['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)