorites is that Pic will eventually gain the ability to rotate pictures and also take "action shots." Any objects that are captured will retain their velocity and direction so that you might have a projectile that you can capture, flip 180 degrees, and fire back at its shooter.

KP: In the future we want to move toward more of a freeform physics-based gameplay environment. Rotating photos and carrying an object's momentum is a great example of something we want to achieve in upcoming builds of the game, and something that will add a lot of life to it.

Imagine that there's a box that falls down from high above, and if the player is quick enough, they can snag it in a photo as it's falling. Now, when they go to place that photo, they can rotate it in any direction they want before it gets pasted. The box will launch out of the pasted photo depending on how its rotated.

If the player finds a bomb that has a button on one side of it, they can snap a photo of it, rotate it, and drop it so it lands on the button and it blows up, and that can knock down a wall or damage a large enemy or something along those lines.

Were there any new ideas for new snapshot uses that you came up with while experimenting with the game's mechanics?

KP: One of the ideas we came up with while actually messing around with the engine was the idea that you can take pictures of a door and paste it back onto a wall to access a new area. We added this in at the very end of the level in the IGF build.

The player finds a door that seemingly leads to nowhere, but hovering the camera over it shows that it can be captured in a photo. If the player can find where to paste the door, they can walk through it and advance to the next area.

Have you played Daniel Benmergui's I Wish I Were The Moon? It has a similar snapshot mechanic, though presented on a smaller scale. What are your thoughts on that title, and its use of photos?

KP: I played I Wish I Were The Moon when the Redux version came out, I missed the first version of it. At first, when I played it, I thought, "Oh crap, there's a game that uses photos already."

It's a great sort of bite-sized game that's easy to enjoy. After spending some time on it, I still don't think I've found all the endings, but I don't want to resort to a using a walkthrough to ruin it. It's pretty awesome that games which are so different can share the same unique mechanic.

PJ: Now I have! I think the idea that your actions permanently change the final outcome is really interesting.

Can you describe how you developed the game's art style, and why you chose this particular look? It's very Yoshi's Island-esque.

PJ: We went through a few different styles for Snapshot and had a tough time deciding how our protagonist would look. Since its submission, we've begun determining a storyline that will probably dictate some sort of change in its general appearance.

However, from the start, we knew Snapshot should be a vibrant, picturesque environment almost out of a storybook. It was natural that we looked to Yoshi's Island as a source of inspiration. It has always stood out in my mind as one of the most beautiful games across the board.

We also never expected Snapshot to get this much attention, so we're excited to continue refining and refreshing its artistic development to provide the most unique and appealing experience possible.

The game is still in its prototype stages -- can you share some of the gameplay elements that you intend to eventually include?

PJ: We have a lot of exciting game play elements that we want to include. We hope to have a way for Pic to take a picture of himself, and create a copy that exists and moves like he does for a limited time. We'll have "gate keepers" that want a picture of something, not necessarily an object, before they'll let you pass.

It would be cool to use the negative space of a pasted picture in order to pass through certain barriers. Double-prints, enlargements, film negatives -- some of our best ideas have come up mid-development, so there are a lot more elements waiting to be discovered.

Oh, I've also always wanted passive animals in a game. Why is everything trying to kill you? That's not cool; so I thought it would be fun to have some animals that even run away at the sight of you. A side quest might be to capture every type of animal and enemy in the game. And then you'd have to build a team, to fight other animals ... just kidding.

KP: Most of the game will be based around the concept that you'll be able to deconstruct and reassemble the level through photos as you play. Besides the photographs, though, we also have plans to incorporate some grapple hook and climbing type stuff, because that's always fun.

We also want to try to appeal to the collectathon lovers out there by rewarding players for bringing back photos of objects, enemies, or anything else they can find, and displaying them in a big trophy room of sorts. The final game will definitely have a lot of layers so there will be something there for all types of players.

What sort of development tools did your team use?

KP: Everything that exists in the game right now is made with Multimedia Fusion. I had built a level editor with MMF, as well as the game engine. Unfortunately, we're starting to hit some of the limitations of MMF, and it has a lot of overhead for getting relatively simple things running, so we're going to have to explore other options in the months ahead.

PJ: We used some software called Adobe Photoshop too, you should check it out. It's pretty effective at creating images.

If you could start the project over again, what would you do differently?

PJ: We had such a small time span to get it ready for our thesis presentation. I think a second go-around would see a little more time spent planning on exactly what we wanted. Since we didn't have too much time, we had to dive right into it.

KP: I think that having a real programmer on board from the start would've been nice. I've been trying to do my best with Multimedia Fusion, and I think I've done a pretty good job so far, but it sure would've been a lot smoother if I wasn't the one coding.

Time wasn't on our side, as we had to have a polished presentation ready in about 10 weeks from when we actually started. Instead of having a lot of half-finished mechanics, we just decided to have a small set of polished ones.

What do you think of the state of independent game development, and are there any other independent games out that you currently admire?

KP: I'm brand new into this crazy world of making games, so I can't really offer any profound thoughts on the state of indie games. It's definitely a growing space with limitless potential (Could I say anything more generic?).

With tools out there like Game Maker, Multimedia Fusion, XNA, and countless others, anyone with access to a computer can make something, and having that kind of openness is going to result in (and has resulted in) some amazing things I'm sure.

I hope that the model of publishing games will evolve in a way that will really open doors for some of the small teams or individuals with great games. Crayon Physics Deluxe is among my favorites right now, and before that it was World of Goo and Aquaria.

I'm a big fan of Konjak's work and Noitu Love 2 was one of my favorite games of last year. Long before that, I really enjoyed Within a Deep Forest, and Lyle in Cube Sector, and so many more that I couldn't possibly name them all.

As of lately, all the indie games on my PC have completely taken me away from my consoles. There's just something about playing a game that was only developed by one person or a small team of people. The experience is just more personal than playing a huge big budget game.

PJ: There's so many great things going on that it's hard to keep up with it. We were both lucky enough to go to college in the same town that Jason Rohrer lives in. I love showing "non-gamers" and artists Passage to see their reaction. His titles reach an emotional level that I can only dream of achieving at this point.

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

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Summer Session, a teen summer school PC casual simulation/story game by Hanako Games in collaboration with Tycoon Games.]

PC casual game title Summer Session is a dating simulation implemented in Ren'Py. That means that it belongs to a long tradition of Japanese dating sims, but is quite unlike anything in the U.S. casual or hardcore markets: it deals with the management of time and resources, certainly, but the chief goal is to connect with one or more of the girls you encounter.

Game-play in Summer Session consists of two kinds of interaction. One is pure resource-management: you set up your schedule, a week at a time, to determine what you'll do each afternoon. You're allowed one activity per day. Activities adjust your stats: studying makes you smarter but less cool, exercising makes you stronger, and so on.

In this respect, Summer Session is a lot like Kudos, only quicker to play through, and without the mini-games associated with some tasks. Also as in Kudos, you can go to the mall on weekends and stock up on objects that improve your stats or make your life easier somehow.

Unlike Kudos, though, Summer Session also allows you some direct conversation with your friends and potential girlfriends. These interactions can directly influence how people feel about you; the key is usually to demonstrate that you've been paying attention to the characterization by discussing topics that interest the person you're talking to.

In practice, I found Summer Session hugely more appealing than Kudos. For one thing, characters are presented as distinct individuals, and their interactions with you aren't purely dependent on their assessment of how cool you are. For another, the scope of Summer Session is more modest and the days play through faster, so that the experience is proportionally more story-content and less busywork.

Speaking of story, though: the first few times you play Summer Session, you probably won't experience much of a narrative arc. Instead, you'll bumble around trying to impress everyone (or even just a chosen girl or two); fail to do so; and possibly even fail the biology class that you're there to take. It'll feel like a somewhat aimless summer full of social near-misses, but no particular cohesion -- a lot like real life, as seen without the organizing structure of fiction.

Those near-misses guide replay -- not only replay to win, but replay to produce a narrative.

There are many possible encounters with other characters that depend on being at the right place at the right time; having them go well requires that you also have the right statistical profile. Some girls are interested only in a boy who is cool, or smart, or wealthy. Usually it's only possible to achieve the right balance if you go in knowing more or less what a given girl is looking for, and when and where you can expect to find her.

Getting any one of these girls interested in you will require a number of encounters. I found (somewhat to my surprise) that despite its straightforward-seeming choice-based gameplay, Summer Session is actually pretty hard. Several of the girls require that you be proficient in more than one thing, and you also can't win the game if you slack off too much: passing the biology course is a prerequisite for any other form of success.

