['Bell, Game, and Candle' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column by writer Alex Litel, discussing stuff that happens - or doesn't happen - in the game business. This time, he writes a response to Hilary Goldstein's editorial about Resident Evil 5.]

For what it seems like to be eons, the question of “What is the Citizen Kane of video games?” has been wondered by the gaming-journalism-industrial-complex’s proletariat and its bourgeoisie.

Can it be possible that Orson Welles’ seminal 1940 pièce de résistance of cinema of the same name, a film about the rise and fall of a media magnate Charles Foster Kane—played by Welles himself—loosely based off of the life of William Randolph Heart, can be a scenario where gameplay is existent?

One would logically think the best we could be hoping for is a strategy simulation based on the newspaper industry intertwined with the grandiose profoundness of Kojima-style storytelling and romantically lengthy filmic extracts.

When Citizen Kane: The Video Game was announced a year ago by publisher Square-Enix, disgust was essentially universally expressed by my colleagues at IGN, from popcorn fanatics to all out cineastes, at the thought of some third-rate shovelware-producing unknowns like Epicenter Studios.

Who the hell are they to cash in on red herrings and to crap all over a filmic legacy? This was really run-of-the-mill and hackneyed cynical prejudice that every film fan and gamer held, though.

In an idiosyncratic move, Square-Enix also steadfastly refused to show the game prior to the release date—a move that made the game be viewed even more intensely as unnecessary and awful. It is a brand of such a prestige, and they just brush it aside? That goes against every tenet of Marketing & Common Sense 101!

In a way, the story is similar to a real-life Silent Hill, replete with the haunting, proverbial and distorted reality that accurately mimics our worst fears and biggest desires—and how the two can often be intertwined.

It’s Citizen Kane which means it is Oscar-caliber; it is far beyond that, the game tells an fantastically unfantastically epic and multifaceted tale of the United States comparable to Philip Roth’s postmodern masterwork American Pastoral. Loosely based on the film in strict adherence, the game’s original tale will certainly please fans.

Imagine if the ghost of David Lynch besieged your favorite console controller, you would have this game’s intoxicating and naturalistically uninviting control scheme which will frustrate, abhor and cause much rejoicement.

Steel Battalion meets Wii Fit but on your controller and without the hulking plastic peripherals is what the controls could perhaps be described as.

The graphics are nothing short of unfurled visual onasis, an innovative blitzkrieg of beauty that never lets up in a manner bordering on relentless. And the style is indebted to the noir aesthetics of your, which the game renders immaculately.

But it turns out the marketing by anti-marketing, was for the best. Gaming grammar may not quite be the same after the cognizant, cogent gameplay of this game. This game has a little of everything, like Grand Theft Auto IV, but on steroids and far more incredible. The game creates a nonpareil kinetic bond, whether you like or not.

Quite literally but also metaphorically, Citizen Kane: The Video Game is the Citizen Kane of video games—a marvelously applaudable feat that gallantly contorts with the poise and consistence of a second-year community college dance appreciation professor as she stoutheartedly gallops on the morbidly determined divinity to provide a blitzkrieg of introspection into the most tepid slice of Americana.

[Alex Litel can be reached at alexlitel@gmail.com and occasionally found at alexlitel.blogspot.com.]

Posted by Alex Litel at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Capcom, NetDevil, Realtime Worlds, PlayFirst, 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

Realtime Worlds Ltd.: UI Artists
"Realtime Worlds, creators of the no.1 hit game Crackdown, are looking for a UI Artist to join the art team on their latest, cutting-edge, AAA project -- APB. This role will focus specifically on the design and creation of 2D User Interface graphics, helping to create a modern and innovative interactive experience."

PlayFirst: QA Engineer
"PlayFirst is an innovative entertainment company that makes games appealing to everyone. We create engaging story worlds that capture imaginations and we make those experiences available everywhere consumers want to play... PlayFirst is seeking an experienced QA Engineer to join our team. The successful candidate will have experience testing games. We are looking for a self-motivated team player with a passion for QA."

NetDevil: Senior Programmer
"This position is a very challenging role requiring deep knowledge in multiple disciplines. This person is required to lead a team of programmers and mentor and guide them while also being a significant contributor to the project's technical requirements. This person is also responsible for overall architecture, system design and integration. Additionally, this role requires interfacing with other parties involved in MMO development including operations, deployment and publishing teams."

Capcom: Senior Product Marketing Manager
"This position will manage and lead the development, planning and execution of marketing and promotional product marketing campaigns. Will develop brand and product strategies, managed focused market research to analyze market demands and opportunities for assigned products. Oversee the integration of product marketing programs with activities of sales, PR, online and finance groups to maximize program effectiveness. "

WorldsInMotion - Online Games

True Games Interactive: Online Marketing Manager
"Our rapidly growing MMO gaming team is looking for an experienced individual with a strong passion for on line video game Marketing. The right candidate will possess a balance of strategic vision and the ability to work effectively in a hands-on role in a start-up oriented team environment."

GamesOnDeck - Mobile Games

Namco Networks America Inc.: Mobile Game Designer
"Namco Networks America is looking for experienced game designers with the desire to create games for the ever-expanding mobile market. The Mobile Game Designer is responsible for generating a detailed, comprehensive Game Design Documents, which are the roadmap for the entire development team. An important part of the role is then communicating that vision clearly and concisely to the rest of the team. A strong technical or art background is highly desired. "

Gameloft: iPhone App Developer
"Calling all iPhone App Creators! Gameloft, worldwide leader in downloadable video games, is currently in search of 3rd party iPhone application developers. Team up with us, and your apps will have a great chance of reaching #1 on the App Store."

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

[What happened during Secret Level's $15 million-budget Golden Axe: Beast Rider? Extracting from an honest Game Developer magazine postmortem, the creators detail how they lost focus on co-op, and Iron Man's development distracted them -- but they still shipped in just 18 months.]

The latest issue of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a creator-written postmortem on the making of Secret Level's Golden Axe: Beast Rider, a modern reimagining of the arcade classic.

These extracts reveal how the San Francisco-based internal Sega studio behind the game kept itself together -- and even grew stronger -- despite myriad challenges, and an eventual product that was roundly panned by critics.

Secret Level producer Michael Boccieri crafted the postmortem of the Sega-published game, which was introduced in Game Developer as follows:

"In one of the most honest postmortems in recent memory, Secret Level producer Michael Bocciere takes us through the troubled development of a $15 million game with an aggregate review rating of under 50 percent. Boccieri explains how the studio ultimately turned this frown upside-down, strengthening the team along the way."

Losing Focus On The Property's Core

As is frequently the case in game development, the original design spec for Beast Rider was much more ambitious than was reflected in the shipping game -- and along the road of paring the game down to its essentials, the team lost sight of what elements struck at the core of the Golden Axe property:

"At the project's outset Golden Axe was designed to be a cooperative experience. However, the depth to which a cooperative experience was scoped and scheduled was far short of what was necessary to turn planning into reality.

"While the team made a valiant effort to retain other aspects of the classic franchise within Beast Rider—classic locales, a decidedly retro-flavored combat system, and the return of the beasts and gnomes from the original series—these elements proved ineffectual in piquing interest from the press and the hardcore consumer base, jaded by news of co-op's omission."

If You Can't Make One Game, Don't Make Two

During development, Secret Level found itself assigned another licensed game. While this allowed the studio to benefit from some synergy in tech implementation, it also spread the already-strained development bandwidth even more thin, damaging both games in the end:

"By 2006, Golden Axe was digging itself into an increasingly deeper hole. While slow progress was being made on the engine front, gameplay prototypes remained woefully inadequate on delivering expected quality. The studio was also grossly over budget. Secret Level -- and ultimately SEGA -- looked around for a hero to save the studio from itself.

"In a sense Iron Man and Golden Axe were conjoined twins. One could not have survived without the other, yet neither was able to fully blossom into its own element with the other one attached."

Performing Under Pressure

By the time Secret Level found its footing, the game had already spent too long going down the wrong track -- but that didn't keep the team from buckling down and doing its best to make up for lost time, to great effect:

"I cannot stress enough how much was accomplished in the last 12 to 14 months of development on Golden Axe: Beast Rider. The team made monumental strides in development under a very tight schedule, even as code and content were being developed simultaneously, a situation that very rarely leads to efficiency in product development.

"Nevertheless, few developers can say that they developed a title of the scope of Golden Axe in the time the game was truly in development with a full team — roughly 18 months, similar to some of the larger downloadable titles on the market today!"

Additional Info

The full postmortem, including a great deal more insight into Golden Axe: Beast Rider's development, with "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" reasoning, is now available in the February 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes Gamasutra and Game Developer staff picks of upcoming Game Developers Conference 2009 session highlights, David Hawes' primer on getting Stackless Python working in-engine on consoles, an interview with LocoRoco creator Tsutomu Kuono, and Bronwen Grimes' treatise on introducing artists to new tools.

As usual, there is Matthew Wasteland's humor column, as well as development columns from Noel Llopis, Bungie's Steve Theodore, LucasArts' Jesse Harlin, and BioWare's Damion Schubert.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of February 2009's edition as a single issue.

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

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

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

The goodies in this edition include two time-bending arcade games, a strategy game themed around eskimos and igloos, a freeware version of the kakuro numbers puzzle, a new commercial release from adventure game developer Dave Gilbert (no relation to Ron Gilbert), and a strategic typing game.

Game Pick: 'Cursor*10 2nd Session' (nekogames, browser)
"A follow-up to Yoshio Ishii's popular mouse clicking game, where players have to once again collect all pyramids in each of the sixteen floors with only the ten cursors they're allowed to use as lives. You will direct the action of every cursor, one at a time, with events beginning to loop once the allocated time for that cursor runs out."

Game Pick: 'Avalancher' (Sinister Sea, browser)
"A strategy game involving lots of snow and a fearless eskimo. Players are invited to choose a spot for our freezing hero and then given the chance to build a small igloo around him before unleashing the avalanche. The game follows the recent trend of 'physics is cool', so expect the little guy to go a-tumbling about when the snow hits."

Game Pick: 'Typomagia!' (Sol Games, freeware)
"A typing game in which you quickly enter words on your keyboard to build up magic power, which can then be used to conjure creatures to battle enemies. While not exactly unique, it's presented nicely and even has a Story Mode, as well as the option to choose the types of words so you can practice specific sets."

Game Pick: 'Time4Cat' (Megadev, browser)
"Time4Cat is the story of a stray feline who accidentally discovers a time-controlling collar. With its power, he sets out to do what he does best - eat leftovers off the street. Utilizing a unique gaming mechanic to make time seem all bendery, the player must collect food whilst dodging the people walking around. However, no-one will move a muscle unless the cat does."

Game Pick: 'Kakuro Nichiyou' (MK2K, freeware)
"A freeware implementation of the kakuro numbers puzzle. Similar to crossword puzzles, you are given clues about the sum of the numbers that are found in any given row and column, and from this you must deduce what number appears in each entry on the grid. The game also features a fairly robust solver and a puzzle creation utility."

Game Pick: 'Emerald City Confidential' (Wadjet Eye Games, commercial indie - demo available)
"A 1940's film noir take on L. Frank Baum's classic Wizard of Oz. The story follows Petra, Emerald City's only detective, as she tries to solve the case of a missing person. Of course, things are never as simple as that in an adventure game, and she is soon emersed in an epic tale of crime and magic."

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

[How have different survival horror games created fear over the genre's complex history? Writer and commentator Nayan Ramachandran examines the diversity of terror in key games such as Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Condemned.]

Horror games have had an interesting, if not bumpy, past. The last 20 years has seen the genre develop, die suddenly, return to life like a zombie, and escalate to mainstream proportions, surpassing even horror movies as the hair raising entertainment medium of choice.

My first experience with the horror genre was on the PC, with Hugo’s House of Horrors: an adventure game that had its tendrils primarily wrapped around the pillar of horror, no matter the snippets of humor that managed to rear its ugly head.

Since Biohazard’s success in almost every territory (and its revival of a genre that died unceremoniously in the West after the release of the original Alone in the Dark), numerous competitors have tried to copy, emulate and outrun it.

Later still, in hopes of serendipitously stumbling upon a nugget of innovation, developers began to eschew "survival horror" conventions in favor of either the more accessible, or the more obscure.

Each has touched on different elements of fear and terror, sometimes overlapping with each other, and sometimes even being at odds. What truly makes a scary game, though? What have the successful few done to overcome that perilous hurdle that seems to trip up so many?

There are the most obvious ones that all horror buffs cite as the most important agents of fear: the unknown, and frights.

Fear Of The Unknown

Possibly the most obvious horror element, the unknown is used to keep the player guessing and their mind going wild. Often times utilization of only a fraction of the player’s senses can trigger fear. Being visual creatures, humans are most comforted by sight because of our ability to discern objects, action and consequences based on a picture.

As a result, cutting visual stimuli and sticking purely to audio or speech is one of the best ways to keep a player on their toes. Even with weapons, it’s very hard to find what you cannot see, and what you do not know.

Even if visual stimuli is used, limiting or obfuscating the player’s view can enhance the horror in a game, especially if the player sees it for an incredible short time. This can hint both at the difficulty of an upcoming encounter, or even allude to matters earlier in the narrative that the player will soon have to face.

Scared Out Of Your Skin

Then there is the cheap scare. The infamous zombie dog jumping through the window in Biohazard 1 is not just memorable, but one of the hallmarks of the entire series (and perhaps horror itself). These unexpected occurrences, or fright moments, only seem to work once or twice before they become tired and irritating.

Cheap scares work on the weak of heart, but the average horror gamer has cojones of steel and expects monsters to jump out of dark corners. These types of scares are the bottom of the barrel.

Games still use cheap scares at times, but often use it to great effect by dashing a player’s expectations. One particularly memorable example is the original Silent Hill. When the player first visits the elementary school and encounters the lockers, there is a thumping sound coming from a single locker. When you open the locker, a cat jumps out and runs away.

When you return to the locker again in the dark world, the same locker is thumping from within. Whispering “fool me once…” to themselves, the player opens the locker again to find…nothing. The locker is totally empty.

Strangely, this absence of climax was more scary than a monster popping out. At least if a monster had jumped out, there would be a sense of climax and relief, but this lack of climax prolongs the hanging anticipation.

What Are You Waiting For?

This, of course, ties into another great element of horror that people often do not consider: anticipation. The only thing more terrifying than not knowing what to expect around the next corner, is having a vague idea of what it is.

Condemned for Xbox 360 did this masterfully using complex AI, but it’s not always needed. Traveling through the darkness with just a 2×4, the player slinks through the darkness looking for enemies. Through the doorway ahead, a single lamp hangs, illuminating very little of the upcoming hallway.

Just as the player approaches, a figure darts across. There’s no way to know what they’re armed with, or even who they are, but the player knows they are around the corner, waiting to pounce.

Here, there are two schools of thought on horror. In more action-oriented horror games, the enemy would indeed be there, waiting to club the player to death with a lead pipe.

In games that look to play with the player’s emotions, fears and anxiety, the enemy might not be around the corner at all. In fact, it could be a harmless figment of the player’s imagination, created to make the player question and harshly judge everything in the environment.

Dazed And Confused

This is why anticipation goes so well with the element of confusion. Playing with a character’s anticipation is not always entirely effective, especially if it’s consistent. The minute a player catches on to the fact that a given ghost or horrifying denizen of the game is no longer an actual threat, the player’s fears drop away like onion layers.

Killing the vulnerable and unexpecting player after almost Pavlovian levels of forced repetition builds a ruleset of expectations in the player’s mind.

“That enemy does not actually exist. Like every other time, it will just disappear, and I can continue with my game.” Imagine the player’s horror when, instead of disappearing, the creature finally turns towards the player, and slowly begins walking towards them, each tile and plant in the vicinity corroding and shriveling with the creature’s every step.

Suddenly, the player’s known rules and expectations have been dashed, and no amount of quick planning is a match for pure, unadultered panic. This path is most effective in games where the player is armed with very little, or nothing at all. In games like Clock Tower or The Nameless Game/Nanashi no Game, where the main character is a normal, vulnerable character, with no way to fight off enemies permanently. Instead, they have to run for safety or hide.

All that said, horror is still a very personal experience. Each of us has our phobias and insecurities, and a well done horror experience plays upon the most common among us. It’s difficult to create a horror experience that is tailored to each person, but many companies have done a fantastic job of making us want to lock our doors and cry ourselves to sleep. What makes you scared?

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

[Every week, sister site 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, Xbox Live users can check out EXIT 2, Taito's puzzle platformer title which has been converted from PSP to Xbox 360. They can also buy Braid for 800 Microsoft Points this week, but only if they're a Gold subscriber.

Elsewhere, PlayStation Network users can check out PopCap's Zuma, finally making it to the platform. But this week's draw is Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy, possibly the most bizarre thing you've ever seen.

Wii owners can check out Onslaught, a WiiWare first person shooter done by a Japanese development team. That's something you don't see every day. You can also now check out Commodore 64 titles in the Virtual Console section.

This week's big news is that Sega plan to release Virtual On for the Xbox Live Arcade, in what seems to be the first time Sega of Japan have done anything on next-generation consoles. We also interview DICE about Battlefield 1943, their upcoming multiplayer game for XBLA and PSN:

GamerBytes Specials

Interview: Between A Company And Heroes - DICE Talk Battlefield 1943
We talk to Patrick Liu, director of Battlefield 1943 about distributing a digitally downloadable online shooter for PSN and XBLA.

Xbox Live Arcade

EXIT 2 Now Available On XBLA - Don't Forget Your Cheap Braid As Well
The sequel to Taito's side scrolling puzzler now available on Xbox Live Marketplace.

Virtual-On Oratorio Tangram Confirmed For Xbox Live Arcade
Sega's classic Arcade robot fighter is coming to the Xbox Live Arcade. I get dibs on Raiden.or Cypher.

Matt Hazard Retro Game Coming To XBLA And PSN
The parody shooter's non-existent classic game gets a little more real.

Gel: Set & Match Announced - Match 3 In This Puzzle Action Game
Semi-sequel to the original Xbox's Fuzzee Fever coming to XBLA soon.

PlayStation Network

EU PSN Store Update - Noby Noby Boy, Street Fighter II HD Remix, Burnout DLC
Europe finally gets Street Fighter II HD, and also enjoy some craziness with Boy.

NA PSN Store Update - Noby Noby Boy, Zuma, And Burnout, HV Bowling DLC
PSN users can begin to take their hallucinogenic substances, because Noby Noby Boy is here. I'm pretty sure that Zuma frog is on something too...

WiiWare

Let's Catch Getting English Release
Don't have time to play catch with your kid? Here's another way that the Wii can do your parenting for you.

First Screens Of Adventure Island: The Beginning Released
Hudson has revealed the first screens of their brand new title in their classic platformer.

NA WiiWare Update: Onslaught And Commodore 64 Comes To Virtual Console
Players can now play downloadable first person shooter Onslaught online with up to for players. Or they can go play The Last Ninja.

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

[For anyone who hasn't got a Game Developers Conference ticket yet, this Green Label Games-supported competition is a great chance to win an All-Access pass, just by inventing a game concept that represents (futuramavoice) the wooorld of tomorrrrrow (/futuramavoice). Go for it!]

Gamasutra and sister sites GameCareerGuide and GameSetWatch are presenting a new competition for future-oriented developers, with 20 All-Access GDC Passes (collectively worth over $40,000!) available for lucky winners who can envisage what video games might be like in the year 2020.

The prizes in this special competition are awarded thanks to Green Label Gaming. The Mountain Dew-backed gaming label is heavily supporting innovative gaming at GDC this year, and is committed to empowering the emerging talent – helping to shape the future of the industry.

In addition to the GDC All-Access passes, Green Label Gaming is adding $10,000 to the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival, to make the IGF's top prize $30,000 this year.

We know the kind of break-out games that are popular in 2009 - from World Of Goo to LittleBigPlanet and beyond. But how about in 2020? Can you predict what kind of games will be smash hits, how they will be delivered, and how we will consume games as an entertainment medium?

As you may know, there are people called futurists who get awarded to talk about what hasn't happened yet. So that's what we're letting competition entrants be for this test, with the winners being showcased in a special Gamasutra feature.

Therefore, for this competition, devise the name of a game that will be popular or cutting-edge tech in 2020, and write a description of how it is controlled, as well as its chief design concepts and innovations.

Use illustrations if you think it'll help your point, and also try to give an impression of the minute to minute gameplay that you'll play through while advancing in this game.

Obviously, a lot of the game genres or concepts may be the same as today, even in 2020 - for example, role-playing games will still have orcs and goblins in them, perhaps? But how will you control your player, what extra detail or interactivity will you see in the game, how will that mesh with the real world, and how will these titles be additionally social and fulfilling?

We're presuming that the most cutting-edge games of 2020 may use some of the same game mechanics of today's games, but different ways of being integrated into your lifestyle and controlled.

More complex gesture controls? Direct brain control of games? Wearable devices that keep you playing on the move? Games that work seamlessly into your work time? There's plenty of opportunity for invention here, both in design and control methods.

The competition prizes, supported by Mountain Dew's Green Label Gaming as part of their Platinum Sponsorship of this year's Independent Games Festival, will be twenty All-Access passes to this year's Game Developer's Conference; total prize value over $40,000.

Please enter the competition by sending your entry to gamesof2020@gamasutra.com by Wednesday, March 4th at 11.59pm PST - and good luck!

[Gamasutra editors will collectively judge the entries, and winners will be notified via email within 24 hours of the competition's completion. The contest allows one entry per person, and they can be submitted from anywhere in the world. You will retain all rights to your game concept, but we may reprint it as part of the competition results.]

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

[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.]

Almost finishing up the week, this set of GameSetLinks is headed up by the 1UP RPG blog discussion of Falcom, one of those developers that never quite seems to get their due - although not all of their games are that awesome for today's discerning Western consumer, of course.

Also in here - a Black History Month-triggered interview about the Fairchild Channel F, plus Ultima Online, an Infinite Ammo interview, a great Sonic documentary, and a few other things besides.

Samba de amigo:

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : The Mystery of Falcom
An interesting mini-discussion on the Japanese RPG maker: 'The company has built a loyal niche of fans in America almost in spite of itself.'

Vintage Computing and Gaming | Archive » VC&G Interview: Jerry Lawson, Black Video Game Pioneer
An excellent Benj Edwards interview with the designer of the Fairchild Channel F, the world's first cartridge-based video game system (released in 1976).

Ultima Online Article - Page 1 // MMO /// Eurogamer
'Where your City of Lord of the Warcrafts like to lay their landscapes out in a linear, tiered fashion - there's room at the top-level dungeons they're telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill fire beetles - UO presented its virtual Britannia just as it had appeared in offline Ultima games: open, detailed, and deeply interactive.'

GameTap Blog » Blog Archive » GameTap Premieres Four-Part Sonic Retrospective
Completely great video documentary on Sonic and friends.

The Reticule: 'GunsGunsGuns - An Interview with Infinite Ammo’s Alec Holowka'
Nice interview with an indie stalwart.

Low Fierce: The Dogface Show
A video cast about 'the culture of Street Fighter', indeed!

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

[Portable rhythm titles Elite Beat Agents and Patapon are critical hits and fan-favorites -- but Matt Matthews' new, exclusive NPD stat-revealing column shows that the U.S. mainstream "collectively yawned" compared to titles like Guitar Hero: On Tour.]

In 2008 the American video game industry surpassed $21 billion in sales, according to the NPD Group, and even in the current tough economic times the industry is able to support a robust and diverse universe of software.

Let's shine some light into the corners which, for one reason or another, whole swaths of the videogame consumer public simply haven't seen before.

Today, we begin with two rhythm-based handheld games: Elite Beat Agents for the Nintendo DS and Patapon for Sony's PSP.

How can anyone have failed to notice the splash made by the dancing Agents? Do people exist who haven't seen the cute warriors of Patapon? In the well-connected world of online video game media, these are core games, ones that everyone is expected to know, and most likely have played.

Yet as we'll soon see, for all the importance that these games have among industry followers, they are little-known to the wider public.

Dancing Days

At its heart, Elite Beat Agents is a touch screen rhythm game. Players tap and slide the stylus according to a predetermined sequence of on-screen icons and the beat of the soundtrack.

Hit the beats and the player is treated to bits of melodrama as the game's titular Agents carry out their missions: to cheer various people through life crises using the power of song and dance.

In one mission, a track star suffering with a cold days before an important meet is revived by the curvaceous nurse-personification of his immune system – while the Agents dance to the tune of Ashlee Simpson's "La La". Later, an oil-digging billionaire loses and then earns back a fortune to regain the attention of his gold-digging wife -– with David Bowie's "Let's Dance" for a soundtrack.

On paper the premise sounds unwieldy, but in practice the game can be a true joy to play. With a sense of rhythm and a hand to hold the stylus, practically anyone can master the easy songs. The delightful stories and catchy musical selections are a strong lure to earn the right to see and master all the challenges.

Even with strong backing from Nintendo, including a demo installed on units at retail locations, Elite Beat Agents opened to disappointing sales. One month after its U.S. launch, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé told MTV's Stephen Totilo that initial sales were only 120,000 units, well below the 300,000 level that the company had expected.

Fils-Aimé conceded that the title and its concept hadn't been surefire hits, but that he was disappointed that sales had not reached what he had anticipated would be "explosive" levels.

By early 2007, Elite Beat Agents had won several awards, including Nintendo DS Game of the Year for 2006 from IGN and Best Music/Rhythm Game of 2006 from GameSpot.

Despite these accolades and continuing support from the online video game fanatic community, including a recent live-action video produced by video comedy site Mega64, most Nintendo DS owners have likely never heard of the game, much less played it.

As of January 2009, Elite Beat Agents has sold 179,000 copies in the United States, according to exclusive data supplied to Gamasutra by the NPD Group.

Pata-Pata-Pata-Pon

Within fifteen months, Nintendo's rival in the handheld space, Sony, would make a play for the quirky music-and-rhythm genre with its new game, Patapon.

The exclusive PlayStation Portable (PSP) title follows the adventures of the Patapon, a warrior tribe bent on reclaiming its land from the enemy Zigotons. Ultimately, the tribe finds meaning in a loftier goal and that quest leads them, literally, to the far end of the world.

The player commands the Patapon in battle through a set of four talking drums, each mapped to one of the standard PlayStation controller face buttons. By tapping out command phrases in time with the game's background beat, the Patapon can be instructed to advance or retreat, attack or defend. Keep the beat well enough and the Patapons reach a fever pitch, during which their attacks are exceptionally potent.

With its catchy beats, silhouette-and-eyeball cartoon aesthetic, and goofy sense of humor ("Spank them bottoms!" is a typical war cry), Patapon found a fanbase in the online world.

For its part, Sony promoted the game heavily on its PlayStation Blog. Chris Hinojosa-Miranda, the game's associate producer, posted new information about the game nearly weekly from December 2007, through the game's February launch, and into March 2008.

To stoke the fires at retail, Sony provided an exclusive pre-order demo disc – containing a rare combat item available through no other means. Later, the same demo was released through Sony's PlayStation Store.

By the end of 2008, Patapon was honored with several awards for its unique music and gameplay, including an award from GameSpot for Most Innovative Game and IGN's Best New IP award.

Despite all the energy Sony poured into Patapon and its promotion, the game had barely edged out Elite Beat Agents, selling only 229,000 units in the United States by January 2009 after almost a year on the market, according to NPD data supplied to Gamasutra.

(A sequel has already been released in Japan and is scheduled for release in the U.S. and Europe during Spring 2009.)

A New (Handheld) Hero Appears

For their efforts to break out of traditional game design and push new ways mix music and storytelling, Nintendo and Sony received little reward.

Elite Beat Agents and Patapon were pitched for systems Americans have bought by the tens of millions, yet the games sold fewer than half a million units combined. The mainstream, if it even knew about these titles, collectively yawned.

One might suspect that music-and-rhythm games on a handheld are simply not an easy sell. After all, Sony and Nintendo put their weight behind these lauded titles, and they've sold miserably.

However in Summer 2008, Activision and Guitar Hero: On Tour for the Nintendo DS proved that handhelds are fertile ground for the right kind of music game.

The brand new iteration of the Guitar Hero series went on sale at the premium price of $50, contained a soundtrack of over 30 songs, and required a special piece of hardware to add guitar frets to DS system.

Within its first six months on the market, sales had reached over 1.1 million units in the United States alone, according to Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities.

These games – Elite Beat Agents and Patapon on the one hand and Guitar Hero: On Tour on the other -– provide a particularly clear example of the tensions that exist in the videogame industry.

There is a vast gap between what the online media and online community find compelling and what mainstream consumers appear to see and want.

Well-known licenses and familiar interfaces can often propel a game to success while new characters and novel ideas languish. And for all their clout and money, neither Nintendo nor Sony are powerful enough to make a deserving game a successful one.

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

['Pixel Journeys' is a monthly GameSetWatch column by John Harris discussing games with unusual design attributes that have lessons to teach modern game designers. This month, an awesome Atari Lynx oddity.]

One of my favorite things to do, when scouting around the breadth of video and computer gaming, is to collect exceptions. It's habitual, and more than a little annoying to me.

What exactly do I mean by this? Every time I see some blogger or columnist say some game aspect is unnecessary, obsolete, or even unwanted across the whole of gaming, I immediately search my memory for an exception that will prove the commentator wrong.

I often do, then post an insufferable comment to that effect. And often, if I find one, that exception turns out to be something essential to one game or another's design. This is why I'm reluctant to give hard-and-fast edicts of what game designers must do, for it's really easy to be proven wrong.

This may be because video games are such a uniquely varied and far-reaching medium. Whether they live up to their potential is a question that I will not answer now, mainly because I don't wish to depress the reader or myself too much when I have a happier subject to cover.

But the most inventive games can be truly unique, unique to an extent that they can cause the player to forgive many other things that might otherwise be seen as faults, even make those faults over into advantages.

Yes, I insist, this is so. A good example is the relatively obscure game Todd's Adventures in Slime World, developed by Epyx for the Atari Lynx and designed by forgotten genius M. Peter Engelbrite, a game that proves, once and for all, that a side-scrolling exploration game need not steal all its play from Metroid in order to be any good.

Introduction

Slime World was seen as something of a showpiece for the Lynx's connectivity features, which allowed up to eight players to compete or cooperate in certain games. The Lynx had very few games that supported eight players, but in Slime World was one of them, and it remains a highlight of the system's small library.

Renovation released a Genesis port with worse graphics that only supported up to two players, but even with the game population reduced to such a low number, the game still manages to shine. (Really, The Genesis version has worse graphics! The Lynx version may be the best-looking game for the system.)

I've mentioned Slime World before, in the article 20 Open World Games over on Gamasutra. The game serves as a rather striking contrast to the game that's often held up as one of the best games of exploration around, Super Metroid.

Both games are two-dimensional games set on an alien world, with an automap and lots of secret passages. The methods the player has for moving around the world are the core of the play; many times a given area can only be accessed using a particular move. Checkpoints in both are frequent and death is (mostly) more of a delay than a real obstacle.

But despite all these similarities, the games are vastly different. Samus' powers in Super Metroid are slowly built during exploration of the game world. While dying forces the player back to his last save, it's infrequent enough, and save points sufficiently common, that this is rarely a factor. On the other hand Todd's abilities are reset to zero every time he dies, and death is frequent.

Super Metroid's Zebes, for all its supposedly being a hostile environment, is relatively fair in that there are no instant death situations, and with thorough exploration the player will usually be more than capable of overcoming whatever challenges he faces.

Slime World couldn't be more different; instant death is everywhere, and in fact there exists an enemy, called by us the "Snapjaw," that can kill the player instantly, without warning and with no escape, when he walks upon the spot in which it is hidden. It's a sudden, unavoidable death trap, something that game designers are told to avoid at all costs.

Slime World has them, and what's more, it makes them work: the player will be dying all the time anyway, and checkpoints are so frequent that usually the player won't have to go through one or two rooms to return to the scene. The only way to kill a hidden Snapjaw is, in a multiplayer game, to have one player purposely die while another blasts it.

The only way to avoid one is to be hyper-alert to clues left by the designer: bare spots in a field of items, the one spot in the room that doesn't contain a visible enemy, the bottoms of slime pools, strangely empty rooms, and so on. And if the player avoids one he won't know it; they only show up when activated, at which time it's already too late.

So here is a game with stiff jumping, a low frame rate, slow speed for an action game, a cramped screen, tricky controls, and the most treacherous enemy in all of video gaming. And yet, I and friends have willingly spent many hours exploring Slime World, finding its many extremely devious hidden passages, searching tunnels, finding treasure, shooting enemies.

We have observed a curious temporal-warping effect when playing it, in that a period of game time that a player perceived to be about thirty minutes often ends up being hours passed in the real world. This does not happen during bad games.

The low speed and frame rate contribute to a more leisurely pace, generally, than other games. This fits the play well because, in most game modes, the finding of secret passages and treasure is its own reward. There is enough cool stuff going on in a typical Slime World chamber that just seeing it for the first time is a reward. To this end, the game puts secret passages everywhere, EVERYWHERE.

The extent of its mazes is shocking; I'm not aware of there being a complete map for this game in existence. It makes the bulk of Super Metroid look downright puny, and unlike that game, Slime World is far more willing to hide huge sections of its game world behind those secret passages that the player may never happen upon even after multiple completions.

Playing the Game

One thing that Slime World seems to do poorly at first, but turns out to work quite well, has to do with the way Todd jumps.

A good bit of the challenge in the game comes from making pinpoint jumps onto ledges, platforms and walls. When a random section of floor can kill the player immediately, being able to make these jumps reliably is important. Todd is able to make three kinds of jumps: a normal jump, a high jump and a long jump. Once in the air, the player cannot alter his course, ala Castlevania.

This means he can't flexibly adjust his trajectory in mid-air, and dissuades him from making long, arcing leaps into unknown territory (which, considering the Lynx's small screen, there is apt to be a lot of). But it also means that, once he leaves the ground, his destination is set, which adds regularity to the jumping mechanism. An important early skill to gain when playing is a sense for how far a long jump will take Todd, and how high a high jump will go. This becomes an integral part of some of the puzzles, where the player, desperate to avoid a Snapjaw on the floor, must navigate around it through a series of carefully-judged wall-climbs and leaps.

The play is helped a bit by giving Todd four different kinds of jumps. Pressing the jump button by itself sends him about one Todd-height into the air. Holding up and jumping results in a leap of one-and-a-half Todd-heights. Holding left or right when pressing the button causes a fast long-jump that's actually faster than walking the same distance and good for covering ground quickly. And If he's latched onto a wall, pressing jump makes him spring directly away from the wall. Also, if he climbs down off a wall into empty space, he curves "inward."

Wall climbs are another important movement skill to pick up. Attempting to walk off of a ledge will instead initiate a climb down the side of the ledge. Jumping into a wall causes Todd to immediately cling to it. Those are the ways to climb walls: there is no "wall jump" button. Climbing is automatic and frequent, and nearly every wall can be climbed. Many of the enemies can fly, so being able to be more vertically-mobile like this is important for killing or avoiding them.

It's difficult to over-emphasize how ubiquitous climbing is. One of the most common types of secret passages is the hidden shaft, a spot in the ceiling that contains an invisible opening to a room just above. Their locations can be picked up with careful observation of the automap (they show up as one-block outcroppings), but to enter them the player must high jump into the right spot of the ceiling, causing the player to cling to the shaft wall, from which he can climb up into the room.

