Psytronik Software, a small company releasing old and new Commodore 64 titles, revealed that it will release a PC conversion of Cyberdyne's 1988 C64 shoot'em up Armalyte later this year. Working with developer S-A-S Designs, Psytronik plants to update the game with new graphics, animation, music and sound effects.

Psytronik will also release a Competition Edition of Armalyte as "a proper C64 commercial release" tomorrow. Along with new full-color artwork, the Competition Edition features like level-select, adjustable enemy bullet speeds, a scrolling demo mode, and more.

It will also include a bonus disk with music demos and Armalyte demos, as well as a demo of the Armalyte 2 game that never made it to market.

The company plans to sell Armalyte's PC edition through its store as a CD-ROM in "a white Wii-style DVD case", and intends to soon make available a downloadable demo with the first level. You can see screenshots from the new PC conversion below:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Midway's story is one marked by fascinating characters, plot twists and gripping drama. In an in-depth analysis, new Gamasutra recruit Kris Graft examines how this once celebrated Mortal Kombat creator went from booming to bankrupt.]

The story of Midway Games reads like a video game business soap opera:

There’s the celebrated Midwest game maker with a coin-op heritage; the old billionaire media mogul – a Harvard man and U.S. Army vet who made the company his plaything, only to discard it like an old toy; a failed CEO who went from softcore porn publishing to software publishing; a mysterious investor named after two disciples – one faithful, one doubtful – who bought out the old man in a fishy scheme; a tragic bankruptcy that marked the beginning of the end.

Let us also not forget the mothers who grieved for their wayward young; the children who ripped vertebrae from ninjas’ torsos throughout the 1990s.

Today, Chicago-based Midway Games, which officially established as a corporation in 1988 (although its heritage goes back to the 1950s), is in the midst of a bankruptcy that began in February 2009, as pressure from creditors grew too much to bear.

But Midway’s problems were mounting several years earlier. With some formerly brilliant companies, it’s easy to pinpoint the exact moment where the business went sour. In Midway’s case, the current situation is the result of a culmination of several salient factors.

Profit Problems

Midway hasn’t turned an annual operating profit since 1999. That’s nearly a decade’s worth of losses. The most recent fiscal year ended December 31, 2008 saw operating losses rise 52 percent year-over-year to a staggering $113.5 million.

We should examine that turning point in 1999. In the late 90s, Midway, whose history traces back to the heyday of the arcade, was reporting heavy declines in its coin-op business, which steadily dropped since 1996.

It’s no coincidence that the PlayStation and increasingly advanced home consoles were taking hold of gamers around that time as well. The term “arcade perfect” was quickly becoming meaningless – gamers would soon expect their consoles to perform at the same level as arcade cabinets.

Midway’s financials in the 1990s are striking. Annual revenues for Midway’s home video game business didn’t surpass those of its arcade business until fiscal year 1996, when it dawned on management to begin publishing home versions of its own coin-op games instead of farming out home gaming duties to Acclaim. In 1997, coin-op revenues hit $168.3 million, compared to home game revenues of $219.9 million. For Midway, it was a banner year for its arcade business.

Two short years later we would see Midway falter. In 1999, Midway managed to eke out an operating profit of $8.3 million, way down from 1998’s $65 million. Revenues tumbled $27.5 million from the prior year to $134 million. The age of decline had begun.

You can argue that on a fundamental basis, Midway is in the position it’s in today because it never really broke free of its admirable but stifling coin-op roots, and failed to become a true top-tier home console competitor.

Just look at Midway’s most recent top-performing game, November’s Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, which shipped nearly two million units in its opening weeks at retail. This is a one-on-one fighting game based on an arcade game from 1992. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily – good on Ed Boon and the Mortal Kombat team for making the franchise commercially viable after nearly 20 years.

But it exemplifies how little Midway has evolved as a company overall. The publisher is still remembered for games like San Francisco Rush, Cruisin’ USA, Hydro Thunder, Spy Hunter, NBA Jam and the original Area 51 -- arcade games, in other words, most of which saw home ports. But can one think of a Midway game that originated on home consoles that can nobly stand shoulder to shoulder in the pantheon of great Midway arcade games?