So a fair amount of work goes into any successful ending; and, of course, it helps to have already had a number of passes through the early dialogue portions, so that you can be sure to say the right things to people early on to make them like you.

The tight structure gives the game a bit of challenge and more replayability, but it also has a narrative value. A winning playthrough not only has more meaningful events than an unsuccessful one, it also has fewer extraneous events.

The design of the game is such that if the player is pursuing one particular girl using an effective strategy, he'll necessarily be skipping a bunch of activities that he doesn't have time for -- and he's therefore less likely to have his playthrough contaminated, as it were, by encounters that really only matter to a different narrative arc.

That's not an absolute guarantee that everything you do in a successful story arc will turn out to be relevant to the story, and there are some events that happen consistently on every playing or that are significant in multiple story versions. Nonetheless, there's a strong tendency for coherence to go along with winning.

That design feature is helped along by a bit of player psychology. The game allows you to go into "skip mode" when replaying, which speeds through dialogue passages that you've seen before. Extensive use of skip mode makes the more mundane parts of the game fade into the background even more.

The realistic, life-like one-day-at-a-time pacing of the first playthroughs gives way to a more story-oriented pacing, in which the many afternoons you spend uneventfully studying or working in the computer lab are allowed to blur together, and only the highlights of the story get extensive attention.

In other words, the experience of the game changes not only because the program generates different output, but also because the player (encouraged by the presentation style) perceives, processes, and weights similar output differently.

This is really pretty ingenious. There are quite a few games in which the story ends well if the player wins, badly if he fails; there are many others in which the player isn't really allowed to fail permanently. Overall, Summer Session is unusual in offering a simulation to the player if he loses, but a story if he wins.

That's not to say Summer Session has a flawless design. It can be frustrating, in particular, to replay thinking you've got a likely strategy to win with a new girl, only to have it fail towards the end. If you get almost-but-not-quite the right combination, you'll have to restart from scratch.

And then there are limits on the ambition of the stories; however well you do, you still wind up with a lightweight tale of adolescent infatuation. Several of the characters are basic stereotypes; it makes sense for gameplay reasons that they need to have a complementary set of behaviors and preferences, but sometimes it all feels a little too formal and formulaic.

Then again, some of the characters rise above their surroundings -- I particularly liked the prickly, insecure Midori. And I was satisfied after my ambition to chat up my teacher ended in rejection when I failed my end-of-term test. (I don't know whether she would have gone out with me if I'd passed. Maybe. But as it happens, the rejection seemed fitting, and probably wiser on her part, too.)

I've played a few other games by Hanako, and while most of them shared the Ren'Py engine and the Japanese-styled aesthetic of Summer Session, none quite hit this narrative sweet spot in the same way.

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

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

[Here's the second set of IGF announcements for this year - and as always, the Student Showcase winners span an amazing variety of genres, countries, and styles - congratulations to all those honored, and thanks to everyone for entering.]

The 2009 Independent Games Festival (IGF) has announced the ten winners in the Student Showcase for its 11th annual awards, with games from three continents spanning ecological, paint-splattering and fantasy exercise games to be shown at GDC this year.

Chosen from a new record of 145 Student Showcase entries (up over 15% on last year's 125 entries), these games will go on to compete for an overall Best Student Game prize, to be awarded at the IGF Awards Ceremony on the evening of March 25th, 2009.

Some of this year's Student Showcase winners include CMU's 'active play' exercise-centered game Winds Of Orbis, quirky Danish first-person dish cleaning game Dish Washington (pictured), and ecological management puzzle game City Rain from Brazilian students.

Also honored are titles including USC's abstract painting game The Unfinished Swan and reality-manipulating German side scrolling shooter Zeit Squared:

All IGF finalist games will be exhibited at the IGF Pavilion at this year’s Game Developers Conference. GDC, Think Services' annual conference dedicated to the art, science and business of games, takes place March 23rd-27th at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Each finalist in the IGF Student Showcase will receive a $500 travel stipend to help aid expenses for the trip to GDC 2009. The winner of the IGF Best Student Game Award will receive a special trophy and $2,500 cash prize during the ceremony.

The Student Showcase games and game mods that will be considered for the 2009 Best Student Game Award are all highlighted on a special page on the IGF website.

The full list of finalists is as follows:

- Tag: The Power Of Paint (DigiPen Institute Of Technology, Seattle)
- Feist (Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland)
- Winds Of Orbis (Carnegie Mellon - Entertainment Technology Center, Pittsburgh)
- Dish Washington (The National Academy of Digital, Interactive Entertainment, Denmark)
- The Unfinished Swan (University of Southern California)
- Where Is My Heart? (Universität Ulm, Germany)
- The Color Of Doom (The Guildhall at SMU, Texas)
- City Rain - Building Sustainability (Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil)
- Kid The World Saver (University Of Southern California)
- Zeit Squared (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)

The IGF was established in 1998 by Think Services to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers, in the same way that the Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community.

Notable previous IGF honorees include many of today's breakthrough independent games, from Number None's Braid through 2D Boy's World Of Goo and Invisible Handlebar's Audiosurf. Previous Student Showcase winners have included Narbacular Drop - subsequently evolved into Game Developers Choice Game Of The Year winner Portal - and Cloud, from the student team who then created downloadable titles Flow and Flower.

GDC 2009 will continue its support of independent gaming with the return of the Independent Games Summit on March 23rd and 24th. The IGF Pavilion, where GDC attendees can experience the finalist games in the IGF Main, Student, and Mobile Competitions, is open in Moscone West from March 25th to 27th.

For more information on the Independent Games Festival, please visit the official IGF website; to register for GDC, please visit the official Game Developers Conference site.

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

[Our own Game Developer Research division, which includes various of us including the redoubtable Chris Remo, has debuted its first-ever research into iPhone games, suggesting lengthening production cycles and a diversification of game genres away from the still-dominant puzzle & word game sector. Yep, folks, the cute lil' iPhone is growing up - here's the details.]

Game Developer Research has revealed select results of its first ever State of iPhone Game Development report, helping to illuminate the growing but still largely undocumented iPhone and iPod Touch game software market.

While the iPhone game development market is still in its relative infancy, evidence suggests projects are becoming more ambitious and studios are becoming more sophisticated in their approach.

Select report metrics have revealed a trend towards longer development cycles for iPhone games currently in production, as follows:

For example, the number of games with 1-3 month development cycles among survey respondents dropped from 61% of completed projects to 41% of in-development projects. In a related trend, the number of games with 4-6 month development cycles rose from 25% (completed) to 47% (in development).

The survey also hinted at upcoming changes in popular iPhone game genres. The majority of developers are still working on projects in the extremely popular puzzle and word game genre (53%), but that’s somewhat decreased from 62% who’ve worked on completed puzzle and word games.

Other uncommon game genres are also expected to increase in number as apps get more sophisticated. 11% of respondents explained they had worked on completed strategy games, but 15% were planning strategy titles. Similarly, 11% were already done on projects in the story-heavy adventure game genre, with 21% planning such titles.

The full 39-page report uses iPhone App Store data and an anonymous survey of almost 150 current iPhone developers to outline a number of important data points. These include purchase prices for iPhone games, the effects of and reason for post-launch price adjustments on games, download number ranges, game porting trends, and many other vital stats.

“This survey shows the increasing importance and maturity of the iPhone game market,” said Simon Carless, director of Game Developer Research. "The open platform seems to be encouraging a multitude of developers to jump on board, creating an intriguing melting pot of short form and more sophisticated game titles."

For more information on the report, which should be extremely useful for businesses and individuals considering pricing and genre possibilities in the packed iPhone game space, please visit the official Game Developer Research website.

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

[Developers are looking for a way to integrate narrative and gameplay effectively, and Gamasutra's Christian Nutt looks at a surprising, but -- he claims -- effective example: the slot machine-like DMW system in Square Enix's Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII for PSP.]

As I talk to developers and attend industry events, it becoming clear to me that designers and writers have a real thirst to see narrative and gameplay become more closely enmeshed in games.

Funnily enough, I played a popular game in 2008 that did an excellent job of effectively bringing these two things together, but I've rarely heard anyone discuss it in those terms.

Several people I've talked to personally have spoken highly of the way the title combines the two, but there hasn't been broad recognition, as far as I can tell.

That game is Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, by Square Enix, for the PSP. I have a feeling that there are a couple of reasons there hasn't been more dialogue about this title.

For one, it's a PSP game, so it doesn't have the same stature as a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 title. For another, I don't think people outside of the fan base give the series a lot of credit these days.