Some of the movement options, all except for the long jump, are depicted in this image:

This is from one of the first rooms in the Logic game, which emphasizes clever solutions as opposed to blasting enemies. This room is composed of an regular, alternating sequence of platforms. From atop each, Todd can either jump to either side, grabbing the side of the next platform up in the direction he's facing; press left or right to climb down, clinging to the side of his current platform; or from there climb down off the platform, which will cause him to curve in and attach to the side of the next platform down. (By the way, long jumps are useless here, as Todd's head will hit the platform above him.)

The dangerous thing about this room is that, although there are no normal enemies here, all along the bottom is a slime pool full of Snapjaws, and there are also hidden Snapjaws atop certain platforms in the room! The key is, after discovering which platforms hide snappers, to use the various jumping and climbing moves to avoid the tops of those platforms, and wind your way to a jet pack on the far right wall, which allows for aerial movement unmenaced by lurking green death and easy escape from the room.

Beneath the Surface

It is the map's utility, since it reveals secret passage entrances, that makes finding secret passages fair and enjoyable; if they didn't show up on the map then the player could only find them by jumping into every section of ceiling. A big reason to play Slime World comes from repeatedly experiencing that moment of discovery: there are probably hundreds of secret rooms. Many are relatively easy to find, but there are just so many that it's easy to miss some. A few are much more devious.

There may be no other video game that has as many secret areas as Todd's Adventures in Slime World. This is worth illustrating:

The above graphic shows a small portion of the map of the Easy game, by far the simplest of the game's seven modes. In this mode there are few Snapjaws and the route is far more linear than in most of the other modes, but the chances of getting lost are still considerable. (The Genesis version is a little easier since it switches out the checkpoint sparkles with arrows to point generally to the way out.)

If you look carefully, you'll see that all of the secret rooms are tipped off by a one-block outcropping in the adjoining room. While there are other kinds of secret areas in Slime World, this kind, the invisible passage, is by far the most common. In this small section of the game, there are 12 of them. (They are more common in Easy, however, than in later modes, although there are still many to find.)

The area depicted would be a full level, or more, in most games. Given differences in character size, screen size, exploration speed and difficulty, among other things, it is difficult to fairly compare world sizes between games. But the game "feels" huge. Compared to the gold standard for exploratory gaming map size, Super Metroid, I'd say that this part of the map of Easy feels about the size of Crateria. But Slime World has many more, smaller, rooms, and more of them are secret. The Easy map, in Slime World, is basically an appetizer; most levels are much larger.

In addition, many of the modes have special rules only in effect for them. The Logic game takes away your gun, Suspense is an exploration race to find items that replenish a timer, Arcade must be finished on one life, and Combat, a favorite, is a sidescroller deathmatch for up to eight players.

What can we learn from Todd's Adventures in Slime World?

The most surprising thing about Slime World is that it's just about the purest game of exploration there is, and that it proves that such a game can work extremely well. It's that exploration itself, not character advancement, not collecting new abilities, and not seeing new sights, that is the point of the game.

There are lots of enemies to defeat, but they too are largely the same throughout the different modes, although the different game rules change the strategies players must use in dealing with them. The colors and background graphics change often in most of the modes, but the basic terrain, slime-covered walls, is mostly the same.

And unlike in Metroid-style games, the player gains no permanent abilities in the mazes, only tools that are used once then lost. Secret areas most commonly contain Red Slime Gems, which are worth tremendous point awards, full healing and invulnerability time, but these things are actually not that useful in terms of playing the game. Score only matters at the end, healing is common, and invulnerability in Slime World is a relative state; Snapjaws and red slime will still instantly kill a flashing player.

And yet, it still feels great to find those secret chambers. Part of it is that they're hidden with some skill, part of it is that Engelbrite was a very clever world designer, using the basic world pieces in such a great variety of ways that different sections of the game are recognizable despite the fact the same graphics set is used throughout the game.

And part of it is that the game is paced very well, with more exotic enemies and terrain types saved up for special rooms and challenges. There's the way that the tools the player can find are never necessary, but still very useful, and carry many hidden features and consequences.

Previously:
Entry in Game Design Essentials: 20 Open World Games

Posted by John Harris 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.]

Still not out of the GameSetLinks, thanks to some particularly industrious weekend RSS-trawlin', and we start out with some completely adorable Sega arcade cabinet mini-figures, which I fear I must own some time fairly soon.

Also in here - Turkish political games, classic Resident Evil revisited, hidden bits of Shadow Of The Colossus, uhh, unhidden, plus Emerald City Confidential explored, and lots more.

It is over for youuuu:

NCSX Import Video Games & Toys: Sega Taikan Game Collection - Import Preorder
'The Sega Taikan Game Collection from Organic looks back at Sega's custom sit down coin-ops which rocked and veered from side to side to simulate the onscreen action.'

"Huys"/"Hope" - Turkey's first political game - News Games: Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project
Excellent continued work on this blog: 'Besides the speeches and a documentary film, for the first time in Turkey an editorial game was introduced to the audience: "Huys", meaning "Hope" in Armenian.'

Richard Cobbett > Richard's Online Journal > Emerald City Confidential
Definitely underdiscussed thus far, this one: 'It’s an interesting release, and arguably the first old-school adventure to really be built as casual game.'

TOKYOMANGO: RPG gadget tells you whether you're spending too much $
'This handy digital device is kinda like Mint.com, a Nintendo DS, a MMORPG, and your mother all bundled up into one little white box.'

GAMBIT: Updates: The Pleasures of Old School Resident Evil - Sherry Birkin
A nice look back at a sometime-maligned early part of the series: 'I played RE2 so long ago (back in 1998) I'd forgotten all the subtle touches that make Sherry and Claire's relationship endearing.'

Shadow Of The Colossus: unused eastern area discovered! | Unseen 64: Beta, Unreleased & Unseen Videogames!
An interesting find by hacking Shadow Of The Colossus - they've 'discovered an huge, unused architecture hidden in the Eastern area of the game map.'

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

[In the latest 'Sound Current' audio interview column for GameSetWatch, Jeriaska sits down with freelance composer (and friend of GSW, actually!) Vincent Diamante to discuss his work on the deliciously ambient soundtrack for ThatGameCompany's new PSN title Flower.]

A Playstation Network downloadable title for the PS3, Flower invites players to soar through the air as an adventurous petal, alighting on flowers to cause them to bloom. It is the latest title by ThatGameCompany, a design team that traces its roots back to the University of Southern California Interactive Media Division. The controls are handled by steering the Sixaxis controller and a single button allows the player to accelerate in flight.

Important to the experience of Flower, which was sound designed by Sony Santa Monica's audio lead Steve Johnson, is the music by USC alumnus Vincent Diamante, whose subtle score is nevertheless designed to make an impact.

Previously the musician behind ThatGameCompany's PC title Cloud, Diamante has selected layers of acoustic instrument samples that rise and fall depending on the actions of the player.

In this discussion with the composer, Diamante explains how the layers of audio that make up Flower's score came together, both through his own independent decisions and by way of a dialog with artists, illustrators and level designers.

[Interview conducted by Jeriaska. This article is available in French at Squaremusic.]

GSW: How far back can you trace your collaboration with Jenova Chen, the co-founder of ThatGameCompany?

Diamante: Jenova was an artist on a USC game I had previously worked on called Dyadin. It was an action game with a multi-player network component. The game actually made it into the Independent Games Festival the year before Cloud. It was very collaborative and did not really have a strong auteur, while Cloud did.

GSW: How would you describe Jenova's creative vision for Cloud?

Diamante: Cloud and Flower are similar in that they are very personal for Jenova. He would ask people on the team to remember how it was lying down on the ground and looking up at the sky. Of course I did remember that, back when I was a kid and I thought clouds were cool. Flower has people flying through valleys and canyons, and I kind of had that feeling as a kid as well -- that dream of flying.

GSW: The sound of instruments in Flower are suggestive of natural forces, like listening to the wind blowing through chimes. What audio techniques were involved in your use of instrument samples?

Diamante: I wanted the instruments to have independence, even during Levels Three and Six, where the orchestration is a concerted effort on the part of the group. I spent a lot of time listening to the tracks alone to make sure that the individual instruments when played all by their lonesome were enjoying it. If I could not answer that question honestly in the affirmative, then I went back to the drawing board.

I spent a lot of time looking at the level design in Maya and understanding how it was organized into discrete components. Knowing how each of these individual pieces of the gameplay experience operated, I was able to build a score that fit that.

GSW: You have mentioned that your interest in video games stretches as far back as the Commodore 64. Flower consciously departs from the synthetic quality of traditional electronic videogame music to embrace an organic, acoustic style sound. Do both sounds appeal to you?

Diamante: Absolutely. I started out with mods on the Amiga and later got a PC with a Sound Blaster so I could do S3Ms. I really liked pushing the boundaries of what that format was capable of. To me the Commodore 64 is more than just a play-back device. It's an instrument, like a piano or a violin. It has its own particular sound and idioms.

GSW: When did you begin work on Cloud?

Diamante: I started writing the music at the same time the rest of the USC team was getting ready to start production. I was an Interactive Media MFA student, just like most of the rest of the team, so there was a lot of trust that I knew what the game sound should be like even before all the game details had solidified.

While the music was one of the first things to be finished, throughout the process all of us matched each other's understanding of what the game would become.

GSW: What programs did you use for the score?

Diamante: I used mostly Cakewalk Sonar and Miroslav Mini. Synful had just come out that year and I was really excited about it. Additive synth instead of a big sampled library really appealed to me from a technical standpoint. The soundtrack to Cloud is a free download.

Flower is surprisingly not that huge a departure from Cloud in terms of the tech I used. These days, I still use Sonar, a more advanced version of the Miroslav sounds, and an updated version of Synful as my base orchestra, along with other less encompassing libraries I have picked up.

GSW: Are there design elements of Flower that appeal to you as an game player?

Diamante: Everyone says Flower is an experience, not a game... but there are so many good game ideas that it has. Subtle things like using the wind to hint at objectives are so much more elegantly integrated than the typical signposting that you see in adventure games these days. Also, Flower has my favorite motion control in any video game.

GSW: From a musician's standpoint, was it influential to have the Sixaxis be such a prominent component of the gameplay on Flower?

Diamante: The Sixaxis for direction was there from the beginning. Just how you tilted the controller to fly was definitely a big influence on the music that I wrote. It's a really soft type of control. You can feel that there is a texture to the way you fly through the air. That texture definitely had a big influence on the way I wrote for my winds.

GSW: The simplest layer of the soundtrack seems to be the single instrument that sounds when you brush by a flower, causing it to bud. Was each kind of flower associated with a different instrument?

Diamante: Yes. When you are in level 3, pink flowers correspond with a choral sound and white flowers have a chime sound. The instruments are always tied to a particular color within the level and were the same sounds from my software music library that I was using for music creation.

There might be some more significant post-processing that happened before they became a flower sound in the game, but the base was always a musical instrument, just like I was using in my sequencer.

GSW: If you are traveling through the level and you take a particular path through a row of flowers, that will cause a string of instruments to sound and interact with the background music. Did you have a say in where the flowers were placed so that this interaction was harmonious?

Diamante: I did have a lot of say in that. I spent a lot of time at ThatGameCompany so I had the opportunity to talk with the artists about the arrangement of flowers: tightening up lines of flowers or stretching them out, replacing red flowers with white flowers, and so forth so that the sound would work.

GSW: Were there particular specifications for the instruments you included in the background music?

Diamante: I really enjoyed taking some of the lower instruments, like bass flute and bassoon, and pushing them up into the higher registers, as opposed to using instruments like the piccolo or violin to convey the sense of flying through the air. These are flowers that are dreaming of flight: they are used to being down low, and in this game they are finally given opportunity to fly in these different environments.

GSW: Did your specifications change during later levels of the game, for instance from daytime to nighttime stages?

Diamante: On Level One there is a guitar, a piano and string pads. It's a pretty simple instrumentation for a relatively simple environment. Then, moving from Level One to Three the complexity increases.

Level Four drops us back again to a layering similar to Level One, kind of like the beginning of a new arc. The intensity builds again and climaxes with Level Six. The two different musical arcs match the way the game's flowers are divided on the menu screen.

GSW: Was Level Six more work intensive?

Diamante: Six was pretty intense. I wanted the interactivity of the music and the building of layers to work in the same way as in previous levels, but the instrumentation was that much more complex. I had to think really hard about just what instruments would be grouped in.

It was harder to handle because I was using that much more of the orchestra. In terms of orchestra size, prior to Level Six I was using 10, 20, 35 players, tops. Then there is the length of Level Six. Like the music in the other levels, it is a loop, but the Level Six loop is about six times the length of any other loop in the game.

GSW: There is a section of the game where you are caught in a wind tunnel and rushing between canyon walls, where your progression through the level is on a track. Did the track provide more structure for the background music?

Diamante: That particular piece was written before I saw a canyon in the game. I wanted to write something that had a vibrancy and buoyancy to it. There's a faster tempo and the instruments are playing more closely together. Before I had seen that moment of the game designed, I think we only had grass hills.

GSW: When did you first start work on the score?

Diamante: As with Cloud, I started writing music for Flower during pre-production. The guys at ThatGameCompany were working on prototypes on the PC. There were still core gamplay mechanics decisions that had not been determined.

As with Cloud, they could trust me to subtly influence the level and art design with my music. In fact, they enjoyed being surprised and inspired by it.

GSW: The game operates on a non-verbal level, so was this conducive to distributing the title to other language regions?

Diamante: Yes, it was even released in Japan and Europe ahead of the U.S. Recently I have been checking out the Japanese boards and saw that guys were putting playthroughs on Nico Video with the scrolling comments.

It's great to see those guys appreciating the music, especially since those great Japanese tracks like Star Fox and Zelda are the songs that I remember from when I was a kid.

GSW: Are there any plans to make the music for Flower available online?

Diamante: Sony and I are talking about it. Flower's music definitely lends itself more to the interactive game experience than the album experience, however. There are songs and well defined loops, but so much of it is the player's interactions bringing a new layer of the instrument bed into the mix.

[Images courtesy of Sony Computer Entertainment.]

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

[Since Don Mattrick has been part of the Canadian game scene since, oh, 1982 (Distinctive Software, yay), my colleagues at GDC Canada thought him a good choice to keynote May's GDC Canada in Vancouver. Lots of Test Drive questions, please!]

Don Mattrick, Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business SVP, will deliver a keynote at the inaugural Game Developers Conference Canada taking place May 12-13th in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The keynote will be presented in the form of an extensive on-stage interview, with games journalist Victor Lucas, creator and co-host of “The Electric Playground,” asking Mattrick a series of questions exploring the changing landscape of Canadian game development and Mattrick’s own role in expanding Canada’s role in the industry.

Previous to his work at Microsoft, Mattrick helped bring to life such successful game franchises as Need for Speed, Harry Potter, and The Sims during his tenure at Distinctive Software and Electronic Arts.

With 25 years of broad industry and game development experience, Mattrick’s portfolio includes some of the most successful games in the world, including a number of series established during his time at EA, EALA, EA Tiburon, EA Canada and Distinctive Software Inc.

"While it’s one thing to discuss the thriving game development field in Canada, it’s another thing entirely to have shaped the transformation of this growing industry yourself; Don Mattrick has done just that," says Izora de Lillard, event director at Think Services Game Group. "The mark Don has left, and will invariably continue to leave, on Canadian game development makes him the perfect person to discuss the future role that Canadian developers will play in the industry."

GDC Canada also confirmed a number of sessions from high-profile developers, such as Relic Entertainment's (Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2) Animation and Cinematics director Owen Hurley on "Realism in Animation. Misnomer or Oxymoron?", who will talk about defining and creating realistic animation in video games.

Mario Vasquez, quality assurance manager at Electronic Arts Canada, will discuss "The Science and Art of Quality Assurance in the Video Game Industry" in a useful session designed to help attendees "improve software quality and reduce development/testing costs by moving focus from manual, black box defect detection to a more scalable, automated white box defect prevention strategy."

Producers Justin Dowdeswell and Ken Yeeloy from Next Level Games (Punch Out!!) will talk about "Building Strong Teams Around Gameplay" and share how developers can "get the best gameplay out of their teams," with tips on creating a cohesive leadership group and implementing an inclusive design approach.

In his session "Generic 'One Size Fits All' Networking", Amaze Entertainment's Ken Noland will teach attendees about the low level details of being a networking programmer and the importance of an open and robust library. He'll also describe ideas for how to design and implement game ideas with multiplayer in mind, and discuss problems such as "forward prediction, compression, encryption, and reliability layer."

Presented by Reboot Communications and Think Services, GDC Canada enables Canadian game developers to share best practices for fostering ingenuity and quality games. The conference emphasizes studying the challenges and opportunities inherent in creating games with long-production cycles, large development teams, and across multiple platforms.

More information on the event's sessions and registration details can be found at the official GDC Canada site.

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

[We originally - and accidentally - ran this 'Game Anthropologist' column on Quake Live before the embargo was up. Now that the game is officially launched - and we have comments from John Carmack over at Gamasutra, with a bigger interview to follow, we're re-running Mike Walbridge's piece.]

“Man, it has been a long time since I played THIS game,” I wrote, hoping to break the ice.
“Welcome to 1999,” someone replied.
“The crazy thing is...some people never left,” another said.

We were all dead, waiting our turn; we're playing Quake Live's clan arena, a mode where the teams square off and each player's death merits no respawn until the next round. We call get maximum armor, health, and weapons, pounding each other into oblivion.

There's also duel, which pits players one on one while the rest wait in line to face the challenger. The list of spectators is a virtual list of quarters lined up on arcade machine. The atmosphere of the site, with its ladders and stats, is almost like a chess club. Quake Live is a bold and new move—it is absolutely free, and it is better than the Quake 3 I repaid twenty dollars for about five years ago.

The download did not take very long; while I waited for the full installation I was offered to do the tutorial level. A woman with a calm mellow voice introduced herself as Crash, whom I recognized from Quake 3.

She walked me through a small level and explained all the weapons and powerups. She was talking in the tone an elementary school teacher might take with a child who tries hard but is failing and needs extra attention and explanation.

“Okay, now let's practice!” Crash said. “You shoot me, I shoot you. Simple, right?”

The sense of competition may be at its peak; right now, Quake Live is in an invite-only stage of beta, and the people most interested are the old Quakeheads. The only advertising is for QuakeCon, which reminds me of the way a new TV network has a higher ratio of advertising for its own shows.

The advertisement has two Fatal1ty-ish guys in the corners (one looks just like him) with the date and location: August 13-16th in Dallas at the Hilton Anatole. Everyone is conscious of how well he is doing; every single kill and death is a permanent part of your stats and almost every stat ranks the thousands of players.

My highest rank is on the frag list: I'm 5,576 of 27,535. Thousands at the bottom didn't get a single kill after playing for some minutes, but that will be different by the time this is printed.

Another guy quips: dammit my wife is vacuuming everywhere, I'm so distracted
Me: Heh, I wonder how many Quake Live players are married
Asinine guy: that's a dumb question
Me: Why is that a dumb question?
Asinine guy: it just is

Later on, asinine guy starts talking about his penis and arguing with someone else. But no one else joins in. No one even says “guys, c'mon”, so I resist the temptation to. I wonder if all the silent players are married, like me and the guy with the vacuuming wife.

One guy's name I recognize: Id fake_id, a guy who is at the top of one of the ranked leaderboards. Rocket jumps are something I'm familiar with; I've heard of rocketing off the wall in a sideways manner, but here's a new one: using the plasma rifle to float off the wall, through the air. This guy can literally fly.

He drops. He switches to the long range rail gun, a sniper rifle of sorts. While falling, the wall ends, opening up a brief open space that gives him less than two seconds to aim through it; on the other end of the map is the last guy on the other team. The rail gun sounds lasery, old, retro, just like I remember it. That's the last of the other team. My team wins again. I got 3 points, but no frags that round.

I leave the first server, feeling out of my league there and tired of being ganged up on. I go to a duel server, and within five minutes it's me versus someone who is highly untalented. I beat him, 20-3.

Then the M1kenoid comes along. He's been throwing smiley faces and correct grammar all over the place. He build up a lead quickly, 17-2. He beats me to the megahealth by inches numerous times. At one point he gets out his gauntlet, a weak melee weapon. It takes 4-5 rockets to take him down. “Don't be insulting,” I tell him.

“I'm not,” he replies. Oh, he's just having fun, he says. Fun! I lose, 19-3. He leaves at the last moment, giving me a win and putting himself at the back of the line. Maybe he can sympathize with why I thought he was taunting me. The next guy who comes along is not as good as the last one, but he beats me; it's a boring, low-scoring match in the single digits. It ends due to the time running out. I get behind M1kenoid in line.

The line will be a bit for either of us. “What's the respawn time on the megahealth?” I ask sheepishly. “35 seconds,” M1kenoid replies. A few seconds pass. “25 for the weapons and armor.”

“Man, you are old school,” I tell him.

“Not really,” he replies. “I've only been playing since September. I've been practicing a lot though.”

I alt+tab. He's got a lot of games under his belt.

“I think I'm getting the hang of it,” he says.

The strangest thing about Quake Live and its features is the curious blend of how friendly it's attempting to be to people of various skill levels. Any time a server is moused over in the browser, it tells you how you would stack up against the people within the server, with ratings like “easy” and “very hard.” That, along with the tutorial, shows that the free price isn't the only thing Id is doing to make Quake accessible to the masses.

Still, the vast majority of playtime seems to be from serious players; a significant minority has played anywhere from five minutes to at least half an hour without scoring a frag. The precision of the stats and ranking system, along with the first ad, remind you of exactly how good at Quake you are.

The blending of free-to-play, casual-style gaming with a very old and competitive player base could result in driving away those that lack experience or skill in the game, but I get ahead of myself; free is free, gamers are cheap, and Quake's international success has yielded a lot of unfamiliar flags next to some player names. In the world of PC gaming, Quake is becoming the violent chess, an international pastime.

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[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.]

Forging valiantly onwards, this midweek GameSetLinks starts out with David Edery putting forth some interesting points of view on Gabe Newell's DICE speech, and particularly how the industry has taken Newell's discussion of Left 4 Dead and price drops. I think Edery is at least partly right - numbers can always be deceptive.

Also in here - the best PC AGS graphic adventures of the year are honored, some approximate (but still interesting) WiiWare charts are exposed, Mega64 are extremely silly as per normal, the creator of IGF Mobile finalist Smiles explains his journey thus far, and much more.

A la ka zam:

Game Tycoon»Blog Archive » Console Game Prices
'I simply reject the flawed assertion that a big bump in revenues from a long-delayed price cut equals “proof” that launch prices are too high. It isn’t proof. It may be the opposite of proof.'

Gnome's Lair: The spectacular 2008 AGS Awards ceremony
The best PC freeware graphic adventures of last year, as voted by the community.

Channel Surfing: Virtual Console/WiiWare Sales Chart, W/E Feb 8th, 2009 | VG Chartz.com
These numbers are still basically invented (esp. compared to XBLA), but it's interesting to see at least some estimates for them.

YouTube - Mega64: Elite Beat Agents (HD)
This is silly, even for Mega64, but hey, it makes me grin.

A Tree Falling in the Forest: Citizen Kane of Games: Poisoning Young Developers' Minds Edition
'For years, scores of games designers worship at the false altar of film and emotion as measures for their art. Enough is enough.'

A Cheerfully Blunt Road Map « tooNormal
The creator of IGF Mobile finalist Smiles talks about his path so far, quiet success in the iPhone store, and what's next.

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

['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 considers the interaction between fiction and gameplay in the latest Chocolatier game for PC.]

The Chocolatier series of casual games is a favorite of mine, as I've written about elsewhere before. So I was excited to see PlayFirst announcing the launch of their latest, "Chocolatier: Decadence by Design".

The new version is fun in many of the same ways as the originals: you get to command a growing chocolate empire, buying ingredients and selling products, and playing small arcade games to establish the baseline productivity of your factories. The arcade elements this time around were a little less challenging than in "Chocolatier 2: Secret Ingredients", but in a way that made them less distracting from the overall game structure. They've also smoothed out a few other little game-design hiccups. It's no longer possible to strand yourself someplace without money and without chocolates to sell, because another character will offer you a loan. So there's good stuff here.

I was even more pleased to see that this version of Chocolatier was branching out to allow the player to design her own chocolates to sell. That idea was a logical extension of the gameplay in the second game, where the player has a chocolate tasting lab, but can only experiment to discover recipes previously intended by the designers. In "Decadence by Design", the player gets the opportunity to combine ingredients freely, then create an appearance for the new confection and provide it with a name and a description.

This is fun. That sounds silly, but many of my most enjoyable moments with the game involved blending flavors together and then trying to picture what the results should look like. I also enjoyed coming up with slightly risque titles for my confections, which, er, was possibly a reaction to the squeaky-clean, G-rated ambiance of the rest of the game.

Many games that allow a certain amount of customization that is basically irrelevant: you can pick the hair color, hat style, and chin shape of an avatar that you look at for the rest of the game, but on the other hand your character's physical appearance has no significance to the plot.

In Chocolatier, on the other hand, the player is supposed to be learning the craft of chocolate making. There is a tacked-on framing plot about lost love, but since the player has no influence on this other than by moving the game forward, and since that story is written to be so peripheral, the real narrative arc here concerns the player character's progress towards total chocolate mastery.

So being allowed to blend your own chocolate experiments is a much more interesting representation of that craft than scurrying around the globe completing recipes given to you by other people.

Another benefit of this gameplay element: the chocolate mixing encourages the player to imagine the flavor of the chocolates in question, to think about what might taste good together, to contemplate combinations of texture and crunchiness. Since a lot of the appeal of the whole series is in its fictive veneer -- this is unabashed dessert pornography -- it's surely right to give the player more of a chance to wallow in the chocolatey goodness of it all.

By the end of the game one really has a rich flavor palette to work with -- everything from candied rose petals to saffron -- and I had a lot of fun concocting themed recipes, crazy recipes, recipes that emulated my favorite real life chocolate bars, and so on.

I couldn't bring myself taint perfectly good chocolates by putting the pistachios in them, though.

What I really wish is that there had been a lot more of this: more opportunities to make and mix your own chocolates; more detailed feedback on the mixtures; more of a system to learn about which chocolate combinations worked and which didn't. The chances to create new recipes are doled out sparingly, as a reward for major achievements in gameplay. They make a good reward, I admit, but I would rather have had them be more the norm than the exception.

And there isn't really enough feedback to teach the player any general principles of chocolate mixing. Oh, there are a few limits on what you can create. Some blends, especially chocolates without any sweetener included, will get bad marks from your tasters in the lab for being too bitter. If you try to make a truffle with no truffle powder, the game will deny you.

But you can get away with other combinations that seem equally implausible, like a chocolate bar that includes no cacao or sugar at all. I'm not sure whether the game's model genuinely allows for the possibility of a lemon-orange-hazelnut bar (a solidified stick of citrus-flavored Nutella, I guess), or whether its diagnostics were simply buggy.

Sometimes you'll get comments from your tasters saying that a given flavor element really sets off a recipe, or that a certain flavor pairing is advantageous -- my taster really liked the lemon/hazelnut combination, evidently -- but it's not clear what that means in terms of the underlying model.

Moreover, I had the impression from my experiments that sometimes the feedback given was slightly randomized, so the taster might not comment on a good pairing of flavors the second time he tasted the same recipe. The advice is inconsistent. Sometimes he discouraged me from using all one ingredient, but on the other hand, he really seemed to like my proposed all-chile-peppers "Fire of a Thousand Suns" bar. (Too bad I couldn't summon the nerve to manufacture this thing.)

So how does one optimize? If I hit a good flavor pair, does that mean my bar is going to be a success? Should I be trying to find those? Or should I (as I thought at other times in the game) be trying to construct combinations of the most expensive ingredients to hand, on the grounds that they'll seem exotic? Or should I be reaching for ingredients that haven't appeared in many previous compounds, in order to make the most of novelty?

It's not clear. There are too few opportunities to experiment with the system. The feedback one gets is too vague. Some products clearly command higher prices than others on the open market, it's rarely obvious why, and by the time you've committed to a recipe and added it to your recipe book and started manufacturing it, there's no way to go back and tinker to improve the flavors.

Some time much later -- after another hour or two of play -- you may get another chance to make a recipe; but it will likely be a different kind of recipe, for truffles this time rather than infusions, and you don't get the chance to try and screw up and test and retest.

In fact, even on a bunch of replaying I never fully worked out the system. There's an annoying bug in the Mac version of "Decadence by Design" that causes it to crash a good percentage of the time when the player switches between windows and then switches back to Chocolatier. (Like a lot of monomaniacal multitaskers, I rarely play games in full-screen mode: it feels dangerously like wasting time.) So I lost a bunch of progress on several occasions until I figured out what the triggers were for this crash, and wound up playing large stretches of the game two or three times instead of just once. And that still wasn't enough to let me figure out what sorts of rules underlay the pricing of the designed chocolates.

Besides, replaying involuntarily convinced me that this isn't a game designed to be replayed: too many of the sequences of play are too linear, and all the thrill of discovery is gone on the second runthrough. One might conceivably play over again months later, but certainly not the next day and with the intention of cracking how the chocolate system works.

The character dialogue sometimes offers tantalizing little hints, like "Isn't it interesting that some ingredient combinations offer a much higher profit margin?" This seemed to be the game heavy-handedly directing the player to seek a strategy, rather than just customizing to suit one's personal aesthetic tastes. It would only be sporting to help the player find said strategy.

Unless, of course, there isn't really a well-worked out system behind the scenes, and "Chocolatier: Decadence by Design" is using randomness to simulate complexity. Or bugs to simulate randomness.

It's really irksome to have spent this much time playing a game and come away not knowing whether a whole level of play complexity even exists, or whether the game was hinting at something that isn't there, by pretending that the economic model was assessing and giving prices to my creations on a much subtler set of rules than it was actually using. It doesn't help that the experience was demonstrably buggy.

Committing more fully to the "by design" aspect of the game would make Chocolatier less like a tycoon game and more conceptually similar to mix-and-match fashion games such as "JoJo's Fashion Show". I can see how that might be risky. There is, I assume, always a bit of a balancing act, especially when it comes to creating sequels to popular casual games, where the assumption seems to be that the fans of the original want a second slice of the same cake.

And, in fact, I was a bit disappointed when the franchise took a break from the tycoon/"economic simulation" form to make "The Great Chocolate Chase", a time-management game set in the Chocolatier universe -- though my gripe there was mostly that it was a very uninventive time management game and badly balanced in the highest levels. It felt like a failure of imagination, or a decision to cash in on a lucrative genre, rather than a genuine contribution to what the Chocolatier games try to do.

The concept of having the player mix her own chocolates was a good one, though -- one that fit into the themes and motives of the series, one that reflected the progress the player character was supposed to be making. That was a gameplay idea worth fleshing out even more. I even think that element have been developed a bit without reaching a complexity level off-putting to the core audience of the series.

All that the player is required to do is make and sell some viable recipes. The puzzle of optimizing those recipes for profit would be entertaining for people who want to do that, without holding up players who are in it for an easier experience. It just needs to be rounded out to be more playable as a puzzle.

I hope it's clear, though, that the gist of all this griping is: the latest Chocolatier game makes a move towards a better, more thorough synthesis of gameplay and fiction than the previous entries. It doesn't go as far as I would like, that's all.

PS.: Yeah, I know it should be "Saint Clements" with a T.

[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 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Every week, we sum up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by guest editors Danny Cowan and Mathew Kumar.]

This week's notable items in the iPhone gaming space, as covered by FingerGaming, include the release of the horror-themed shooter iDracula and the debut of Jason Rohrer's second App Store title Primrose.

Here are the top stories:

- iDracula Debuts in App Store
"iDracula includes six different weapons, an experience-based 'perk' system, and two game modes. The developer will continue to support the release after launch, as new levels, enemies, weapons, and modes are planned for free future upgrades."

- Jason Rohrer Releases iPhone Puzzler Primrose
"Indie game designer and Passage developer Jason Rohrer has released his second iPhone title, Primrose. In a departure from his earlier arthouse PC titles, Primrose is a comparatively straightforward puzzler, though it does feature an intriguing set of mechanics all its own."

- i Love Katamari Receives Free Lite Version
"If you also shied away from buying I Love Katamari due to the largely negative reception it found upon its initial release, I Love Katamari Lite gives you just enough free gameplay to let you decide whether or not the full version is worth $7.99."

- Review: Time Crisis Strike
"while I've always expected on-rails shooters to be easy to play on my iPod Touch, I've usually found them a bit inaccurate. Because the system relies on pudgy fingers to strike at baddies - who can often be small on screen - I often miss in my urge to strike as fast as possible."

- Top Free Game App Downloads For The Week
"Fastlane Street Racing Lite takes top free app honors for the second week in a row, beating out competition from the recently released demo version of Skyworks’ skeeball sim Arcade Bowling. Bounce On Lite drops slightly in this week’s results, as Rolando Lite moves up several places to take fourth."

- Ideaworks3D Brings Morpheme Engine to iPhone
"Mobile technology developer Ideaworks3D has announced the Airplay Partners Program, an initiative that pairs NaturalMotion's morpheme animation middleware with Ideaworks3D's Airplay software development kit. The partnership makes the morpheme engine available to iPhone and smartphone software developers."

- Top-Selling Paid Game Apps For The Week
"The sliding-block puzzler Blocked surpasses last week’s sales champion LightBike to become this week’s best-selling App Store title. Bejeweled 2 continues to move up the charts, meanwhile, finishing at third place in the weekly results."

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

[In this personal opinion piece, Japan-based journalist Nayan Ramachandran considers Capcom's challenges with making Street Fighter IV more approachable for casual gamers, and why fighting game enthusiasts often reject those accessibility efforts.]

My head hurts, and my stomach is empty. It’s nine o’ clock in the morning and everyone seems a lot more awake than me. I finally get to the front of the line for the play I wanted to see, only to find out it has been sold out for almost two months.

My friend and I walk to Denny’s for a pick-me-up breakfast, both of us despondent and still feeling the effects of the party the night before.

When I finally finish my grilled cheese sandwich and scrambled eggs, I mutter to myself "Well, at least Street Fighter IV comes out tomorrow." My friend says nothing, and we continue eating. It was not a great start to the day.

On the way to the train station, my friend peels off down another street for a separate engagement, and I take the train one stop back to my neighborhood, my belly full but my head still throbbing.

Instead of taking the usual walking route from the station back to my apartment, I decided to swing by a tiny game and DVD store in the open air mall close by to have a see what they had in stock.

To my surprise, they had Street Fighter IV in stock, but it was selling for ¥1000 more than the store I had the game reserved at nearly five blocks away. I walk to the other store, past my apartment, in hopes they might be holding my copy, ready to buy a day early.

When I realized they were going to stick strictly to the street date for the game, I walked back another five blocks to the first store and snapped Street Fighter IV up, aware that plenty of people in the neighborhood would want a copy just as badly if they knew it was already available.

This was the real start of the day: my re-introduction to the world of Street Fighter, and my re-activated status in the secret club of fighting game players.

The Velvet Rope

That’s what it is, after all. Fighting games are hugely exclusive. Since Street Fighter IV was announced, I and many other people have been inundated with questions, all with a similar theme: accessibility.

From "How easy is it to pick up and play?" to "What game should I practice with to get ready?", questions and worries have been pouring down.

Street Fighter IV might seem too accessible to avid series fans, and may even feel like a step back to those who lived off Street Fighter III over its various incarnations, but Capcom and other fighting game developers might have no choice. Alienation is a very real problem.

Fighting games are inherently competitive, and while they may seem pick-up-and-play friendly at first sight, the amount of dexterity required to perform regularly used actions is almost completely out of grasp for the average gamer not used to fighting games as a genre. On top of that, the fighting game community has become far more insular than others.