A Lack Of Foresight

Midway’s attempt to explain the sudden decrease in sales in 1999 seems endearingly naive, like a confused father trying to explain to his kids why the family dog dropped dead, when he doesn’t even really know the reason why:

“The decrease in home video revenues was primarily due to a reliance on third party designed games that were favorably reviewed but did not do well in the market place and a reduced number of home games converted from coin-op games that generally have higher sales.”

Again, the above shows Midway’s dysfunctional marriage to coin-op: coin-op properties are the key to the family room; more coin-op to home ports will turn things around; publishing third party games, even if they’re of quality – is not the answer.

Also in that final year of profitability, Midway – although it just suggested in the same filing that coin-op ports are the pathway to success in the home gaming market – tried to explain away why its coin-op business was slipping away:

“The decrease in coin-operated video game revenues was primarily from a reduced number of sit down driving games in the product mix and a sharp decrease in demand, during the latter part of fiscal 1999, for games that incorporate guns or a shooting theme.”

Hindsight is 20/20, for certain, but knowing what we know today, the reason for the drop in coin-op revenues wasn’t because there weren’t enough sit down driving games, or because nobody wanted to play light gun games anymore: people didn’t want to play arcade games anymore.

Nowhere does Midway in its filing that year address that home video game consoles like the PlayStation were beginning to eat away at the arcade business. Today, that trend is blatantly obvious.

Midway realized a full two years later that it was time to drop its coin-op efforts. In June 2001, the publisher discontinued its arcade business, cutting 60 workers and saying in a press release: “…The Company implemented a strategy to focus its product development resources on next-generation home videogame consoles, which are expected to generate significant demand for game software over the next several years. As a result of this strategy, Midway is expecting to generate significant revenue and profit growth in fiscal 2002, which commences January 1, 2002.”

Despite the optimism, that projected profit growth stemming from a greater focus on home consoles never happened. While Midway cut the dead weight known as “coin-op” that year, in fiscal 2002 – the year that the focus on home consoles would “generate significant profit and revenue growth” – the game maker reported an operating loss of $52 million – a narrower loss than the prior year, but still substantially negative.

In May 2003, Midway appointed David F. Zucker as chief exec, the former president of Playboy Enterprises who would take the place of COO Neil D. Nicastro. Under Zucker, Midway’s operating losses continued fiscal year after fiscal year:

2004: -$25 million
2005: -$108 million
2006: -$72 million
2007: -$78 million

After about four years under his guidance and nearly $300 million in total losses, Zucker “ceased to be the president and CEO” of Midway in March 2008, the company claimed. Clearly, his departure wasn’t entirely on his own volition. Nevertheless, Midway earmarked a $1.2 million golden parachute for the exec that fiscal year.

A class action suit filed in 2007 that names Zucker and other Midway execs is currently pending in the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois.

The plaintiffs allege that Zucker and his colleagues “made a series of misrepresentations and omissions about Midway’s financial well-being and prospects concerning its financial performance…” Two investors who filed a similar suit earlier that year voluntarily dismissed their action in December 2008.

Disaster Set In Motion

Matt Booty, Midway Games’ current CEO, took over as interim CEO following Zucker’s departure. He’s been with the company since 1991 – a true grunt who’s been in the trenches – working various capacities in product development before climbing the corporate ladder.

Before his departure, Zucker had already made some decisions that would impact Midway’s ability to become a viable competitor in the generation of Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii. For one, Zucker decided in 2005 to use Unreal Engine 3 across its entire slate of next generation games.

While Zucker touted the capable Unreal Engine 3 as a magical ingredient that would cut costs, improve efficiency and return Midway to profitability, Booty was more transparent in an August 2006 interview (when he was EVP of worldwide studios), admitting that the studio-wide adoption of Unreal Engine 3 wasn’t wholly popular at first:

“Was there a cultural hurdle we had to overcome to get everybody on the same page? Yeah. I think that's going to be true with anything. … There's a lot to adapt to in terms of infrastructure. It also impacts the art and the development pipeline. It's a major cultural shift to get that many studios aligned with each other. We're spending a lot of time working on that stuff as well. ... You've got to look at the big picture as to how you're going to build your organization around it.”

Anonymous ex-Midway employees surfaced recently saying that Midway’s tech team tried layering custom modifications on top of the base Unreal Engine 3 to make a company-wide, multi-game genre solution, which caused development difficulties in adapting the largely shooter-specific engine across a range of games.