I think many professionals, while recognizing the series' popularity, would be surprised to hear just how often it gets things right.

A Surprising Mind Wave

The most innovative element of Crisis Core is the Digital Mind Wave system. It may have a silly name (that's a weakness of the Japanese, for sure) but it is an ingenious gameplay system.

Most of the writing I saw (in reviews) was confined to confusion about the randomness of the DMW -- it's essentially a slot machine. When you hit onto the right combination of numbers you get stat boosts, powerful attacks, or even more impressive monster summons.

It also governs the leveling of your character, his special attacks, and spells. This is the bit people didn't like: though it wasn't actually random (since it masks a more-or-less standard experience point system) it appeared random, and that galls players.

I understand why, and I'm not here to defend that aspect of it, but pick up the conversation where I think the system really worked: the DMW's clever integration of character and story directly with the battle system, and the game's larger narrative.

As you fight battles, the DMW continuously spins, without your input, in the top left corner of the screen. When it gets close to making a beneficial match, the spinning reels zoom in to take over the entire screen.

Instead of fruit or other typical slot machine items, important characters from the game's story populate the DMW; when you first encounter those characters in-game, they're added to your DMW roster.

This is ingenious, because it ties what would otherwise seem very arbitrary into the game's narrative. Say what you will about Final Fantasy. Even those who do not enjoy the series must recognize that its characters are its strength, particularly with its fans.

This is so much so that Final Fantasy VII continues to produce successful products 11 years after its initial commercial introduction.

"Heightened emotions have affected the DMW!"

The way the package ties so neatly together within the context of the game is what makes it work so well. The DMW is affected by protagonist Zack Fair's emotional state (hence the quote above.) The more intense his emotion, the higher likelihood there is of a match. When a match is made, that might be it -- you just get a bonus.

But sometimes, a (very short) cutscene might play. This cutscene is always a memory Zack has of an important character of the game, and it's always from Zack's perspective.

This memory, just like memories do in real life, affects Zack's emotions -- and allows him to take advantage of his emotional state to perform more effectively in battle. This is what translates into the bonuses.

When you arrive at a combination -- say, FFVII antagonist, Sephiroth, who's also a major character in Crisis Core -- across all three reels, a cutscene displays an interaction between Zack and that psychotic silver-haired swordsman.

You'll see the scene -- for example, a simple training exercise where Sephiroth, who takes the role of Zack's superior officer in the Shinra army for much of the game, goads Zack into battling more effectively. At this point, the game reappears and Zack performs a devastating special attack against the foes he's facing.

We all know that our emotions and memories affect us in this way in real life, but when's the last time you've seen this communicated at all effectively in a game, particularly in the heat of combat?

When Zack remembers a particularly strong memory, he's filled with strength to fight even harder. This is rewarding both from a story perspective and from a gameplay perspective -- who doesn't want an HP boost in the middle of a tough fight?

Boosting the Story, Too

Even more cleverly, these memories show events that fall outside of the primary story sequences you've already seen. They are vignettes that logically follow from the plot of the game, but which were not part of the main narrative -- which makes them compelling to view, sometimes revelatory.

And, depending where you are in the twists and turns of the story, even a scene you've seen before (they're finite, of course, and do repeat) can be imbued with new shades of meaning. It's really clever.

And from a design perspective, it reminds the player that the story is integral to the Crisis Core experience. But it doesn't penalize the player who doesn't have much interest in it -- these scenes are skippable.

It also provides a respite from battle, which is a great chance to regroup mentally; and, as this is a portable game, allows you to shift position or look away for a moment to check which stop the bus is pulling into -- or whatever.

The Digital Mind Wave system, then, quietly does something we've been asking for -- but in a small, somewhat unassuming way, rather than suddenly delivering the revolution in gameplay and narrative concepts people seem to be waiting for.

The mechanic takes elements that already existed (chance, traditional narrative, RPG special attacks and stat boosts) and fits them into a larger, traditional game design (an action RPG with random encounters).

Thus, the developers of Crisis Core have nudged forward the evolution of their series, offered a fresh new gameplay system to fans. They've also put a few cracks in the cutscene/gameplay dichotomy that Square Enix is famous (or infamous, in some circles) for relying on.

To say that the developers use the DMW effectively by the end of the game would be an understatement. Its appearance in the final moments of the game -- which would be poor form to spoil here -- boosts that up another level.

Crisis Core is a game whose developers know how to use the tools they have given themselves. The DMW is the most striking example of that.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[GameSetWatch is extremely proud to debut the return - after a more than 2 year hiatus - of the column from legendary journalist Joseph 'BUZZ' Berkley. 'BUZZ' really has the measure of today's gaming market, and it's Sony's Kaz Hirai which has prompted his return from exile.]

There's been a lot of internet BUZZ over some comments that Sony Computer Entertaiment chairman Kaz Hirai made in the February 2009 issue of Official PlayStation Magazine.

For example, there's the following exchange to consider: "This is not meant in terms of numbers, or who's got the biggest install base, or who's selling most in any particular week or month, but I'd like to think that we continue official leadership in this industry."

These are comments which happen to mirror those that I made in my column of October 26th, 2006. But what Eurogamer didn't bother to cover was Kaz's refutation of the persistent claim that his pants are, in fact, on fire.

While the claim has gone unaddressed for some time, Kaz has finally deigned to deliver his own brand of PR to the situation. "These are not flames," Hirai was cited as saying, according to reliable sources. "I am not on fire. I just like having warm pants."

Kaz (pictured above, in earlier, less smoldering times) went on to explain that he was actually beta testing Sony's new Garment Heating Device, the Sony Pant & Suit Sweat Suite, or P3S.

He explained that any smoke, or appearance of a chemical reaction involving oxygen, fuel and heat resulting in the creation of light and heat were entirely within Sony's design specifications, and should not be construed as "fire", despite industry comments to the contrary.

Then, in his typical aggressive fashion, Hirai went on the offensive. "Sony's Garment Warming Device may be something of an expert level product. It's not for everyone. The Garment Warming Device offered by Microsoft may produce somewhat less ash, but the heating element tends to wear out in a year or two. These slacks will be hot nine years from now."

Hirai had less to say about Nintendo's offerings. "I think they're making glove warmers these days? What's with that?"

Finally, Kaz addressed those who criticize his pants-related comments. "You might think you know what fire is, and that there is fire on my pants. What I'm saying is, maybe you don't know what fire is? And maybe I do." He then ran off in search of cooling devices for his burning trousers, yelling: "FRIIIIIIIIIIDGE CHAAAASER!"

['Berkley's BUZZ' was a regular column from veteran game journo Joseph Berkley, whose illustrious career extends from the formation of Video Game BUZZ Monthly back in 1982 all the way to the founding of seminal teen game mag 'GameBUZZ - For Kids!' in 1992.

More recently, he was a regular columnist for much-loved late '90s game mag Big Important Thing, and the author of self-help manual: 'BUZZ Says - Less Drugs, More Games!' He has been unable to write for GSW of late, due to his demanding Managing Editor position at Official Phantom Magazine.]

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

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

I had a doctoral student from Texas mail me the other day asking if I could track down any issues of RePlay and Play Meter magazines from the mid-70s until 1983 for her. She's writing a paper about the economics of the classic-era arcade industry, and she's interested in looking through all the little fine-print distributor advertisements in the back of both mags.

I'd like to help her out, but I regrettably don't have much of either publication. I used to own a fair bit of RePlay from the late 1990s, but I sold them out many years ago because the contents weren't of much interest to me -- endless pages about redemption games and Chuck E. Cheese kiddie rides and not very much you'd care about if you aren't a working operator. They are also very heavy and large, making storage a pain in the arse.

Still, both it and Play Meter (which, sadly, had most of its back-issue library destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, I hear) would be a nice resource to have available for reasons exactly like this, especially issues from the early years. If anyone has any sort of collection of either magazine, by all means let me know (kgifford at magweasel dot com) and I'll get you in contact with her -- 'ell, I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who collects either mag anyway, given that both have circs in the 5000-ish range.

Moving back to the modern era, click through to see commentary on all the mags that crossed my desk in the past fortnight. This is the first month without any EGM, sadly:

(Don't ask me when the retrospective piece I wrote for their phantom final issue will go up on 1UP, 'cos I sadly don't know. I did get paid for it, however, proving that Ziff is far nicer to its freelancers than most publishing houses that close mags. Thanks, gentlemen.)