Online first-person shooters are also a fairly competitive and difficult arena to enter, but their popularity has spawned a large community of varying ability, forcing developers to form viable matchmaking systems.

Even without these systems, first-person shooters have become largely team based, allowing new players to play with veterans on their team who can protect and teach them as they play the game.

As the mainstream popularity of fighting games has waned over the years, communities have become far more entrenched, developing and using lingo and strategy that the average player would never be able to decipher on their own.

The Smash Bros Effect

Many gamers that played fighting games as kids only played Street Fighter II, and after the series took a huge departure with Street Fighter III, many decided to stay away.

Increasingly technical fighting games like Virtua Fighter often led to incorrect generalizations about the entire fighting game catalog, most people considering them to be inaccessible for newbies and impossible to enjoy.

When Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series started to gain a large following after the release of its Gamecube incarnation, many within its ranks considered it a fresh new look at fighters, and a fresh take on the genre. It’s departure was grand, and its gameplay was vastly different.

Super Smash Bros. Melee seemed to skew more towards the idea of a party game than a traditional fighting game because of its gameplay types and its concentration on four-player matches. Much of its resemblance was to Power Stone, rather than Street Fighter.

The problem, though, was that many did not even consider it to be a fresh fighter that could bring new gamers into the community. In fact, many today still do not think it is a fighting game at all.

Arguments on semantics seem to flare up on message boards even now, its very existence seemingly an insult to the sensibilities of the hardcore fighting fan.

Increasing Accessibility

But then, what needs to be done to make fighting games more accessible to new gamers, and still appease the hardcore? I love Street Fighter and have played it for years, but as long as new 2D fighters follow the conventions of special attack joystick movements and conventional 1-on-1 play, new players will not come in droves.

The likes of Smash Bros. attracted a whole new generation of fighting game fans, but the very same lack of adherence that made the series so popular with its community was the same element that drove purists halfway to their grave.

Street Fighter IV is a surprisingly accessible fighting game, and seems designed to bring back those who fell off the bandwagon years ago, but throwing a simple hadouken or shoryuken -- both of which must be mastered to be of any use when playing -- takes more practice than most new gamers are honestly willing to put in.

It’s a dichotomy that unfortunately may be its undoing. Fighting game specific forums are confusing to read, even for me, a gamer that has been playing fighting games casually for over 10 years.

The amount of acronyms and colloquialisms that litter their conversations makes for smoother communication between veterans, no doubt, but it makes it overwhelming and impenetrable to outsiders.

At the same time, the approachable fighting games are either lacking in the depth required to attract the enthusiast audience, such as Dead or Alive, or so far removed from the norm that their existence does not register, and enthusiast skills cannot be transposed without a steep learning curve.

With the growing cost of game development and the higher technical expectations with each future iteration, it is no surprise that Capcom took the safe route with Street Fighter IV, mirroring Street Fighter II’s roster and shedding a lot of the systems from Street Fighter III that made the game unpopular with casual players.

Street Fighter IV seems to be successfully straddling that bridge between casual and enthusiast for now, but it is hard to tell if it will have the staying power that past titles had.

Hopefully, companies like Capcom, SNK, and even Rare can see that there’s some room for more casual titles. Releases like Tatsunoko vs. Capcom (released for Arcade and Wii only in Japan) show that Capcom knows how to make a more casual fighter and is willing to, but there needs to be bigger strides. Hopefully, the fans won’t sneer when that happens.

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

[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.]

Continuing the week's RSS-derived GameSetLinks goodness, firstly, Ian Bogost points out a new award specifically for news games - a good thing, if you believe that timely games about news events are one of the areas that video games can bring insight and gain credibility.

Also in this set - What They Play on violent media and aggression, Tom Chick on why Grand Theft Auto IV and its expansion aren't doing things right, Leigh Alexander on Dangerous High School Girls and censorship, and lots more besides.

Beau tee ful:

Water Cooler Games - Knight News Game Award
'Games for Change has announced plans to offer the Knight News Game Award at the 2009 Sixth Annual Games for Change Festival in May of this year.' Most interesting.

What They Play - Violent Media and Aggression
'Studies suggest that the most effective method to combat the aggressive effects of violent media is parental involvement' - and the ratings system is (basically) working already to help parents.

Why I won't be playing Grand Theft Auto IV: Lost and Damned | Fidgit
'It would be nice to see a modicum of social conscientiousness in what is arguably the face of videogaming presented to the world at large.'

Ironic Sans: Idea: The Blogosphere Adventure Game
Lazyweb but darn cute concepts: 'The opening animated narrative would introduce you to the protagonist “Dave” who was staying up late reading blogs instead of going to bed. Some sort of mishap (energy drink spilled on the computer?) was going to start a chain of events that digitally teleports him into the internet.'

Sexy Videogameland: Big Trouble For Dangerous High School Girls
Leigh continues the subject of taboo in video games by discussing the casual portal woes for Dangerous High School Girls.

Death Tank's Ezra Driesbach Interview - Eurogamer
The former Lobotomy staffer talks about the Saturn and the new XBLA Death Tank in a most edifying chat.

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

[It's a month til GDC 2009, but the lecture announcements are continuing to come in, and there's some really interesting stuff here rustled up by my colleagues - especially Ueda, Suda, and Pagliarulo on game design, as well as the DSi insights lecture.]

Organizers of next month's Game Developers Conference are continuing to add major talks, this time revealing a panel featuring ICO creator Fumito Ueda alongside Suda51 and Fallout 3's Emil Pagliarulo, plus DSi hardware lead Masato Kuwahara on making Nintendo's new handheld.

Firstly, in a newly revealed panel called 'Evolving Game Design: Today and Tomorrow, Eastern and Western Game Design', Sony's Fumito Ueda, creator of ICO and Shadow Of The Colossus, will be making a rare Western appearance to discuss the state of Western and Eastern game design.

Appearing alongside him is Goichi Suda, aka SUDA51, the creator of titles including Killer 7 and No More Heroes at Grasshopper Manufacture, as well as Bethesda's Fallout 3 lead designer Emil Pagliarulo, with 8-4's Mark MacDonald moderating the panel.

As the description explains: "What are the most important recent trends in modern game design? Where are games headed in the next few years? Drawing on their own experiences as leading names in game design, the panel will discuss their answers to these questions, and how they see them affecting the industry both in Japan and the West."

Secondly, in a talk named 'The Inspiration Behind Nintendo DSi Development', Masato Kuwahara, who is Project Leader for the Nintendo DSi hardware group, will discuss the creation of Nintendo's enhanced DS handheld.

According to the lecture description, Kuwahara, who led the team adding features like flash memory and downloadable games to the DSi, "will explain how the company came to develop the system with all these new features, and what kind of new software development opportunities the team had in mind."

Game Developers Conference 2009 takes place at the Moscone Center from March 23rd to 27th, and more information on the event and registration is available at the official GDC website.

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

[While we started covering the DICE Summit on GSW last week, there were far too many neat lectures to all crosspost here - so here's the full round-up of Gamasutra write-ups for the Vegas game exec summit.]

Gamasutra was at the DICE 2009 Summit in Las Vegas at the end of last week, and has compiled all of our coverage of the event, from Valve through Bethesda, Nintendo and beyond, into one handy post for your reading.

The invite-only event, which is intended to provide a high-level business look at the game industry, and is organized by The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, too place from February 18 - 20 at the Red Rock Casino.

With multiple Gamasutra editors in attendance at the event, and in-depth interviews with some of the key attendees debuting on the site soon, here are the in-person write-ups documenting key lectures at the event:

DICE 09: Valve's Newell On 'Using Your Customer Base To Reach New Customers'
"Kicking off DICE 2009, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell discussed a theme central to the Half-Life creator's success: entertainment as a service, revealing 3000% download increases for Left 4 Dead's recent sale on Steam."

DICE 09: Capcom's Takeuchi On The Challenges Of Aiming West
"Capcom's Jun Takeuchi gave a frank discussion at DICE on why Japanese companies have struggled to address Western markets, revealing the company's ten commandments governing needed adjustments -- and perhaps unintentionally revealing how Japan fell behind so quickly."

DICE 09: Electronic Arts' Tactics For Tough Times
"At DICE, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello spoke about the current economic climate, sharing the company's plan to get "smaller and leaner", talking new IP like Brutal Legend, and discussing concerns like sequelization, budget reductions and outsourcing."

DICE 09: Dave Perry - 'The Days Of Single-Player Games Are Numbered'
"During a talk at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, industry veteran Dave Perry reflected on gaming's past -- and pointed to the future, where he sees single-player taking a distant back seat to online free-to-play games."

EA's Riccitiello: Recession 'Blessing In Disguise' That Can Clear Away 'Junk'
"Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello admits at DICE that even EA "got a little too fat" -- but that the current recession may be a "blessing in disguise" that could lead to "clearing away" some of the "junk" filling gaming shelves."

DICE 09: Mirror's Edge And The Perils Of Innovation Over Execution
"D.I.C.E. Studios' Lars Gustavsson admits his team's appetite for innovation has sometimes come at the expense of execution, and discusses lessons learned from Battlefield: Bad Company to Mirror's Edge and more."

DICE 09: A Postmortem Of Ensemble Studios
"Although Age Of Empires creator Ensemble Studios has closed, its legacy lives on, and Bruce Shelley spoke eloquently at DICE about what went right and wrong during the Texas-based developer's nearly 15-year history."

DICE 09: NPD - Six Million New Gamers In Last Year
"Sharing statistics on console online gaming growth and diminished PC game retail sales, NPD analyst Anita Frazier revealed in a DICE session that U.S. gamer numbers jumped 61 percent over the last year, bringing six million new players to the industry."

DICE 09: GameStop's Raines Talks 'Bullish' Retail Forecast
"In a notably positive DICE Summit speech, GameStop COO J. Paul Raines claimed that "every indicator points to continued growth in gaming", suggesting of the retail games market in 2009: "We're bullish and optimistic.""

DICE 09: Media Molecule On 'The Broad Church' Of User-Generated Content
"Media Molecule's Alex Evans talked at DICE about the studio's social, design, and production experiments with LittleBigPlanet, discussing "the broad church" of user-generated content, and why the LBP designers are just "power users" of the same in-game tools."

DICE 09: Bethesda's Howard On Supreme Playability
"Bethesda's Todd Howard (Fallout 3) detailed his studio's development and design principles at DICE today, commenting that "great games are played, not made", and discussing why his studio has a "very low asshole quotient.""

DICE 09: Nintendo's Prata On Stepping Up WiiWare Support
"Rounding off the DICE Summit, Nintendo's Tom Prata discussed the company's WiiWare efforts, revealing that only two of the top twenty WiiWare games are Nintendo-created, but noting of the service: "I think there’s more that Nintendo can do for support.""

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

['Hit Self-Destruct' is a regular GameSetWatch column by blogger and writer Duncan Fyfe, focusing on alternative approaches to game criticism. This week, an abridged history of Obsidian Entertainment.]

Last week, weblog Kotaku claimed that more than 20 people lost their jobs when Obsidian Entertainment's Aliens RPG was cancelled. Though not confirmed, no one should have to look for any other reasons why that report was bad news. Selfishly, perhaps, I thought of some anyway.

Very little was ever said about the Aliens RPG, but I'm sure that I would have played it, regardless of whether it now gets completed. I've found that Obsidian Entertainment, compared to every other developer that makes party-based RPGs, has consistently had the most interesting and forward-thinking ideas about party members and dynamics, whether in games that I like (Knights of the Old Republic II) or ones that I don't (Neverwinter Nights 2).

If RPG parties don't seem like a design element fraught with weakness, consider games like Knights or Mass Effect wherein your character faces the greatest conceivable evil in the universe, but isn't allowed to take more than two people along to fight it.

No game fiction has ever made a convincing argument for why the world's biggest hero can't deal with having three guys around at once. Restrictions on party members are a tech limitation, presumably; in the isometric Baldur's Gate days, the limit was five. Still, there were always more characters available, so why not six? Why not seven? What can they possibly be doing that's more important than saving the world?

I think gamers largely recognise it as an issue of engine capacity or gameplay balance, but that doesn't make it any less of a logical flaw. Whenever the player character meets an exciting new person, he should never have to lamely respond "I'd love to have you on board, but I don't have room."

Party members haven't aged very well conceptually. Games used to present them solely as stat amplifiers and combat assists, but even as they developed voice acting and subplots and became love interests they still seem more often than not like accessories instead of personalities.

If it wasn't so steeped in familiar RPG convention, it would surely seem bizarre that party members, upon their initial meeting with you, sign on to your cause and then hang out inactive at your headquarters forever after you decide they're no good in fights.

Why would anyone be so content to be relegated to the background and how can they afford to put their lives on hold? No hero's that charismatic. Maybe in the future all RPG protagonists should be eccentric billionaires who hire random pedestrians to carry their bags; it would explain a lot.

The closer RPGs approximate our own reality, the less plausible this comes off. It's passable in fantasy worlds where nobody has a job other than tavern owner or blacksmith, but when placed against the near-future military backdrop of BioWare's Mass Effect, certain conventions become absurd.

The commander is required to buy munitions from his subordinates and, on a whim, appoints as his closest advisors and ground team foreign nationals and volunteers who never passed a security check and are happy not getting paid. If you're in line for a promotion on the good ship Mass Effect, twenty years of service doesn't cut it next to a mysterious alien with a past.

With every game they've made in the last six years, BioWare have moved closer towards a cinematic style of storytelling, an more immediate combat model and away from traditional CRPG artifice. Except they're still encouraging players to accumulate characters as extra abilities and then leave them in the engine room, forgotten.

Obsidian writer/designer Chris Avellone addressed this point ten years ago when he worked at Black Isle Studios. In Planescape: Torment, a disparate cast of characters, in the usual fashion, abandon their everyday routine to support a stern, violent and naked man with more tattoos than memory.

For once, this is remarked upon as odd. In a denouement equivalent to a detective gathering all the murder suspects in the parlour room, the Torment party members' motivations and histories are all revealed to be deeper than originally apparent. Given their specific, tragic circumstances, they had no choice but to follow him when he asked.

Knights of the Old Republic II echoed that scene. One of the game's principal features was its influence system. Players gained influence with their companions by performing actions that they endorsed, which unlocked additional dialogue options.

Avellone works this mechanic into the story, explaining that the main character is in fact so aberrantly charismatic that he exerts a metaphysical influence on people which compels them to do crazy things like join his party and fight on his behalf. He is therefore dangerous and must be stopped.

Neverwinter Nights 2 players don't have the same luck. In that game some party members will quit or switch sides based on the level of influence the player has with them. Most will leave over ideological disagreements, but at least one person will side with the enemy at a critical moment if the player didn't put her in the party enough or give her any cool armour or weapons.

It might not be convincing that she'd want to kill her former friend based on that grievance, but it's a pretty accurate indictment of typical RPG player behaviour. I never selected that character precisely because I did think she was useless, and games have conditioned me to think that she wouldn't have a problem with that.

In Knights II, Obsidian had players take direct control of their supplicants for solo missions, and the full cast featured in their own cutscene-driven subplots. Neverwinter Nights 2 treated its concluding battle with appropriate gravity by allowing the players control of their entire party. Obsidian granted those secondary characters greater presence with each successive game -- until removing them entirely in their upcoming spy RPG, Alpha Protocol.

Alpha Protocol has one controllable character and no permanent party members. Maybe it's a deliberate change of pace for Obsidian, or maybe it's the best solution of all. Alpha Protocol will certainly be free from deadbeats and hangers-on who admonish you for acts of kindness but will still do whatever you say. The best way to deal with those plausibility issues is not to invite them into the design in the first place. It'll work, but because it's the safe option.

If it marks the beginning of a new approach for Obsidian, then I'll miss the subversion and the experimentation. Developers can craft a character with a wealth of personal history, trust issues and the potential for an ice-thawing courtship, and they can have them try to kill me for not buying them shoes. I like the second option more.

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

[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.]

Rounding the curve into the week, this set of GameSetLinks starts out with the folks behind LucasFilm's seminal online game Habitat doing some after the fact checking on a new book, and continues with a multitude of other fun pieces.

In particular, check out what's killing the game biz - or maybe isn't, depending on who you believe - and PixelVixen707 on some rather tragic game event marketing, among other things.

Bleep bleep bleep:

Habitat Chronicles: FACT CHECK: Lucasfilm's Habitat in Rogue Leaders
The creators of Habitat point out quite a few inaccuracies in Rob Smith's new book about LucasArts' history, oh dear. Still, good to know now!

Episode 2 - Multiplayer | Stage Clear
Hey, Richard Perrin of The White Chamber and Rob Fahey (ex-GI.biz editor) have a podcast, now, neat.

chewing pixels » 16-bit Minutemen
Ah, GSW columnist Simon Parkin is one of the folks behind the Watchmen side-scrolling beat-em-up, yay.

What's killing the video-game business? - By N. Evan Van Zelfden - Slate Magazine
Agreed that lots of small titles is one way to go, Evan, but that's what indies are already doing, and there's no way you can make billions that way. What's really happening is that revenue is spreading out over lots of new and smaller players - and free games. That's not bad, just the way of the world.

Shawn Elliott: Symposium Part Two: Review Policy, Practice and Ethics
War and Peace, part deux!

Subatomic Brainfreeze: Let's look at this month's Arcadia popularity rankings!
The Japanese arcade scene is nichier than niche, recently, but always interesting to read what Enterbrain's arcade mag has in their charts.

Kill Yr Goddess » PixelVixen707
Ew, I got this press release before, and commented on its horrid nature, but it's really yuckier than I even imagined.

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

[Colleagues including teh awesome Brandon Sheffield and Jeff Fleming just debuted this month's Game Developer magazine, and I think it's one of the best issues for a long time - the Golden Axe postmortem is honest and interesting, to boot. Here's the relevant info.]

The February 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra.com and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to print/digital subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats.

The cover feature for the issue is an exclusive and frank postmortem of Secret Level's action game Golden Axe: Beast Rider. The article offers insight on the challenges and struggles Secret Level faced while developing the expensive, flawed title. The piece is described as follows:

"In one of the most honest postmortems in recent memory, Secret Level producer Michael Boccieri takes us through the troubled development of a $15 million game with an aggregate review rating of under 50 percent. Boccieri explains how the studio ultimately turned this frown upside-down, strengthening the team along the way."

Alongside the postmortem is the Game Developers Conference 2009 Preview, which covers the must-see sessions at the March event in San Francisco, as follows:

"If you like the idea of a bunch of smart-alecky editors telling you what you should like about GDC, this is the article for you. Herein, we defend our top picks (as of press time) for the latest edition of this seminal conference."

In addition, Eutechnyx game programmer David Hawes offers an in-depth technical feature on the Stackless Python scripting language:

"As a scripting language, Stackless Python is meant to serve the needs of multi-threaded environments, namely each of the current gen home consoles and PCs. Here, author David Hawes details how to get the language working in-engine on consoles."

Finally, in "Good Morning Class!", Valve technical artist Bronwen Grimes provides another useful technical piece on how to successfully introduce new tools to your art team:

"Introducing new tools to artists who just want to get on with making their game is no easy task. It can be done, but it takes a lot of finesse, a lot of understanding, and maybe a technical artist or two."

In addition, our regular columnists contribute detailed and important pieces on numerous areas of game development.

This issue, we include Bungie's Steve Theodore on tiled textures, Noel Llopis on dynamic memory allocation, BioWare Austin's Damion Schubert on focusing innovation, LucasArts' Jesse Harlin talking with female sound designers, and Matthew Wasteland with his monthly humor column.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of February 2009's magazine as a single issue.

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

Yikes, it's the end of the weekend already, so time to recap some of the week's top full-length features on Gamasutra, plus a few other notable news and opinion pieces from the site.

Some primo picks here: the Gamasutra 20 for game writers, Ian Bogost on the concept of video game kitsch, the ever-smart NPD analysis, Jesse Schell's excellent game design book reviewed, and lots more.

Here are the top stories:

Gamasutra Features

The Gamasutra 20: Top Game Writers
"Continuing the 'Gamasutra 20' series, we name and profile a score of the world's top game writers and story crafters, from Levine to Schafer and far beyond."

Intelligent Brawling
"How do you make a great third-person brawler? THQ's Smith cross-examines titles from God Of War to Ninja Gaiden and beyond to analyze the hot genre."

Book Review: The Art of Game Design
"What's the big deal with Jesse Schell's new 'Art Of Game Design' book? Writer and designer Daniel Cook takes a look at the Front Line Award winning tome."

Persuasive Games: Video Game Kitsch
"Who is the Thomas Kinkade of video games? Writer and designer Bogost explores how mawkish sentimentality can be lucrative -- and how it applies to games."

NPD: Behind the Numbers, January 2009
"In the industry's most-read NPD analysis, Gamasutra looks at the state of the U.S. game market going into 2009, from Nintendo dominance through Call Of Duty's evolution."

Gamasutra News Originals/Interviews

Interview: Getting Funky With Scratch: The Ultimate DJ
"Genius Products' Mike Rubinelli talks to Gamasutra about Scratch: The Ultimate DJ, 7 Studios' turntable controller-using rhythm game that he says goes beyond the "effectively glorified versions of Simon Says" of existing music titles."

Previewing GDC 2009: Inside The Business & Management Track
"Picking the top GDC 2009 lectures, we check out the Business & Management Track, featuring talks about starting up an independent studio, learning from Flagship's demise, Age Of Booty creator Certain Affinity's rise, and more..."

Interview: ESA's Taylor On Bringing E3's Buzz Back
"After a renowned slimming-down, this June's E3 Expo is bulking up, and ESA SVP Rich Taylor talks to Gamasutra about how publisher feedback drove improvements, and why a "return to a bit of the buzz and excitement" is vital for E3's future."

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

[How do you make games appropriately difficult for all players? Bethesda and LucasArts veteran Brett Douville offers ten practical tips for managing difficulty in games, from "make the metrics known" through "don't conceal assistance" and beyond.]

Lately I've been playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer on last gen's Xbox, and it has stirred up a few thoughts I have about difficulty -- mostly because it gets it so horribly wrong.

I've been gaming a long time, and have come up with a long list of must-haves for most games, particularly games which target the mainstream audience.

In my career at LucasArts, I helped steer difficulty in some specific directions, some bulleted below, and I actually got a game credit in the "hey, thanks" list for a late but timely suggestion to the project's design director when he used it whole cloth.

The other thing that I ran across in the last few weeks was a little video project by a blogger in which he discussed what he felt was the most innovative game of last year -- Prince of Persia, which in a way dropped difficulty altogether by making the Prince more or less invincible.

The Prince was accompanied by a companion who would rescue him when he misjudged, bringing something we saw in the beginnings of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time to fruition: a less punishing form of death.

Now, I'm fairly certain that I would prefer the latter to the former, but I understand the impetus to applaud the designers. After all, they took a thorny problem and tried something different -- they eliminated difficulty altogether.

Now, bear in mind that I'm targeting mainstream games -- these bullet points are not for games like Ninja Gaiden, which use their difficulty to club gamers into submission.

That is more or less its design goal -- to provide an extreme level of challenge, and managing difficulty for them is and should be about making the game as difficult as possible.

Similarly, performance games like Guitar Hero, which have difficulty levels where the practicing and not the "getting through the narrative bits" is most of the fun, are exempted -- they should adopt and have adopted some of these, but ultimately, it's not what they're about.

Here I'm basically talking about mainstream-targeting games with a narrative through-line, primarily action-adventure titles and shooters.

1. Don't Make Players Start Over To Change Difficulty

Make it easy to switch difficulty whenever the player wants. This may have been somewhat more difficult last-gen, but not appreciably so, so I'm not prepared to give Buffy a pass for this. I'm several levels through this game, and I've decided that the difficulty level is distracting from my enjoyment of the game.

I came in looking for some basking in the Buffy-sphere, and picked the "Normal" difficulty, thinking that I'd take it easy on myself, as I used to play games like this on "Hard".¹ However, here I am, maybe a third of the way through the game, perhaps half, and I'd like to dial it back and coast awhile, probably to the end, get a little extra Buffy fix.

But changing the difficulty in this case means... starting over. Wow. What. Were. They. Thinking. This is rule #1. This one can't be broken.

2. Explain Difficulty Levels Clearly

Name your difficulty settings well; describe the user experience for each. We have enough space on the screen to say, "Use this setting if you are unaccustomed to first-person shooters; you can always make it more difficult!" or "You will die. Many times. Most of them unpleasantly. Regardless of your experience level."

It's okay to say Easy, Medium/Normal, or Hard... but we have to know what that means to the designer. I thought "Normal" for Buffy meant, "Normal for the sort of person who would watch Buffy" but apparently it actually meant, "Normal for a game designer, who has played more hours of games this week than you do all year."

Note: there may be a temptation to name this stuff from your fiction, but there's a fine line there. If Buffy named its Hard mode "Slayer", I'd want to play just because, hey, I want to be the Slayer. Isn't that why I'm playing this game? Mainstream players may not understand that you're being cute, and may be turned off when you call your easy level of difficulty "Puppy mode".

3. Adjust To The Player

I'm not talking some extreme form of dynamic difficulty adjustment, that fabled Shangri-La of difficulty design which somehow magically keeps the player in the sweet spot of perfect level of challenge (and which we will never reach).

Sucker Punch did an amazing job with this in Sly Cooper; I don't recall it making a return in the sequels, but it was in the original game and was inspired.

After dying a few times on a level, the game would grant you a "lucky silver horseshoe" when you returned; this would prevent your death, returning you to full health once over the course of the level. If you died several more times, it'd give you a gold, which was worth two deaths.

It was a simple little crutch, accommodated different levels of ability and the fact that the developers may have been unable to judge the difficulty of their levels. I recommended a variant of this to my friend years ago, and that's what they implemented.

4. Make The Metrics Known

Make it clear what dials the difficulty knob turns. This is one we sort of failed on my LucasArts projects; we had a very clear idea of what difficulty was going to be, but ultimately we didn't communicate it to the player.

It's a few years back now, but what I recall is that we simply applied a multiplier to the damage enemies did to the player. The thinking was that players would get the same experience, they'd just survive longer and thereby be able to defeat more enemies.

5. Allow For More Control

Provide the player with more knobs. It's great to say Easy, Medium, and Hard, but it's even better to allow the player to adjust certain aspects of the game themselves. Perhaps a gamer wants harder puzzles but simpler combat or vice versa.

If your game supports jumping puzzles, feel free to give the player a knob saying, "OK, you can jump a little further." The best example of this I can recall is System Shock 2, which gave three axes of difficulty via its configuration files.²

6. Don't Conceal Assistance

Do not hide the things that make the game easier. Buffy hides secrets in each level, and tells you on the pause screen how many there are to be found. Unfortunately, in almost all cases, these are things that make the game easier -- health potions that you carry in your inventory, and health and power crystals you give to Willow to power you up in between levels.

This is insane. Not only is the game difficult, but I have to seek all over your levels (risking more spawning vampires) to find the things that'll make my life easier? Legend of Zelda has been hiding hearts in stray clumps of grass for years -- don't be stingy! Your mainstream players want to get through the game and feel a sense of accomplishment. Be big-hearted and let them.

7. Use Real Player Feedback

Test your difficulty settings on real people. Years ago I was playing Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, which LucasArts had released shortly before I started working there. I was playing on the hardest difficulty setting and got to the mid-game level where Kyle Katarn has to escape a falling Star Destroyer, or whatever, within a certain time limit. I tried again, and again, and again.

Finally I asked a designer friend of mine, and he said that the way they set the time for that level was to take the fastest tester's time to complete it... and to subtract ten seconds. I could have played that for days and not beaten that time. Finally, I just asked for the cheat code to move to the next level and moved on.

Particularly when we develop for the mainstream, we are not our audience and we do not share our audience's goals. This is true for me with Buffy: I'm looking for more Zander-Cordelia banter and Willow-isms... not another ten nailbiting vampire combats.

This is true not just of combat. I knew someone who struggled with getting out of the Black Mesa lab -- because it didn't occur to him to break the glass on the elevator door with the crowbar he was carrying.

8. Let Players Adjust

Give players time to get used to new tools before you throw a challenge at them that demands those tools. Buffy has thrown several new kicks and spins and other combat moves at me to absorb into my arsenal of moves. However, because I can only really use these in combat (since they use up a resource that I can't otherwise recharge), I'm kind of stuck.

I'd like to be able to practice these before I have to use them in combat, but I don't have any option to do so. Zelda games have historically done this well also -- big challenges appear after you've gotten a new ability, but usually you have an opportunity to use that ability in a safer, less threatening environment, typically in level navigation.

9. Offer Hints When Needed

Make suggestions. We have the tools to fight player fatigue. If a player spends a long time in an area, we can detect that and give them hints. That can even be one of the knobs, "give me hints when it looks like I'm lost."

I know that Perfect Dark Zero got some flak for this particular decision, but honestly, I think it was a good one. Hardcore players should be able to turn it off, and it should never be a crutch to avoid careful level design... but it should be used as a crutch for players who are easily disoriented in virtual spaces.

10. You Can Always Make It Easier

Your easiest setting should basically be "push button, win game". You will think that it can't be made easier, that there are no wall missions. You will be wrong. Make it easier.Give them an out.

I'm sure there are more, and almost certainly I had another one or two in mind last week, but I'm getting tired and thinking of finishing a movie before hitting the sack. I'll add to this if anything from last week occurs to me again, and I encourage comments to throw out ideas I might have missed or forgotten.

Difficulty often breeds frustration, particularly in the narrative-plus-action games that licenses lend themselves too. Give your players a break... and they'll come back.

¹Sad but true, I'm also getting older, but it's not a lack of finger dexterity that gets me in the end, it's the lack of time to play on a more regular basis. I got very close to the end of Metroid Prime 2 some years back and then got quite busy with work. I've never gone back, because attempting to play once your skills start to fall away is no fun at all. (back)

²Normally I'd say putting it in the config files was bogus, but it was definitely a hobbyist game, and it was on the PC, where config files were practically the latest and greatest tech. :)

[Brett Douville joined the industry eleven years ago as a senior programmer with LucasArts, working on such titles as the Starfighter series and SW: Republic Commando. He is currently the Lead Systems Programmer at Bethesda Softworks, of Oblivion and Fallout 3 fame. He thinks that building games is difficult enough, and playing them shouldn't be.]

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

[Continuing interviews with the 2009 Independent Games Festival finalists, Eric Caoili talks to Ace Team' Andres Bordeu about Zeno Clash -- a first-person action game set in a "punk fantasy" world and emphasizing hand-to-hand combat -- nominated for the Visual Art Award.]

Looking to separate its title from the dozens of other PC first-person game hitting the market this year, Chilean developer Ace Team set Zeno Clash, its first commercial title, in a punk fantasy world that's both beautiful and disturbing, populated with grotesque creatures that seem taken from The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Zeno Clash also stands out for its focus on up-close, hand-to-hand combat, allowing characters to punch, deflect, knockback, and grab their opponents, learning new moves and combos as they encounter new enemies with different fighting styles.

In the Source engine-powered game, players take on the role of Ghat, a member of his city's most powerful clan and the son of an aberrant, hermaphrodite creature named Father-Mother. Ghat seeks to escape his family and explore the world of Zenozoik as part of a quest that the studio hints could be driven by feelings of rebellion or revenge.

We spoke with Ace Team game designer and artist Andres Bordeu about Zeno Clash, nominated for the Visual Art award at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website):

What kind of background do you and your team have making games?

Andres Bordeu: The Ace Team group was formed around 1998, when we were just three brothers (Andres, Carlos and Edmundo Bordeu) making mods. We developed some large conversions for Doom and Quake 3 before we decided we wanted to make commercial games. We were a very small team committed to big projects; there were only the three of us doing the art and design, plus a programmer, Juan Pablo Lastra.

After working on a prototype game, which was in some way Zeno Clash’s “spiritual predecessor” -- we never released this prototype -- we managed to capture the interest of some companies and scouting agencies, and some of us started working at Wanako Games when they were just starting out.

Wanako Games is another Chilean development studio that’s developed several casual games and XBLA games. At Wanako, we contributed to many great games, such as Assault Heroes, which was awarded XBLA Game of the Year by IGN.

After working with them for four years, we decided to leave with David Caloguerea, our lead programmer, and start our own studio. Zeno Clash was then born.

What sort of development tools did you use?

AB: For Zeno Clash, we’ve had the privilege of working with a great toolset from Valve’s Source SDK.

One of the features we considered very important when making a first-person game that emphasizes close combat is facial expressions. The Source SDK has a very powerful facial animation tool called Faceposer, which has enabled us to give life to our characters and creatures. The tool has allowed us to do lip sync for our voice overs using phoneme extractions, and we’ve also been able to create predefined expressions that are triggered during the game.

The Hammer level building tool is also very powerful and versatile, giving a lot of control with the level designer. Many tasks that could have been coded were resolved in Hammer through an intuitive Input-Output system, saving us a lot of time.

The SDK has several other tools that are very welcome for a smaller team that wants to focus directly on building the game and not the toolset that sustains it -- a complete particle editor, a model viewer, and exporters are just a few more examples of what we didn’t have to build ourselves.

How did you come upon this idea of developing a first-person action/fighting game with an emphasis on hand-to-hand combat?

AB: Basically, we were looking for a way to add a new ingredient to the repeated formulas many FPS games have used. As a small company, we knew we were incapable of competing with the AAA titles on their own ground. We thought that the best way to stand out was through innovation, so we wanted to use something that felt new to the genre.

It’s true that melee has already been attempted by a few games, such as Breakdown and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, but it wasn’t standardized and we were confident that we could give it our own approach.

Can you talk a bit about your Zeno Clash prototype, and how it evolved into what it is now?

AB: The prototype was developed using Touchdown Entertainment’s tech (formerly Lithtech). This prototype was called Zenozoik. The Zenozoik demo we developed was a mixture of several games. It featured characters with dialogue trees, branching options to problems, shooting with weapons, and of course melee combat.

The melee combat was much more basic than the melee in Zeno Clash. The majority of all the other features were also underdeveloped. The game was unsuccessful in becoming more than a prototype because we tried to do too much. Instead of focusing on a few strong features, we decided to add too many ingredients in the mixture.

After we finished the Zenozoik demo, we looked back at our work and thought about what we would have done different if we had to start all over again. We made a list of the features we had included in the game, and scored them by level of interest. The entire team agreed that melee combat with a first-person perspective was the single feature we should have focused on.

We eventually realized that the decision to go with hand-to-hand was ideal for us from many other perspectives. We wanted to bring something new into the FPS genre, and a strong melee combat component had been attempted by very few other companies.

We could also focus on melee because it didn’t require us to build tremendous levels that involved a lot of exploration; we were too small team to tackle something like that.

Can you tell us a little about Zeno Clash's "punk fantasy world" and its characters/creatures?

AB: The decision to create a punk fantasy world was because of personal interest of the team, but also for the same reasons I've already mentioned. We wanted to stand out through innovation, and what better way to capture the interest of players than presenting an art style not seen in today’s games?

Many of today’s titles seem to look at competitive titles or related media such as blockbuster movies when looking for sources of inspiration. You can tell that Star Wars, Aliens and war-themed movies are a common source of inspiration for many shooters.

The punk fantasy theme was a great way to stand apart from other titles because it doesn’t make a reference to traditional media. It was also considerably more reasonable for a small company like ours to focus on the artistic qualities of the graphics, instead of the technical qualities.

The world and the characters have been designed to express the freedom with which we’ve been able to design this game. The surreal art style is great to work with, because we’re not bound to scale, form ,or color.

The punk fantasy has also had a great impact in other aspects of the game, not only the graphics. Sticking to our desire to innovate, we also decided to avoid clichés often seen in the fantasy genre.