Technical hurdles on the new PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 led to the long delay of Midway’s next-gen debut, September 2007’s John Woo’s Stranglehold. Reports said the game cost anywhere from $30 to $40 million to create, a hefty amount for a console game even by today’s standards. Midway said the game sold over one million units.

Following Stranglehold was Blacksite: Area 51, developed by Midway’s Austin studio. The game was rushed to market and poorly received by critics. Respected developer and lead designer for the game Harvey Smith called the project “so fucked up,” citing everything from technical issues to management snafus.

And then there’s another one of Midway’s major current gen titles that was supposed to shake things up: Wheelman, a property that, along with Stranglehold, was supposed to be part of Zucker’s major cross-media strategy. Originally announced in early 2006, following multiple delays, the game finally released this year – although published by Ubisoft due to Midway’s weakened position.

As late as 2006, analysts had held hope that Midway could turn itself around, even in the face of mounting losses. The above games were supposed to be the ingredients of a comeback.

But instead of blasting into the room, two pistols blazing as doves scatter in slow-motion, Midway faltered out of the next-gen gates in poor form, setting the company up to continue the losses incurred in the years prior.

Midway had botched the all-important console generational transition, just as it botched the arcade to home transition.

What happened in the years to follow were job layoffs, studio closings and snarky game journos who found it advantageous to use images of Mortal Kombat fatalities in their Midway doomsday articles.

Let The Real Finger-Pointing Commence

But Zucker can’t be the only one to blame for Midway’s most recent misfortune. The buck ultimately stops at the desk of 85-year-old media mogul Sumner Redstone, whose company National Amusements bought a controlling stake in Midway in 2004. Under his watch, Midway languished until he offloaded the company to a mysterious investor by the name of Mark Thomas in late 2008 for $100,000, although Thomas agreed to assume $70 million in debt.

With the change of hands, creditors got the go-ahead to demand the money owed to them by Midway. Without the ability to pay the loans, the firm decided to file for bankruptcy on February 12, 2009.

The drama didn’t end there. The sale of the company to Thomas came under scrutiny, and accusations of shady dealings emanated through news reports. Redstone and his daughter Shari, Midway’s former chair, were subpoenaed in March over the sale.

A bankruptcy hearing in April had a judge summing up his thoughts on Redstone’s handling of Midway: “This is a game company. But that did not give National Amusement the right to treat a public company as if it were a toy.”

Of Friendships And Fatalities

Midway is now on the chopping block, with its pieces ripe for the picking. Management hopes to sell Midway's assets, including its crown jewel Mortal Kombat, for a total of at least $30 million.

Midway made five-and-a-half times that much in one year in sales from its coin-op business in 1997 alone. The company has fallen far.

It’s easy to kick a company while it’s down, criticize the failings that past custodians “should” have seen long before problems became insurmountable.

But the current reality is that here we have yet another fabled video game brand that will likely never be the same again (add Midway to the list of Acclaim, Sierra, Atari, etc.), not to mention hundreds of workers whose livelihoods have been negatively affected. When a plane smashes into the ground, what do you do first? You look for the black box and find out what went wrong. Not because you’re sadistic, but to learn how to prevent future disasters.

Sure, mourning for a video game brand that isn’t quite dead is probably being too nostalgic and over-dramatic. Although what’s a good video game business soap opera without a healthy dose of drama?

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

Pilgrim in the Microworld, David Sudnow's "pilgrimage to the land of video games" as the New York Times described it in 1983 when the book first released with its ominous eye firing beams of green light (or breakout balls), is available for download as a free PDF through the late author's store.

A trained ethnographer and social psychologist, Sudnow also wrote Ways of the Hand, which chronicles how he learned to improvise jazz on the piano, and Passing on: The Social Organization of Dying.

Pilgrim in the Microworld follows his introduction to Missile Command after watching his son defend its cities from falling ballistic missiles, to his obsession with Breakout that leads him to analyze its mechanics, seek game-playing tips from Atari programmers, and question the "philosophical and social issues raised by video games".