Edge January 2008

Cover: Uncharted 2

This issue's a bit old by this point; I forgot to cover it in the last installment for some reason. The cover piece is nothing too new from GI's a little bit ago, just with some more concept screens, a wee bit more in dev commentary, and a great deal of tech detail. The nerd's version of the GI piece, in other words. More interesting is an interview with Apple's VP of iPod and iPhone marketing about his devices' gaming possibilities -- like any Apple vice president, he talks a great yarn about being "the future" and all that, and spins faster than the fan on my air-conditioning unit as his product's faults get brought up.

It's not a very big surprise that LittleBigPlanet wins most of the bigger awards in Edge's 2008 roundup. It's also no surprise, given that the holidays are over, that the reviews are pretty harsh this month -- nothing gets over 7 and most are a fair bit below that, such as the 5 Prince of Persia earned.

Game Informer February 2009

Cover: Singularity

Yep, it's another exclusive GI cover featuring a very brown game starring a futuristic, brooding army dude killing squadrons of enemies with his bare hands. I know it's my imagination, but GI seems to do 8 covers like this a year.

The interior succeeds in making the game look a great deal like BioShock, which might be the point, but unlike many GI features, both the devs and the visual accompaniment have a great deal to say to you. The secondary feature on Fight Night Round 4 is way more engaging in my opinion, but a) I am a boxing fan b) I know sports games never, ever make good cover subjects.

The Connect industry-news section is pretty packed this month -- afterthoughts on Far Cry 2, a quick bit with Nobuo Uematsu, and (most interestingly) a spread on Bang Camaro, a band who owes much of its popularity to being in Harmonix games.

GamePro February 2009

Cover: Halo 2009

The Halo stuff on the cover kicks off a big 360-in-2009 preview feature inside. Most of the feature isn't that memorable, but Halo's got awesome art and awesome design! Seriously, they out-OXM'd OXM here. No earth-shattering new information, but a great piece overall.

PC Zone January 2009

Cover: Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II

Reason why PC Zone is worth buying, part X: The opening paragraph to their Left 4 Dead review, which is as follows -- "Any game whatsoever can immediately be rendered fun through the inclusion of a co-op mode. A game in which four players stand around slowly getting buried deeper and deeper in sand would be fun, for example, simply for the witty repartee of your friends and glib remarks about its (presumed) crap framerates and crippline load times. A game in which you and your strangely dressed companions stand around next to a tree, discussing bags and boots while waiting for someone else to log on so you can get on with things -- that's pretty much World of Warcraft, and 11 million people can't be wrong..."

This month's PCZ (and PC Gamer UK, too) also comes with a booklet on "How You And Your PC Can Beat the Credit Crunch," except the "e" in "credit" is replaced with a pound sign, and it's just too cute!

PlayStation: The Official Magazine February 2009

Cover: Killzone 2

PTOM's got the hot-sclusive review of this very fine, very brown game, extending over eight pages and looking pretty sharp.

PTOM's also got engaging page design down to a science by this point, I think -- I'd like to believe that's part of why it's relatively successful today. Even their '08 game awards feature is neatly designed, which is more than I can say about any of the similar features in other mags this month, including Edge's.

Other highlights: a "how to get easy trophies" feature similar to what OXM's done with achievements, and a spread where the managing editor's son reviews PS3/PS2 kiddie games that's funnier than you'd expect.

Official Xbox Magazine February 2009 (Podcast)

Cover: Brutal Legend

Double Fine's latest is now an EA-published title, and OXM celebrates with five radical, radical pages with Tim Schafer, kicking off a preview feature/industry piece about the 100 most awesome things about '09. I like it, and while the "best of '08" feature isn't as nice-looking at PTOM's, it's similarly bite-sized and fun.

Nintendo Power February 2009

Cover: RPG special

I noticed this issue that Nintendo Power has a bunch of advertising that no other game mag gets. It's mainly DS/Wii casual stuff, but I wonder if it's that advertising that keeps NP vibrant.

RPGs are the top theme all issue, starting with PS0 (an extraordinarily long feature for a DS title, longer than even GTA Chinatown Wars a few months back) and continuing with Fire Emblem and a crapload of others. It's all your basic preview type coverage, but at least it's pretty and interview-laden -- in fact, kind of like the big-arse preview features of 2004-era EGM, complete with humorous boxes that link each game together (the "RPG Cliche Checklist," for example).

NP also talks to Uematsu this month, and they're kind enough to give him three pages instead of GI's 0.5 pages.

Beckett Massive Online Gamer March/April 2009

Cover: Guess

Yep, more Beckett MOG. I feel bad about it, but I've long since run out of stuff to talk about with this mag -- it's the same thing each month, fer Chrissakes. The same WOW stuff, the same strategy guides for Korean games you never heard of, and occasionally some hot cosplay. Yippee!

Game Developer January 2009

Cover: LittleBigPlanet

Aw, who can forget about Game Developer? The LBP postmorterm is worth reading more than others, since it's such a unique (and small!) team behind the game. (Good things about a small crew: smooth, informal company style: Bad things about a small crew: crunching for half a year before launch.)

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

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Time to carry on with some GameSetLinks goodness, headed up by a great 1UP video special - and hopefully not the kind of thing there will be less of, post-UGO transition, given the costs and not always obvious returns of video content.

Also hanging out here - discussions of Sony and artsiness, indie games in New York magazine, a Proper Games profile, iPhone games sales stats (at least on the high end), and various other neatnesses.

Road to perdition:

1UP Specials: Street Fighter 4 with the Pros: News from 1UP.com
If you're going to do custom video, do it right, like this: 'We brought in three Street Fighter experts from Shoryuken.com, the community for hardcore Street Fighter players, for an hour-long video preview covering the new console characters (Gen, Sakura, Rose, Dan, Cammy), Challenge Mode, voice customization, strategies, and game mechanics.'

The Age of Indie Video Games - The All New Issue -- New York Magazine
'Unshackled from the blockbuster-or-bust mentality of the big corporations, these indie designers are ushering in a new golden age of smart, beautiful, and really weird games.'

Is Sony too artsy for its own good? - The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety on Variety.com
Completely agree, esp. if you look at investment vs. return for some of the PSN titles. Return is meant to be in prestige and hardware sales, of course, but... is it working?

Grey Alien Games » Blog Archive » Some Fantastic Indie Sales Stats!
Very useful discussion of what PC indie/casual folks can hope to make through selling their games online.

Flock and the art of downloadable game development | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Proper Games, I love the look of your game, but IMHO, you're scaled wrong in terms of project length/staff size for XBLA/PSN - the right size is 2-3 people plus contractors, I reckon. (I guess being privately funded and publisher-supported will let you get away with it, though.)

iPhone Savior: iPhone Developer Quits Day Job After 'iShoot' Hits Number One
Aha, single day iPhone sales to be #1 on store apparently confirmed: iShoot was the 'number one Top Paid App in the iTunes App Store with 16,972 downloads in one day.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['Hit Self-Destruct' is a regular new GameSetWatch column by blogger and writer Duncan Fyfe, focusing on alternative approaches to game criticism. In this inaugural edition, he dips into the English Lit paint-pot for some musings on Fallout 3.]

The protagonist of Bethesda's Fallout 3 is a cipher, a window through which to view the gameworld, so if he had a LiveJournal he would not be writing about his feelings. He'd write about the post-nuclear Wasteland, about the slaves who rallied around the Lincoln Memorial, the android who wanted to live like a human, free elections in a one-man republic, the day the ghouls crashed the gated community.

He'd write about the young girl who fell in love with a priest, the father who took shelter with his injured son in a storm drain, the downfall of Vault 106 and the rangers trapped on the hotel roof. Fallout 3 is like any other RPG insofar as the player collects experience points, gear and currency, but it's essential to the experience that they collect stories, too.

Fallout 3 is easily cross-referenced and classifiable in the modern video gaming canon. The game grew up in an Elder Scrolls household where it aspired to be Fallout, it has all the trappings of a Western RPG and the unbroken camera of Half-Life, and gameplay buzzwords cling to it: non-linear, open world, emergent. Its least likely structural resemblance, though, as per the above paragraph, is to a book of short stories. Essentially, it's Dubliners with guns.

Holding forth on Irish municipal politics in a drunken stagger, this thought probably never even crossed James Joyce's mind. There was nothing to suggest the eventual similarity in the video games of Joyce's day (older games, they would have been in black and white). Dubliners and Fallout 3 compile isolated tales about unrelated people to establish the character of a city in decline: Dublin and a fictional future Washington, respectively.