Again, many fantasy games tend to refer to specific media when looking for sources of inspiration. The Lord of the Rings is a common source of inspiration in games. Our world, in contrast, is not about elves, orcs, or wizards. There is no obvious separation between good and evil.

In a punk world, there is no state, no law, and no authorities. We wanted to make a story of something more personal, and not so overwhelming like saving the world. A great story can be about a simple thing like a conflict within a family.

How did you develop Zeno Clash's visual style, and were there any particular sources of inspiration?

AB: For Zeno Clash, we were looking for something not seen in the first-person genre. As I mentioned previously, we started looking for sources of inspiration that were not from the video game industry or blockbuster movies.

We were very interested in the work of illustrator John Blanche. We were acquainted with his work through some adventure books that featured his illustrations, The Crown of the Kings adventure books from Steve Jackson.

We also looked at traditional art as a source of inspiration. The paintings of 15th century painter Hieronymus Bosch had fantastic creatures and designs that we could refer to.

Another great source of inspiration was The Dark Crystal film from Jim Henson & Frank Oz. The world and the characters featured in that film are absolutely marvelous. Not even the rocks and the plants are real. They were designed to convey the idea that the characters were in a world nothing like our own. But that world also has mountains, woods, deserts, and the animals that live there. We wanted to do the same; build a world where everything was immersed in a particular art style.

The direction of the final art style was developed by Edmundo, our art director. He had of ton of his own style to add to the mixture. The end result is something we’re very proud of. We’re definitely happy with the surreal art style, and we’ll definitely continue to look at sources of inspiration that are not traditionally seen in video games.

Can you share how you came up with the Father-Mother creature's odd look?

AB: The Father-Mother character was developed in a later version of the story. We went through several scripts before reaching the final one.

Actually, Father-Mother was born as a reaction to some of our early play testing sessions. In these sessions, we had people playing in a dark bar setting with some unfriendly looking characters hidden in some dark corners. One of these characters was a shadowy figure, similar to Father-Mother.

He was sitting at a table, and next to him, on top of the table, Edmundo had placed a small baby. All the testers who saw the scene said something like, "Oh no! That thing is going to eat the baby!"

Edmundo was surprised by the reaction, because there was nothing that indicated that the creature wanted to harm the baby. Edmundo thought; "Why can’t that be its baby, and it is taking care of it?"

After that, Edmundo developed Father-Mother to defy the monster concept. The character was created to demonstrate that even a huge ugly creature can have an attachment to its family, and it doesn’t have to be inherently bad.

What do you think you're able to accomplish with this setup that you don't think you could with a more traditional 2D/3D fighting game, or a first-person shooter?

AB: The level of immersion has always been one the biggest strengths of a first-person game, because you feel like you’re playing through the eyes of the character. On the other hand, combat is one of the most engaging actions a player can experience in a game, because it’s close and personal.

The combination of the engagement of hand-to-hand combat from a fighter and the immersion of a first-person game was the great mix we were looking for. So, with Zeno Clash we have the best of both worlds.

With the first-person hand-to-hand combat, the camera moves and jerks around a bit -- were there any steps you consciously took to ensure that players didn't become too disoriented? Or were you looking to convey disorientation?

AB: We were well aware of this many years back when we started thinking of having a strong hand-to-hand component. Some external people were thinking it was a bad idea because the camera would move too much for the player to be able to focus during combat. At that time, shooters mostly felt like their avatars were moving pivots with a gun attached to it.

We quickly prototyped scenes to test disorientation issues using a 3d package. We developed several videos from a first-person perspective where we animated sequences that involved severe movement of the player’s point of view. It’s true that during moments, the player could become disoriented, but at the same time, the videos were extremely fun to watch.

These lessons were taken into consideration during the development process, but we eventually realized that this was no longer such a big issue because it became a standard in today’s games. Many shooters have included realistic camera movement during certain actions.

Take Mirror’s Edge as an example; the player’s view is coherent with the player’s running, jumping, and climbing, and this doesn’t necessarily mean that the player will become disoriented.

We also thought that at some key moments, a certain level of disorientation is acceptable. If you’re getting run over by a huge elephant man, you wouldn’t expect not to be disoriented while you’re flying through the air.

The way the player's health is presented, along with their current targeted enemy's, is very much like a more traditional fighting game or even a brawler; why did you choose this particular health design over something more like what you see in a traditional FPS?

AB: Zeno Clash is a hybrid game. We see it like a mix between a brawler and a FPS. We wanted to include many elements from the fighting genre to convey this perception. That’s why we decided to include versus screens prior to battles and HUD health bars like you’d see in classic Final Fight, where even the enemy’s health is visible.

We also didn’t want players to think Zeno Clash was a game like The Elder Scrolls, where the focus of the game is in exploring huge open environments. Our first game is all about the fighting, and the GUI had to reflect this.

Were there any other first-person or fighting titles that you looked at for ideas or things to avoid?

I suppose that to some extent, we did think about other games. We had already worked on a lot of mods and played every FPS there was to play.

I remember I was also lucky enough to attend an Arkane Studios session at GDC, in which the team behind Dark Messiah of Might and Magic talked about their design. They had sp,e very interesting feedback to provide. Our melee combat system is very different from theirs, but they surely had to deal with many of the same problems we encountered during the development of our project.

We also looked at some old school 2D fighting games when we were looking how to get the attacks impact feeling right. It was important that the attacks felt punishing, with a good sense of weight and good sound cues. I remember checking out some cool animations from The King of Fighters when we were looking into that.

What aspect of developing and designing Zeno Clash did you find most challenging?

AB: From a design point of view, the combat mechanics were definitely our biggest challenge. There are no formulas for fun, so we pretty much worked with an iterative process. Our first builds had a lot of things going right, but also a lot of things going terribly wrong.

The first combat mechanics were very restrictive, because we were convinced that we had to take control from the player and let the combat system handle certain events for some combat actions.

We were trying to avoid some excessive key configuration nightmares from some shooters. I’ve spent virtually 5 minutes configuring keys in some first-person shooters. When you have to press ‘prone-> reload-> aim down the sight-> zoom in-> hold your breath-> press trigger’ just to fire a sniper rifle, it can be a little too much, don’t you think?

Still, taking too much control from the player is never good, so our final control configuration is a good balance between easy to use and having a good learning curve.

From a technical point of view, the lighting was very challenging, too. We were able to get great results with our new lightmap technique, but it also involved a ton of hand tweaking. With the existing lighting techniques and the inclusion of other lighting tools, such as our self projected shadows, good lighting was very hard to produce.

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

AB: Hmm, that’s a hard question. Maybe we could have invested some more time in planning the levels to support the combat system. We had to work around some levels because they felt too confined. Re-editing them took a lot of valuable time.

On a side note I remember something similar was said during Arkane Studios's presentation at GDC some years ago. When they built Dark Messiah, they finished the levels before developing all the features of the combat system. So they said pretty much the same thing I’m saying now; if we could have designed the levels with all the features ready, we could have designed the levels to maximize those features.

What lessons were you able to pick up from your previous mod work that you were able to apply to Zeno Clash's development?

AB: I think the most important lesson was learning to identify the strength of our game before starting to develop it. When you’re building a mod, it’s not very different from making a game. You have to be able to focus on your key features and identify your weaknesses. We made a lot of mistakes when we built our prototype, and learning from those mistakes was an essential part of getting things right with Zeno Clash.

Aside from that, building mods is the best way to train yourself in professional video game development. You have a bunch of tools at your disposal that the big AAA companies are also using. You face many of the same technical challenges.

You also have to do a lot of things that aren’t directly related with the game: you have to promote your mod, you have to manage a team, etc. We’ve always recommended getting involved with mod making for people who want to get into the industry. At least from a designer’s point of view, it’s a great way to start.

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

AB: I think that independent game development will continue to grow and will expand, the same way casual games expanded some years ago. The advantage of indie games is that they can take much more risks because there is no corporate pressure when developing their ideas. The current trend in today’s industry is that larger budget games with traditional funding from publishers are taking safer bets.

Many of the innovative titles are coming from the indie game group. It’s no coincidence that the Independent Games Festival is getting more submissions every year. And there are a lot of quality projects among those submissions.

I think that my personal favorite is Braid from Jonathan Blow. It’s a great example of how thinking outside of the box can produce an outstanding product. I admire people who take chances and succeed. The guys making Machinarium also have a fan with me. I love the art style of their project.

Is there anything unique that you feel that Ace Team, as an independent studio operating in Chile, has in its development process or identity that isn't present in most other developers in other countries?

AB: I think that making a game from Chile obviously gives our project an identity that is not in other games. Latin America is very new to the game industry, so there are very few games developed from this region. And if you think in proprietary IPs it’s even less.

We weren’t looking to make something "Chilean" with Zeno Clash, but it has some small references to our country and culture. We probably perceive it less because we are from Chile, but I guess Zeno Clash feels like a very ‘foreign game’ to the rest of the world. And that’s a great thing to have because it sets us apart.

I think that having an identity is one of the most important things a studio can want when working in a creative environment, and we’re happy because we know we have that. I think nobody will be able to say in many years to come that Zeno Clash was just another cookie cutter game. I hope we can keep that identity with all the future projects we make.

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

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Telltale Games, Konami, Krome Studios, Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, 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

Lucasfilm Animation Singapore: Lead Artist
"Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, which opened 2005, creates top quality entertainment in the television, film and handheld game community. ... The Lead Artist leads an art team in the development of the highest quality of art work for Games. The art team is comprised of animation, environments, character creation, visual effects and user interface and works directly with the Design and Engineering team."

Konami Digital Entertainment Co., Ltd.: CG Designer
"Konami, a Japanese leading group in the entertainment industry, is famous for its titles such as Metal Gear Solid, Winning Eleven and Major League Baseball. Hideo Kojima, the head of Kojima Production producing mega-hit series Metal Gear Solid will be speaking at GDC on March 26th. If you are interested in becoming part of this amazing team, please come to the Konami Digital Entertainment booth at the Career Pavilion."

Telltale Games: Gameplay Programmer/Software Engineer
"Telltale is a new breed of interactive entertainment company that is ideally positioned to capture a significant share of the fastest-growing market segment in the game industry. ... Telltale Games is searching for a qualified Gameplay Programmer/Software Engineer to work on our growing library of unique episodic games. Gameplay Programmers are responsible for the implementation of the games using Lua, C++ and the Telltale Tools."

Krome Studios: User Interface Designer
"Our studio in Melbourne is looking for a talented, experienced UI Designer to join our team on an upcoming licensed title. Melbourne is widely known as the hub of Australia for its art, music, culture and sport. A relaxed yet bustling city, you can find wineries, spa country and beaches only a short distance from anywhere in Melbourne! This role will focus more on the technical side of UI to complement the skills of our resident UI Graphic Artist. Your role will include but not be limited to the following:"

WorldsInMotion - Online Games

ArenaNet: Senior-Level Graphics Programmer
"ArenaNet, located in Bellevue, WA, is a wholly owned subsidiary of NCsoft Corporation and is the creator of the block-buster RPG, Guild Wars. ArenaNet has built a state-of-the-art, interactive game network and develops premier multiplayer online games for dedicated game players. ArenaNet's first title, Guild Wars, is a global online role-playing game that allows gamers to play with anyone, anytime and anywhere in the world."

GamesOnDeck - Mobile Games

Ngmoco: Launch Coordinator, AQ Manager, and Live Producer
"Ngmoco is a venture- backed creator and publisher creating games exclusively for the iPhone & iPod Touch. We think the iPhone is the next great gaming platform, and it’s the first of a class of devices that will radically reshape the landscape for mobile games. We are committed to developing the very best of those games and entertainment experiences for the iPhone. In 2008, ngmoco released the critically acclaimed Rolando, Topple, Dropship, Dr. Awesome and MazeFinger to the iTunes App Store."

Scholastic Media: iPhone/iPod Touch Developer
"Scholastic Media is looking for partners to create fun, smart games for kids on the iPhone/iTouch. Our games are designed to get kids thinking and playing in new ways. We will be adapting some existing games to the iPhone/iPod Touch as well as creating some new games. We are open to working with Mac programmers with an art background, or Mac programmers who have teamed up with an artist. Please include your portfolio of launched iTunes Applications with your response."

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 Simon Carless 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.]

Usually I write something that tries to be pithy or witty to kick this column off, but this time I'll just begin by introducing a new Future special right off: 20 Years of Nintendo Power, which you should be able to find at any bookstore chain right now.

This is, to be succinct, the sort of thing I wish I saw more often in the US marketplace. It's all original content, and it essentially tells the story of Nintendo through spreads from old Nintendo Power issues -- as opposed to the year-long feature series that ran in NP throughout '08, which covered the history of the magazine itself.

The effect is at once nostalgic and very authoritative, and the text's not at all throwaway -- it's filled with very tiny little behind-the-scenes tidbits and neat (and also surprisingly honest) commentary from Scott Pelland, the man who's hung around NP for nearly its entire history.

This is a great piece, to sum up, and I think everyone should buy it. My only qualm is the price. This sucker's only 68 pages long, and yet costs ten bucks, which is more than even what an imported issue of Edge rolls in at. The pages are nice and thick, yeah, and that's 68 pages of ad-free content, but I can't help but think this woulda been twice as good if it were twice the size. Regardless, well done on all ends.

With that done, let's move on to the other mags that hit stands the past fortnight. It's been a busy one, too:

Edge March 2009

Cover: Infamous

An inordinately thick issue of Edge (166 pages), thanks to another "Region Specific" look at the Nordic game development scene -- pretty dense going, but it's fun to read studio peeks at places like CCP without the devs burdening to PR the hell out of whatever game they're working on at the time.

The top highlight of the mag may be the Metacritic piece, which has already been reported around the net and echoes what I've written a few times in other publications.

The cover piece is good, as what we usually see when Edge does a follow-up cover to a game GI just gave the hotsclusive cover to, as is a rather deep piece about the labor of preserving video game history even as it gets erased from online on a regular basis. That, and a game (not telling which) gets a 2/10 review this issue -- always my favorite sort of Edge review to read. Guilty pleasures, I know.

PC Gamer March 2009

Cover: Dragon Age: Origins

I put PC Gamer a bit closer to the top this installment because this is the first edition led by lovely EIC and former Kevin Gifford boss Gary Steinman -- a man who is very smart with magazines and games and such, but, let's face it, has been leading console mags for years now and doesn't have much experience with PC game media. Will be comfortable in the world of WASD and MMO and SARS and such? I hope it works out!

Changes will undoubtedly be a-coming to PCG, but this issue's not so different from the norm. There's a lovely and exhaustive cover piece -- and exhaustive it should be, given that the game's rumored to be all but ready for shipment despite its delay. The GOTY '08 piece is remarkably non-straightforward -- no simple list of categories and screenshots here; every page has its own theme and design, and it's all very UK-like in style, actually. Very eye-catching.

Retro Gamer Issue 59

Cover: Battlezone

Distribution of Retro Gamer seems to have mysteriously restarted in my neck of the woods, although Issue 58 never made it down here. (I think I've got it ordered from Imagine, but it's hard to tell since I've been having odd credit-card issues with their website, complete with back-and-forth emails with their tech support. Hopefully it will work out soon.)

Those who think Retro Gamer is getting a bit stale will find ample ammunition for that argument in that issue, given that they interview Jon Ritman and cover Head Over Heels for about the bajillionth time, this time as part of a top-25-isometric-games piece. The mag's still worth buying, though, because of the cover piece and because of the massive Wing Commander history inside -- one of the first times, I think, that creator Chris Roberts has talked much about the series since he left games for the film industry.

Game Informer March 2009

Cover: God of War III

GI certainly wins the pretty-cover sweepstakes this time around, although the piece inside is a bit long-winded and heavy on tiny little plot details and other things that ain't my bag. More interesting: An interview with Dave Shippy, a guy with an amusing name who led the team behind the PS3 and 360's processors, and a news piece on the tendency of modern video-game credit sequences to be long as hell. No, really. Hey, it's annoying if you're hoping for hidden content at the end of it, okay?

Play March 2009

Cover: Dante's Inferno

Classic Play here -- a cover piece that's mostly rambling interview, a lot of pretty pictures, and it's all over very quickly.

This issue must've been heaven for Dave Halverson to work on, given that he got to write about Ayumi of X-Blades and the Oneechanbara games in one go. ("I wouldn't give either [game] a second look if it wasn't for the novelty of all these ferocious young girls getting drenched in zombie blood, especially Aya, whose sinful animation, especially on 360, is to me what added realism must be to a modern warfare junkie.")

Nintendo Power March 2009

Cover: Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings

The new Indy is a neat game that seems to have the curse of not being seen as a AAA title by the media for some reason. NP does a good job of covering it (though the cover feature is a bit bland in design), as it does with The Conduit and the new Shin Megami Tensei and Major Minor and all that -- nothing exceptional, but still nice, plus I don't think any game mag actually interviewed Rodney A. Greenblat before. He's pretty deep, man.

PC Zone February 2009

Cover: Empire: Total War

Choice quote of this issue: "Don't think about it too hard, but a few years ago a couple friends of mine used to enjoy donning Halloween masks and contacting random webcam owners on some instant messaging program. People would scream or laugh at them, or both -- it was weird, harmless internet fun. One day they came across a fat, topless man sitting in a bedroom. Before they could disconnect, a baby elephant walked across the screen. Then it came back, and just stood there. A baby elephant, flapping its ears in a topless man's house. Until I played Left 4 Dead, I thought that was the most amazing thing that's ever happened online..."

Game Developer February 2009

Cover: Golden Axe: Beast Rider

You can tell Game Developer isn't Play Magazine because Game Developer published screenshots from GA:BR that doesn't have Tyris in it and postmortem author Michael Boccieri doesn't spend paragraphs discussing breasts. In all seriousness, though, the fun-to-read quotient of a GD postmortem seems directly proportional to how how much trouble the staff had making the game, and this one is a corker as a result.

[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 (1)

[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.]

Just before we hit the weekend, here's a cornucopia of not entirely out of date RSS-trawled wonders - some of which date, yes, from a little closer to last weekend, but all of which are just marvelous, so shh.

Among the delights - Tiny Cartridge talking to Gaijin Games about their bleeptastic WiiWare game, Cory Barlog at WETA, Jeff Green on designing games, and the Vancouver Game Design folks on having opinions about things. Which we all do, don't we? I know I do!

Crazy horses:

Seriously...don't play games with me!: ...yeah, we have a Warthog.
Cory Barlog is still working on the Mad Max game with George Miller, but more importantly, he's been riding a Warthog at WETA, like Wallis. The lucky so and so.

Fullbright: Basics of effective FPS encounter design (via F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2)
Another good Gaynor post: 'In my mind, the design differences between the original game and its sequel highlight a few essential elements of good encounter design in a first-person shooter.'

Well, That’s Like, Just Your Opinion, Man « Vancouver Game Design
A fun post, with non-game industry examples, of why - well - opinions are opinions!

Tiny Q&A: Gaijin Games' Chris Osborn (BIT.TRIP:BEAT) - Tiny Cartridge
Not sure I agree that the Wii Art.Style games 'showed us there definitely was a market for tight, retro-inspired games on WiiWare.' More like... Nintendo just paid for them and shoved them out there :/

Greenspeak: Game Design is Hard, Part II
Asinine comments section aside, it's interesting to look at Jeff Green's transition from journalist to designer at EA from his own perspective, in terms of the humbling complexity behind video games.

How PC Gaming Ended Up on Your Couch from 1UP.com
Heh, Robert Ashley in the comments: 'Keep in mind that this story was written for EGM, an explicitly console-centric magazine.'

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

['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This time, a surprising press release sheds light on a dangerous profession.]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Video Game Critic Killed Over 7/10 Review

A white, male video game reviewer has been murdered at his home in South London.

Charlie Drummond, a 30-year-old print and web journalist, was hacked to death by between 12 and 20 members of the gaming forum New-Gaf in his bedroom on Saturday morning.

According to police, his attackers had become riled at a review Drummond had written of the, at the time unreleased, videogame, Gears of Killzone 2, a product which the writer valued at 7/10 in a review printed in the Wedge Magazine two weeks ago.

A friend and fellow journalist told the BBC that Drummond’s killers had carved a 7/10 into his forehead using a DS stylus, a reference to the value judgment that apparently led to his demise.

While most of Drummond’s attackers are at large, one man, known at this point only by his online handle ‘Dutka-Fan’, handed himself in to a police station on Sunday morning. The police are yet to issue a statement, however one officer confirmed to the BBC the suspect had “not played the game in question yet”.

A discussion thread on New-Gaf, which ran to 60 pages prior to Drummond’s killing, was filled with expressions of dismay from forum members who accused the writer of “indulging [his] massive ego in an underhanded attempt at getting attention”, arguing that Drummond should “not be allowed to do things like this” and, in reference to the score he awarded the game, elliptically claiming: “This...is...a...lie.”

Such volatile discussions of unreleased videogames on the web are well-established, young men often defending products they have become heavily invested in. However, this is the first time that such anger has manifested itself as real world physical violence.

Drummond is believed to be the first videogame reviewer killed in the country, although game journalists have long lived with violence or the threat of it.

In 2008, games writer Oli Welsh received death threats for scoring the hotly anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4 an 8/10 for gaming site Eurogamer.

Likewise, Alec Meer was once threatened by a reader in response to a review of Star Wars: Empire At War claiming that he was going to “find your house, construct a giant wax statue of you outside it, and set fire to the thing”. Both men, and other writers working in the field, will no doubt take such anonymous threats more seriously in the future.

Veteran editor at Wedge Magazine, Anthony Mitt spoke of his shock at the news while praising Drummond as "brave and multi-talented", a writer who “was never frightened to speak truth to publishers and consumers alike”.

He went on to add: “We would always encourage readers to read the content of a review, which is often useful for understanding what the reviewer thought of the product with more detail and nuance than the ten point score system allows.”

But some members of the gaming community weren’t quite so sympathetic to Drummond’s fate. One prominent PR man from a large publisher, who asked to remain anonymous, told us: “Publishers and developers have long had to live or die by their Metacritic scores. Perhaps now it’s time for game reviewers to get a taste of their own medicine.”

However, the local office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights deplored the murder and called on the authorities to identify those responsible and bring them to justice.

"This tragedy should galvanise those responsible for protection of media freedom to take the necessary action to ensure the security of game reviewers,” said Vera Bingotits. “Every person should feel free to score anything whatever they like without fear for their safety,” she said, before giving our reporter a 6/10 for punctuation and dress sense.

The game in question, Gears of Killzone 2, entered the all format gaming charts last week at number 1. This week, however, it had dropped out of the charts altogether, superseded by a raft of fresh releases.

The New-Gaf thread about the game had also lost its head of steam, some posters adding comments such as, “Drummond might have actually been right about this one LOL”, “The zeitgeist has left the building: please move along now” and, “Tits or GTFO.”

Drummond is survived by his Nintendog and a pretty badass PC.

Posted by Simon Parkin at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

[Every week, sister site 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, gamers can finally check out Death Tank on Xbox Live Arcade. Despite the 1200 Microsoft points ($15) it may cost you, those interested in checking it out before buying should know that the demo includes free online play for Gold users.

This is a whole hour's worth of free online multiplayer to try out, and needs to happen more for downloadable console demos - and it helps that it's a great game.

Last week, the PlayStation Network got Flower, and this week, users can check out Noby Noby Boy. Even the creators aren't quite sure what sort of monster they've created this time.

Finally, WiiWare users can download Evasive Space, a space shooter where you... do not shoot. If you're a fan of Geometry Wars' passive mode you might want to give this a shot.

Here are the top stories of the week:

Xbox Live Arcade

Death Tank And The Maw DLC Now Available
Hey kids, it's time for a blitz round!

Sega Vintage Collection Expands - Sonic 3, Gunstar Heroes And More
Leaked screenshots show more Sega classics coming to Xbox Live Arcade.

XNA Roundup Episode 5 - Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp
This week's XNA Roundup episode showcases one of the best XNA titles currently available.

Watchmen: The End Is Nigh Hitting XBLA March 4th, PSN March 5th
Check out the Watchmen companion game, days before the theatrical release.

Xbox.com Reverts Dates, Galactrix, Exit 2 Now TBD
We thought Exit 2 was coming out this week, and Galactrix next week. Looks like we were wrong.

PlayStation Network

NA PSN Store Update - Noby Noby Boy, Zuma, And Burnout, HV Bowling DLC
Keita Takahashi's super-quirky downloadable title debuts, alongside a casual game classic and notable DLC.

Comet Crash And Hammer Fall Announced For PSN
A new Desktop Tower Defense game coming exclusively to the PlayStation Network.

EU PSN Store Update - Flower
Flying through the sky so fancy free.

NA PSN Store Update - Flower, Lumines Classic Pack
Become one with the wind, as you fly through this beautiful game.

WiiWare

Crystal Defenders Splits Up On WiiWare, XBLA And PSN Only In The West?
Square-Enix's Tower Defense game gets expensive on WiiWare.

Animales De La Muerte No Longer WiiWare Bound
High Voltage Software's zombie animal decapitating simulator now on hold.

Mr. Driller Burrows His Way To WiiWare
Famitsu magazine shows off the latest Mr. Driller title coming to WiiWare and DSiWare.

EU WiiWare Update - Onslaught, Pop Up Pirate
Hudson's first person shooter comes first to WiiWare, as well as Tomy's classic toy going digital.

NA WiiWare Update - Evasive Space
High Voltage Software's non-shooting shooter now out in America.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | 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 puzzle design in the Myst series.]

Puzzle. The word has many different meanings in the context of video games. The term "puzzle game" can refer to a game in the mold of Tetris; there are many shaped or colored blocks or jewels or bubbles that must be cleared by manipulating them within a time limit. In this context, the "puzzle" tests the player's coordination and reaction time.

However, the word "puzzle" is also commonly used in a broader and more conventional context to describe an intellectual obstacle in any video game. When the developers of Half-Life 2 break up the shooting-and-driving gameplay to have the player assemble a makeshift ladder, that's a puzzle. So are the ubiquitous sliding-block puzzles of Zelda infamy. In these cases, puzzles are intended to serve as pacing devices, allowing a moment to relax and think in the middle of all the killing.

However, there are categories of video games where the game is entirely composed of puzzles. One group is games like Chip's Challenge, 3D Logic, or Portal, which all present a sequence of similar puzzles differing only in complexity and scale. However, to the true puzzle connoisseur, the height of the art is to be found in the adventure game.

The Monkey Island series, the Infocom interactive fiction games, and escape-the-room games portray worlds in which puzzles are a fact of life. The developers try, with various degrees of success, to incorporate puzzles seamlessly into the game world, so that players can inhabit a character who thinks her way around difficulties rather than shooting her way through them.

In the adventure game category, few games are more maligned than Cyan Worlds' Myst series. Spanning five single-player games and one repeatedly-resurrected online game, Uru, the Myst series is often blamed for bringing about the death of the adventure game. It popularized the concept of a silent, faceless protagonist exploring an uninhabited game world, and led to a myriad of copycat games where the atmosphere was spooky but the puzzles were arbitrary and banal. These concepts were anathema to fans of the character depth and humor of the Sierra and LucasArts adventures.

However, it really is the puzzle-solving where the Myst series shines. By looking at the best (and worst!) puzzles of the series, we can gain an understanding of how to construct truly compelling intellectual challenges. For a puzzle to be effective, it must be three things: fair, novel, and integrated.

A Fleeting Glimpse

First, let's look at my three favorite puzzles from the Myst series. These are Riven's marble puzzle, Myst III: Exile's Amateria Age, and Uru: The Path of the Shell's Ahnonay Age. All three require observation and logic, then reward the player with an "a-ha!" reveal. Below, I'll discuss the setup and solution to each puzzle.

The marble puzzle is the trickiest challenge in Riven, the second game in the series. In order to restore power to the mystical linking books that lead to the villain's haven, the player must enter a combination into a device on Dome Island. Luckily, the villain has an unreliable memory, and has based the solution on the geography of the game world. The player must place five marbles in a grid, with each marble's color and location matching that of a small dome encountered over the course of the game.

Part of this puzzle's genius is that it brings together all of the challenges surpassed so far in the game. In order to know the locations of the small domes, the player must have solved all of the earlier puzzles which provide access to the domes. Discovering the associated colors requires the player to have determined which symbol matches each color, and which dome matches each symbol.

At a few points in the solution process, a process of elimination is required to account for damaged machinery. The solution requires a full exploration of the game world, over five leaps of associative logic, and the use of several devices to process and sort the proper information.

Trial and error would get the player nowhere with this puzzle; there are thousands of possible combinations, and only one correct one. The puzzle is fiendishly difficult, but it isn't unfair; every aspect of the solution is prominently clued somewhere in the game, and all the player needs to do is put the clues together. Many players, including myself, required more than one hint to solve the puzzle, but my reaction to the solution was "Why didn't I see that?" rather than "How could I have been expected to see that?"

Amateria is one of three main puzzle worlds in Myst III: Exile. It is an island with hexagonal geology and enormous crystal spheres that roll along metal tracks. In a series of preliminary puzzles, the player must get spheres to traverse short patches of tracks, using simple logic to disable obstacles. This provides access to a central control station, where the player discovers that the three short stretches of tracks are connected, and must arrange a route so that a sphere can roll through all three tracks in sequence.

Finally, when everything is set up properly, the player discovers that the tracks are more than puzzle elements; they are a transportation system. The reward for solving the puzzle is a roller-coaster ride through each of Amateria's puzzles, finishing at the part of the world that the player has been trying to reach the whole time.

Like Riven's marble puzzle, Amateria's final puzzle brings together each of the previous puzzles of the Age. The player must have solved each puzzle and understood its solution in order to complete the challenge. Beyond that, the puzzle is based on real-world principles. Amateria does not just ask for a secret password which magically opens a door; the player is constructing a path for herself to take to her goal. Beyond that, the reward of the roller-coaster cutscene is one of the most exciting and good-looking sequences of the series.

Finally, Ahnonay is one of the worlds from the Uru expansion, The Path of the Shell, as well as being included in a modified form in the short-lived, GameTap-sponsored Myst Online: Uru Live. This Age was constructed by a charlatan named Kadish to fool people into believing he had power over time travel.

When the player first enters the Age, it has been abandoned for some time; she must use a description of how the Age used to work in order to experience Kadish's illusion of time travel. By experimenting with objects in the world, the player finds that Ahnonay is nothing more than a soundstage that is somehow being transformed from one "time" to another.

Diagrams within Ahnonay suggest a fourth "time" that is not part of the usual tour. By combining the player's knowledge of how travel between worlds works with the controls found behind the scenes, the player can reach an observation room outside of the entire structure, where the true nature of the world is revealed.

There's nothing mystical about Kadish's trickery. He simply built a huge device which rotates each "time zone" into place in preparation for a group's arrival. There are four separate soundstages, each one able to be rotated in and out of the active position.

The player's progress through Ahnonay works on two levels. As the player solves small puzzles within the Age, her understanding of the mechanisms behind the world grows. At the beginning, Kadish's illusion is powerful, and the puzzles within seem impossible. By the end, the player has solved all of the puzzles and understands the mechanism behind the Age's trickery.

Each of these puzzles — Riven's marble puzzle, Myst III: Exile's Amateria Age, and Uru: The Path of the Shell's Ahnonay Age — is memorable and compelling because of certain qualities they share. By looking at these qualities, we can better understand how to construct equally effective puzzles.

Not Yet Been Written

For a puzzle to be a good one, it should be fair, novel, and integrated. A fair puzzle is one which can be solved using information and tools provided in the game, without depending on guesswork, specialized knowledge, or a walkthrough. A novel puzzle is one which is unique to the game, not a reskinned version of one the player has seen before. An integrated puzzle is one which can believably exist in the game world, and which has appropriate in-game consequences.

For a puzzle to be fair, it should be possible to solve it using only information provided in the game and accompanying materials. It's fine for a puzzle to require things like basic math and logic skills or the fundamentals of gravity and electricity, but more specialized knowledge should either be avoided or provided in an in-game text.

In Graham Nelson's "The Craft of Adventure," he cites Zork II's diamond maze as an example of an unfair puzzle; it requires knowledge of baseball, which is uncommon outside of America. This is a mild offense, but imagine a game which assumed knowledge of medieval heraldry or Indian Carnatic music. In the worst case, a player might not even notice a puzzle existed, which would mean she wouldn't know to look up the required information in an external source.

Additionally, a puzzle can be unfair because it requires undue guesswork. A puzzle solution that only makes sense after the fact is unfair, as is an unclued, arbitrary solution like Dare to Dream's use of a fish tail as a key for a door. Generally speaking, if a walkthrough is the only way to figure out a solution, then the developer is being far too clever. There should be a continuous trail of logic from the clues to the solution.

Novelty is also important in puzzles. At some point, the boxes-on-a-slippery-surface puzzle was novel. Not anymore. Any experienced player who encounters one of these puzzles knows the way to solve it; she just needs to carry out the solution algorithm. There's no intellectual challenge, which makes the puzzle nothing more than a time-waster. The same goes for a sliding tile puzzle (or "fifteen" puzzle). As a general rule, if a puzzle is included with the default installation of your operating system, it's not novel.

Novelty is important because the fun and challenge of a puzzle is in discovering its solution. Just implementing a solution the player already knows is pointless. Nor is it enough to just dress an old puzzle up in new clothes. A Tower of Hanoi puzzle is not made new again by making the disks precious coins or UFOs. It might be acceptable to do something clever like make the disks actual floors of a tower that could be navigated in different configurations... but only as a last resort.

The final requirement is integration. Players are perfectly willing to accept a world full of absent-minded folks who write down the combination to their luggage in code, but there are limits to their credulity. Take 7th Guest, which is famous for its puzzle in which rearranging soup cans opens a door. This is a game where ghosts are evidently murdering other ghosts, and the puzzle is still hard to believe. At the very least, a puzzle should make sense in the game world.

More than that, though, a puzzle should fit. Most of Myst's puzzles suit the game world; there is a reason for them beyond the game designer's need to challenge the player. The series' use of Ages, or dimensions, helps with this by providing a strong theme for sections of the game. Channelwood's puzzles are related to the water-based power system used there, while Kadish Tolesa's puzzles all feel like they were created by a conceited and slightly crazed con man.

Fairness, novelty, and integration are all important for making good puzzles, but what makes the puzzles discussed here stand out is their payoffs. Each of them has a moment of epiphany, where the odd structure of the game world suddenly makes sense, and all the pieces fit together. Because they are especially tricky, the reward is sweeter, and the player feels a greater sense of accomplishment.

It's this puzzle with a twist that is the greatest strength of the Myst series. By starting with a solid puzzle and then adding a twist, developers can make their own puzzles stick in players' memories. This doesn't just apply to adventure games, either; any kind of game that uses puzzles will be better-served by a cleverly crafted obstacle rather than just another game of Nim.

[Gregory Weir is a writer, game developer (The Majesty Of Colors), 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 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

[While you'll also find Gamasutra stories on DICE talks like Dave Perry's and John Riccitiello's, we're just printing the longer-form, less business-y stuff here - and this Capcom talk, written up by Brandon Sheffield, hits a lot of the right buttons re: intriguing cultural questions.]

Jun Takeuchi, creative director at Capcom and producer of Resident Evil 5 and Lost Planet, opened DICE's first full day of programming with a keynote intended to tackle the issue of global game development and Capcom’s recent success in the Western market.

But in effect, he wound up making a better case for why Japanese game companies are not succeeding in the West.

"Maybe it’s strange for a Japanese person like me to be speaking to you," he began at the Gamasutra-attended talk during the Las Vegas business summit, "but I want to tell you a bit about how it’s like for us in Japan just now."