You can read an excerpt from Pilgrim in the Microworld, posted by superannuation, below:

"They were all out of Missile Command, damn it. I’d woken up in the morning with the silhouette of that psychedelectric landscape still etched on my retina. Wouldn’t it be neat if a “city in memory” came up looking a little different, more imperfect than the original, say, with just the essence suggested? That would at least make it appear computers remember sights as we do, rather than as just series of numerical values for each grid point on the screen. Remembering the looks of things, we forget aspects of them in ways we can’t predict in advance, which is to say images live a history within our lives. Computers don’t have that kind of memory. How could they?

Herb had another game called Breakout, which I’d glimpsed some guests play during timeouts from the favored bouts at nuclear defense. Was there a truly worthy video opponent - a Don Juan of Silicon Valley? Who knew, but the salesman said this Breakout thing was a real good game, the TV was sitting in the backseat of the car, and rather than drive around all day looking for missiles, I figured I’d take this one home for starters. How was I to know it would become “my game,” that I’d get so obsessed with it as to live out the next three months of my life almost exclusively within this nineteen-inch microworld, heaven help me."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm hopelessly infatuated with the Meggy Jr., the fully programmable handheld console featuring an 8x8 RGB LED matrix display, but don't have the coding knowhow to actually mess with one, so for now, I'll live through the Meggy Jr. projects of others, though there aren't many.

Orbus Gameworks' Darius Kazemi, who also created a roguelike for the system, posted the above video for MeggySeqSynth, which turns the handheld into a "standalone performance device where you sequence your samples and then improvise over it using the MeggySynth arpeggiator."

The project combines the work of Kazemi's MeggySynth (a proof of concept for a rhythm game idea) and Josh Brandt's step sequencer MeggySeq. The Orbus Gameworks president also posted this clip of Jonathan Mak (Everyday Shooter) trying out MeggySeqSynth:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Four Leaf Studios, a team consisting of community members of popular and oft-maligned imageboard site 4chan, yesterday released an "Act 1 Preview" for its free English "bishoujo-style visual novel", Katawa Shoujo, or Disabled Girls.

As you can surmise from the title, the group took a controversial approach with the project, succinctly describing it as "a cripple dating game". Players take on the role of Hisao Nakai, who suffers a congenital heart defect and is forced to attend a high school in Japan for disabled children, where he'll seek out friends and love.

The game features five main female characters which presumably one can seduce, each with their own storylines and ailments -- cheery and optimistic Emi Ibarazaki is the star of the school's track team with her prosthetic legs; caring and diligent student Lilly Satou has been blind since birth; philosophical and armless Rin Tezuka uses her feet and mouth to paint and complete everyday tasks; strong-willed and manipulative Shizune Hakamichi is the deaf and mute class representative; and reclusive Hanako Ikezawa is disfigured from a fire early in her childhood.

Despite its perverse and contemptible premise, the game so far is well-produced, and you can see the team's talent and earnest in Katawa Shoujo's music samples and opening movie:

The game was birthed from a sketch by Japanese doujin manga artist Raita summarizing the potential dating sim, scanned and posted onto 4chan in early 2007. "For reasons we will never know, someone's genius idea of actually realizing Raita's idea of the game caught on like wildfire and soon suggestions ranging from tender love stories to depraved sex fantasies were running amok in the thread," explains Four Leaf Studios on Katawa Shoujo's site.

"The insane idea of creating an actual original game, based on nothing but a single picture and the sparse ideas Raita had written in the margins titillated the imaginations of [4chan posters] so much that people became truly serious about the fledgling project," the team continues. "Soon, there were development forums and for the next months, ideas and suggestions were flying around, with people trying to flesh out their ideas, drawing sample art, writing sample text, trying to control the chaos of dozens of people arguing and bickering about the direction of the game."

You can see Raita's original concept sketch here (with translated text):

The reactions from those in Japan who noticed the project last year is interesting (machine translated):

"For them you might be one small step For GAIJIN is a major step HENTAI GAIJIN the way it is now only beginning"

"I do not know the nerve of those who think of this plan."

"The foreigners are good."

"Buyer is a would-be criminals, the police must monitor.

Whether you think that police must monitor or that hentai gaijin is only beginning, you can learn more about Katawa Shoujo and download the "Act 1 Preview" from the game's official site.

[Via Sankaku Complex (NSFW)]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

[Although the video game business has definitely been hurt by the recession, our sister Game Developer magazine has just debuted its latest salary survey, and as can be seen, for those still holding jobs, average wage is still edging up. Here's the details.]