They abstain from a central unifying plot (more on Fallout's exception later): Dubliners relies on its 13 vignettes, Fallout 3 on an array of sidequests, text and environmental tableaus for players who skip all the dialogue.

Joyce presents 13 drunks, writers, schoolboys and stage mothers whose collective epiphanies on themes of religion, nationalism and masculinity inform the artist's portrait of a city. The book is less a chronicle of individuals but of the social, religious and economic constitution of early 20th century Dublin. Fallout 3, obviously, is not nearly the literary equivalent of Dubliners: they are analogues in form, not in depth.

This is, in part, because Fallout 3 is collaboratively written and designed, and so lacks a prominent auteur as its figurehead. While critics can analyze Dubliners in the context of Joyce's personal history, Fallout 3 players don't know as much about the troubled Roman Catholic upbringing of Todd Howard or the trenchant alcoholism of Emil Pagliarulo, and so instead of subtle and deeply-encoded meaning we see plainness.

To be fair, some of it is plain: the Fallout 3 dramatis personae is not blessed with Joyce's lavish attention to detail: the Wasteland mercenaries, victims and general losers are thinly drawn, comparatively. However, they are sketched out enough to communicate their circumstances and contribute to the persistent mood which hangs over the world. Through this series of character interactions, players discover exactly what kind of place Washington is.

You, the player, encounter people trying to survive in peculiar ways, whether emulating pre-war domesticity or pretending to be vampires. You'll casually be asked to murder, as your prospective employer has no fear of recrimination and neither of you have any expectation that you'll be held accountable for your crime. Everyone assumes that they can put monetary value on your morality, because that's how it's worked there as long as they all can remember.

There's an alarmingly high proportion of slaves, addicts, thieves, nomads and beggars. This is the new society. All instituions and laws were erased after the bombs fell. Life is lethargic and brutal, the Wasteland is a nightmare with a dubious chance at survival, and it's no surprise the only bastions of normalcy have to aggressively barricade themselves from the outside world with walls of steel.

The archetypically evil slavers of Paradise Falls, the willfully ignorant ruler of the Republic of Dave and the Megaton bartender who hordes blackmail material on the town's secretly ugly residents have nothing to do with one another except that they all exist in the same game, and so they inform the player's perception of the setting.

There's a derelict police station in the game, whose computers can recall transcripts of 911 calls from before the war, one of them a realistically horrifying account of a home invasion in progress. That has nothing to do with a post-apocalyptic future but it's there to reinforce the point, in terms contemporary and familiar: Washington DC is fucking bleak.

The message is not all that sophisticated. A moody teenager scribbling "life sucks" in her diary has it beat. As always, the key is not what it says but how it says it. Fallout 3 unleashes anecdotes that cohere into a whole, and tells stories through characters instead of about them. Washington isn't explained in an opening crawl or an in-game textbook, the player learns by being there.

It's an uncommon narrative construction, especially in a medium whose great existential debate on storytelling sometimes feels like an argument over whether the cutscene proportion should be more like Half-Life 2 or Metal Gear Solid. Look at BioShock for an example of something similar: the posthumous histories of its characters, told via audio diaries, represent one sociological element of Rapture. The difference being that the stories run parallel and are paced out for the entire length of the game, where the Fallout 3 vignettes are segmented and sequential.

The separate chapters of Fallout 3 have a thematic unity that the content of other RPGs lack. This is why the short story associating doesn't apply to the whole RPG genre, even though the games usually have a comparable volume of sidequests and incidental characters.

Frequently, side content is more explicitly an elective method by which to improve skills and gather gold, but in Fallout 3 there's no reward for uncovering the diary entries of the war nurse succumbing to radiation poisoning the besides the story itself. Few RPGs share Fallout 3's subdued main quest or centralised setting. Mass Effect doesn't say much about the galaxy except that every planet conceals an artifact or a building of pirates.

While considering points of difference, here's where the Dubliners/Fallout 3 analogy fails. Fallout 3 quite clearly has a primary plotline, which would suggest the shorter, incidental stories, so highly prized by the thesis of this article, are in fact tertiary and do not bear the narrative weight of the game. If the comparison is to hold at all, it relies on marginalising the game's plot.

Fortunately the game itself does that, intentionally. In a departure from its predecessors, there is no time limit or even implied pressure on the player to finish the main quest; instead, they are encouraged to ignore it. Players following their progress on the in-game map will note that the ostensible "story" path only takes them through the smallest portion of the city. To adhere to the main quest is to visit the Wasteland by way of a Disneyland tour bus. Also, the majority of the questline can be skipped entirely without penalty. None of this negates the main story's existence but diminishes its traditional stature and renders it equivalent to the sidequests.

Fallout 3's non-linearity is an obvious distinction with Joyce's prose. Sidequests can be discovered and abandoned in no order, like short stories on shuffle. It therefore loses the deliberate escalation of Dubliners, which features progressively older characters and concludes with the longest instalment in the book.

Then, of course, Fallout 3 is interactive, and the player is forced to intervene in almost every conflict. This is how the player contributes to the game's greater premise, a referendum on whether the city unfailingly venal and corrupt or if it is capable of altruism despite itself. The ending of Fallout 3, thematically, rests less on a final binary choice but over dozens of encounters with strange people that coalesce to make the player's own point about humanity.

There's really a wealth of potentially very interesting and creative literary influences still unrealised by games. Lord of the Rings and Ender's Game are covered. The entire history of entertainment and art is available, inspiration can come from some pretty weird places.

Joyce never got the chance to consider Fallout 3, but we can leave Vault 101 with something as improbable as Joyce's prose in mind: "...real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad." Even if Fallout 3 is not consistently inhabited by the literary spirit of James Joyce, for a moment, it fits.

Posted by Duncan Fyfe at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

[Here's another alternative interview from big sister site Gamasutra that you might otherwise miss - this Brandon Sheffield-conducted interview talks to Koei about their intriguing push onto the DS with the thus far low-profile sidescrolling 2D racer Monster Racers.]

Japanese-headquartered publisher and developer Koei may be known for its Dynasty Warriors, series, most recently market-expanding in Japan via the Dynasty Warriors: Gundam crossover.

That Bandai Namco team-up may have seemed an unlikely combination, but was demonstrative of a surprising market savvy on Koei's part, and the firm is now trying to expand its reach further.

Koei is at work on DS title Monster Racers [video] -- which sidescrolls when most racing games are head-on, offers four-player multiplayer in a fashion more often the territory of the PSP -- and tries to challenge Nintendo's market dominance, with strong stylistic influences of Pokémon and Mario Kart.

In this interview, Gamasutra catches up with producer Hisashi Koinuma and Koei sales and marketing manager Jarik Sikat to talk Monster Racers, from the challenges of the explosive Japanese DS market to the subtleties of the company's bold strategy:

Since we spoke in 2007, which games have you been involved with?

Hisashi Koinuma: This title [Monster Racers] and a few others that I can't mention at this point.

Jarik Sikat: Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, Samurai Warriors: Katana... Samurai Warriors was the last project.

Looking at the art for Monster Racers, there seems to be some Pokémon influence there. Was that an intentional aim to capture that market, or was it a coincidence??

HK: Before, the object wasn't to make a Pokémon game. First, there was the vision to make a kids game; to focus on games that were more geared towards younger boys. So, when thinking about younger boys' games, there may be some references to Pokémon.

And, also [with] the fact that this game uses monsters, there is also that overlap in similarity with Pokémon. But we don't necessarily think that all monster games are Pokémon games, so it's difficult to make a kids', boys' monster game and not have people relate it to Pokémon, so that's very difficult for the team.

Another historical background of the game is Koei released a title [in Japan] ten years ago called Monster Racer that included monsters. It was quite successful, and is what this game is based off of. An additional reason why Koei decided to make this game is that our Nintendo category is weaker than our other platforms, so this --

JS: Say we wanted to grow our Nintendo...

Translator: "Improve our relationships with...?"

JS: Say that we wanted to grow our Nintendo library...

I could, but that's what he said! I heard it too! Well -- nobody's going to argue with that, really. It's not a secret.

HK: So that was a good challenge.

It's true that the old Monster Racers had a different style of character art, and this one leans stylistically more toward Pokémon -- but I guess I don't need to actually ask about that.

Translator: OK. (laughs)

How do you think you can strengthen the DS market right now, when the market is a bit bloated with titles from so many companies?

HK: As a video game entertainment company, we can't ignore the success that Nintendo is having with their platforms, and we want to challenge ourselves to release titles for the most popular platform that is out there.