Takeuchi frequently punctuated his talk with similar kinds of casual and perhaps somewhat unconscious remarks, which ensured the audience got the idea that Japan is different from America.

"Japanese people, when they come to a place like [America], have a very unique feeling," said Takeuchi, presenting a slide representing Japan's perception of the West. "The first thing I feel when I come here is ‘wow, you’re all not Japanese.’ This is of course down to Japan being an isolated island country for many years."

While he delivered his comment as a half-joke, the comment about Japan’s isolation is valid, and is a point of "differentness" to which he kept referring during his talk.

But the harsh realities of the game market do not escape the company. "When I look at the games world market right now," he said, "I have no choice but to admit that Japan is a small part of that market."

Mistakes On The Way To A Bold Goal

"For software sales, Japan is just 6 percent of the global market. For the past several years, Capcom has had the goal of making the majority of its products for the Western market. We plan to increase our sales in the West to 70 percent of our total."

This is indeed a bold goal, and likely that focus is helping Capcom sell its games here, especially given that keeping other markets in mind from the beginning makes localization far easier. In terms of Capcom’s initial approach to this goal, Takeuchi highlighted the company’s initial missteps.

"I think the first mistake we made is thinking ‘we have to understand how foreigners think.’ And the first way we thought to do this was to dye our hair blonde, and then think wow, I’m a foreigner!" He joked.

"The game that came from this strategy was Onimusha 3. Of course, this was still a game about samurai, and it didn’t sell as well as we wanted."

For that title, Capcom tried adding Moroccan-born French actor Jean Reno, to whom Takeuchi referred as a "popular Hollywood actor" -- an indication that the company misunderstood what it takes to make a game popular in the West.

"We dyed the game blonde," he admitted.

Developing A New Approach

At this point, Capcom hired current Bionic Commando producer Ben Judd, who at the time was simply consulting. Judd asked: "How will this help?"

Takeuchi joked that the next approach was to put baseball caps on their developers, because Americans like baseball. The Western-focused game that came out around this time period was Shadow of Rome.

"Just as Ichiro [Suzuki, of the Seattle Mariners baseball team] has his teammates who are American who help him," he said, "we decided to get lots of feedback from Westerners. It didn’t really work out, either.”

At this point, Judd expressed to Capcom that he felt they weren't taking Westernization seriously. "We were taking it seriously as Japanese people," said Takeuchi, "if there’s one thing we hate at Capcom, it’s quitters, so we went back to the drawing board."

The company’s new approach was based on the Japanese proverb: In order to defeat your enemy, it’s not enough to know your enemy - you must truly know yourself. "We used this as our touchstone in our new strategy," he said.

With this in mind, Capcom looked at the problems of Japan itself. Japan is a society that is nearly homogenous, Takeuchi reminded the audience. And Japanese as a language is only used within Japan itself. It’s a very small and built-up country, which leads to small communities as well, he says.

"But we realized that we in Japan enjoy lots of different cultures. We listen to music on iPods, watch movies from Hollywood, eat at McDonalds, want to own Mercedes, and love rock and roll."

Obstacles In The Way

The crunchiest bit of his talk was in the recognition of three problems within Capcom, which also reflects on the Japanese industry as a whole. "First, we realized that risk reduction can actually increase risk," he said.

Concentrating investment on the Japanese market first that will succeed just in Japan, is not a good idea. "The Japanese market is quite small, so the amount of money you can spend on a title like this is quite small."

"The second issue was that our understanding of the Western market was nowhere near clear enough," he admits -- thinking too simply about making games just for the West would also lead to smaller budgets. "A typical result of this might be to take a really stylish character and turn him into a big macho man," perhaps echoing the transition of Capcom’s title Sengoku Basara from Japan into the muscle-bound Devil Kings.

The third problem was that "management was only thinking about the West as an extra sales bonus, not a target market for development." New technology was developed blindly without a proper goal in mind.

Capcom's 10 Commandments

As a result of their rethinking, they came up with some new practices for themselves. Here then, are the 10 commandments of Capcom development.

1 – Keep staff turnover below 10 percent per annum.
2 – Maintain the ability (and cash reserves) to increase personnel by 10% each year.
3 – Keeping the first two points in mind, keep development cost fluctuations within 10%.
4 – Investment in new IP needs to be kept within 20% of total development budget.
5 – The structure and organization of the company needs the flexibility to change in response to growth; the goals and objectives must constantly be reviewed.
6 – Goals and objectives must be adaptable to external forces.
7 – Objectives and aims must always be set from the top down.
8 - Reform must always be taken from the bottom up.
9 – There should be no taboo areas where it comes to reform; reform must be undertaken at all costs.
10 – Don’t set unachievable goals.

"The first three points reflect the fact that Japanese people look first and foremost for stability in their companies," he admitted. "Japanese people view switching developers as a big risk, so people rarely do that."

New IP is important – "but we don’t think it’s a good idea to spend over 20 percent [of budgets] on new IP. If one of those new IP doesn’t take off, it can damage the company quite seriously," he said, adding that "Japanese companies don’t like organizational change – but if you can’t adapt to the time, you can’t succeed in the market."

Troubling Signs In Implementation?

Perhaps most distressing was his discussion of how these sorts of company adjustments need to be undertaken. "When there are problems in the company, they’re almost always within developers themselves," said Takeuchi, explaining that managers must always enact reform from the top down, and communicate this to their employees, as seen in the seventh Capcom commandment. "Management must always work with developers to enact these reforms."

The trouble here is that the idea of adapting the company to changing market conditions is a new one to Japan, and it is extremely telling that this needed to be a commandment in order to come to fruition. This also reflects how quickly Western developers were able to overshoot their Japanese counterparts in the last 10 years or so.

"There’s one more rule that’s as important as the rest," said Takeuchi. "Make games that users will enjoy! This has been the philosophy at Capcom for many years, and is the thing developers learn when they first come to Capcom."

"All things we do in Capcom have to be tied to how the end user will feel. If you can’t do that, you lose the reason for your company to exist."

"Make fun games" seems like an amazingly vague thing to say to other game developers. Perhaps it occasionally needs restating, but unfortunately the reason a game like Lost Planet or Resident Evil succeeds in the West is not because of adapting business practices, or management telling the developers the right way to do things, but because Capcom came up with a good mechanic, executed on it well, and made the locations non-specific to Japan.

He closed by reminding us of our differences: "You’re all Americans, and I’m Japanese," he said. "The things we eat, the language we speak, it’s all different. But I don’t think there’s any difference in our understanding of what a fun game is."

"While I was developing Resident Evil 5, I really fell in love with BioShock," he continued. "I’m really struggling with the fact that I can’t work my way up the rankings in Call of Duty 4. There are no borders to fun."

Question And Answer Session

First, Chris Kohler of Wired asked, to paraphrase: "Localization was difficult on Game Center CX (Retro Game Master) because the developers didn’t think the game would ever leave Japan. Should games be created with localization in mind even if they’re created primarily for Japan?"

Takeuchi responded: "As you say, this is a big problem that’s happening in the Japanese market. There are some developers out there who, because their games don’t take off in the West, can start to ignore the West when developing games."

"I think that’s a very sad and dangerous game for the Japanese market. I think we should remember that in the development of games, the idea of fun, goes beyond national boundaries. I think the fact that we’ve developed games with the thought to release them in the Western market has really helped us."

Seth Schiesel from the New York Times asked: "Why do you think games have become Japan’s most successful cultural export, when other media like film and music are not as successful?"

Takeuchi responded: "Certainly I can see how you’d think that way, but the Japanese film market used to be more popular worldwide than it is now." He cited filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa (Ran, Rashomon), and movies like Godzilla.

"So I think the real question is why, with experience from the past, Japanese films aren’t popular anymore," he said. "And I think that reason is because filmmakers decided to reduce risk by not focusing on the West."

"I think that if an American studio were to make a movie like Godzilla, they would view it as a product to sell around the world, and might spend $100 million. But in Japan, they would never spend more than $5 million, and hope to make their money back only in Japan."

His specific comments regarding games were especially interesting, and summed up rather well the difficulty of making games in Japan in the first place, as well as the trouble with bringing them to the West.

"I think the reason games are different is ultimately down to Nintendo," he said. "Nintendo -- in contrast to other Japanese companies -- really made a big effort to succeed not only in Japan, but also in the West, and all over the world."

"And after them of course came Sony. So we in Japan were inspired looking at these companies. I think that if Nintendo and Sony hadn’t blazed these paths first, I don’t think we at Capcom would be developing games for the West."

"I think with better management, Japanese films and comics would be able to do much better in the global marketplace," he concluded.

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

[In honor of Noby Noby Boy's PSN debut, I specially wanted to highlight these new GDC talks because I was surprised and delighted to see Keita Takahashi pop up at the last minute - and I'm wondering if Level-5 will discuss their Ghibli game in any detail, yum.]

Organizers of next month's Game Developers Conference have revealed major new talks from Keita Takahashi on Noby Noby Boy, Valve's Michael Booth on Left 4 Dead, and Level-5's Akihiro Hino, on Professor Layton and his firm's other titles.

A high-profile late addition to the program for the San Francisco-based developer event, Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi will present a talk called 'All About Noby Noby Boy', discussing his supremely quirky new PlayStation Network title. Attendees are promised that "This class will be a refreshing change of pace."

Also newly confirmed is 'From Counter-Strike to Left 4 Dead: Creating Replayable Cooperative Experiences' from Valve's Michael Booth. As the description explains: "This session will review the high-level design of Left 4 Dead, how it evolved from Counter-Strike, and the importance of procedural systems such as the AI Director in creating replayable and compelling cooperative experiences."

Finally, in one of the firm's first-ever Western conference appearances, Level-5's Yasuhiro Akasaka will speak alongside company president Akihiro Hino on 'Level-5’s Techniques to Producing a Hit Game — From Professor Layton to Inazuma Eleven and The Another World'.

The studio is noted for games spanning Dark Cloud through Dragon Quest VIII. More recently, its acclaimed Professor Layton DS puzzle game series and move into self-publishing in Japan is notable, with upcoming titles including Studio Ghibli co-operation The Another World.

Game Developers Conference 2009 takes place at the Moscone Center from March 23rd to 27th, and more information on the event and registration is available at the official GDC website.

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

[My colleagues Chris Remo and Brandon Sheffield are at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas right now, and Gamasutra has our full coverage, of course. But I thought we should run the most thought-provoking write-ups here, starting with Remo's write-up of Gabe Newell's excellent opening lecture.]

Kicking off DICE 2009, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell discussed a theme central to his company’s success: entertainment as a service.

“The old way was using intermediaries,” Newell said, in a lecture attended by Gamasutra as the Las Vegas game business event.

“The product would be sold through retailers or other intermediaries. …You were really focused on spending three years to build value for your customers to get through the friction of the retail experience.”

When you focus on entertainment as a service, on the other hand, “you will use your customer base to reach new customers, and your focus is much more about providing ongoing value to your customers – maybe every three weeks, or even more often than that.”

The internet is fundamentally changing the medium, says Newell, and the new model affects all parts of the business.

“There are songs that are dusty, sitting in the back catalogue, and by putting a service layer on top of it – some level of interactivity – those very same songs become very profitable all over again,” he says, pointing to games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero as ways of making existing media “vibrant again.”

The Piracy Thing

Moving onto the hot-button issue of piracy, Newell says pricing is not the main problem. “The pricing issue, I think, is really misleading,” he says. “In the PC audience, these people are spending thousands of dollars on their PCs and their internet connectivity. They are perfectly happy to spend money, so that’s not the issue. But when it comes to the service, that’s where the pirates are way ahead of us.”

He gave an example of wanting to own copies of the Dr. Who television series on DVD – but being unable to legally do so, because it isn’t available in his region. When consumers are presented with such scenarios, pirates win out.

Furthermore, Newell claims, techniques like DRM actually increase piracy, not decrease it. It puts more distance between content creators and their customers, which ends up disempowering the creators.

Keeping The Customer Close

On that theme, Newell noted that Valve conducts huge amounts of gameplay and other data tracking on Steam to help with game design and pricing schedules – but rather than putting a veil of secrecy between users and that information, Valve makes it available to the press to distribute it out to the gaming community at large, strengthening the bonds between creators and consumers.

The word of mouth and other “natural” marketing that occurs as a result of close communication with the user base ends up being far more meaningful and effective than traditional paid marketing, Newell notes.

Newell says Steam, Valve’s digital distribution platform was formulated after asking the following question: “How can we have a relationship with our customer to maximize the relationship to our customer and monitize that relationship?”

Steam currently boasts 20 million users and 350 games – and the service is seeing consistent year-on-year growth of 100 percent.

What People Want

There are some key desires on the part of both the customer and the provider, Newell notes. Customers, for example, want portability of their content and files, multiplayer games that are free of cheating, software that keeps itself updated, a broad and diverse variety of games, and a rich social environment.

On the other hand, says the co-founder, businesses have their own desires. They want to be paid for their content without needing to worry about rampant piracy, and they want to be able to maintain worldwide pricing structures.

“If it makes total sense for me to have certain pricing in one part of the world, I want to make sure that price doesn’t flow into other parts of the world and mess up my distribution models,” he says.

Developers also want to stay in touch with their customers – a desire that intersects with the consumers’ own desires. But they also want useful data that shows if, and to what degree, promotions are having a real, tangible effect. Trying to track such information at retail is “like handling your data with oven mitts on,” says Newell, but Steam-like platforms make it trackable in real time.

Businesses also want a choice of business models – some games might be subscription-based, some might depend on advertising revenue, some might rely on downloadable content, and so on.

A Case Study

Valve’s Team Fortress 2 provides a real-world example of the “entertainment as service” model. When the company shipped the game, “that was just the start,” Newell says.

In the 14 months since the game shipped, the PC version of the game has seen 63 updates – “that’s the frequency you want to be providing updates to your customers,” he adds. “You want to say, ‘We’ll get back to you every week.’”

“The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”

“We think our customers are ahead of us on the notion of what kind of entertainment company they want us to be,” he says. “They’re saying, you can’t be a game company anymore, you have to be an entertainment company. …The successful entertainment companies are the ones who have product development groups who are successful at making cross-media entertainment choices that are the most valuable.”

For example, Valve has made a series of Team Fortress 2 short films that have proved very successful in increasing visibility of the game – and the company plans to have the team responsible for those movies to move onto creating comics.

“Why does it work?” he asked. “It works because the people who build it are the same people who build the game.” Newell painted a strong contrast between keeping such supplementary content in-house, and contracting it out to a third party that has less investment in the core property.

Converting Customers

Much of the success of Team Fortress 2 comes from players who become evangelists for its games – Valve hands out limited-time Steam-based “guest passes” to its most fervent players, who then introduce their friends to the game.

The hardcore players tend to become invested in making sure their friends have a good time for the duration of their free pass – and the conversation rate among those friends ends up being incredibly high.

“Converting people from being spectators to being paying participants,” Newell sums up, “is something that a clerk at a retail store can’t possibly do.”

Pricing As A Service

The retail model of “lower the price until the game ends up in the bargain bin” is purely a function of “friction in the [retail] system,” Newell argues – it’s not a necessary pricing model outside of brick-and-mortar stores.

In reality, he says, with an online service, pricing can be moved up or down depending on appropriate data, those changes can be executed instantly, and customer response data will be available “within five minutes.”

“Last weekend, we decided to do an experiment,” he says, referring to this past weekend’s Left 4 Dead sale, which brought the game down to $24.99 through Steam – sales rose 3000 percent, and revenue far eclipsed the game’s sales during its launch window.

Meanwhile, Newell notes, retail sales did not change at all (full Steam integration allows Valve to monitor retail sales as well) – defeating the assumption that Steam sales cannibalize retail sales.

“One thing that really annoys me is the inefficiency of pricing we have in our industry,” Newell says.

When Valve held its recent holiday sale, titles discounted by 10 percent (the minimum) they saw revenue (not unit) increases of 35 percent. At a 25 percent discount, revenue was up 245 percent.

At 50 percent off, revenue was up 320 percent, and at a 75 percent discount, revenue was up an astonishing 1470 percent. Newell stressed again that those revenue boosts represent actual revenue dollars, and not unit volumes.

Wrapping it up, Newell again pointed to emerging services like Kindle and iTunes as further proof of this service model permeating modern business development – and reinforcing its importance to the games industry.

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

[Originally published on Gamasutra but with distinct GSW relevance, not least because Facade creator Andrew Stern is trying to bring some really interesting design aspects back to those darn cute virtual pet games, here's a Christian Nutt-conducted interview about Touch Pets Dogs.]

Rolando publisher ngmoco and Stumptown Game Machine have announced the spring 2009 release of Touch Pets Dogs for the iPhone -- a networked virtual pets game, and the first product from the Portland, Oregon studio, founded by Andrew Stern.

This game marks the reemergence of Stern into the world of virtual pets, a field he was at the foundation of, with the creation of the Petz PC CD-ROM franchise on PCs in the '90s while at PF Magic.

The Petz franchise has successfully been resurrected (largely in name only) by Ubisoft following the success of Nintendo's title Nintendogs. But Stern is also known for the narrative experiment Façade, and is promising that this iPhone title be significantly more interesting than your average virtual pet game.

In addition to the predictable touch interaction with an adorable cartoon puppy, the game features advanced AI simulation and social networking features that make it a more interesting proposition.

Thus, Gamasutra used a detailed demo at ngmoco's San Francisco offices as a chance to talk with Stern, who is the director of Stumptown Game Machine and is designing the game and working as an AI behavior engineer on the project.

Also present was Karlo Kilayko, the game's producer at Stumptown, and subjects discussed include the foundation of this new developer, the game itself, the state of virtual pets and AI simulation in games, player agency in AI-driven games, and more.

New Games, New Company

Can you catch me up on your personal history?

AS: I started working on the Façade R&D in January 2000. I've been working on that for four or five years. I did some other freelancing in between. It took a long time. I actually continued doing more on R&D until 2008 and continued past [the inception of Stumptown]. At the moment I'm fulltime on this stuff. Like I said, it borrows from it.

You recently founded your company, Stumptown Game Machine. This is the first game that you're working on, right?

Andrew Stern: Right. The Façade technology out there -- there was another studio I worked at called Procedural Arts that sort of owns the Façade tech. And so Stumptown Games is like a sister studio to that.

So you're maintaining both studios for separate projects?

AS: At the moment, yeah.

You're back to developing mainstream products. Façade was not a commercial product.

AS: Right. It was a lot of R&D, but gearing towards smart products. And so, right, that's exactly what I'm interested in and what we want to do with Stumptown Game Machine -- discover new genres where AI is one of the primary components of enabling [gameplay].

What was your intent in founding Stumptown Game Machine?

AS: iPhone games were the way we wanted to go. We started working with ngmoco. Yeah, that is our focus.

How many people do you have working on the game?

AS: In our studio we have three or four full-time, several are three-quarters time and several are contractors. The total number of people involved is 14 or 15. Just about every game developer in Portland. [laughter]

So, everyone who is working on this game is actually working out of your studio, even if they are contractors?

AS: Yeah. They are all in town. There are a couple of people who are not in town, like the lead animator who I used to work with on the original Petz is in LA. But, virtually everyone is from Portland. Yeah, we have an office there.

Is that the model that you are pursuing for your studio, to keep it together? Or are you outsourcing?

AS: I have always found, development-wise... I've mostly worked at start-ups. Definitely as much face-to-face time, with everyone working together very closely, works really well. Well, sound effects, for example, or music is something that you can more easily outsource.

But, for the core game, we are trying to keep it as face-to-face as we can. I've found that we just get more. The iPhone games are on short schedules. We're trying to get to market, so the faster we can make it and the better communication, so face-to-face is good for that. I lean away from outsourcing important features.

Karlo Kilayko: Yeah. Art and sound can be broken off a little bit, except for animation. I think the only reason it works with our animator remotely is because Andrew and Jeremy have worked together for a long time.

AS: Yeah, we worked together for a long time. We know what to do. We have built similar things in the past, so we know what we're doing.

The AI Question

Now, obviously your background has been in AI, and behavioral simulation with the original Petz.

AS: And also direct interaction. Very lifelike animation, too. It's a combination of AI and animation.

And Façade sort of carries the same conversational simulation and behavioral simulation aspects too.

AS: Exactly.

So what's really compelling to you about simulating those things?

AS: Yeah. I mean, applying AI to games is like the killer app for AI -- games are the killer app for AI. You know, everyone's fascinated in creating simulated living characters in games.

It's just a super-compelling area to work in. It's the medium for the twenty-first century for the story, obviously. It's where the next generation of the story is going to go.

What do you think about the state of AI in games right now? First of all, in terms of execution? What's being done right now, do you think?

AS: I mean, today's games are really impressive. No doubt about that. Especially graphics environments and AIs are getting better. I mean, they're still mostly focused on tactical AI, strategy AI -- the actual emotional life of characters is still really shallow, unfortunately.

There can be fancy cutscenes, but in terms of actual interactivity with characters and their emotional lives and conversation, the technology still has a long way to go.

So the Façade project was a big experiment in R&D to try to push on that. Virtual pets are in the same universe, trying to push hard on creating models of emotion and personality, having them express themselves. So it's all sort of the same push, more and more lifelike characters.

And of course that enables new genres of games. I mean, this is a new genre here, we've got. We're taking virtual pets but we're adding social networking to it, and mobile. So it's sort of a cross-genre thing, but the AI enables these new genres of games. So it's really exciting.

So is the AI technology in your new game particularly advanced compared to what you've done in the past?

AS: It borrows some of it. It has new things. The Dog Feed, this sort of ongoing story -- it's a bit of story generation. And there's a bit of AI -- how do you describe the events, you know? And how do the dogs decide, are they going to become friends or romances, there's a little bit of personality there. So, yeah, it borrows some from the Façade stuff, and it adds a few new things.

Is there an AI model of the dog in terms of its attributes, and the AI model in terms of like, building relationships or things like that? How does that work?

AS: Yeah. It has a model of what its base personality is, and we're probably going to expose some of the players to that, some not exposed yet. Like, is the dog, how social is it? How greedy, or generous, or tolerant, or energetic -- all these various personality traits.

And then those determine what is going to make another dog attracted to it. So some dogs are really attracted to high-status -- dogs that have accumulated lots of toys, for example. That might attract a sort of materialistic dog. And some other dogs might be sort of introverted, and want another dog that's also introverted.

Or maybe some dogs are more conservative; so, they meet another dog who's got, like, six romances going on. Maybe at first they get wooed by them, but once they meet some other girlfriend or boyfriend of that dog, now they're totally turned off. So there's a little model. It's not super-sophisticated; we have to keep it simple.

How does player agency fit into that? Some of these things are values that can reflect the way the player perceives, or wants to aim, their dog.

AS: Yeah. So when they first adopt the dog, we're going to expose some of the personality. So you're already making a decision, in the adoption center -- do I want a dog that's promiscuous? [laughter] Do I want a dog[-friendly] dog? There'll be some decision there.

And then you can influence your dog's personality, to some degree, depending on how you take care of it. You know, the identity, try to shape more of it with these missions, can be an influence. And during the play date, you can buy gifts in the pet store to give to your dog, to give to other dogs. Or depending how I dress my dog up, make him dress up in an embarrassing outfit or not, you know, that might influence things.

If my dogs start to scuffle, and I decide -- do I pull them apart, or keep fighting? So there's various factors, and the idea that the Dog Feed is explaining to you, what is the reasoning behind what just happened? So, yeah, the player has agency there. But the dog also has a mind of his own, too. So it's like a collaboration between you and the dog.

Are you working with anyone who has a background in social networking or web development or is that sort of like stuff that you just taken as an influence?

AS: Yes, and its influence. We're learning as we go. We're working closely with these guys here [at ngmoco] of course. And we've been working on some stuff for a while now. But yeah, definitely surveying what's out there and learning what works and what doesn't work.

Adding Social Networking: The Sharable Player Story

It's interesting, and the fact -- you talked about it in the demo -- the Dog Feed is a status report on the interactions your dog has had. And I'm assuming it's going to cover the missions you talked about, where the dog goes off and you send him on missions and, also, the relationships he has with your friends' dogs.

AS: Yeah. And, maybe, any other things that you just happen to do. If I train my dog to now catch a Frisbee, then that will be announced, too. Also, dogs that need to be fed or that no one has been playing with, it will announce that they need that. It's a whole huge mix of stuff.

The key to making this interesting for a lot of people is having dog relationships between themselves and other players. Especially in San Francisco, almost everyone I know has an iPhone, and probably a bunch of people are going to play this game. But you still have to make that leap to both agree to buy the game and then network together. What kind of challenges do you see in terms of getting that sort of social networking aspect up and running in a game context?

AS: Word of mouth is obviously huge with these kinds of games. We are trying to make this so that the game is so cool that I would want to show you. Right? "How cool is this? You have to get this game so that we can have our dogs play together!"

We are thinking of other mechanisms for ways to have players find other players. There will be a global feed, too, where you can view activity going on in general over the whole network. You could potentially find other players who you've never met that way.

The social networking aspect of it is something that I think is probably going to be compelling for people. Obviously, that's why you put it in there. People like to compare, and I think people like to compete in different ways. That is probably going to drive it.

AS: Yeah. Some of it will be competition -- like "my stats are higher than yours." Or I see cool stuff that you're doing with your dog, and I'm going to want to do that. But I think some of it -- I don't know if "cooperation" is the word, but the "play" is going to be fun, to make our dogs go through relationships. Oh, our dogs were in love, now they've broken up and now they're back together again. That's great.

KK: It's like a soap opera.

AS: Yeah. There's some competition and there is some just play.

KK: It's a story.

AS: Yeah, a story.

A sort of a procedural narrative emerges from the dog's life.

AS: Yeah.

Is there any sort of arc to it? Is it a chronology of events, or is there an arc that you see emerging?

AS: As your dog's social life gets richer over time, I think the dog will eventually need to reflect that. If two dogs had been together in the past, they'd broken up and they got back together, then you have now progressed to that point. They are reunited.

And with those missions, there is definitely a progression that you make in terms of achievements in the missions. There are some arcs there.

In a way, with soap operas, you can go on forever. Right? The way that soap operas do, things happening again... It is always interesting to see why: "Why are we friends or not, today?"

There are also moods. We can still be friends, but our dogs could be annoyed at each other today for some reason. Then they would recover from that. Or our dogs are in a romance, and then my dog is attracted to some other dog but hasn't started a romance with that other dog. I think it will be, hopefully, endlessly entertaining to see that unfold.

Tell me about the design of the missions. You alluded to the missions, but we weren't able to check it out. What I got was that you pick a mission and send your dog on it. You don't see that mission happening but you get the result.

AS: You'll get a screen shot, though, of what happened. You'll see your dog rescuing a cat off of Mount Everest. Then, on the Dog Feed, if you click on that item, Dog Feed, anyone can see that image.

The State of A.I. Today

What do you think of this state of the virtual
pet genre? I'm not asking you specifically talk about any project, but do you think it's evolved, or do think there's a lot of room to evolve?

AS: Yeah, there's a lot [of room]... it needs to evolve more. Yeah, we need to see more new stuff with the genre.

It seems to me that with the current capacity of any of the platforms that I have mentioned, iPhone, DS, anything, there is probably more things to be done, but the simulation aspect is very weak. I would think probably in terms of behavioral simulation, there's room for improvement.

AS: Yeah. That's the hardest thing to do. That's no surprise that most virtual pet products are a little light on the AI and the simulation part. It's hard. It takes a lot of expertise and a lot of time. So...

What's the benefit to concentrating on it? What's the concrete benefit to concentrating on that part?

AS: It's coolness. It's cool, the actual product, the quality in the product. Just shipping it and get help to sell products.

Do you think that's what the end user is going to perceive that?

KK: Even when I play it, after so many months, I'll see the puppy do something that's emergent or a little different that I've not seen before and it's really cool. You start to form a better connection with it.

AS: You just believe in it as a living thing. It's not fake. It's not simple, or obvious... it feels more alive. That's the goal at least. That's what we are striving for.

What about communicating that to the player?

AS: There's going to be more of everything you see here [indicates screen with dog on it] but there's going to be even more facial expression. Like if he's hungry he's not going to be running around happily -- if he is starved, really needing to be fed. He's going to whine and howl and yip.

With characters, there's sort of the underpinning of AI but what's important is the way the AI expresses itself.

KK: Yeah. If it's not expressive it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much affect is going on if it is not showing it, right?

It goes back to -- how does the simulation engage the player?

AS: Right.

Have you talked to people, like other professionals who are working on AI? Have you found that there is a demand for people wanting to push forward? This is going to sound accusatory; I thought that AI would push forward more in this generation than maybe it had, in terms of behavior.

AS: Yeah. I think a lot of us want it to. I think the reality is that large studios... I know a lot of the AI programmers and designers, and they all of course want to push and innovate.

But it has a lot of constraints. They have to ship product. They can't take too much technical risk. So, it's really the smaller studios and indie studios that can afford to take technical risks and innovate. I think that is where a lot of the innovation will come from, like ngmoco.

KK: My total personal opinion, but I think the expansion of online gaming has actually slowed down a little bit with the perceived value, from the business side. Because when you have other humans to play against...

AS: Yeah. That is true. With the rise with online gaming, AI perhaps takes a little bit more of a backseat for a little while.

I've heard people say that explicitly, at least in terms of, "Who can make a better opponent than another person?"

AS: Well, but it's not about opponents. It's about cool characters that are creating, potentially, a story. So, it's about when you need strong characters.

The problem is that you can make small, incremental innovations in AI, working in a large studio. But to really make a revolutionary leap, you have to take more risks, and you have to take more time. It's tough to do within larger companies. It's part of how larger companies work, I think.

There's that, combined with the fact that it is a really hard problem, even if you have a lot of time. I spent five years, off and on, working on the Façade stuff. It was like three person-years for my collaborator and me. We made some progress, but it is a long way to go.

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

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

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

The delights in this edition include a simple yet polished space-based RTS, a small but atmospheric maze game, an arcade game which features a talking moon, an action RPG in which you're supposed to beat in thirty seconds, and a mod for a new release from last year's IGF finalist in the Seumas McNally Grand Prize category.

Game Pick: 'The Space Game' (Casual Collective, browser)
"A space-based RTS which involves building up a mining base while holding back enemies. It's simple but very polished, with a number of different modes to choose from and a variety of baddies who are always on the offensive."

Game Pick: 'Where' (Mike Inel, freeware)
"Where is a small but atmospheric maze game created by in under three days, and apparently 3D glasses can actually be used while playing for that added effect as well. There is an actual way to reach your intended destination, although you will have to figure out the solution to a puzzle or two in order to get there."

Game Pick: 'Classic Night' (Akarolls, freeware)
"A strategy game with arcade elements, where players are asked to help a talking moon grow brighter by constructing utilities or buildings which give off light. Light from flowers and structures can then be collected as the main resource for upgrades or new constructions."

Game Pick: '30 Second Hero' (UUE, freeware)
"An action RPG consisting of really short battles that require no interaction, as players race against the clock to save the kingdom from an evil wizard's wrath. As indicated by the title, you only have thirty seconds to level up your character sufficiently for the final battle, although additional time can be bought if you have enough gold to cover the cost of your purchase."

Game Pick: '4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness' (Petri Purho & friends, freeware)
"An extremely strange yet unique invention by which the user loaded the 'game' and then simply sat and watched a bar fill up. If anyone else in the world booted the program up while you were 'playing', it would quit and you had lost. If, however, you managed to last the entire time as the sole user, you win... Now Jonathan Basseri has created a tracker so players can follow exactly who is 'winning' at any time."

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

[Have independent games finally "come of age"? Venture Arctic creator and indie veteran Andy Schatz looks at the recent history of the scene to examine why this decade is "defined by the rise of the casual game and the subsequent birth of the modern indie game."]

We always knew "indie" meant something. But no one could ever define what it was.

With the success of high-wattage Independent Games Festival winners, the divorce of the casual gaming market from the indie gaming market, and the continued commoditization of free-to-play flash games, the beast has finally emerged from the mud. It has become clear what indie games are.

How has indie games distribution evolved, and how has it shaped the content and helped to finally define what indie means as a genre of game? Let's discuss.

The 80s were defined by the golden age of computer games, the rise of the console, and the apex of the arcade. The 90s will probably be remembered best for the move to 3D. And it is becoming clear that the 2000s are defined by the rise of the casual game and the subsequent birth of the modern indie game.

What Blessed Road Hath Led Us Here? (2003-2007)

The first half of the decade saw the rise of the portals on the strength of sales from games like Diner Dash and Zuma in 2004. This opened up a digital distribution route for smaller games made by small "proto-indie" teams.

The fact that some of these small teams were making buckets of cash turned the heads of game industry execs and spurred many devs to quit their jobs working on AAA games to try to strike it rich working on smaller, more personal projects (see Last Day Of Work, makers of Virtual Villagers).

During these times, indie just meant "small and unfettered". A majority of the people making indie games were actually making casual games intended for distribution on portals like Yahoo Games, MSN, and the like.

From 2004 to 2007, two things began to happen:

1) So many people were trying to get into the game that production values (and thus costs) started going up.

2) Portals began to switch from finding games with hidden potential to spending their time and money on sure bets -- games in proven genres like Click-Management (Diner Dash) and Hidden Object (Mystery Case Files).

Then, portals like Big Fish Games started the price wars. Big Fish started offering "game passes" to customers, who would pay a subscription fee in order to pay a smaller amount, $7, per game purchased. Eventually, the other portals followed suit, most recently with Reflexive’s price drop across the board to less than $10 per game.

The Road Forks (2007-2008)

The next two years will be remembered as the high water-mark for indie games.

As the casual game market became inhospitable for indie developers, a few other big players saw the casual portals covered in cash and decided to open up their own distribution portals.

Like the earlier web portals, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Valve, and others decided that there was a fortune to be made on the backs of indie developers. Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, PSN, iTunes, Facebook, and Steam all offered distribution routes for the indie devs who made games that no longer fit into the narrowing definition of "casual".

Like the golden age of the casual games, these new portals are still searching for a formula for success. Every time it seems that they have it figured out (XBLA with retro and casual games, WiiWare with their Nintendo back catalog), an indie game comes along to break the mold.

Titles like World of Goo, Castle Crashers, Audiosurf, Braid, Everyday Shooter, and fl0w have all broken rules, bended genres, and proven that in the entertainment world, there is still lots of money to be made with innovation.

There may be dark times ahead, though. Microsoft dropped the developer’s share of royalties in half on Xbox Live Arcade. After a very strong start with the iPhone store, games have been dropping in price dramatically, and the indie applications are slowly getting choked out by licensed brands.

New Allies

Luckily, indies have a new ally in their relationship with distribution portals -- the gaming press.

The lack of excitement about hardcore gaming has left the gaming press starving for content. Lo and behold, indies come along to save the day.

Sites like Kotaku and TIGSource have benefited hugely from the oddities coming out of the indie gaming world. And their attention has allowed indie devs to command more lucrative deals and even make money on direct sales.

Distribution is no longer the only key to success in the indie world; PR is the second avenue to indie success.

Is This the Promised Land?

If the quality and innovation of the content is defined by the distribution opportunities, we are currently hitting a high point in independent game development. The "core portals" such as Steam and XBLA are still experimenting, and smaller distribution avenues are opening up as well (see Kongregate and Newgrounds).

In 2006, indie games were lumped with serious games and casual games, because they all had one thing in common: they were less expensive to make than AAA games. But the changes in funding and distribution has split those markets from one another and helped define what indie games mean to the customer.

Gamers and customers now see indie games as the poetry, the short stories of the gaming world. They are different, they are thoughtful, and they make you appreciate nuance.