Editors at Game Developer magazine, the leading video game industry publication, have released the results of its eighth annual Game Developer Salary Survey, calculating an average American game industry salary in 2008 of $79,000, a 7% increase from 2007’s figure of nearly $74,000.

While the recession is, anecdotally, significantly impacting the amount of jobs available in the U.S., the income of still-employed game industry professionals in 2008 continues to edge up, thanks to increased asking prices for more experienced professionals.

Highlights of specific findings per category for the survey, which is the only major publicly released analysis of salaries in the worldwide video game industry, and is available in further detail in the newly published April 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine, include:

Programming: programmers are the highest paid talent next to high-end businesspeople, with an average annual salary of $85,024. Experience pays in this role, as those with greater than six years of experience earned 26% more than the average annual salary.

Art & Animation: artists – averaging a $69,532 salary, nonetheless, 28% of art directors reported lower salaries than the previous year. But these more experienced, higher status artists also tend to earn at least 35% more than those with less experience and lower title.

Game Design: averaging $67,379, design positions sprouted an average $3,730 over last year. As with many roles, region makes a difference, given that West Coast designers make on average $8,283 or 12% more than the rest of the game designers in the country.

Production: of all the game development disciplines, production – with a salary average overall of $82,905 – is the most welcoming to women, with 21% of the workforce made up of females – more than twice the industry average. The discipline as a whole saw a strong $4,189 bump from last year.

Quality Assurance: testers with less than three years experience make up the largest percentage of this segment – 46%. Quality assurance is the lowest paid of the game development disciplines, averaging $39,571 – almost flat to 2007 – and the majority of Q/A people – 87% - are lesser experienced. The number of female Q/A testers jumped from 6% in 2007 to 14% in 2008.

Audio: sound designers as a group earned 6% more than they did in 2007, up $4,758 on average over last year to $78,167. 74% of audio developers reported that their salaries increased over 2007. Interestingly, 48% of those in the game audio industry have been working there for 6 years or more – more than the 40% for game design, and equal to the 48% for production.

Business & Marketing: the business field as a whole remains the highest compensated group in game development - with an average salary of $102,143 - and also receives the highest amount of additional compensation. However, salaries vary significantly between individual job titles in this section, with experienced VPs and executive managers making the most of any individual section in the entire survey – at $131,085 on average and reporting at least 6 years experience.

An extended version of the “Game Developer Salary Survey” includes much more detailed U.S. regional and growth data for year-over-year results from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, plus international information from Canada and Europe. It will be of particular interest to business and HR professionals in the game industry, and is now available for purchase via the Game Developer Research division.

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

If we can enjoy ourselves with activities like personal fitness and "brain training" presented as games, why not take that same approach to managing our budgets or paying off debts? Ever since I saw Takara Tomy's RPG piggy bank, I've hoped that someone would bring something similar to the U.S., except scaled for adult use.

If having money in your bank account and building a nest egg aren't themselves goals that will motivate you to manage your savings, personal finance site Mint.com is testing a simple game-like feature called “Financial Fitness” with a private beta. The game encourages you to pick up points for completing monthly tasks such as avoiding bank fees and annual challenges like getting a high-yield savings account.

As you earn more points and improve your financial fitness rating, you can earn badges for achievements like keeping a 100% health status for an extended period of time. Also, you'll have the reward of having more money in your pocket or savings.

To develop this feature, Mint studied the reward systems of Wii Fit, World of Warcraft, and Nike Fit, according to a report from technology news site TechCrunch. While it's still a very simple implementation and not a full-fledged finance RPG (Dragon Quest X: Defenders of the Starry Savings For Retirement), perhaps Mint or someone else will expand on this idea in the future.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Showcasing highlights from sister site Gamasutra's Member Blogs, we hand out a lifetime Game Developer magazine subscription for a proposal to reduce some games' reliance on hard numbers, and focus more on true narrative meaning.]

In our weekly Best of Member Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game community who maintain Member Blogs on Gamasutra.

Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals.

Our favorite blog post of the week will earn its author a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra's sister publication, Game Developer magazine. (All magazine recipients outside of the United States or Canada will receive lifetime electronic subscriptions.)

We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines.