We need to keep challenging ourselves, as a development team, regardless of the number of other developers and publishers that have released titles for that platform.

Many seem to perceive that there are a great deal of lower-quality titles on the DS. Is that also a challenge, since it can be hard for consumers to differentiate the quality products from so many other look-a-likes?

HK: First, we'd like to see it succeed in Japan, and to help it succeed in Japan, we'll be releasing demos, for people to try it, and we hope that people might soon find that they like it, and if they like the game, we hope that they might purchase it.

And, also, [we want] to push it with the publications and the media over in Japan, so that the game gets noticed and picked up. Then once we've developed a reputation in Japan, [we plan to] use that as a springboard to release it in the States and Europe.

It seems like very few non-Nintendo games have really used multiplayer functionality in a big way on DS. Monster Racers' four-player racing mechanic is the type of thing more common on the PSP right now -- are you specifically attempting to address this absence on DS?

HK: Maybe it's not quite the case in Japan, because Mario Kart has become quite popular, with the multiplayer.

Right. But other than Nintendo...

HK: We feel that the multiplayer feature is a communication tool, a social tool, that will bring people together, and if people can use this game to increase their communication with other people, we think that's a great thing.

The sidescrolling perspective is slightly unusual these days for racing games, which usually rely on a depth-based, front-bumper kind of camera. Why did you choose the side view?

HK: The main reason was that one of the appeals of this game is the monsters themselves; we wanted to see the monsters. In Mario Kart, when you're from behind the car, going forward, you can't actually see the character's face. That's why we chose the sidescrolling.

We are currently also working on not just sidescrolling, but moving up, or moving down, for different stages. It's easier for variety in the game.

That almost helps it become a cross between a racing title and a Smash Bros type of aesthetic, because there's some combat, right?

HK: Like you say, there is much more of a visual appeal when there's sidescrolling, because you can see how your opponent is reacting to the attacks that you've made.

This is very hard to express in games such as Mario Kart, where all you're seeing is the back of your car, and your opponents being attacked either in front or in back of you, where it's off-screen.

Is there a very effective way to release demos for DS games at this point? On Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network, people can simply download them, so is there more work involved in encouraging them to try DS demos?

HK: In Japan, the Nintendo download station is very popular. When people go to retail stores, there's a Nintendo station, and you download demos or whatever into your DS -- and that's the way it is in Japan, and since it's popular, it's not very hard to do. But that might not be the case in the States or in Europe.

Obviously, the toy stores and the retail stores, but even the train stations and some restaurants are also carrying Nintendo DS stations.

I didn't realize it was quite that prevalent. Finally, as a developer-publisher, how do you feel about the DS market right now?

HK: In Japan, the DS sales have come to a point where it's so large that it's not just a target audience; you can't limit it to a younger generation or older generation, it's gone beyond a certain audience, to where they even have a term called 'touch generation'.

So, it's something that has become a very commonplace electronic device that can be assumed that everybody already has, and I think that will be the same in US and Europe as well.

So for a device that is becoming not just a game device, but actually a communication tool, as publisher and developer, you can't ignore that platform and not develop any software for something that is becoming not just a gaming device.

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Starting out the week with a fresh set of GameSetLinks, and nice to see the UK Guardian go out and about to check out some of Scotland's more interesting indie developers - still a fun scene going on there, even if the alleged Crackdown 2 is so much haggis.

Also in here - the Forbes cover profile of Activision's Bobby Kotick, alongside Arc System Works analysis, another Mega64 video, Broken Toys on the adjacent history of Tabula Rasa, and more besides.

Cha cha cha:

Tag Games and the wonder of iPhone | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Really interesting discussion on what small developers can do - iPhone, XBLA, WiiWare all come up, but the volume of product coming through those must be getting crowded soon, right? It's still awesomely open.

selectbutton :: View topic - Useless Gaming Trivia: Star Control vs Little Witches
I knew about this game, but didn't know it re-used Unholy War enemies - totally weird! [Via TC]

Subatomic Brainfreeze: Talking back to Arc System Works WITH A WALL OF TEXT
Some good analysis of the recentGamasutra Arc System Works interview.

Activision's Unlikely Hero - Forbes.com
Notable because Kotick is on the cover of Forbes with a Guitar Hero axe, grinning demonically. (I believe I provided some background to the journalist for this piece, but did NOT tell him Rock Band was a 'shameless knockoff', sigh.)

Mega64 » Archive » Metaphors
On 1UP/EGM, and yes, very metaphorical (also, the dog is cute, and only acting.)

Broken Toys » Perspectives
Scott Jennings on NCSoft/Tabula Rasa and his own experiences there - just interesting from an honest inside game development perspective, really.

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

[Continuing the GameSetWatch-exclusive series quizzing rarely interviewed Japanese game music veterans, Jeriaska sits down with a Sapporo-based music studio, best known for creating audio for the Final Fantasy spin-off series starring the ever-fluffy Chocobo.]

The presence of the amiable yellow avian known as the "Chocobo" has been an indispensable part of the Final Fantasy series since the second title for the 8-bit Famicom console. In Final Fantasy V for the Super Famicom, the chocobo outgrew its role as a mere means of transportation, becoming a supporting character by the name of Boco.

Following suit, the mythical bird became the main protagonist for the game Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon on the Sony Playstation. Along the way, the chocobo theme song composed by Nobuo Uematsu has been treated to practically every remix style imaginable.

Now that the character has its own Nintendo series by the name of Final Fantasy Fables, the responsibility of scoring the music of the chocobo has passed to Joe Down Studio, located in Sapporo, Hokkaido.

Previously the company has arranged Uematsu's Final Fantasy themes for the soundtracks to Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungon and Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales. The latest installment has just been released in Japan, a sequel to Chocobo Tales for the Nintendo DS, developed by h.a.n.d Inc. and published by Square Enix, titled "Chocobo and the Magic Picture Book: The Witch, The Maiden and the Five Heroes."

As the DS port of Chocobo's Dungeon was making its way to store shelves in Japan's northern island, we had the chance to visit Joe Down Studio to inquire into the making of the in-progress DS title. Shoji Tomii is the representative director of Joe Down and has overseen the company since its start two decades ago. Yuzo Takahashi arranges themes from the Final Fantasy series and writes original tracks.

Composer Chiemi Takano wrote songs for Culdcept Saga (her voice can be heard on the Chocobo's Dungeon soundtrack's "Memory of a Distant Day") while Kazunori Takahara creates sound effects and contributed the voice of Bahamut to the Wii title. Their perspectives help illustrate how the music of Final Fantasy has retained its luster over the years as the chocobo has become an increasingly recognizable figure in videogames.

Joe Down Studio representative director Shoji Tomii and composer Chiemi Takano

GameSetWatch: Tomii-san, thank you for offering us this opportunity to visit Joe Down Studio. Walking through the office, there appear to be an equal number of game consoles and exotic musical instruments in sight.

Shoji Tomii: There are many different instruments here at Joe Down Studio. Quite a few of them are stringed instruments like guitars, bass guitars, shamisen and koto. One of the rarest instruments here is this Egyptian oud. I traveled to Egypt a long time ago and found this there. I brought it back with me, holding it in my arms the entire trip. I've been fascinated with guitars for as long as I can remember, so whenever I run into an interesting instrument related to the guitar family I pick it up when I can.

GSW: What is the meaning behind the company name “Joe Down”?

Tomii: The name “Joe Down” comes from... well, let me start out with the disclaimer that I've always been serious about my work. Anyway, one of my friends who was senior to me by a few years used to say about my company, “I bet you’re doing this as a joke!” "Joke" translates as “Jo-dan” in Japanese. I thought about how this Japanese word would sound spoken by an American with a guitar and a Southern twang. I bet it would sound like “Joe Down.” That’s how the name originated, though I'd like to emphasize that all of us are very serious about the work we do here.

Sound designer Kazunori Takahara and composer Yuzo Takahashi

GSW: Takahashi-san, thank you for joining us. Could you offer us a brief introduction to give us a sense of your background as a composer?

Takahashi: I'm a 29 year-old musician, and I've worked on arrangements of songs for four Final Fantasy Fables titles. They include Chocobo Tales, Chocobo Dungeon, the sequel to Chocobo Tales and the Nintendo DS port of Chocobo Dungeon, known as Labyrinth of Forgotten Time in Japan. If given the chance, I'm interested in exploring this role further in the future.

GSW: What are some of the responsibilities attending working as a composer and arranger on the Nintendo DS series?