As 2D Boy's (World of Goo) Kyle Gabler said in his recent Global Game Jam keynote ,the best games made in game jams "introduce one new concept to gaming as fast and as clear as possible." This is largely true for all of indie games as well. The finalists in this year’s IGF competition also tend towards this concept.

Why is this important? Because in the past, indie games didn’t mean anything to customers. We, the developers, knew what it meant -- it was important to us because it meant that we were unfettered. But customers didn’t have expectations about what an indie game was.

Customers do have expectations now. Indie games are games that, by definition, don’t fit into any other box. They cost from $0 to $30. They are "cool" -- knowing about them is "cool."

Five years ago, the market looking for games that fit this description was very small. Today, it’s a viable market, and one that is likely to be resistant to overly oppressive distribution portals.

The Future of Indie Games

It is always true that every business-related article in any publication is wrong. It is the visionaries that find and exploit exceptions to the rules.

Take Grubby Games, for example -- they still manage to exploit the casual gaming market with My Tribe, while developing the ultra-indie, ultry-nerdy, web-based community game, Incredibots.

Indie games will change. But indie has finally emerged from its adolescence and found its own identity, unique from casual games. Indie games have come of age.

[Andy Schatz created the critically acclaimed indie titles Venture Arctic and Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa and is currently working on the next title in the ecosystem-sim series, Venture Dinosauria. You may also recognize him from the 2007 and 2008 IGF awards, which he hosted. Andy writes for his business and indie game devblog at www.pocketwatchgames.com/blog.]

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

[Have been enjoying my Gamasutra colleague Chris Remo's Idle Thumbs leisure-time podcast of late, and especially the game-related songs he's been doing for it, so I thought it might be nice to showcase a couple of the highlights here. And here's a brand-new, fresh one.]

For the latest installment highlighting songs from the Idle Thumbs podcast, we're looking at the song 'A Letter To Edge', from Idle Thumbs 19: "Citizen Killzone". As Mr. Remo is away covering DICE in beautiful Las Vegas, I thought I'd explain briefly what you need to know:

- The UK's Edge magazine re-published (via Edge Online) a review of Guerrilla's Killzone 2 for PlayStation 3 in which they assigned it a score of 7 out of 10.

- Over at PSXExtreme.com (bear with me, here!), one Ben Dutka published an editorial called 'Edge Killzone 2 Review: A Disservice To Game Consumers'.

- Among the gems within the PSXExtreme critique, which refuses to link to the Edge review: "[The score] is assigning a numerical value to a game that basically says, "it's good, but there are better titles out there for your money." This...is...a...lie. That's right, a lie."

- Oh, and also: "We're not saying everyone is going to enjoy KZ2, but this review is akin to saying something similar about "The Godfather II" or "Citizen Kane."

As a result, Chris composed a charming ditty on this very subject. The song and podcast can both be downloaded directly from the official site. The lyrics (and download link) are as follows:

A Letter To Edge (MP3)

"Look, we're not saying that we're right
We're just saying that you're wrong
With your quote-unquote review of Killzone 2
Edge, you're desperate for attention
Yet barely worth a mention
Except to take contention with your desperate grab for hits

You gave Killzone 2 a seven
I wanted an eleven on our site
Our scale doesn't go that high but I had to try

And who are you to say Killzone 2 is a good game?
Because it's not
It's a perfect video game
Yes, it's a perfect video game
Oh, it's perfect

You can't give Citizen Kane a seven
Everybody knows, just ask Roger Ebert
He would tell you that's a disgrace
Citizen Kane gets two thumbs up
and therefore so does Killzone 2
The SDF [Sony Defense Force] said so

I would give it three thumbs up
But I don't have three thumbs
So you can lend me one
And together, three thumbs up for Killzone 2!
Me and you, giving Killzone 2 its due

And that leaves one Idle Thumb
Who thought this game was a little bit dumb."

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

[We're talking to this year's Independent Games Festival finalists, and this time Eric Caoili interviews Amanita Design's Jakub Dvorský about Machinarium -- a gorgeous full-scale adventure title populated with rusty, hand-drawn robots -- nominated for the Visual Art Award.]

Based in the Czech Republic, Amanita Design has made a name for itself producing visually unique point-and-click 2D adventure titles, crafting several commissioned games for the BBC, Nike, and symphonic group the Polyphonic Spree.

The studio is best known for its Samorost games, a series of Flash-based releases in which players control a gnome on his quests to save his home planet and recover his kidnapped dog, exploring and interacting with a collection of surreal backdrops to advance the plot. Samorost 2 was a finalist in two categories for the 2007 IGF competition, and took home the "Best Web Browser Game" award.

Machinarium, Amanita's latest title, is once again a point-and-click title featuring detailed, decayed scenes, but it's also the developer's first full-length project. The game will release later this year for PC, with other platforms under consideration.

Featuring hand-drawn graphics, Machinarium follows a little robot who's been left to rust in a scrap yard, as he tries to save his robot-girl friend and stop a bomb attack from the "Black Cap Brotherhood."

We spoke with Amanita's founder and designer Jakub Dvorský about Machinarium, nominated for the Visual Art award at this year's Independent Games Festival (part of Think Services, as is this website):

What kind of background do you have making games?

Jakub Dvorský: I grew up on early 8-bit computer games; I owned an Atari 800XE, and later I had my first PC 386. Of course, I loved to play all their great games. Later on in grammar school, I started doing my own games with some schoolmates, and we enjoyed it a lot.

My first game, Asmodeus, was published 12 years ago. Later, I studied at the Academy of Art in Prague at the Studio of Animated Film (my diploma work was Samorost 1).

What sort of development tools have you been using for Machinarium?

JD: Our tools are pencils and paper, digital camera, tablets, PCs, Photoshop, Flash, Rebol, sound recorder and some musical instruments.

How long has your team been working on Machinarium?

JD: Two years already. It should be finished and released this fall.

What advantages or attraction do you see with the point-and-click genre over others that have kept you producing these adventure titles?

JD: The narrative part -- the story, puzzles, characters and the whole micro-world itself -- are the most important things in adventure games. I prefer these things over game mechanics and tactics, which are the main elements of first-person shooters or real-time strategy games.

It's also possible to create a standalone adventure/puzzle game independently in a small team like ours, which is probably absolutely impossible for a first-person shooter.

Did you notice any differences in your development process, working on a full-length adventure title versus the shorter experiences you've usually released?

JD: We put together a bigger team, and the communication between us is now a very important part of the work. Therefore, it's more complicated, but we also have more fun and the results are better. Also, we need more patience as the development process is really long and it's always difficult to stay concentrated on one project for such a long time.

What lessons did you take from your previous games that you were able to apply with Machinarium?

JD: Firstly, we gathered important general experiences from creating games and working in a team. However ,smaller projects like Samorost 1, can almost be made without a proper scenario, which is necessary for a bigger full-length game. Secondly I learned a little about how to create game puzzles, which I hope will be much better in Machinarium than in our previous games.

What can users expect to see in Machinarium that they didn't see in your previous games, or perhaps in any other titles in the genre?

JD: Compared to our older games, Machinarium will be bigger and more detailed. [It will have] a stronger story line, more logical puzzles, an inventory, and a couple of other new features, like mini-games and animated communication between characters. The main character, a little robot, will be able to walk freely around the locations and be telescopic.

Compared to other titles in the genre, I think we try to put a bigger emphasis on details and things which aren't in the main focus -- subtle animation jokes, music composed carefully for each location, and every building, character, or item in the game having its own history and meaning. We also try to think a little differently when designing the puzzles.

Was there any specific art or media that you looked to for inspiration or guidance for Machinarium's visual feel?

JD: We were influenced by a lot of science fiction books and films -- Stanislav Lem, Douglas Adams, Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Stanley Kubrick, Karel Zeman -- and also by older adventure games like Grim Fandango, Myst, Gobliins, Discworld, Neverhood, and Monkey Island. Besides that, a lot of our inspiration comes from old rusty machines, abandoned factories, and industrial buildings.

Machinarium's protagonist -- a little robot left behind in a scrap yard -- will naturally draw comparisons to Pixar's recent film Wall-E. What did you think of the movie? And did seeing Wall-E affect the development or direction of Machinarium at all?

JD: I saw Wall-E when we had the whole concept, main character, and also many backgrounds and animations already finished, so it didn't affect us at all. However ,I must admit there are many similarities -- the post-apocalyptic world, the main protagonist being a rusty robot, almost no dialogue, etc.

Still, the poetics and the conception of our game is very different. I enjoyed that film; the animation part is especially awesome.

The characters in your games speak very little, if at all, and hardly converse with each other. Why do you feel this is important in your games?

JD: It's for a couple of reasons -- listening to endless conversations is boring, I'm a bad writer, and it's easier to localize the game when there are no words in any existing language. However, this time the main character sometimes communicates by comic bubbles with simple, funny animations instead of written text or speaking.

Can you describe the process with which you usually create the puzzles and scenes in your adventure games?

JD: First, we create a lot of small assorted ideas -- puzzles, characters, environments, situations or pieces of a story. Then we usually make a very rough drawing of some location and think about what should happen there and take some older ideas to use it here.

When the location with all of the puzzles is designed, we paint the background and characters, and then it's all animated and programmed.

What animation technique did your team use for Machinarium, and why you decided to use it?

JD: We use cut-out animation, which is a simple classical animation technique where you paint all parts of a character's body separately, cut it out with scissors, and the animate it frame-by-frame under the camera.

It's similar to puppet animation, only it's 2D. Of course, we are doing all the graphic parts and animations in the computer, so we don't use scissors and a camera, but most of the animations are done essentially similarly -- frame-by-frame and very carefully.

Were there any elements that you experimented with but decided didn't work with your vision for Machinarium?

JD: Yes, we wanted the main character to be more convertible into different shapes with different functions, but it was technically very difficult and it also didn't fit into the story, so we abandoned that idea.

However, I still think it could work nicely in a game like this, so maybe we'll try to implement that feature in some future game.

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

JD: I've seen independent game development growing and blooming recently, and I'm very glad about that. There are a lot of really great new ideas, and big developers are obviously inspired by that.

I really enjoyed Knytt Stories, World of Goo, and most recently Dyson, an addictive RTS. I'm looking forward to Fez, Blueberry Garden, Feist, and Night Game.

Is there anything unique that you feel that Amanita, as an independent studio operating in the Czech Republic, has in its that isn't present in most other developers in other countries?

JD: The Czech Republic has strong tradition of animated film -- Jiri Trnka, Jan Svankmajer, Bretislav Pojar, Jiri Barta -- so I hope that we are its followers.

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.]

A few more of the trusty RSS-extracted GameSetLinks here, and we're starting out with Spitfire on what you should be looking for in game education, before moving on to Gaynor's GDC guide and some House Of The Underdogs mourning.

Also in this set of links - designing around existing IP for games, and how we can calculate scale and therefore return for lots of tiny indie titles for things like newsgames, based on Global Game Jam numbers.

Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo:

Game-Ism: 'Education: Getting Your Money’s Worth'
Excellent and practical advice about game schools.

Fullbright: GDC Guide 09
2K's Gaynor does an excellent job of tracking down some of the very best GDC lectures this year.

Flash Of Steel: 'RIP HotU'
House Of The Underdogs was not the way to preserve games, but it had a lot of important metadata. Luckily much of the metadata is available via Wayback Machine, though.

Elder Game: MMO game development » Designing For An IP
Some interesting, perhaps controversial thoughts here: 'A movie might take a tiny IP based on a book and literally reinvent it for a completely new audience. A video game cannot do that. Video games must take an already-mainstream IP and play off of it to make something that appeals to existing fans of the IP.'

Games and Men: Video game innovation and storytelling incompatible?
Yep, yet another article discussing You Have To Burn The Rope's IGF nomination. We'll be announcing a slight naming (and judging) redefinition for that particular category going forward, btw, so at least people know what they are expecting when they see nominees there.

Practical Matters in Breaking Newsgames - News Games: Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project
'What the [Global Game Jam] demonstrates is not the fact that it is easy to produce a good game in two days with a few people. Rather, it demonstrates that a such an thing can be successful when operating at scale.'

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

[Continuing a series of GameSetWatch interviews from Jeriaska on video game audio, a chat with Tenchu series composer Noriyuki Asakura examines the music behind the notable stealth-based ninja game series.]

The restrained intensity of Noriyuki Asakura's soundtrack to the 1998 Playstation title Tenchu: Stealth Assassins was one design feature that helped to underscore the memorably strategic gameplay. While infiltrating the castles of rival feudal lords by ducking through their shadows, protagonists Rikimaru and Ayame were accompanied by songs that maintained the steady rhythms and artful purpose of a trained assassin.

Developer Acquire's production of Tenchu 4 for the Nintendo Wii and Sony PSP intends a return to the stealth gameplay conventions of the original. In the West, the influence of the first game is mirrored by the title Tenchu: Shadow Assassins.

Asakura, head of the sound studio Mega-Alpha and composer of Tenchu 1 through 3, also makes a return, this time introducing a broader palette of international musical conceits to Tenchu's world of ancient espionage. The latest installment in the series continues to apply progressive rock concepts in broadening the bounds of traditional Asian music.

Taking place in a meeting with the composer during the production of Tenchu 4 Original Soundtrack, an album published by Aniplex Records in Japan, this interview centers on the intersection of audio techniques found in the original Stealth Assassins along with the recently localized Shadow Assassins.

The discussion offers various insights into how the composer sought to differentiate the game's audio from mainstream renderings of traditional Japanese music, in favor of a fusion of Asian musical influences, so that game players could savor an otherworldy soundscape more reflective of the historical setting's distance from everyday reality.

Interview conducted by Jeriaska with translation by Ryojiro Sato. This article is available in Japanese on Game Design Current, in Russian at Game-OST, and in French on Squaremusic.

Composer Noriyuki Asakura

GameSetWatch: Asakura-san, thank you for joining us for this discussion of your music for the Tenchu series of games. In English-language regions, players have commented on how the use of instruments on the original title matched the pace of the game and helped provide the stealth combat with an immersive quality. How did you go about finding a balance between traditional instruments and modern musical styles that would complement the gameplay?

Noriyuki Asakura: I was interested in taking a different approach from what you find in most narratives set in a historical Japanese era. Often an ambient soundtrack styled after imperial court music is used. Because that is frequently the norm, I looked instead to establish a novel vision of Asian music. Instead of limiting myself to Japanese traditions, I opened up the score to Chinese and Thai influences. Beyond that, I incorporated West Asian musical styles, such as the Arabic scale practiced in Turkey. The goal was to fuse these various elements with Western rock and fusion in a way that would defy anyone's expectations. Just like you had progressive rock music in the '70s, I was exploring the idea of progressive Asian music.

GSW: How did you first become involved in the making of Tenchu for the original Playstation console?

Asakura: I had been introduced to Masami Yamamoto (producer at Sony Computer Entertainment), who had been searching for a composer for the project. I was given an impression of the storyline and based on that I delivered a sample from a previous project that I felt might be appropriate. Clearly it resonated with him because he asked to include that very track.

The song had been written for another project, so I was required to speak with the copyright holders, but eventually this track became an important part of Tenchu. This is the theme that plays during the game's opening. For the remainder of the soundtrack I was asked to continue along those lines. Looking back, it was serendipitous that this music arrived in the hands of Tenchu's producer at the right time.

Tenchu Original Soundtrack translated track list

GSW: What previous experiences would you say prepared you for scoring the soundtrack to the game?

Asakura: As far as videogame music is concerned, I was involved in the making of Crime Crackers, a game that was released close to the hardware launch of the Playstation. Sony was going strong, they told me they wanted a cinema-quality music score, and that money was no object.

The quality of a music project cannot help but be influenced by the budget. In this case we had access to the equipment needed for various audio experiments. The end result was as polished as one could have hoped for. For someone who prefers working with actual acoustic instruments, as I do, it was a blessing.

At that point I had yet to recognize the full appeal of the Asian musical aesthetic. When I did come to grasp it, the newfound appreciation was perfectly timed. I had just started composing for Tenchu and the anime Ruroni Kenshin.

GSW: What language do the vocals heard in the intro to the original Tenchu belong to?

Asakura: That's Hausa, a language from West Africa. I was interested in conveying images like "a sense of isolation within the vastness of the surrounding earth" and "being alone at prayer on the dry desert sand." My plan was to use English lyrics, but it felt like the wrong choice for conveying this image. The next step was try it with Japanese, but the language was too close to everyday conversation. I made a variety of attempts at lyrics that suited the original concept, and Hausa was the best match.

GSW: It sounds like you must do a lot of traveling.

Asakura: To get ideas and acquire musical instincts, yes. I've gone to Turkey and Malaysia for this purpose. To generate the energy required of working in the entertainment industry, I visit New York and LA. It's all about a sense of balance. But when I travel, it tends to be by myself.

GSW: The character of Rikimaru is a prominent example of ninjas in videogames. How has the history of the character affected your approach to writing music for the Tenchu series?

Asakura: He's a powerful representation of masculinity, I'd say. There is a scene in Tenchu 3 where he is surrounded by armed assailants and the odds against him are overwhelming. I named the introductory theme of the game "Fate ~SADAME~" as an indication that the character's destiny is to persist, no matter how many enemies face him. That's my image of the character.

GSW: The performers of the song are people you have worked with since?

Asakura: We have a unit called add'ua composed of a guitarist, bassist, vocalist and myself. The vocalist, as you may know already, is Yui Murase.

GSW: Tenchu's gameplay style is often referred to as stealth action. How have you gone about providing a mix of action and suspense in the music to suit this genre?

Asakura: This subject actually relates to the idea of progressive rock as well. Prog rock musicians in the '70s found a way to introduce significant variation to the atmosphere of a given piece by changing keys frequently. To apply this approach to music with an Asian background it seemed to me would organically expand the horizons of those conventions. Sudden dramatic changes in the intensity of the score are situated so as to make listeners more aware of these shifts. However, the most important part of implementing this concept of progressive Asian music was to make it sound natural.

GSW: Tenchu 4 is anticipated as a return to the spirit of the original game. Was the goal to revisit concepts from the Playstation title while also exploring new territory?

Asakura: This was in fact the request I received from the director: to make something entirely original while retaining the image of the original Tenchu. It made me think... That sounds like a contradiction in terms! (laughs) The way I interpreted this challenge was to include new instruments, try and see if drums could be used to different effects, and include a touch of classical. Just how to continue the tradition of Tenchu within an all new context was an enigmatic assignment.

GSW: Were you involved in the making of the Aniplex soundtrack album?

Asakura: Of course. I oversaw the process in its entirety.

Tenchu 4 Original Soundtrack translated track list

GSW: What instruments were recorded for the live tracks?

Asakura: On this score, violins have a strong presence due to the participation of Gen Ittetsu Strings. A frequent collaborator on Tenchu, Kiyotsugu Amano also offers his familiar guitar accompaniment. New to this project is the use of live shinobue [a high pitched Japanese flute] and shamisen. While previously I have sampled sounds for these instruments, I sought out musicians for original recordings for Tenchu 4.

GSW: Can you tell us about some of the other performers that have participated in the recording sessions?

Asakura: Hyakutaka Fukuhara plays the shinobue, while the shamisen is performed by a third-generation shamisen master, Yutaka Oyama. The drummer is a friend of mine, and we performed in a band together back in the day, so he picks up on my ideas quickly. It concerns me that among young composers today, very few have experience playing in a band, as this can be an invaluable experience for a musician. It teaches you to communicate as a musician and work as part of a team. Practicing a given song together with a group, you will learn more about it than by working on it by yourself. Creating only according to one's own personal tastes, a musician finds few opportunities to grow.

GSW: What will be added to the soundtrack for the upcoming PSP port of Tenchu 4?

Asakura: Fundamentally the score is the same for the Wii and PSP versions, but two new tracks have been added to the portable game. There are additional classical elements, something of a departure from the norm. It is a continuation of the Asian musical theme, but with hints of classical music blended in. The audio recordings that took place earlier today included drums and percussion instruments. That is to give the audio more of the feel of a film score.

GSW: Overall, what were you most interested in emphasizing in the process of writing the score to Tenchu 4?

Asakura: Love. The theme is love. It might sound misleading but throughout the series a prevailing theme has been Rikimaru's love for others. As a composer, my job is to help make this love manifest, which is also an expression of care for the figure of Rikimaru. In that sense, the meaning is love.

[The original soundtrack for Tenchu 4 can be imported from Amazon.co.jp. Images courtesy of Ubisoft. Photo by Jeriaska.]

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

[Every week, we sum up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by guest editors Danny Cowan and Mathew Kumar.]

This week's notable items in the iPhone gaming space, as covered by FingerGaming, include an upcoming port for Toki Tori, the free release of Magnetic Joe, and reviews for Jetset and WordJong.

Here are the top stories:

- Review: Jetset: A Game For Airports
"Jetset can roughly be described as a time management game — though it's not exactly similar to titles like Diner Dash, the game essentially relies on the player being able to remove the correct prohibited items from passengers' luggage and move them along (without removing acceptable items) before the queue gets too large and the game ends."

- Free Full Version of Magnetic Joe Debuts in App Store
"Most Wanted is using the free version of Magnetic Joe to promote the upcoming App Store release of its sequels, along with ports for the Nintendo DS and WiiWare. Magnetic Joe features 40 levels in all, and has the polish and fullness of a paid App Store title."

- Puzzle Quest Update Brings Lite Version, Free Second Chapter
"Following up on last month's update that fixed a number of issues and bugs, publisher TransGaming has submitted Puzzle Quest's second chapter to Apple for App Store review. Better still, this update will be available as a free download for those who purchased the first chapter."

- Toki Tori Bound for iPhone and iPod Touch
"Dutch developer Two Tribes announced yesterday that its Game Boy Color and WiiWare puzzler Toki Tori will soon make its way to the iPhone and iPod Touch. An App Store release is scheduled for the first quarter of 2009."

- Review: WordJong
"It's rare, then, that a word game features a concept so novel that it stands out among its App Store competition. WordJong features both a unique gameplay mechanic and near-limitless replayability, making it one of the best puzzlers I've played on the iPod Touch so far."

- Bush Shoe-Throwing Title Denied App Store Release
"It's interesting to note Apple's interpretation of the TOS' original (and somewhat vague) wording, which makes no mention of parody content relating to public figures. MyShoe's developer is upset by the rejection, claiming that the issue is one of freedom of speech."

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

[As decided by developer nominations and my lovable wrangling of his peers within the Choice Awards Advisory Committee, Hideo Kojima is being honored for his 20+ years of Metal Gear at GDC next month, hurrah. Here's the full press release.]

The 2009 Game Developers Choice Awards, the highest honors in game development acknowledging excellence in game creation, will honor Hideo Kojima with a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s ceremony taking place at the Game Developers Conference next month.

Kojima is Corporate Officer, Executive Producer and Director of Kojima Productions and creator of the seminal Metal Gear series, and the Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes the career and achievements of developers who have made an indelible impact on the craft of game development.

Renowned as one of the world’s most influential contemporary game developers, Hideo Kojima first decided to get involved in the game development business while studying economics.

Driven by the hardware limitations of the MSX personal computer, he pursued a fresh approach to the action game genre – and thus the stealth genre was born with 1987's Metal Gear for Konami.

After creating the cult Snatcher and Policenauts franchises, the global breakthrough for Kojima’s career took place in 1998 when Konami's Metal Gear Solid was released on Sony’s PlayStation platform.

This seminal title has been followed by a host of important sequels and franchise additions, including the critically acclaimed Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and 2008's multi-million selling Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots.

Kojima also produced the well-received mech action Zone of the Enders series, and also created Boktai: The Sun in your Hand, a Game Boy Advance game which contained a photometric sunlight sensor in the cartridge that charged a vampire’s solar weapon, another example of the designer's signature disruption of traditional gaming mechanics.

“For years, Hideo Kojima’s contributions to game development have broken new ground and inspired the community to think about creating games in never-before-imagined ways,” said Meggan Scavio, event director of the Game Developers Conference.

“From giving birth to the stealth action game genre to showing game makers how to interact with their players by breaking the ‘fourth wall,’ Kojima’s achievements make him an obvious choice for an award that in previous years has gone to luminaries including Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Richard Garriott, Eugene Jarvis, Mark Cerny, Gunpei Yokoi, Yuji Naka and Will Wright.”

Presented by GDC and Webby-award winning Gamasutra.com, the awards ceremony is held in conjunction with the Independent Games Festival and will be hosted on March 25, in the Esplanade Room in the South Hall of San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

The editors of Gamasutra.com, who are in charge of award management, worked in association with the Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which includes notables such as Doug Lombardi (Valve), John Vechey (PopCap), Ben Cousins (EA DICE), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), and Clint Hocking (Ubisoft), to pick the Special Award winners following audience nominations.

Hideo Kojima will also be making his Game Developers Conference speaking debut at GDC09 when he gives the keynote lecture, “Solid Game Design: Making the ‘Impossible’ Possible,” the morning after the Choice Awards Ceremony, on Thursday, March 26, 2009 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PST in the Esplanade Room of the Moscone Center’s South Hall.

For further information about the Game Developers Choice Awards, please visit the official Choice Awards website. For further information about GDC and to register for attendance, please visit the official GDC website.

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

[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.]

Whoa, fresh new week, new GameSetLinks appear to also be here - headed by the 'games in journalism' blog - which is Knight Foundation-supported, btw, a great example of philanthropy taking games seriously - discussing Dead Rising and news reporting, thought-provokingly.

Also in here - what Usenet thought about SNES, why everyone in the game biz itself is still missing the point on Wii, Project Horseshoe reports, and plenty more besides.

Wheeze wheeze wheeze:

Dead Rising and Interventionist Media Ethics - News Games: Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project
'Does the exclusion of the photography mechanic in the Wii version of Dead Rising change anything about what the game says about photojournalism as a practice?'

Project Horseshoe, 2008 reports
The craziest, most oldskool, borderline theory-tastic whiny, but still fascinating discussions on gaming surface, after last year's instalment of the invite-only micro-conf.

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : Heart on Fire: Deleted Scenes - #04A
Looking at Usenet for classic gaming opinions of the time is a really nice idea - in this case, the SNES launch.

Video Games Business & Marketing: Video Games needs a Copernicus
You know, I've really liked and respected Russell's posts on this subject to date, but this one goes too far for me. There are some Wii and DS titles nominated for many of the major awards shows (including Choice), and I don't really see, despite being accessible, what 'best of the year' categories that games like Wii Play, Wii Fit, or Mario Kart Wii would fit into. Anyone?

Missed news: Cecropia shuts its doors « Arcade Heroes
I also completely missed the shutdown news late in 2008 - they were the folks behind knob-based arcade storytelling title 'The Act'.

MMOG Nation » The developer of D&D’s online tools needs to go back to school
Usability is just incredibly important - some excellent comments by Michael (who is off to work on DC Universe Online, congrats!) here.

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

[We're continuing a series of quirky Todd Ciolek-conducted interviews for GameSetWatch, and here's a really odd one - with the folks at O'Shea, Limited, who have stashed 3 million sealed Atari cartridges in a cave back in 1990, and have been selling them ever since.]

A Missouri limestone cave is hardly the place you’d expect to find a towering tribute to the excesses of the Atari era, but that’s exactly what a liquidation company created there years ago.

When Atari ditched its stockpiles of unsold games in the early 1990s, O’Shea Ltd. was there to buy up some three million brand-new copies of Joust, Galaga, Tower Toppler, Pole Position, Ms. Pac-Man, and other common titles for the Atari 2600 and 7800.

O’Shea chose an uncommon place to store them: 150 feet underground, in a warehouse built from the unused space of a limestone mine. In the 20,000 square of storage space leased by O’Shea, stacks of sealed Atari games stand in testament to Atari’s past dominance of the video game market, and every title there is available for sale to the public (along with a few Jaguar games) through O’Shea’s website.

In an interview, O’Shea president Bill Houlehan (right) revealed just how the market for mint Atari games is doing today:

How did you come to buy these games in the first place? How did you find out that Atari was liquidating them?

We've been in the closeout business for many years and we were notified by Atari that they were selling everything off.

What really inspired you to grab all of the games? Was there heavy bidding for the unsold games?

In our business it is important that if you have an opportunity to purchase an entire inventory instead of just part of it, you purchase all of it. Otherwise you run the risk of having another company purchase the remaining inventory. Yes, there was heavy bidding for the games.

What year did you buy all of these games? What was the market for Atari games like in the early 1990s? Had Atari 2600 collecting really taken off at that point?

We bought the inventory in 1990 and we had a great deal of business from overseas. We were selling container loads of games to a company called Intertoys based out of Holland. At the time we purchased the inventory, Atari collecting had not taken off. That really happened in the last few years.

What games are the best sellers? Why do you think they're popular?

Pole Position, Ms. Pac Man, and Dig Dug are our three best sellers, followed by Battlezone, Galaxian, and Hat Trick. I think these are the most popular because they are the videogame classics.

So many of our customers say how they feel like a kid again when they get these games. Atari started the videogame industry and they built themselves on games like Pole Position and Ms. Pac Man.

Do you find that most of the people who buy your games are simply going to open them and play them, or do you get a lot of business from collectors who want their sealed copies to stay that way?

We have numerous buyers who buy two of each game so that they could play one set of the games and then they can put the other set of games aside as a collectable set.

Do you see the demand for Atari 2600 games increasing in the years to come, or do you think that nostalgia-driven collecting has already peaked in the generation that grew up with the system?

The generation that grew up with these games have children now and with the new movie Atari coming out with Leonardo DiCaprio, it is bringing back childhood memories around the Atari console. Their kids have the Wii, but they were the generation of the original videogamers and many customers want to bring back a piece of their childhood with these games and also show their children what they grew up on.

You've been selling these games for some time now. You started with three million, correct? How many games are left? How many do you sell a year?

Yes, we purchased Atari's entire inventory of just over three million games and we have about one million left. There is usually a very steady flow of purchases for the games, but since the announcement about the movie Atari, we have noticed a drastic spike in sales over the past few months.

How do you decide to raise the price on these games? I see that you've gone from $2 to $5 per game in the past few years.

The cost to store and maintain the games has considerably increased since we first purchased the inventory in the early 90's, and it got to a point where we had to increase the price a few years ago to maintain a reasonable profit.

Posted by Todd Ciolek at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Promised my colleagues at Game Developer magazine that I'd crosspost this here. Developers who read GSW and would like to contribute to our salary survey, maybe you can help us out? Appreciated.]

The editors of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra are reminding readers of the annual Game Developer Salary Survey, the only statistical study of game industry salaries and benefits across the years. The information provided will help inform the entire game development community.

The survey takes approximately 5-7 minutes to complete, and will run until Monday, February 16th. The results will be published in the April 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine, and further expanded in a forthcoming Game Developer Research report.

In appreciation for their time and effort, participants' names will be entered into a drawing to win a Main Conference Pass for their choice of the lineup of Game Developers Conference (GDC) events in 2009: GDC in San Francisco, GDC Canada, GDC Europe, GDC Austin, or GDC China. (Contest rules are available here.)

Interested developers can now fill out the survey and register for the GDC Main Conference Pass drawing. This survey is anonymous, and none of the information presented will be associated with any individuals.

Posted by Simon Carless 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.]

It was noted in the comments for last week's column that Play Magazine is, perhaps, a misunderstood title in the US marketplace.

I want to set the record straight on this one as soon as possible, especially because assuming Dave Halverson's little game mag makes it to May '09, it will have published more issues than the infamous Die Hard GameFan, the publication that made him gamer-famous.

There are many good things to say about Play -- mainly, its unique design and ability to take any kind of game asset and make it look pretty. There are a few bad things to say about it -- mainly, the fact that the staff seems to not believe in copy editing, perhaps for religious reasons.

But the greatest attraction that the mag has going for it is undoubtedly Halverson himself. If you think the publisher and former EIC of Play has changed his writing style any from the age when he wrote things like "Atari is back, come pet the cat......", you are blissfully incorrect. His penchant for snappy, occasionally nonsensical closing lines has aged like fine wine over these past 15 years, and in recent times, it's only been improved by his new-found undying love for games starring either furry animals or girls with big breasts.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I subscribe to Play half because of its visual design, and half because of Dave's whimsical writing. The man is such a stud that he wrote a report for Play's E3 coverage in the September issue without actually attending the event, something he freely admits in the text. Does your favorite game media outlet have anyone ballsy enough to do that? Of course not. That is because they are not hardcore.

Don't believe me? Just take a look at these actual excerts from Dave's 2008 work:

"You want 'casual' gaming? And you bought a Wii? Ah-hahaha. Take it back and do yourself a favor. Meet Eye of Judgment; shelf life...forever! I need more cards STAT by the way Wizards of the Coast." -- Dave discussing his favorite PS3 online game in February. Does he still play it?

"I get a few (like 2-5 a month) hate letters of my own griping about how we score games too high. They obviously don't read Play as I've explained our philosophy over and over, but I'm pretty sure that none of them really play games. Seems like they pretty much surf the web and then grab a torch." -- Dave hatin' on the haters in March. Play dropped scores entirely a few months later.

"If this one doesn't launch a major franchise, then there's absolutely positively no justice in the world for Valhalla." -- Dave giving a 9.5 score to Viking: Battle for Asgard in April, approximately 30 points above the Metacritic average.

"If this doesn't float your boat, then you live in a dingy [sic]. See that 80ft. motor yacht about to run you down; that's me." -- Dave goes nautical without warning while previewing The World Ends With You in April.

"The genius behind [Hellboy:] Science of Evil started in the board room, which is never the case, when someone said 'rather than constrain ourselves to the rigors of creating a game based on the movie, let's make a game that further solidifies Hellboy as a top quality brand. The last time that happened we got Diesel-powered perfection. I rest my case." -- A bit from Dave's May preview of the latest Hellboy, a game that got average reviews from nearly every other outlet.

"[X-Blades] certainly has all the requisite ingredients [...] There's the parallax mapping, high dynamic range lighting and rendering, radiosity lighting, radiance transfer/indirect lighting, rim lightning, subsurface scattering effects, shadow depth mapping, ambient shadows, volumetric lighting, motion blur, dynamic color correction, advanced image post-processing, animation blending, particle effects, trail effects, and one of the most epic asses ever." -- Dave wrapping up a May preview in only the way that he can.

"I don't see a 360/PS3 version of Tak or Spongebob [sic], but I'm gonna let that slide." -- Dave kicking off a collection of THQ game previews in June.

"Portal is neat I guess, if you're bored, but short." -- Dave berates midgets (or is simply wording his sentences awkwardly) in July.

"Here's a game that's gorgeous on Wii and 360, endlessly creative and 100% FUN." -- Dave talking about (pause for a moment here and try to take a guess..........) Crash of the Titans in July.

"The only problem: We may never see Faith's beautiful face as it's been depicted on many a magazine cover -- including our own -- and advertisement. We also don't see much of her body. Her point of view begins below her chest and so far there are no in-game cutscenes. Then again, the game is called Mirror's Edge; it can't be long until she's standing in front of one." -- Oh, if only Mirror's Edge came through for Dave's wild fantasies!

"Prepare to fall in love with Sonic all over again, unless you're a hater, in which case do us all a favor and play through Brothers in Arms again." -- Dave explaining exactly what anyone who didn't like Sonic Unleashed can do in November.

"Tyris is a beautiful heroine; so beautiful, in fact, that the absence of dynamic animation is all the more puzzling. Her distinctive walk and run, separate animations for every beast (and there really isn't anything more intoxicating than a beautiful half-naked woman riding bareback on a snarling beast) and superb battle movement make the flat stance on sloped surfaces and steps a real head-scratcher. Her boobs are motionless until you reach Fiends Path, too, after which they have subtle natural animation, but I'm guessing that's due to the detail on her various tops. Some flies, eh? Darn limited boob animation!" -- Dave doing what he does best, devoting boundless page space to nubile fantasy game heroines, during his Golden Axe: Beast Rider preview in November.