Takahashi: At the moment I'm writing songs for the next Chocobo Tales. For the first DS title, I only composed one original song, which was Irma's Theme. This time there will be a few more. Nobuo Uematsu's fans might be disappointed when they find out that it isn't just arrangements of Final Fantasy songs on the soundtrack. You could say the music of Final Fantasy Fables is beginning to set its own course.

This is a new Chocobo Tales, so there will be improvements upon the previous title. The staff is becoming more adventurous about exploring themes that are not directly related to Final Fantasy, so we are challenging ourselves to see how many new ideas we can introduce while maintaining a good balance between the novel and familiar.

Our goal with the sound design is to help create a fantasy atmosphere. What stands out about the sounds of the Final Fantasy series is that they are both beautiful and easy to remember. We set out to retain those two aspects in the new arrangements to the best of our ability. In terms of my work as a composer, I wanted to capture something of the texture of the music we remember from the NES and Super Nintendo era. If that comes across to the listener, I couldn't be happier.

GSW: Since beginning work on this series, has there been the chance for you to meet Toshiyuki Itanaha, the character designer for the Chocobo and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series of games?

Takahashi: Just briefly. (Oh! By the way, Hello Mr. Itahana, if you happen to be reading this!) We met at a party celebrating the release of the first game. I wrote the song for the character of Irma after being shown an illustration by Itahana, so it's fair to say that without him there would not be an Irma's theme.

GSW: What are your impressions of the music of the traditional Final Fantasy titles?

Takahashi: Uematsu's songs for Final Fantasy are pleasing and hard to forget. There is something distinctive about the flow and chord progressions of his songs. The emphasis is placed less on how complexly the notes are layered or how forceful the sound comes across than on the fact that so many listeners never get tired of the melodies, no matter how many times we hear it.

GSW: For the Nintendo DS port of Chocobo's Dungeon, which was previously released for the Wii, you have remade the score from the ground up. How would you describe the difference in the sound capabilities of these two game systems you have worked with?

Takahashi: The Wii features CD quality streaming playback. The DS is not quite optimized for the same level of audio quality. It puts a lot of strain on the processor if the music files are not compressed. Instead of streaming music, we have arranged the audio specifically for use on the DS. Basically it isn't feasible to reproduce the exact same soundtrack that appeared in the Wii game, so we remade all the songs so that the music would have a bright, crisp quality when heard on the DS speakers. In some cases, the arrangements turned out even better on the DS.

[This winter two Chocobo titles are appearing on the Nintendo DS featuring wireless inter-connectivity. The port of Chocobo's Dungeon (2008) features Cid as a playable character. The sequel to Chocobo Tales (2007) carries the title "Chocobo and the Magic Picture Book: The Witch, The Maiden and the Five Heroes." In addition, two original soundtrack albums, including arrangements by Joe Down Studio, have also been released in Japan. Cover art for Chocobo Dungeon OST and Chocobo Tales Series OST can be found below.]

GSW: How did it come about that your company became involved in the Chocobo Tales series of games?

Chiemi Takano: The game production company h.a.n.d. Inc. has been a client of ours for some time. They were the ones who approached us with the idea of collaborating on this project. We were, of course, very interested in participating on the sound design for Chocobo Tales. I think we were very fortunate to have been afforded the chance to join. Square Enix has been happy with our arrangements, and allowed us to stay on as the series has broadened in scope. We've grown a lot as musicians during this time and have done our best to offer a worthwhile experience for game players.

GSW: You are credited as a composer on the soundtrack to Culdcept Saga, whose score was written by Kenji Ito. As it so happens, the musician has made his own arrangements of the Final Fantasy songs for the Playstation title Chocobo Racing. What kind of work was involved in assisting the composer on this project?

Takano: Development on Culdcept Saga took place just over two years ago, and the game was released in 2006. Ito-san sent us various compositions and asked us to arrange them. He listened to these drafts and provided us with notes on how to refine them further. He gave us a lot of constructive feedback and I was very pleased with how our involvement in the project turned out.

GSW: What has been your experience in contributing to the Chocobo series?

Takano: Being in the position of working on this series has brought us tremendous enjoyment and pride. It feels wonderful that many people out there are listening to our music. It is the dream of many people to work in a creative field and reach a wide audience, so in that sense it is very gratifying to contribute to these titles.

GSW: Takahara-san, could you share with us a little about your role as a sound designer at Joe Down Studio?

Kazunori Takahara: Sure. I'm the sound effects creator for the Chocobo series. I've worked on Chocobo's Dungeon for Wii and Chocobo Tales for the Nintendo DS.

For Chocobo and the Magic Picture Book: The Witch, The Maiden and the Five Heroes, the approach to sound design has remained the same as on previous titles. Because the game is for the Nintendo DS, it was necessary to strip some of the sound effects from the Wii version down to their component parts to recreate them using less data on the DS. This is an entirely new game, so the graphics are improved over the original title, and we have been studying the storyboards to reflect that increase in quality in the sound design. Judging my own work, I would say that my skills have improved with time. All of us at the studio have been working to match the visual design team's high standards of quality.

GSW: In transitioning between the Wii home console and the Nintendo DS portable, do you make a point of keeping the effects consistent across the board?

Takahara: In terms of what we kept from the Wii game, the voice of the chocobo remains constant. We don't want to throw people who have an idea in their mind of how these characters should sound. The effects used for many of the attacks have been retained as well.

GSW: How do you approach the use of sound effects in full-motion video sequences, such as the monster summon segments in Chocobo's Dungeon?

Takahara: Sometimes cutscenes are not available for us to look at while we are creating the sound effects. We receive a script which contains detailed descriptions of these scenes and are left to imagine how this two-to-three second image will turn out. Once the computer graphics are finally completed, we take another look at the sound effects and adjust them as necessary to match the image. It's a multi-step process.

GSW: What goes into making some of the more layered sound effects for the Chocobo series?

Takahara: Some of the simpler sounds include things like a character jumping or taking damage. When it comes to more complex sounds, I take a look at the script and put together a mix of effects to match the situation. In Pro Tools there is a library of sound materials you can choose from. These include things like sounds heard inside a factory, a fire being lit, a spinning helicopter propeller, that sort of thing. You can put bits and pieces of these noises together to create a unique new sound.

There are sounds around us all the time that we are hardly aware of on a conscious level. In a game like this it's easy just to go ahead and present them as they naturally occur, but that's not so interesting. It's more fun to hear how the noise of a cork being pulled out of a bottle can accentuate the feeling of rocks crashing against the ground. A sound lasts only for a second or two, so it's all the more challenging to make it something to remember.

GSW: How often do you use the microphone to record audio effects?

Takahara: Using the mike is particularly effective for recording sounds for the monsters and summon creatures in the game. When the monsters strike or when they're vanquished I record my own voice, going "Aaargh!" Afterwards, I manipulate the sound to make it resemble the tone of the creature. It's a lot of fun. Also, if you listen to the sound that plays when Bahamut is summoned, you can hear the noise of some shattering glasses and cups I added.

GSW: Now that the series has grown to four titles, do you have a personal impression of this series as a whole, having been involved since the original DS game?

Takahara: My introduction to the RPG genre was with Final Fantasy III for the Famicom. Saying that I have grown up with the Final Fantasy series is no exaggeration, so it is personally satisfying to have the opportunity to contribute to the Chocobo series. As a child you don't really think about how it is that the sound effects in the games you play are created, but I've come to learn just how intricate a process it can be. It's gratifying to think that there are people out there immersing themselves in the game that you helped to create.

[The original soundtrack to Chocobo Tales Series, including songs on two Chocobo Tales games for the Nintendo DS, can be imported from Amazon.co.jp. The soundtrack to Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon is also available through Amazon.co.jp. Interview by Jeriaska. Translation by Kaoru Bertrand. This article is available in Japanese on Game Design Current. Images courtesy of Square Enix. (c)2008 SQUARE ENIX CO.,LTD. All Rights Reserved. Character design by Toshiyuki Itahana. Photos by Jeriaska.]

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

Breaking down some of the week's top features on Gamasutra - plus bonus features from our excellent student site GameCareerGuide - there's a bunch of neat interviews and design analyses posted over the past 7 days.

Notable pieces include interviews with PS3 and Xbox 360 chip co-designer David Shippy and the folks behind Guilty Gear at Arc System Works, plus a look at game playtesting for the Wii version of Speed Racer, an interesting WiiWare postmortem, and the human story behind the recent game development layoffs.

Here are the stories:

Processing The Truth: An Interview With David Shippy
"A new book claims that IBM's work on the PS3's Cell chip helped birth the Xbox 360's Xenon CPU -- and Gamasutra sits down with book co-author and chip architect David Shippy to uncover the facts."

Practical Game Playtesting: A Wii-Based Case Study
"Sidhe Interactive's Griffiths discusses in depth how the GripShift developer playtested and improved their Wii version of the recent Speed Racer game, from Wiimote tweaks to difficulty changes."

Postmortem: RiverMan Media's MadStone
"Gamasutra's first-ever WiiWare postmortem reveals the story behind overlooked block puzzler MadStone, with technical, design, marketing and productivity lessons galore."

Dodging, Striking, Winning: The Arc System Works Interview
"In a rare interview, Gamasutra talks to Guilty Gear creators Arc System Works on the state of the fighting game genre, new projects, and opinions on the Soulcalibur and Street Fighter franchises."

Game Developer Layoffs: The Real Story
"With layoffs hitting the allegedly 'recession-proof' game industry, Gamasutra talks to employees from Pandemic, Eidos, and Ensemble to find out the human story behind the corporate announcements."

Bonus GameCareerGuide.com highlights: Inside the IGF 2009: Sneak Peek at The Ghastleybriar Zoo Incident; Results from the Game Design Challenge: Dress My Sackboy; Inside the IGF 2009: Sneak Peek at Trino ; GameCareerGuide's Game Design Challenge: Balance Board; Why Design Games?; Ragdoll Acrobats: An Interview with IGF Finalists CarneyVale: Showtime Team .

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

['Roboto-chan!' is a column written by Ollie Barder, which covers videogames that feature robots and the pop-cultural folklore surrounding them. This column covers the recent shift in gaming that's included a greater aesthetic, rather than functional, approach to mecha.]

The Koei and Bandai Namco-created game whose logo is to the left is very much a branded Gundam title. You've got the V2 Gundam high fiving the Nu, whilst roundhousing twenty Zakus in the face. Yet, despite the presence of these mecha the game is functionally very much divorced from the pantheon it's visually representing.

When people define genres of gaming, like a platformer or a racer, they're specifically highlighting what those types of games functionally offer. The mecha gaming genre is no different in this regard; as it's offering a selection of playable rules that have been honed from over half a century of pop-cultural references. Games like Virtual On and Armored Core are trying to interpret the abilities of mecha rather than just anything superficially aesthetic.

So why does a game like the one I've been talking about, the Dynasty Warriors/Gundam crossover Gundam Musou, even exist and how should it be viewed in relation to the history of gaming?

Mobile Suit Salarymen

First off, it's worth clarifying that the Gundam Musou games aren't the first (or the last) that have offered playable mecha but without the attempt to re-create their abilities. However, these games are mistakenly thought of as being part of the mecha gaming genre. So that little chestnut needs some analytical distinction.

To the layman, it may appear that if a game contains a robot it's therefore trying to represent that in a functional form. Historically, this was the case but what with the increasing popularity of the mecha mythos both in Japan and abroad, gaming has had to keep up with a greater range of people who may just want something less functionally literal.

People, for instance, who grew up on Gundam but don't want to learn how to actually pilot a complex machine. This then creates a new kind of game that has the visual trappings that punters are familiar with but lacks the complex abilities that gamers would normally expect.

The Gundam Musou games are a very good example of this trend. As the Musou (Dynasty Warriors) series of games by Koei are basic stress relief for frustrated Japanese salarymen. They just want to hit lots of things but without the need to be overly dexterous or cognitively gifted. The design of those games is catered to specifically allow a relatively casual gamer to enjoy themselves without putting in too much effort.

So Gundam Musou uses that design to appeal to salarymen who remember watching Gundam as a kid. Yet, the game allows you to destroy hundreds of enemies at once. Something that never occurs in the original series (at best Amuro only ever managed to take out nine enemies in a single skirmish with the RX-78-2 and that was over the course of five minutes, not in a single beam sabre swipe). So this inaccuracy is acceptable, as is the simplified controls. They just want the visual feedback.

This screenshot perfectly encapsulates what I'm describing. In the foreground you have Kamille Bidan in his Zeta Gundam facing a swarm of mobile suits and the massive Psycho Gundam Mk. 1. This kind of face off would have never happened in the series, as Kamille wouldn't want to get into a situation where he'd be this massively outnumbered. In Gundam Musou 2 however, it's not a problem as the rule set has diverged enough from the host work to make this kind of skirmish feasible. It treats the mecha as though they were the functional equivalent of a Musou series protagonist, rather than as the fragile real robots they actually are.

The interesting thing is how the line blurs on other games that utilise designs from other genres whilst still retaining the visual mecha based element.

Capcom vs Gundam

A few years back, Capcom released a Gundam arcade game using Naomi hardware. It was an arena fighter essentially, with ranged and melee attacks. This may sound as though we're going down the Virtual On route but whilst SEGA's seminal mecha series had fixed vectored dashes interlinking the combat, Capcom opted for a far simpler and less faithful approach.

Capcom used a combat system not all that dissimilar to the orbital approach seen in Zelda Ocarina of Time. So the quick stepping, ground based, approach was merged with how Capcom allowed mobile suits to move.

Unlike Musou, the Capcom games did try (albeit simply) to mimic certain functional traits of mobile suits. Treating more like real robots that could only really handle one or two enemies at a time, all of which would be equally armored and equipped. Even the simplified movement, had enough restrictions to feel as though you were piloting a machine rather than an invincible mythical super being.

The series has evolved over the years and whilst it briefly flirted with space based combat (it used the ground based movement system, so it didn't really work), it's the latest iteration that I want to talk more about.

Gundam vs Gundam was released about a year ago in the Japanese arcades. It was similar to the original games and retained that focused arena based multiplayer combat. What was odd was how the narrative of the game had been explained and why all these disparate Gundams were facing off against one another. In short, the opening intro shows the old Gundam arcade machines becoming sentient due to the resurgence of the Devil Gundam. Only by combing their efforts can they thwart the Devil Gundam and return to their respective timelines. Now this may sound silly but it shows that Capcom know what these games fundamentally are in terms of functional complexity.

This is very much confirmed in the game itself, as each of the Gundams offer a special that is massively out of context. For instance, the Nu Gundam can call down the asteroid Axis from orbit to glide across the map, damaging whatever is unfortunate to be in its way. Even support units teleport into existence when called. The final stage is also a weird mix of virtual reality visuals and the sprawling mass that is the huge Devil Gundam.

The whole game is a post-modern nod to the fact that these arcade games are functional allegories to the Gundam franchise. That they aren't trying to recreate anything in a truly mechanical sense (after all games like Senjou no Kizuna are already catering for that).

Super Postmodern Wars

The final series of games I'd like to cover is that of Super Robot Wars. Since 1991, Banpresto have merged the respective anime series in an orgy of turn based strategy where Getter Robo can give covering fire to the likes Overman King Gainer, a mecha from a series that was created a quarter of a century later.

On the surface, the Super Robot Wars games look more allegorical than Gundam Musou above. In reality, Banpresto go to great lengths to recreate the abilities of each of the mecha as well as the skills of the pilots that sit in their imaginary cockpits. Whilst the games are in the strategy genre, the presence of the mecha is by no means an aesthetic consideration. Even the animation sequences for each of their attacks are painstakingly recreated from the host anime. To the extent that the older mecha retain the earlier stylistic approaches to animation.

The spin off Another Century Episode games probably demonstrate this subtle blend of postmodern functionality better. As they offer direct control of the disparate mecha available. Despite the narrative that justifies why the Nanajin aura battler is pitted against Gradosian super powered tracers, the abilities of the Nanajin are lifted from the series it was birthed from. You also require a greater level of skill to operate the Nanajin in ACE2 or 3 than you would the God Gundam in Gundam Musou 2.

Yet the control system is still "one fits" all, which denotes both series as being outside the mecha genre. As the YF-21 from Macross Plus utilises a brain control interface and I doubt From Software would want to pioneer that gaming peripheral.

Post Mechanical Theory

So what is game that sits in the mecha genre then? Is it a game that just features robots or one where it affords the player to control a robot with a unique and thorough approach to gaming functionality?

Containing robots isn't enough to be part of the mecha genre (that is if you follow the logic that genres represent gaming functionality). This is not say that these games are mecha themed and getting that right is important, after all if the mobile suits depicted in Gundam Musou all wore pink tutus, I doubt many Japanese salarymen would fork out the cash to play them.

The point is that games like Virtual On are trying to re-create something that is functionally inspired from the mecha mythos. Gundam Musou et al are just trying to make money via aesthetic association.

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

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