"Is it too much to ask to enjoy my critter-based epics and various action/adventures without having to be reminded that the average on Game Rankings doesn't echo my enthusiasm? I don't pretend to be the authority on Call of Duty now do I? I just want to enjoy as many Crash, Conker, Kameos, Brutal Legends and Darksiders as I can before the big cryo-sleep (or we colonize space, whichever comes first) and the more heroines and less token GI-Joe's the better." -- Dave admitting what we all knew in August.

[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 (3)

[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.]

Finishing up the weekend with some fine GameSetLinks, this set includes some notes on PSN's line-up for 2009 - apparently including slightly obscure but super-neat former IGF finalist Hammer Fall (pictured) -- as well as a couple of other fun GDC-related links.

Also hanging out in here - an epic iHobo thread starter on QTEs. Even I'm surprised about how QTEs have sneaked into games in recent years, after Shen Mue and friends, but in general, they work. Don't they? Do they? Questions!

Well well well:

GamerBytes - Comet Crash And Hammer Fall Announced For PSN
Notable cos Hammerfall was a slightly obscure but very neat Russian (Ukrainian?) IGF finalist last year, now coming to PS3 and PSN, yay.

Running the show at Game Developers Conference | Geek Gestalt - CNET News
Nice interview with my colleague Meggan, even had some stuff I didn't know about in it!

ihobo: For or Against QTEs
Some good devil's advocate work on the increasingly popular movie/game mechanic.

The Escapist : Can Art Be Games?
Good to see outlets talking about The Graveyard, art, games.

Indie game and artist all-stars collide at Giant Robot/Attract Mode's Game Over II - Offworld
Very neat, indie game notables and Giant Robot-related artists team up for special games, with an exhibition opening on the Friday of GDC.

An Adventure Tournament - Taking Inventory
A Compuserve tournament for the classic Adventure, 25+ years ago - online tournaments are old!

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

['The Game Anthropologist' is Michael Walbridge's regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column looking at gaming communities and subcultures. This week, he examines and appreciates the togetherness created by the online forums of a popular game-related webcomic.]

Forum moderators only have control over what can’t happen. It’s up to regular forum posters (and hosting needs) to mold the forums into what they are.

So when one thinks of Penny Arcade, it is defined as one of two things: the artistry and writing of Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins or the people who follow it. The Penny Arcade forums are property of Penny Arcade but only in the strictest technical sense of the word; it has become a beautiful monster, a living, breathing, curious creature that, while not necessarily obedient, is forever loyal.

The Penny Arcade forums are almost a decade old; originally managed Mike, Kara, and other close friends, the forums quickly grew into something to large for them to handle. Both the software and the people became issues that were too complicated, and moderators volunteered to take over (future moderators can no longer come from volunteers; they must be asked).

Over time, the various moderators and administrators have changed. Since 2003, Kevin Hamilton has been the admin that handles coding and programming, while Patrick Groome has been the admin that handles policy and posters for the last two years. I spoke to them about what makes Penny Arcade’s forums so unique.

I asked Kevin Hamilton and Patrick Groome about what makes the forums work so well and they are modest, giving a lot of credit to its members rather than to administration.

“As far as [moderating] tricks go, one of the things you eventually realize is that the administration is a small part of the forums, and what really keeps it running is the people,” Groome said. Hamilton agreed: “We have a role to play…but I think the fact that that is a manageable workload is down mostly to two thing: a low tolerance for stupid and a large population of great people.”

The credit is well-placed. When asked for examples of how the members act toward each other, Groome gave me plenty of examples. “We've had multiple relationships that started on the forums, and at least two marriages, one of which crossed continents. Every year at PAX a vast number of forumers room together, and there are constant meetups throughout the year."

"Robert [Khoo] also frequently makes meet up threads in SE when he's visiting a part of the country and takes a bunch of forumers out to dinner. Last year I came out to the states and stayed with forumers the whole time I was there, people I'd known for five years and never met in real life. The community is very close in real life, many forumers room with people they met at PA. When a member of the forums dies, everyone takes it very hard and there's normally some kind of tribute.”

I’ve experienced the politeness of a forumer myself. A message came to my inbox from someone who noticed I lived nearby. It said: “I'm from Ogden, just putting some feelers out to see who else from Utah is here. Are you headed to PAX this year?”

“I wish,” I replied back.

He had done a search on the Utah members. “What would you think of a small Utah PA forum gathering? Just brainstorming right now.” He later then said maybe we could grab coffee in Salt Lake sometime. He asked me for my gamertags and asked if I played pen and paper RPGs. I said I didn’t really but still liked it.

Soon after, he invited me to an 8-hour session with some people he had recently met. Here, a total stranger was willing to make friends with someone via a blind pm. I had to decline the session and never got to know him, but the opportunity was there. He was incredibly polite, and sounded and wrote like many of the forumers I see.

The forums, along with PAX and Child’s Play, have truly allowed Penny Arcade’s followers to bind up their identities in it. This makes Penny Arcade not just a product or content but a community, and a community that acts. On the Internet, this seems like a small deal compared to other websites, projects, or movements, but when you consider the context—a profitable web comic about video games that is frequently vulgar—it’s curious to see followers define themselves not just as a consumer of the comic but as having it be a significant part of their lives and identities.

The members are truly great, but policies do help. For starters, moderators strictly require that posters stay on-topic. The base of forumers stays large, though, because the range of permitted topics highly varies. A forum exists for aspiring artists and a forum exists for aspiring writers.

Another is a general advice thread that usually merits questions about sexuality, relationships, computers, or mental illness, but the topics range from “Here’s a picture of my foot. What’s wrong with it?” to “Should I move to Austin? What’s it like there?” The gaming forum is huge, but discussion of MMOs became so prevalent they were given their own forum, “Massively Multiplayer Online Extravaganza”.

There’s also Social Entropy, affectionately called SE++, which features much looser restrictions, much more insults, and dumbed-down threads about YouTube videos or crazy celebrity behavior (Debate and Discourse is the other broad forum, calling itself a “structured alternative” to SE++).

Kevin Hamilton approximates that 30-50% of forum posters cover varying forums but that the rest stay in the same one, giving each forum its own personality. The difference between the MMO and regular game forums and the pronouncedly different writing styles of the writers forum posters easily witness this.

Moderation is not heavy-handed, but enforcement still exists. Justice is swift and impersonal. One moderator wrote in the sparse jails and bannings thread, “Wiggin gets a couple of weeks off for continuing to ignore the New Comic Thread rules.”

The Penny Arcade forums aren’t perfect and free of conflict; Patrick Groome was able to name at least four forums being formed due to mini-Exoduses, one of which he claims left specifically because of his decisions. But he, along with other moderators and managers, remain optimistic. “It’s a mixed bag, but good mostly outweighs the bad. I don’t think you can pigeonhole the average gamer any more than you can the average film enthusiast or the average hockey fan.”

The main site and the forums are very different, but they have a simple creed to agree on. The Penny Arcade forums are a place for gamers to be themselves, a place where they aren’t “gamers” but normal people who happen to like games.

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (38)

Yikes, it's the end of the weekend already, so time to recap some of the week's top full-length features on Gamasutra - plus bonus features from our student site GameCareerGuide.

Some really good stuff in here this week - including a nice Chris Remo chat to The Creative Assembly folks, Paul Hyman on making money with Flash games, a controversial Brian Green piece on legitimacy for game developers (do we really need to ask?), Noah Falstein on Darwin and lessons for developers, and more.

Here are the top stories:

PC Heritage, Bright Future: The Creative Assembly Interview
"Sega-owned UK developer The Creative Assembly (Total War) has some unique views on the enduring nature of 'core' PC games, as the studio's Kieran Brigden explains to Gamasutra."

Sponsored Feature: Light It Up! Quake Wars Gets Ray Traced
"Ray tracing can offer amazing graphical renderings, but it is often seen as too computationally taxing for real-time use. In this sponsored article, part of the Intel Visual Computing microsite, David Pohl of Intel's ray tracing group discusses how his team brought their past successes with the technique to Splash Damage's multiplayer shooter Enemy Territory: Quake Wars."

Design Language: Design by Darwin
"Veteran game designer Noah Falstein (Sinistar, Koronis Rift) commemorates Charles Darwin's birthday with an insightful look at how Darwin's evolutionary ideas have influenced game design."

Emerging Issues in In-Game Advertising
"In-game ad deals can benefit both game developers and advertisers -- experienced game lawyers Boyd and Lalla discuss business and contextual considerations for in-game advertising."

Legitimacy For Game Developers
"How can video games and developers achieve cultural 'legitimacy', and what does that even mean? Veteran developer Green explores how it works in other disciplines, and ramifications for gaming."

Where's The Cash For Flash?
"Is there money to be made in Flash game development? It depends -- Gamasutra looks at the role that revenue streams and clever marketing play."

Bonus GameCareerGuide.com highlights: GameCareerGuide's Game Design Challenge Restaurant Game; Master's Thesis: Game Design and Architecture; Results from the Game Design Challenge: Suess It.

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

[In this pointed opinion piece, David Chang, Executive VP of Business Development and Marketing at online game publisher Gamescampus (Asda Story) discusses what he feels is the error of calling certain MMOs "free to play".]

I would like our industry and media to consider is changing how we refer to our game category. In my personal opinion, the term “free to play” rings hollow and in many cases is completely inaccurate. In calling our games “free to play” I think our industry generates a lot of unnecessary cynicism and calls our product quality into question.

Unless the game is completely monetized by advertising, then the publishers are relying on a certain percentage of people who play the game to find enough enjoyment out of the game to be willing to pay for enhanced features and items. I feel from reading the commentary out there that there is a significant portion of people that feel like the term free to play is a bait-and-switch.

First we should look at our business model as a service that needs to be completely in tune with how a new generation is learning to pay for things; that is, only those things that benefit them, while expecting many other services to be completely without charge. Although it is not a perfect comparison, I do believe there are similarities with Google. For example:

Google doesn’t charge most consumers anything for consuming their most popular service—search. Google search is certainly a very useful free service! However, Google relies on all of the free traffic and searches to power its money making services—paid search and other value added services.

This is perceived to be acceptable because these paid services finance the very useful search service and allows it to be offered for free. In fact, the free search service has been deemed to be so useful, people do not give a second thought to the fact that Google reads very sensitive information about you—what you search for, and what your emails contain (if you use Gmail).

In our game model, almost all content is completely without charge. In fact, we actually rely on most people not paying as the game communities would be really small without them! The truth is that we need the free community to be active, happy, and engaged with the games we publish, if they are not, then we would have very few people that opt to buy a game item.

In both situations, people receive a valuable service—free search or a free game experience, however, both services do need to make money eventually otherwise they would not be able to provide these great services for free. This is where I feel the “free to play” label does more harm than good. I can tell you honestly that my company exists to make a profit—and we do hope that the people that play our games buy in-game items eventually!

In terms of a solution, I propose calling our games “MTS Games” (Micro-Transaction Service) or even MTG (Micro-Transaction Games) if you prefer. I think this label, while a bit technical, gets rid of the “As seen on TV” quality stigma and cynicism that “free to play” engenders (it really can’t be free—can it?) Equally important is to define what an MTS game is (and what it is not). An MTS game would be a game that:

1. Requires no purchase to download and play the game
2. Does not have a level-cap or content-cap beyond which you need to pay
3. Is at least partially monetized by sales of in-game goods

By calling our games MTS games, I hope to separate our games from the cynicism associated with the “free to play” label. I think the definition above also addresses the bait-and-switch concerns as well as an MTS game as defined above would not require any purchases to play.

In my opinion, a lot of the dissatisfaction about micro-transactions stem from the fact that many publishers require one to purchase the game at retail (or download) and then charge them again to experience additional content. In my opinion, this strategy is actually the most consumer-antagonistic as they require an upfront fee and then charge people again when they want more content.

At least with an MTS game, people can play the game without any upfront costs, and if they don’t like the game, they can walk away without a single fee. Also, recall that for any MTS game to be successful, you need a vibrant community that is only taking advantage of the free services (ala Google). There is a symbiotic relationship between the free community and those who choose to enhance their experience by purchasing an in-game item (which in turns allows us to offer the service for free to many others).

Addressing another bait-and-switch concern is to have the entire game playable—no level-caps or content-caps for free players. In my opinion, games that employ the level or content-cap model are really just distributing trial-versions and end up upsetting players—especially if you are less than clear about what you are doing.

People end up investing time and emotionally connecting with a game only to find out that if they want to continue they need to pay an admission fee. It is counterproductive. Not only will you lose most players at the pay-gate, the community on the other side (the paying side) will also suffer because of the lack of community—who wants to pay a cover charge for a club if there isn’t a huge party going on inside!

The last part of what defines an MTS game is that it is at least partially monetized by the sale of in-game goods. I say partially because I do think that there is room here to supplement revenue through ads or perhaps sponsorships if they are appropriate and fit the game property.

While some cynics may sneer at the inclusion of advertising in a game, I think there is definitely room for it as there is in other areas of our lives (during our TV programs, ahead of movies we pay to see, On billboards along our freeways). If it ultimately benefits the game community and is done right it can be a positive thing for the game. Remember MTS games are all about gathering a critical mass of players and then figuring out how to provide a service to the whole community—paying and non-paying players alike.

Our whole business model has just begun to grow and flourish in North America. I have no doubt that the model offers players of a new generation what they expect out of their online gaming experience and will continue to grow. But I also feel strongly that now is the time, when our model is just building a name for itself in this industry and its perception is so important, that we should be looking at re-branding from free to play, to instead being known as micro-transaction service providers.

[David Chang is Executive VP of Business Development and Marketing at Gamescampus/OnNet; he previously served as Vice President of Business Development of PlaySpan, the publisher-sponsored in-game commerce network. This editorial originally ran on sister website WorldsInMotion.biz.]

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

In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Disney Interactive Studios, Capcom, Next Level Games, Budcat Creations, 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

Disney Interactive Studios/Junction Point Studios: Animator
"Founded by Warren Spector, Junction Point Studios (JPS) joined Disney Interactive Studios (DIS) in September of 2007 and is quickly growing. While DIS is part of the larger Walt Disney Company, we still have the autonomy of a smaller developer/publisher without many of the risks and restrictions associated with start-ups. We are currently looking for a Full Time Mid-Level and Jr Level Contract Animators. "

Budcat Creations: Game Programmer
"Budcat Creations was founded in September, 2000 with the goal of becoming a premier developer of entertainment software for the PC and console markets. From the company's studio in Iowa City, IA, a team of seasoned gaming professionals is hard at work making this dream a reality. Budcat Creations is looking for talented programmers to round out our team. You will work with other members of the technical staff to shape the architecture and direction of each title, and will be responsible for major sub-systems of our game engine and tool pipeline."

Capcom: Senior Product Marketing Manager
"This position will manage and lead the development, planning and execution of marketing and promotional product marketing campaigns. Will develop brand and product strategies, managed focused market research to analyze market demands and opportunities for assigned products. Oversee the integration of product marketing programs with activities of sales, PR, online and finance groups to maximize program effectiveness."

Next Level Games: Lead Technical Artist
"The Lead Technical Artist is a key player within our studio. Working with a group of leaders from all functional areas, you will be responsible for proactively identifying opportunities to solve problems before they arise, ensure that your team of artists executes game art efficiently and effectively, and put out the occasional fire. As a Lead, you will coach the art team and ensure the end product is technically sound, developing and teaching techniques to company artists. "

SeriousGamesSource - Serious Games

Medical Simulation Corporation: Software Engineer Graphics C++
"You will be part of the core development team developing our simulation training programs. We will utilize your graphics knowledge and experience to display complex medical devices, improve our xray and ultrasound visualization tools, simulate contrast injections and much more. We need you to be flexible and well-rounded because we have a lot to do!"

SmartyCard: Senior Software Engineer
"Based in San Mateo CA, SmartyCard is developing a breakthrough, first-of-kind web service for online learning focused on the K-12 market enabling direct-to-consumer supplemental learning for elementary and middle school students in the US and worldwide. SmartyCard seeks web engineers with high-volume web application development experience."

GamesOnDeck - Mobile Games

Namco Networks America Inc.: Mobile Game Designers
"The Mobile Game Designer is responsible for generating a detailed, comprehensive Game Design Documents, which are the roadmap for the entire development team. An important part of the role is then communicating that vision clearly and concisely to the rest of the team. A strong technical or art background is highly desired. Designers are a key member of the Production team and are expected to proactively create, manage and coordinate the implementation of game designs with a primary focus on product quality."

GolemLabs: iPhone/iPod Touch Programmer
"GolemLabs is a developer based in Sherbrooke (Quebec, Canada). It was founded in 2000 with the mission of designing original and intelligent games to satisfy a growing need of novelty and freshness to the video games industry. GolemLabs is looking for a Mac programmer to port of its games to the iPhone/iPod Touch. Experience in development within the iPhone/iPod Touch environment required."

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 Simon Carless 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 on Xbox Live Arcade we get NHL Arcade, which was also last week's PSN release. We also get Minesweeper Flags, a game the Xbox Live Team didn't even get round to officially announcing.

It's a big week for the PlayStation Network too -- Flower is coming out! Be checking your store this week for what the developers 'interestingly' call "a video game version of a poem".

And finally, this week's WiiWare release was Lit, a strange WayForward-developed puzzle game in which you must stay in the light in order to continue through every level. It's one of the best WiiWare titles in a while, apparently.

Lots of news this week, too -- Battlefield 1943, Cletus Clay, Worms HD PSN and more showing up throughout the week. I also highly suggest checking out the new YouTube XNA Community Games show XNA Roundup for your latest XNA game updates.

Specials

NY Comic-Con '09 Media Round-Up: Battlefield, Bit.Trip Beats And More
We bring together all the digital download news over the New York Comic Convention weekend.

Xbox Live Arcade

XBLA Store Update: NHL Arcade, Minesweeper Flags
Start checking your players AND your mines.

XNA Roundup: A New Show About The XNA Community Gamer
A YouTube show following XNA Community games has begun.

Gamasutra Postmortem: NinjaBee's A Kingdom For Keflings
NinjaBee discusses their latest avatar-enabled Xbox Live Arcade title.

Cletus Clay Rambles On While Beating On Extra Terrestrials
The first footage of this clay-based XBLA game has been released. Heckle aliens while kicking them in the face, just like old times.

PlayStation Network

Worms Coming To PSN
The German ratings board shows that the highly popular series is making its way to the PlayStation Network.

EU PSN Store Update: NHL Arcade, Battle Cars, Cuboid And Burnout DLC
Europe plays catch-up this week with Battle Cars and Cuboid, along with NHL Arcade.

NA PSN Store Update: NHL Arcade Now Available, Burnout and High Velocity Bowling DLC
NHL Arcade now available, as well as the first paid download DLC for Burnout Paradise.

Battlefield 1943: Pacific Revealed, First Footage
Battlefield makes it way to digital download for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. It's classic Battlefield with a few new twists.

WiiWare

NA WiiWare Update: WayForward's Lit
From the makers of Shantae and Contra 4 comes a game that tells you to stay in the light.

Samurai Toaster Shoots Stuff Till Its Dead
Jump around and shoot things in this new indie WiiWare title.

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

[How could a DS game based on a weird Japanese-only retro video game TV show work in the West? Xseed's Mike Engler talks with John Szczepaniak in a Gamasutra interview about bringing the unique Retro Game Challenge Stateside -- and why localizing the DS game was an "absolute nightmare" at times.]

When Game Center CX was released for the Nintendo DS in Japan towards the end of 2007, it caught the interest of Western retro fans.

Based on a Japanese television show about classic games, the DS title featured a childhood version of Shinya Arino, the show’s presenter, as he played and attempted to complete challenges on a variety of games along with a friend.

All of the games contained within were inspired by popular and easily recognized 8-bit titles (shooters, platformers, an RPG, and so on). Throughout the course of the main game, Arino would read fictional gaming magazines and chat with his friend about the things they were experiencing, such as being able to play an arcade shooter at home.

It seemed like the perfect nostalgia trip, rich in gaming history, culture, and esoteric in-jokes -- it also seemed like one of those titles which would never be brought to the West. It was presumably too much work to localize, compounded by there not being enough awareness of the source material (though the show did go on to receive limited cinema preview screenings in America, renamed Retro Game Master).

Well, sometimes the retro stars align and a quirky, niche title such as Game Center CX makes it over. Now renamed Retro Game Challenge, the game was released this week courtesy of Xseed Games.

Gamasutra caught up with the publisher's localization specialist Mike Engler to talk about the changes and evolutions needed to make its Western release possible:

Can you give a little background on the localization of RGC -- most people never dreamed it would be localized.

Mike Engler: The original idea for doing the game came from the head of the marketing commandos, Ken Berry. He saw the game and thought it’d be something fun to do and started doing what, at the time, seemed like an unwholesome amount of research for a game that we’d never have a chance at since it’s a Namco Bandai title.

Namco, as a rule, doesn’t license their titles to anyone, so the odds of it coming over here were really, really, really low as they had no intention of bringing it over themselves.

However, due to a freak hiccup in the space-time continuum and a series of randomly connected events that I can’t reveal on pain of death, it somehow dropped onto our laps.

The team for this project was but a mere 3.5 people; myself; Kenji Hosoi,the leader of the Localization Menagerie; and Doh Whang, translator and office conscience; and Kunio Sato, trusty intern and media room inmate.

The game was actually done over a fairly long period of time, as there was no pressure in terms of release date. The initial translations and re-writes were done over a couple of months and then put aside as we didn’t have character limits and other technical information needed to do the final revisions, which were a nightmare.

In terms of research, there wasn’t much that needed to be done. Everyone in the office is knowledgeable about gaming both past and present. I still have my old NES and occasionally fire it up when I start feeling nostalgic -- The Guardian Legend is one of the best games ever released, by the way.

There wasn’t all that much voice acting in the game, so redoing it wasn’t that much of a chore, about a half-day to get through all of the lines. The hardest part was deciding on the voice to replace the original Arino. There was a lot of discussion as to who to use and what direction to take, but in the end we’re confident that we made the right choice.

What were your goals when localizing RGC?

ME: The main goal was to somehow retain the humor and historical accuracy of the original game, which was a more difficult task than you might imagine.

For those not in the know, the game is based on a Japanese TV show called Game Center CX, in which the main character, Shinya Arino, has to play through a series of old-school games. In addition, he will sometimes interview people involved in whatever game he happens to be playing.

In the game, Arino is the main character as well, and a lot of the humor of the game was based on knowledge of the show as well as knowing a bit about Japanese 1980s gaming culture.

The challenge, of course, was to somehow keep the game interesting while at the same time trying to remove as many of the references to the show as possible.

Also, fandom in Japan was much more intense with developers, designers, and pro gamers treated like rock stars, something that didn’t happen in America until much later, so trying to convey how important these people were in terms of gaming culture took a little effort.

In addition, lining up the timeline of Japanese 1980s gaming to the American timeline was also an exercise in occasional frustration, as games weren’t always released within the same timeframe and gaming trends didn’t always correspond.

Can you give examples of cultural things which were particularly difficult to localize. Did you have to rewrite the in-game magazines from scratch?

ME: Oddly enough, cultural differences weren’t really a problem. Luckily, most of American gaming at the time was tied to Japanese gaming, albeit with a serious time lag.

As for the magazines, the hardest part was cutting down the content after we got the character limits while still having everything make sense. A lot of jokes and references got left on the cutting room floor. I also had to resist the urge to write eeverything in Engrish, although there are a few bits and pieces of incomprehensible gibberish hidden throughout the game.

The only cultural references to get the editorial axe were the horrible and untranslatable Japanese puns that infected parts of the dialogue, which I immediately replaced with even worse puns and painful 1980s references.

The contents of the magazines themselves really didn’t change too much. I mainly changed names more than anything, especially the game names used in the weekly sales chart included in the game. I also changed a few of the developer, publisher and game designer names, not so much to anglicize them, but more to include names that those in the know would recognize.

The vast majority of the Japanese text survived revision simply because everything in the game is very insular. Using the magazines as an example, since most of the text is directly related to the games within the game, there was no way and no need to do any major re-writing.

Was there a need to alter the game structurally, in terms of difficulty level or game challenges, or to make it more relevant to a US audience?

ME: The basic game remained unchanged, as adding any of the above would have required extensive reprogramming, and to be quite honest, just getting English text into the game was a Herculean task.

According to the development team, the game wasn’t made to be localized, so they didn’t take into account things like changing graphics files or switching out text when doing the initial coding.

In addition, getting the final text character limits took a lot of trial and error, which made my job as the principle editor an absolute nightmare -- a nightmare that continued on throughout the QA process.

As for changing the game to make it more relevant to the American audience, there simply wasn’t any need to. All of the game genres represented in Retro Game Challenge are a part -- or should be a part -- of every gamer’s lexicon and can be enjoyed by anyone and everyone, regardless of whether they were gamers back in the day or not.

Hardware manufacturers and other groups can make publishing games difficult. Did Xseed have any trouble with bringing RGC out?

ME: None at all, really. Outside of the usual industry-related hoops to jump through, there wasn’t any real drama to speak of.

There have been unsubstantiated reports of RGC being brought over to Europe. Would a European publisher sub-license the Xseed localization or do it from scratch? A large draw of RGC is understanding the cultural references -- surely it would require re-imagining to keep it relevant?

ME: There are no plans for Retro Game Challenge to be released in PAL territories that we are aware of. We asked Namco when we first started the project, and they clearly said “No.” If they are discussing it directly with a European publisher, then we here at Xseed are completely out of the loop.

As for the game being re-imagined, as I said previously, there were far fewer changes made than you might think. But as for your point regarding localization,

I’d recommend that whoever does it, do everything on their own as there are a number of marked differences between Europe and America gaming during the 1980s, most notably the fact that while Nintendo owned America, Sega seemingly ruled Europe.

I’m also fairly certain that a lot of the in-jokes and references would fall flat outside of the US.

If people buy enough copies, will you bring over the sequel?

ME: If this one sells, of course we’d love to release the sequel. To paraphrase a wellspring of 1980s wisdom, Indiana Jones, “[Order it]! Do it! DO IT NOW!"

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.]

Having discovered a second burst of steam, here's some more top links from our multitude of RSS feeds over the past few days - and I particularly like the discussion on Flatfingers' blog on Star Trek Online and reaction to lack of expansive player ship interiors.

Why? Because it shows how difficult it is to please fans on a lot of major properties where the action is both micro and macro, and gives a good range of reactions, both logical and heartfelt. Also in here - XBLA charts, Ben Mattes, Chris Bateman, a Backbone pitch for Street Fighter IV, and more.

Las Vegas Hilton:

T=Machine » A game dev studio made of Graduates
'Until you’ve got your company established, and some of your grads have found their natural places both professionally and within your specific company, you need to do everything you can to keep from killing their spirit and optimism.'

Theory by Flatfingers: Player Ship Interiors and Star Trek Online... Again
Interesting in that it accurately dissects messageboard reaction to a new Star Trek Online announcement on a 1-8 scale of 'hate it' to 'love it', with rather well-summarized points of view. Community lessons here, maybe.

Street Fighter IV Flashback [X360/PS3 - Concept] | Unseen 64: Beta, Unreleased & Unseen Videogames!
'Street Fighter IV Flashback was a concept created by Backbone Entertainment in 2006, to try to pitch a full project at Capcom' - not sure if this was David Sirlin designed? Might have heard dark rumblings about it a while back.

XBLA Sales Chart, 2/1/09-2/7/09 | VG Chartz.com
Buried in VGChartz' morasse of approximate information, the XBLA charts continue to give good info - and look at Castle Crashers continuing to sell, blimey.

toomuchimagination: How to get your partner into gaming
The Prince Of Persia producer on why the "biggest change for me is the arrival (en masse it seems) of casually accessible hardcore games - titles that aren't just playable by both extremes but also _fun_ for both."

Tale of Tales » Interview with Chris Bateman (International Hobo, etc)
The interviewer and interviewee - somewhat academic, somewhat divisive, hee - complement each other well.

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

[In this rather fun, breezy interview, Arkedo co-founder Camille Guermonprez tells Game Developer's EIC Brandon Sheffield about the small Parisian studio's latest DS title, Big Bang Mini, a touchscreen-based shoot 'em up with a casual bent -- that also features "friggin' sharks with friggin' laser beams."]

Though the company only has two shipped titles under its belt so far, Arkedo Studio has already made a name for itself producing quirky, colorful games for the Nintendo DS.

The small Parisian developer's debut product, Nervous Brickdown, was a curious revival of the Breakout formula, taking advantage of the DS's two screens, touchscreen controls, and even its microphone to modernize the brick-breaking genre with ten vibrant modes that had players bouncing balls off submarines and exploring haunted mansions.

Big Bang Mini, Arkedo's recently-released newest title, again applies wild splashes of neon color and a novel approach to a familiar genre, shooters, while looking to attract a broader audience that the "core" category usually repels.

Players use their stylus to help an in-game ship dodge incoming bullets, also making flicking motions to fire back at enemies -- an oddball cast of parachuting turtles, pirate penguins, and skeleton marionettes.

Here, Arkedo head and co-founder Camille Guermonprez talks with us about the challenges of bringing Nervous Brickdown to Japan, creating a game for both casual and core groups, and Big Bang Mini's "friggin' sharks with friggin' laser beams":

How did you start Arkedo?

Camille Guermonprez: I had a little bit of spare money, thanks to the fact that I sold my company -- even though I was fired. After that, [artist] Aurélien Regard and I decided to found a new company together.

Our first game was sort-of a Break Out clone called Nervous Brickdown, but we tried to make it a little bit fresh with the DS, using the stylus and stuff like that. We had pretty good fun doing that. It takes us around, like, fifteen months to do a game -- there were three of us at the time.

How many people work at Arkedo now?

CG: Oh, twenty-five percent more! Four. That's enough to make a DS game, so that's quite cool, actually.

I heard that when Success released Nervous Brickdown was released in Japan, some people were saying, "Oh, well, here's a Western game that actually doesn't look completely unappealing!"

CG: Yes! We were really happy about that. We were, at first, really honored to be picked up by Success, because [we were allowed to keep our IP]. I always tried to keep my IP for the company. Since we are funding the whole development, why shouldn't we keep the IP at the end of the day?

It's the kind of thing that's made possible by the fact that we are a very small company. You don’t need millions of dollars to fund a game, and you don't even have to get to the demo stage and then afterward look for a publisher. You can go and see the publisher when the game is almost done, so it gives you creative control, and it may give you control of your IP, which is what we have always done so far, knock on wood.

We kept the IP on our first two projects, as well as the next one, which is already signed.

That's why we went to Japan; we wanted to be able to have an excuse to go there, and to try and see if we were going to be laughed at or not. And luckily enough, we didn't get laughed at too hard, because Success agreed to do that! The problem with the company, of course, is that you don't have that many people who speak English in the company; usually you have one.

You mean in Success?

CG: In Success or in other companies. Many companies have just one guy who speaks English. And when they leave, they don't tell you exactly what's going on, which actually happened to us. The person who was in charge of speaking with us left a month before, and no one picked it up, and there were... I don't know; it was a little bit weird.

We didn't know what happened, but at the end of the day, they didn't make that many boxes in Japan. We were supposed to make like ten thousand boxes, and they made half of that, and they didn't really want to tell us, because it was awkward, you know? I can understand that.

With our new game, Big Bang Mini, we wanted to make a shoot'em-up with fireworks, using the stylus. [We wanted to give fans of] hardcore shooters something fresh to chew on, and wanted to say, "Okay, guys, look: We know you love this kind of D-pad arrangement and stuff like that, but maybe the stylus adds something, or makes something fresh and new. Precision? Enjoyment?" Because you shoot your fireworks just like you're striking a match.

Some people were a bit lost in Nervous Brickdown, because they liked some gameplay elements they and they wanted to keep playing it, but then it was gone in the next stage and they didn't like that so much. So, here we have focused on one gameplay style, and we are just adding some features in one world, and then another feature in the next world.

It's an interesting kind of system you've got set up -- because of the speed of the bullets, you have a shooting time and a dodging time. How did you balance that? Was it like that from the very beginning?

CG: Yes it was; it was pretty natural. In the prototype, we had this already, and we wanted to check two things: the playback time, and that moving the ship and shooting were fun and accurate. We weren't sure about that at all, so we tried it with basic geometry, and it worked out pretty well. So we said, "Okay, let's do it."

What made you decide to do a shooter? Largely your personal interest?

CG: Yeah, definitely. It was not business-driven at all. And to be completely honest, the other two guys on the team wanted to make a shooter from the very beginning, and I said no, because I just wanted the company to live on.

Ultimately, all the work that we did was toward making a shooter that would have the broadest appeal possible. And we had, of course, Aurélien’s drawings, which were quite in that direction, trying to make it fresh and cool and quirky.

At the same time, the gameplay mechanics that we found -- the more you shoot, the more powerful your weapons are and the more payback you get in the end -- were kind-of a very core, automatic balance of the gameplay, because you could snipe, or you could be hardcore.

And that's true for the first world, of course; when you're entering halfway through the game, it gets a little bit hardcore. We haven't been thinking in terms of, "Is it going to be some kind of casual game or hardcore game?" It's a Nintendo game, you know? People who like games, hopefully, will like this game. It's not easy, but it's not damned hard. It's just a game.

Actually, the Arkanoid style gameplay of Nervous Brickdown is almost a shooter in itself, because you're moving something that's like a ship, and you're bouncing a thing that's like a bullet.

CG: Exactly. Funny you say that, because we made some kind of a postmortem for Nervous Brickdown. We wanted to review all the gameplay that we put in Nervous Brickdown and say, "Okay, what's the most enjoyable feature? What's the feature that was most intricate and that could only be done on the DS?"

And funnily enough, there was one boss in one world, which was a shmup in Nervous Brickdown already. We liked this one the most because the stylus was really precise, and we had a lot of fun doing that.

Basically, you're right, the fact that Big Bang Mini is a shmup was already there in our previous game, which was Nervous Brickdown. So it's quite close.

Pretty much only you, EastAsiaSoft, and Shinen are making more traditional shooter-type games in the West.

CG: Yeah.

It's good to see.

CG: It's sad!

It is sad. But there haven't been that many good Western shooters to begin with, except in the old days of Defender or so.

CG: And we didn't want even to try to pretend to make a real shooter because we are not qualified enough for that.

Right; it's not a scrolling-type shooter; it's quite different.

CG: Exactly. That's why we are trying to do it with a twist. We are taking the shooter's dodging gameplay, and we try to take away all of the things that make it only appealing for a very specific kind of person who loves them, and then try to add stuff that could make it appeal more to a broader audience.

The colors, the fact that the enemies look so funny -- we want you to die just because you laugh at the enemies; it's a way for us to make you lose lives by enjoyment. Because it's like, "What's going on there?", and you die while just looking at the baddie that came down.

Though it does seem like players will just glance at the top screen where the enemies are, while largely focusing on the bottom screen. That was my experience playing it.

CG: You are correct about that, but I think it's something that goes away with time. The first hours of play, you will mainly try to stay alive, but then afterward, you have a strange feeling like you know exactly where the bullets are going to be and you don't need to look at the bottom screen that much. "We have friggin' sharks with friggin' laser beams?" So, that's a thing.

How long did you spend developing this?

CG: Fifteen months.

Just like the last?

CG: Yeah, yeah. Even financially, it would be stupid to take more time than this. We are a small team; we like to take our time and polish the game, and not release it before we think it's good. It's easy to do that on a very small project, and that's why we really believe that small is beautiful for us.

Plus, it means we're all in the same room, and we're doing the game as it goes, and we try and we put a lot of things into the trash -- that's the basic thing of how we work. Like, fifty percent of what we do, we'll just [makes a dismissal sound].

Throw away?

CG: Yes. I mean, if it works, then it does; if it doesn't, you trash it.

Then you also do a lot of prototyping?

CG: Yeah.

I know that Mekensleep, developer of Soul Bubbles, prototypes a lot -- I assume you must know those guys also.

CG: They are friends; we have lunch with them like twice a month. You know, there are not so many French studios in Paris, and we are all trying to do it our way, and we are making friends quite easily.

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

[Every week, Gamasutra we sum up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by guest editors Danny Cowan and Mathew Kumar.]

This week's notable items in the iPhone gaming space, as covered by FingerGaming, include the release of an iPhone-exclusive entry in Namco Bandai's Time Crisis series, along with reviews for Chuck the Ball, Pinball Dreaming: Pinball Dreams, and more.

Here are the top stories:

- Rolando Lite Now Available in App Store
"Today brings the release of Rolando Lite, a free trial version of ngmoco's acclaimed action-puzzler that includes the entirety of Honeycup Meadows — a lengthy bit of gameplay that spans a generous number of levels."

- Review: Chuck the Ball
"The challenge lies in staying one step ahead of Chuck. Once the level starts, Chuck will continue rolling until either he hits a mine or time runs out, so players will have to think and act fast, in order to plot out a proper course for Chuck in advance."

- Namco Bandai Releases Time Crisis Strike
"Namco Bandai adapts another one of its popular franchises to the iPhone with this week's release of Time Crisis Strike. This all-new entry in the classic light-gun arcade shooter series features multiple stages, along with unlockable challenges in the form of 'Crisis Missions.'"

- Review: Pinball Dreaming: Pinball Dreams
"Pinball Dreams is an essential purchase for any pinball fan with an iPhone or iPod Touch -- not just those who remember it from the first time."

- iPhone Users Drive Mobile Gaming Growth in 2008
"Market research firm comScore reports that Apple’s iPhone and BlackBerry Curve have surpassed traditional mobile phones as the industry’s most popular mobile gaming platforms."

- Review: Place Your Bets
"Place Your Bets reminds me of the short but glorious period of time when computing students in their final year were given their own private computing lab. It was where we spent most of our free periods — and even a few periods that weren’t free — rarely doing anything other than wasting time."

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

[In another of his GameSetWatch-exclusive series, game audio interviewer Jeriaska sits down with nearly 20-year Natsume veteran and composer Hiroyuki Iwatsuki, to discuss his scores from Chaos World through Wild Guns to XBLA title Omega Five and beyond.]

Few musicians working in the videogame industry today can claim to have been writing chiptunes back when the Nintendo Entertainment System was in its heyday. Self-effacing by nature, long time Natsume staff member Hiroyuki Iwatsuki is one member of a small community of composers who can claim that distinction.

Contributing in the early '90s to the NES title Chaos World, whose 8-bit tunes saw an arranged album release, his most recent score is for the XBox Live Arcade shooter Omega Five. Receiving a soundtrack album that features original songs and retro remixes by the composer, the disc also contains special arrangements by Ridge Racer series veterans Shinji Hosoe and Ayako Saso, along with other participants of the Super Sweep music group.

Iwatsuki's games include the Super Nintendo titles Pocky & Rocky, The Ninja Warriors, and Wild Guns, along with Game Boy titles such as Ninja Gaiden Shadow and various Playstation entries.

Working most often as part of a team of musicians, his distinctive contributions to gaming audio have at times gone unmentioned. This in-depth interview, taking place at Natsume headquarters in Nagoya, takes a look at the development of Chaos World for the Famicom, Wild Guns for the Super Nintendo, and Omega Five for the Xbox 360.

The discussion offers insights into Iwatsuki's personal perspective on the challenges and rewards both of writing 8-bit music in the era of the Famicom and adapting to two decades of evolving game hardware:

Interview by Jeriaska. Translation by Ryojiro Sato. This text is available in Japanese on Game Design Current.

Game composer Hiroyuki Iwatsuki

GameSetWatch: Iwatsuki-san, thank you for this chance to discuss your extensive work in videogame music. Your most recent soundtrack is for the shooter Omega Five. In several respects the game combines traditional and more recent trends in gaming. The visual style is reminiscent of a 2D shooter, but the graphics are made up of 3D polygons. In terms of the music style, there is an original sound mode and also retro remixes for each track that emulate the arcade shooters of a prior era. How much confidence did you have in setting out on the Omega Five soundtrack that you could deliver a score to suit the style of the title?

Hiroyuki Iwatsuki: I wasn't all that confident, to tell you the truth. The aim was to write the music for a 2D shooter, which was something new to me. One thing I had in mind from the beginning was to maintain a feeling of momentum in the music. In the case of action games, the players' choices will affect what is displayed on the screen, which allows for more leeway in how the score is arranged. By contrast, when the screen scrolls at a fixed speed in a shooter like Omega Five, you have to keep in mind that the music will be precisely matching the image presented on-screen during each level.

Personally, I've been a fan of shooters for a long time, so while making the score to Omega Five I was thinking back on all the games in this category that had inspired me. There are any number of conventions from celebrated shooters in the music of Omega Five. The team working on the project wanted to create a solid addition to the genre, so we all had our favorite shooting games from the past as ideals to live up to.

GSW: How conscious was the design team of tradition while making Omega Five?

Iwatsuki: We included strategies from previous shooters and musical conventions that make subtle reference to the past. These days I sometimes read blogs for feedback on the game, and I've found that everyone seems to have a different idea of how Omega Five offers a look back at the past within the context of a new game experience.

GSW: When the album was first released, you mentioned in an interview that composer Manabu Namiki of the sound design company Basiscape first suggested the idea of an album. What other factors motivated the creation of the published soundtrack?

Iwatsuki: Omega Five was the first original game from Natsume's Nagoya office in a long time, so this might have inspired interest in an official soundtrack CD. This email from Namiki-san was very influential in deciding me in favor of putting effort into a printed soundtrack.

GSW: Did you anticipate the release of an album while working on the game?

Iwatsuki: In all honestly, I was surprised at first by the suggestion that people were interested in seeing a published soundtrack. Namiki-san introduced me to Super Sweep. Meeting composer Shinji Hosoe, I found out that everyone at Super Sweep had been playing the game and was familiar with the music. It was gratifying to discover.

GSW: Is it unusual for a soundtrack album to be produced so late in the development of a videogame?

Iwatsuki Ideally, making a soundtrack CD is a process that is set in motion at the outset of a game project. The title came out last January, and we felt it was important to deliver the album within two months so that it was fresh in people's minds. It was a demanding schedule to put the album together within that timeline, seeing as it included new arrangements. Though the deadline was strict, Super Sweep's results were very impressive. Before the album was completed, I had no idea which musicians were arranging which tracks. There were interesting touches here and there, things that I would never have thought of doing myself.

GSW: Omega Five Soundtrack includes a new arrangement of your own song "Road to the Future." Was this a new experience for you?

Iwatsuki: Previously I have never had the chance to do arrangements of my own music. For "Road to the Future," the music that plays during the end credits sequence is the backbone of the track, but it also incorporates the Stage Complete and Start Screen themes. Each of these musical elements appears in that order. I wanted it to be a surprise for the listener that the first track in the game fades up after the conclusion of the end credits theme. I think this idea turned out well, but I would be interested to hear the opinion of listeners.

GSW: What are some of the important differences between composing for the XBox 360 compared with your work on the 16-bit Super Nintendo?

Iwatsuki: The biggest difference between the Super Famicom and the Xbox 360 is the difference in memory. You could almost fit the contents of a Super Famicom cart within the memory space allotted to the music of a single Xbox 360 game. For Omega Five it adds up to a few megabytes because of the high quality of the recorded sounds. The Xbox 360 uses 48 kHz sound output, so naturally we were using those specifications. In retro mode, we consciously lowered the sound source to between 12 and 16 kHz, then rendered these files at 48 kHz to give it an antique quality. Even the retro tracks are large files, which is the sort of thing you could not get away with on the Super Famicom. Back then we were forced to be inventive and make sacrifices on sound quality so that the hardware could handle it.

[Hear samples from Omega Five Soundtrack at the Sweep Record blog]

GSW: When was it that you first became interested in games?

Iwatsuki: When I was around 8 or 9, I spent a lot of time playing at the arcade game center close to my home. Sometimes my parents would scold me for spending too much time there. In particular there was a game called Lady Bug, where you would roll around the screen avoiding enemies, which I remember.

GSW: Would it be too much of a stretch to say that your current profession is something of a dream come true?

Iwatsuki: I loved games and now I write music for them, so in that sense you could say my dream came true. It’s a lot of work to write music, but it's also tremendous fun.

GSW: What were some of the most important factors in writing music for 8-bit games?

Iwatsuki: For the Famicom there was a limit on how many sounds you could use simultaneously, so if you wrote the music without taking into account the limited number of sounds, the song would turn out too simple. It was really important to start off with a catchy melody, something that you would have no trouble humming. Being easy to remember was an important quality of Famicom music.

Another challenge was taking into consideration the memory capacity. That was something you had to keep in mind from the outset. The problem was, if all you worried about was the data size, the music would come out too simple. There were various ways to go about working around the problem. One of them was to use delays to create an echo effect. That required programming the system to automatically insert notes to fill in the gaps in the original data. I used this technique more frequently in the latter part of work in Famicom games. It was a strategy for writing interesting music that fit the constraints of the hardware.

GSW: Would you ever want to return to writing 8-bit music?

Iwatsuki: If there were the opportunity. The retro mode in Omega Five was a step in that direction. Recently, there is this precedence of Mega Man 9's retro music. If that musical style were needed for a new game, it would be fun to work on. Alternatively, as with Omega Five, making the arranged version of an original soundtrack in the style of old fashion games is a concept that still interests me.

GSW: When did you start work on the game Chaos World?

Iwatsuki: It was in 1991. This was my second project at Natsume and followed writing music for one Game Boy title.

GSW: Was there much of a difference between the sounds cards of the Famicom and Game Boy?

Iwatsuki: There was. For instance, the standard for the Famicom included two voices emitted by the PSG sound chip (both square waves) accompanied by noise. The biggest difference is that the Famicom featured triangle waves but the Game Boy had an internal synthesizer similar to a sampler.

GSW: These days there are a lot of amateur musicians making original music with Game Boys.

Iwatsuki: They are uploaded to Japanese websites sometimes. I think it's really interesting.

GSW: How did the process differ from your music writing today?

Iwatsuki: While writing music for Chaos World, mostly I was starting off by thinking of songs in my head, then programming the data to produce the corresponding sounds. These days, I use sheet music or a sequencer program on the computer.

GSW: What were the two songs you wrote for the Chaos World soundtrack?

Iwatsuki: I wrote the song for the save file screen and also the village background music. It was early in my career and I was short on experience, so I was learning as I went along. Mizutani, the composer on Chaos World, had worked for a different company previously and had a lot of experience in the field. At the time when he first joined Natsume he was handling all the sound design by himself, but after I joined, he showed me the ropes. He taught me a lot.

GSW: Was it exciting to have your videogame music show up in a published album?

Iwatsuki: I had no idea that he was arranging the songs I wrote for the soundtrack album. I was surprised when he told me. It was just two tracks, but I never imagined they would be on the CD.

GSW: How was the transition from the NES hardware to the Super Nintendo?

Iwatsuki: Honestly, I was happy to see the system specs change so dramatically. First of all, there were eight simultaneous voices that you could incorporate, which opened the door to a lot of new possibilities. Having a sampler feature was also very exciting.

The biggest difference between the Famicom and Super Famicom hardware was this number of simultaneous sounds. We only had three on the Famicom. While I had been satisfied with the quality of my work for Famicom games, I still had this nagging feeling that there was more that could be done. With the transition to the Super Famicom, I felt a sense of relief. Suddenly you could have harmony along with melodies and a bass line. Overall I would say it was very beneficial.

[Brazilian cover band 8 Bit Instrumental concluded their 2007 tribute album Altered Bit with an arranged medley of Wild Guns themes.]

GSW: At times you have been credited as Nanten in the end credits of videogames. Is there a story behind his pseudonym?

Iwatsuki: This is probably not worth mentioning, but NANTEN was the brand name of a certain candy in Japan. There were these commercials where someone would say "NANTEN," and someone else would respond by singing "NODO AME~" (throat candy). There was this tradition of withholding your given name in staff credits, so I went with NANTEN as a joke. Are you sure this information is useful to you? (laughs)

GSW: How about the nickname Iwadon? You appear to have chosen this as your handle on a number of different internet services.

Iwatsuki: This goes back to a personal story from my youth. As I've mentioned, I really like arcade games. You know how after every game you were allowed three letters to enter into a list of high scores? People had been calling me "DON" back then, but the first time I ever used it myself was at the arcades. You see, I have relatively big body for someone Japanese, but I’m really bad at sports. There’s a word in Japanese “鈍い（Nibui）” which means slow or dull. This word can also be read “DON,” and that’s where I got that name. The name remains until now, and I still go by “Iwadon” or simple “Don” online.

GSW: What kind of a musical background had you acquired prior to joining Natsume?

Iwatsuki: When I started making music, it was purely as a hobby. I’ve never been to music schools, though I took elective classes in high school where you were allowed to choose from fine art, calligraphy, and music. I spent those class sessions playing Japanese pop songs with an acoustic guitar. Instead of studying, I wrote chord progressions in my notebook.

There was a song called “Nagori Yuki” that was very popular. I bought an acoustic guitar, then later an electric guitar, and spent a lot of time listening to a fusion band called Casiopia. Another band called T-square was introduced to me by a friend. I didn’t know much about instrumental music, and was mostly familiar with what my parents listened to around the house, a style of Japanese music called Enka. But in school I was listening to Casiopeia and imitating the style of the lead guitarist, analyzing his compositions.

Casiopeia’s music was very intricate. It was also a unique style, which became like my manual for creating melodies. After graduating, I was hired by Natsume to write music, but as soon as I entered the company I discovered that I didn't know any of the songs that other people were familiar with. It’s embarrassing, but I didn’t even know the Beatles. My first experience listening to the White Album was when I was twenty. The music I was listening to when I first started at Natsume probably formed the basis of my compositional style.

GSW: One of your later works for the Super Nintendo perhaps demonstrates a greater mastery of the 16-bit console's sound capabilities. Wild Guns is regarded by many fans of your music as one of your most memorable soundtracks. What was the concept behind this game by Natsume?

Iwatsuki: Wild Guns is a shooting game where the player controls gunmen to shoot enemies that appear on the screen. The unique thing about the game was that the controller allowed you to both move the character sideways on the screen and also aim the gun's sights. That was different from any other shooting games at the time. There were also actions you could perform, such as jumping and evading enemy attacks.

GSW: What were some of the musical genres that inspired your score for the game?

Iwatsuki: Wild Guns is a game that has mixture of American western and science fiction elements. I had not composed anything like that previously, so I spent some time listening to compilations from famous movie soundtracks like “The Magnificent Seven”. The archetypal Western motifs you can hear on the soundtrack are the whistle, brass instruments such as trumpets, and acoustic guitars. However, there are a lot of fast passages that make the music suitable for an action game. You might chuckle at the lack of subtlety in some of these music cues, but I wanted for the Western theme to be easily recognizable.

GSW: Do any of the tracks from this game score particularly stand out in your memory?

Iwatsuki: Normally I start out by composing the first stage of the game. The first stage music tends to present the initial theme of the game more than the later tracks, and I did spend a lot of time working on it, so for that reason I have a particular fondness for it. Also, there is a stage in which a train speeds by across the screen. I had the idea of making this song start on an interesting note, so I incorporated some irregular rhythms followed by a fast guitar passage. This "armored train" song stands out in my memory as well.

GSW: Enthusiasts of your music have posted movies of these songs to YouTube and its equivalent in Japan, Nico Nico Douga. Is it meaningful for you to observe that your music has left a lasting impression on people around the world?

Iwatsuki: It has come to my attention, and it's something I've been curious about. People outside Japan seem to know about my work and even send me emails. It makes me really happy, but it also makes me wonder where they find all this information. Our company has a relatively modest public presence and I am practically anonymous among game composers, yet there are people from all over the world who have tracked me down for no reason other than to tell me they enjoy my music.

Those online video services you mentioned came out recently. Back when Wild Guns was released, I would receive letters in the mail from people who had listened to the music. Now I sometimes watch these videos that fans make for the old games that I worked on, and I am really happy to see that people still remember these games and enjoy them. I’ve even heard there are still people with Super Famicoms in their homes. It makes me happy to think about.

[Images courtesy of Natsume. Photo by Jeriaska. Omega Five original soundtrack can be imported through Amazon.co.jp]

Posted by jeriaska 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.]

As it turns out, I did manage to sneak a little holiday time to trawl the RSS feeds, and this GameSetLinks is what has eventuated, starting out with the ever-chirpy Clive Thompson devoting his Wired column to the rather successful Global Game Jam (look for more Gamasutra coverage on it next week).

Also in here - a newly funded game emulation project, Scott Jennings on layoffs and the game biz, Amazon and Reflexive's casual game pricing shift discussed in voluminous detail by the indie/casual crossover crowd, and lots more besides.

My tee boosh:

Wired.com: Games Without Frontiers: Sweet Success, Fascinating Failure: 48 Sleepless Hours at Global Game Jam
Clive Thompson on real stories of Global Game Jam: '"We turned Zork into a twitch game," laughed Bob Clark, one of the A-to-Z members'.

Further developments in EVE's 'Grand Theft Alliance' drama - Massively
Slightly missed this due to holidays, but passing on if you haven't seen - massive EVE Online political machinations, tho some commenters claim the stories are a bit overblown.

Best Games of 2008 - z a c k h i w i l l e r
Always interesting picks from Zack - a couple Choice Awards-nominated, a couple not.

Broken Toys » Rituals Of The Betrayed
Scott Jennings writes eloquently on what it means if you care about your job, and it's taken away.

Computergame Museum Berlin on new project KEEP
Good to see European funding for emulation, including game and system emulation, to help preserve old games!

All games on Reflexive [+Amazon] $9.99 - Indiegamer Developer Discussion Boards
A fascinating 9+ page discussion on Amazon/Reflexive halving normal prices on casual PC games, with Reflexive folks commenting in detail.

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

[Originally conducted for big sister site Gamasutra, news director Leigh Alexander's interview with Rainbow's Jordan Itkowitz is interesting, because it showcases a complex, original IP Wii-exclusive title from a major publisher - still relatively rare.]

Rainbow Studios is known for motorsport titles like the MX vs. ATV games -- in fact, that's pretty much all the THQ studio's done.

That's why it comes as a surprise that Deadly Creatures, one of the more anticipated Wii exclusives of the coming year -- is coming from the Rainbow team, especially since THQ often focuses primarily on licenses.

So how did the team get the pitch through, and what advice can they offer to other studios in similar situations who want to try something different? Lead developer Jordan Itkowitz explains, and also discusses the challenges inherent in going to market with a new IP on Wii, plus the benefits in developing a title solely for Wii.

Dreaming Of A New Project

Deadly Creatures, a realistic-looking action adventure that pits a scorpion and a tarantula against other creepy crawlies in their natural desert habitats, is about as far from the racing genre as you can get. "A bunch of us had wanted to do an action title, or something out of racing, for a long time," lead developer Jordan Itkowitz tells Gamasutra.

Although Itkowitz says that racing is the studio's "bread and butter," the team was eager to catch THQ's attention with a change of pace. A small team of about 8 or 9 of the studio's developers had been brainstorming ideas to take to the publisher, and was about to vote on which one they wanted to pitch together.

"The morning before we were going to have this vote, I had this dream," Itkowitz says. "I was a snake in the dream, and I was slithering through some grass with the Wii remote in my 'hand'... I saw a mouse, and reared up with my right hand, and then struck at it and killed it -- and then I woke up."

Itkowitz says he immediately brought the idea to the brainstorm team: a Wii remote-driven action title that casts players as creepy predators. "The team was really into it; it scored really high on our internal vote," he says.

And it was good timing for THQ, he adds -- although the publisher's currently in risk reduction mode, it was at that time quite interested in original IP for the Wii, having just greenlit De Blob.

"It was one of those things where the stars converge and you get a concept through that normally would not have gone under normal circumstances," Itkowitz says.

Aligning The Universe

He calls it a "charmed journey" for the project the entire way, with THQ's full support helping bring in a Hollywood creative director to add a storyline to the gameworld and getting Dennis Hopper and Billy Bob Thornton on board to voice the human characters.

"I think we were lucky in that THQ was in a position in which they were really receptive, and actively looking for new IP," Itkowitz says. Beyond luck, however, owned studios looking to get publishers to bite on new IP can keep a couple tips in mind.

"Make sure it's a really high concept that you can neatly summarize in a couple of sentences," he suggests. "Get that idea across with concept art, a really well-represented example of what that experience is going to be and why it's going to be significant to gamers, and you're off and running."

And what seems fresh and novel sometimes isn't, he cautions. "You run into problems where it does seem really niche and derivative," he says, "and maybe it's just that you're trying to take your own spin on something that has been done before, and then it becomes a little more of a risk."

"We were just lucky this time," he says. Deadly Creatures is Itkowitz's third title with THQ, following Splashdown 2 which Rainbow brought from Atari and the Cars film game. "Creatively they've been great to work with because they pretty much sit back and let us do our thing.

The Wii Audience

Did the team have to strike a careful balance developing a game about frightening bugs and reptiles on the family-friendly Wii? "Our big challenge was not to make it overly violent so that it would turn off the parents of the younger half of our audience," says Itkowitz.

"We had just enough bug guts that the ESRB gave us a T rating," he adds. "But from the beginning, we didn't want to dumb it down or kiddy it up too much. Some people figured... that we were putting googly eyes on [the creatures] and giving them funny personalities, but we wanted to take a National Geographic special and meld it with an action horror experience."

"The fact that it's on the Wii didn't deter us from choosing the tone," Itkowitz continues. "Just because it's on the Wii doesn't mean you can't execute the way you need to. A big hook for us was not the overall family-friendly vibe for the Wii -- it's what we could do with the controls that really made it a family-friendly experience."

Itkowitz hopes players who often complain they want something less casual and light on the Wii will enjoy Deadly Creatures -- "And then we can do another one," he says. "I'd love to do one that takes on the predators of a different ecosystem."

The State Of Wii Development

How does he see the state of Wii development in general now? "The Wii has the potential to be this really interesting petri dish for new and original ideas," he says. "I'd like to see that taken to a bigger level... it's just tough now, obviously, with the economy."

The challenge comes from the specificity required to develop a Wii-oriented game rather than just a Wii edition of a multiplatform title, he suggests. "We were lucky in that we were only making this for Wii... we had new tools and technology specifically for Wii for this title."

It gets more difficult to produce a quality game when a team is simply doing a Wii version of a game alongside the next-gen versions. "It's still next-gen versus last-gen," Itkowitz says -- which means the next-gen version comes first, and then the Wii version has been scaled down, cut up and thinned out in the resolution department, among other changes.

"That's just the reality of the situation -- which means that a team that's making a game specifically for the Wii is probably going to be able to pour a lot more into it than a team that's doing a port," Itkowitz says -- although he was sure to note that some Wii ports, like Okami and Resident Evil 4, are quite good.

But in general, do the highest-quality Wii games tend to be made specifically for Wii? "I think so," says Itkowitz -- "but that's just me speaking as a consumer, really. With my development experience, obviously publishers have to do whatever's going to be best for their portfolio and whats going to be most economical."

And it can be deceptively hard to draw audiences on Wii. "Just because there's a huge install base doesn't mean that people are buying a vast variety of games," Itkowitz says.

"Look at what's selling -- obviously it's mostly Nintendo stuff... really, it's just kind of a process of getting people that are new to video games to dip their toe into the water and try some other genres."

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 Blue Lacuna, a novel-length work of interactive fiction that offers the player a great deal of control over narrative outcomes.]

Aaron Reed's Blue Lacuna is a mammoth new work of interactive fiction, and one of the most ambitious ever written in the degree to which it allows the player to shape the narrative and define character interactions.

The interactive fiction community has been interested for a long time in the development of stories that can be shaped significantly by the player, though what exactly that means varies, of course, from author to author.

Two particular approaches to this problem have received a good deal of attention. Victor Gijsbers' Fate and The Baron and Aaron's previous work Whom the Telling Changed all explore the possibilities inherent in giving the player significant (often morally-driven) choices that control the outcome of play: these are all highly variable stories with many possible paths, but risk pursuing their philosophical aims so rigorously, or so much to the exclusion of personal details, that they lose the ability to affect the player emotionally.

The IF genre of conversation games consists mostly of single-room, single-character interactions in which the player can reach a host of different relationships with the major non-player character. While these pieces tend as a rule to give more weight to the emotional development of the story, they sometimes risk other flaws -- shapelessness, a lack of clear player direction, or a lack of thematic consistency.

Blue Lacuna is set apart from these earlier works by its length and by the fact that it combines both forms of player-responsiveness. It describes itself, justly, as an interactive novel, and it will take many hours of play to complete. Unlike most of its gaming kin, it does not put off its significant branch points until the last quarter of the game.

There are choices to make from the very beginning, which means that early decisions will have later ramifications for the whole duration of play. Some of the choices are morally or philosophically freighted; some more reflect personal tastes. The length gives it a kind of cumulative gravity that is often absent from shorter games, even ones that explore important choices or emotional oppositions.

In Blue Lacuna, one of the essential questions is the tension between love and art, and the difficulty of serving both. In that respect it reminded me (and some other players) of Jason Rohrer's work, especially Passage. But where Passage explores an emotional conflict procedurally, with little narrative content, Blue Lacuna explores it with a narrative that reacts to player choices.

There are also several characters to converse with, most significantly a character named Progue. The player's relationship to Progue is allowed to develop freely on several possible lines: it can be positive or negative, parental or romantic, dominated by one character or the other (or perhaps by neither). Conversation plays into the relationship; so do all sorts of other choices the player makes during the course of play.

Moreover (a little like Façade) Blue Lacuna has available a host of small optional scenes that it will throw into the mix depending on the current situation which also guide your relationship to Progue in one direction or another. Some scenes are designed to drop a hint to a player who has been idle too long, or to provide a little narrative development; others (as far as I can tell) are present chiefly to expand on Progue's characterization or to encourage the player to define the relationship more clearly.

My favorite such scene is a brief vignette in which Progue approaches the player character (otherwise busy on an adventure-game exploration of a Myst-like island) to present her with a sweater he's fashioned himself from the husks of a coconut-like fruit. The sweater is obviously going to be itchy and much too hot for the tropical climate, but Progue seems so fond of it, and it seems like such a gesture of affection, that I just couldn't bring myself to refuse: dutifully I donned the thing, though it immediately began to scratch, and thanked him for it. I didn't take it off again until he was out of sight.

Possibly -- though I can't be sure -- that's why Progue liked me enough to start calling me affectionate nicknames in a later scene. From a gameplay perspective, the encounter alleviated an otherwise somewhat dry stretch of play where I wasn't making too much progress on my exploration and puzzle-solving.

I don't feel I'm ruining anything by revealing this scene, which might well never occur in most playthroughs. One of the statistics that came up when I finished the game was that I had encountered only 17 of the 69 possible scenes one could experience with Progue, though it seemed to me that we'd had quite an extensive set of encounters by the end of the game. When you consider that each of these scenes can end in multiple ways and that most of them offer a host of conversational directions that cannot be taken up at once, it becomes clear that there is a great deal more to see here than one can possibly encounter in a single game.

This is, I think, why the system works as well as it does: any kind of generative narrative is, I think, going to need absolutely heaps of content from which to choose, making it costly and time-consuming to produce. In IF this is a somewhat less horrifying proposition than it would be for other media, since one only (heh) needs to write the thousands of tiny sequences of dialogue, not animate and voice-record them.

Despite the tremendous flexibility of content in its midgame, Blue Lacuna does not sacrifice its narrative arc. No matter your relationship to the other characters or the philosophical positions you may have expressed by the end of the game, certain significant choice points will occur. The resources you have to meet those choices, and the way you feel about them, will inevitably depend on how you played up to that point. The result is a structure that feels narratively cohesive and yet not excessively binding.

Another thing that appeals to me about this production -- and here my geekishness exposes itself -- is that it was written openly for players who are interested in narrative construction. Once you've won, you get a cheat code that allows you to peek at how the mechanisms are working at any given moment. It would be a worthy object of study in its own right, but it's especially charming because it lends itself so frankly to investigation.

There is also a short paper on Aaron's website discussing what he is attempting technically; some of it is about concerns specific to interactive fiction, in particular how to make the parser friendlier to new players, but quite a lot dwells on the details of the narrative structure and Progue's implementation.

There are in my opinion some flaws in pacing: I would have made the early middle game shorter and the late middle longer, among other things, and broken more cleanly with the traditions of the raw adventure game in favor of something more consistently plot-oriented I would also have put a little more personality into Rume, a character who appears at the beginning of the game and who ought to color the rest of it a little more, in my opinion. And occasionally I got bored and would have appreciated another scene from the drama manager sooner than one kicked in (though, to be fair, I was also a bit dense about solving a couple of the puzzles).

Despite these quibbles, though, this is an entertaining game with an unusually developed story and characters. The narrative model is a strong one, and Progue a vital and memorable figure. And -- perhaps most strikingly considering many of the games I've considered here -- there is no separation between the way the player engages in narrative and the way he engages in gameplay.

There are no cut scenes, no uninteractive passages, no portions where the characters are essentially "switched off" and indifferent to what the player does. Everything counts. Everything is part of the story.

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

Posted by Emily Short at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

The goodies in this edition include a new action game by Nitrome, a difficult platformer by the creator of the Karoshi series, a small arcade game featuring a lovable basset hound, a puzzler by the developer of the clever meta game Rara Racer, and an audio game highlight from the recent Global Game Jam event.

Game Pick: 'Twin Shot' (Nitrome, browser)
"A single or 2-player platformer in which strange cat-like angels jump and fly around simple arenas destroying all the enemies with use of a bow and arrow. It's very reminiscent of the classic Bubble Bobble... but with arrow-firing angel blobs instead of cute little dinosaurs."

Game Pick: 'You Probably Won't Make It' (Jesse Venbrux, freeware)
"Following on from his original title You Made It, You Probably Won't Make It is an extremely difficult platformer which involves spikes, double jumps and recorded deaths. When you lose a life, not only must you restart the level again, but your spilt blood and previously attempted path are shown as well."

Game Pick: 'The Black Yeti' (Stephen Lavelle, browser)
"A simple puzzler by the developer of Rara Racer and Mirror Stage, increpare's latest work tells the story of a large ape creature who has to devour all intruders to the cave without them noticing its presence. The game was originally created in under a weekend for a friendly Mini Ludum Dare competition."

Game Pick: 'A to B Basset' (Adam Lobacz, freeware)
"An arcade game created for a friendly TDC competition, where players get to drag a Basset Hound around the rooms of an old house in an attempt to reunite the puppy with its favorite red ball."

Game Pick: 'Din' (Team Bill, freeware)
"A short experimental work which uses audio in a novel manner. The story is centered around a laid-back character named Bill who is having a quiet walk in the park, but is soon followed by his friends and family who harasses him with their troubles, concerns and opinions. Being the friendly guy that he is, Bill must be attentive to their requests or risk upsetting and losing a couple of close buddies."

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

['Diamond In The Rough' is a regularly scheduled GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Tom Cross focusing on aspects of games that stand out, for reasons good and bad. This week, Tom examines Saints Row 2 and Fable 2, and how "great" games can be less fun than "bad" games.]

Many video games concern themselves with providing “realistic,” “immersive,” and “transparent” game experiences. In these games, the developers try to postpone the moment when the games “gaminess,” the certainty of its simulated nature, becomes unpleasantly or blatantly apparent to the player. Games employ fixed first person perspectives, transparent UI’s, hidden loading screens, and seamless transitions between gameplay and cutscene.

For some video games, these concerns are secondary to another set of concerns, namely that of entertaining the player with as many or as intricate game systems as possible. These games forgo narrative and sensory depth, and instead attempt to provide the player with such interesting and varied options that the player will be having too much fun to notice the paper thin quality of the more “stylistic touches.” And, the reasoning goes, if they do notice they’ll be having too much fun to complain.

Saints Row 2 is unapologetically in the gameplay-over-story camp, providing countless diversions, activities and options, right alongside a ludicrous story, bland environments, and highly derivative style.

Fable 2 is also focused on providing a wealth of options and activities for its players, but it also strives to create a complete, fulfilling experience from a stylistic, aesthetic approach. The world of Fable 2 is meticulously realized, brilliantly and beautifully designed, and wonderfully fleshed out with characters and voices.

You, You, You

However, both of these games share one imperative: they are about you, and will often sacrifice degrees of realism or sensibility to maintain the focus on the player character. From Saints’ amazingly deep character creator, to Fable 2’s highly reactive character models, to the reactions of people in the world to your presence and alignment towards them (whether through medieval prestige system or gang allegiance system), both games want to make you the hero, the gang leader, the focal point of the universe.

In this, both games succeed; there will never be any doubt in your mind that you are the Hero of Albion, or the baddest gang leader in Stillwater. Likewise, both games succeed at providing you fun, nigh-unending distractions and options. Real estate, murder, quests, competitions, and item collecting all serve to compliment the main narratives.

However, the difference for me in these two games lies in just how fun they are, and how much I admire their accomplishments (and for what reasons). Saints Row 2 is an absolutely amazing game to play. I have played more of this game without a break than I have any other game in years. It requires almost no investment, and it returns so much more than it requires you to give. At any moment, I can take part in any number of amusing, silly, ludicrous, outlandish, and most importantly, fun activities.

I was eager to see how this game would stack up next to Grand Theft Auto IV, and I wasn’t disappointed. In GTA IV, the most basic tasks are a chore, from moving to shooting, from driving to completing missions. In Saints Row 2, every single one of those simple activities is a breeze. Cars handle way too well, like arcade race cars, shooting is easy, character movement is simple, and the interface is in general simple, easy to navigate, and lacking in any attempts at an “immersive” (read: maddeningly counterintuitive) experience. In Stillwater, you know you’re in a game, and you love every minute.

When compared to my experiences in GTA IV, there is no comparison. There, I disliked every second I wasn’t wandering aimlessly around the city. Even then, the “realism” of the simulation made my movements unpleasantly elephantine, and my encounters with the police frequent and deadly. Saints Row 2 always encourages you to take the path of least resistance, and enjoy it as much as possible.

The Saints Might be Fun, But...

With such glowing praise heaped on the game, I’m sad to say that I hope that the next one is markedly different. The world, fiction, and aesthetics of Saints Row 2 offend, disgust, and annoy me. This is a game that is less offensive than GTA IV (barely), only because it doesn’t think it’s the second coming of absolutely amazing gaming. It’s quite content to be its own breed of stupid suburban gangster-fantasy, and as such doesn’t make the same mistakes that GTA IV made (and that its critics made).

Unfortunately, it can’t match GTA IV’s scope and coherence of vision. I may dislike Rockstar’s latest hit, but there’s no doubt that it is as perfectly oriented and lovingly designed a game as was ever made. It strives to create a complete, uninterrupted fiction, far more than Saints Row 2 could ever hope to do. The only problem is, that fiction is derivative in almost every possible way, blithely trading in stereotypes and w