This Week's Standout Member Blogs

- The Fall Of Math
(Adam Bishop)

Member Adam Bishop has been thinking aloud about what he feels is an over-reliance of "math" in games. He suggests that instead of focusing on assigning numbers to choices, actions and consequences in games, developers should give true narrative meaning to those aspects, or at least rely more on logic rather than statistics. It's easier said than done, but he says that games like Indigo Prophecy and Braid have achieved this to an extent. Not all commenters on his blog agreed with his thoughts, but the notion is thought-provoking nonetheless.

For his effort, Adam will receive a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine.

- The "Living World" Game
(Bart Stewart)

Between single-player RPGs and MMORPGs, Bart Stewart wants the best of both worlds. In an in-depth blog post, he presents a theoretical single-player/MMO RPG hybrid, and runs down the challenges of designing such a beast. Is such a game plausible or merely a pipe dream?

- Pinball Wiizard
(Dave Beaudoin)

A recent reimagining of The Who's 1973 rock opera Tommy has the titular character playing Wii instead of traditional pinball. Dave Beaudoin objects to the way the recent performance (presumably from Michigan State University's run) portrayed The Who's original masterwork as well as the burgeoning gaming market. There's a lesson to be learned here, he says.

- The Debate Goes On...Are Video Games Art?
(Gary Hutton)

If you're not yet exhausted by the video games as art debate, read Gary Hutton's blog entry, presumably spurred by Gamasutra feature editor Christian Nutt's recent opinion piece. Hutton claims the question at hand should be "Are Video Games Art Yet?" As with more established, widely accepted art forms, creators' contributions to the medium will eventually reach a critical mass where video games' "artfulness" cannot be denied.

- World of Warcraft Audio Analysis: A Critique
(John Mawhorter)

An interesting academic analysis of the game audio in World of Warcraft led to this response by John Mawhorter, who finds a few standout problems with the analysis. Mawhorter's critique draws attention to the sometimes overlooked world of game audio, and how well-done auditory signals can improve gameplay, serving more than superficial aural ambience.

- Plus, Richard Cody says $5 is pushing the barrier price-wise for iPhone Apps.

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

As part of a fanart competition held last October for Anna "Auntie Pixelante" Anthropy's Mighty Bomb Jack-inspired, BDSM-tinged platformer Mighty Jill Off, artist and animator James Harvey gave away five handmade activity books as prizes.

The books invite their owners to take part in a variety of creative tasks, like drawing in make-out partners for a group of repulsive, tongue-waggling oafs, or writing a poem for Mighty Jill Off's dom Queen.

Harvey has scanned and posted online pages from the activity book, encouraging others to send in their filled out pages (NSFW) as part of an Activity Week on his personal blog. You can see a couple pages from the books below:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Lingua Franca' is a new biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Daniel Johnson which discusses the relationship between language, culture and video games.]

Piggy backing off the recent discussion surrounding Resident Evil 5 and the cultural liability of game developers or how the games industry breeds a “boys club” culture? No, I wouldn't be so brash. Culture has always been an integral influencer of game development and consumption.

As this introductory guide will attempt to explain, culture is a difficult to define, powerful force which has become ever more important as video games begin to touch deeper themes, wider markets and an audience which is more culturally adept.

What is Culture?

Culture is one of those tricky concepts generalized by many, yet clearly defined by none. There's simple reason behind the ambiguity, being that even when given a clear definition the concept is still terribly icky since it manifests as a agent that influences the greater part of our thinking. Culture affects the way we interpret the world and everything within that interpretation, hence it's difficult to separate culture from the mess of surrounding issues, so admitting generalization is almost compulsory when dealing with the matter.

Delving into the complexities of cultural definition are completely un-worthwhile (and hardly entertaining) for you the reader. It's an endless rabbit hole of confusion. Instead let's adopt the mantra that culture should be understood as a very open term, with the generally accepted definition being: “the way of life of a people”. These people could be connected by geography (country), interest (fan) or anything else that binds them together.

Why Culture and Games?

Culture is becoming increasingly more important in the modern era due to globalisation, multiculturalism and bilingualism. Businesses now operate on a worldwide scale, adapting their products and services to fit multiple cultural demographs. International communities reside in all corners of the earth, be it the Spanish speaking community of San Fransisco, Australian expatriates in the UK or mainland Chinese doing business in the bordering countries of South East Asia.

With the mixing of cultures, new hybridized identities have emerged such as the American-born Chinese, African-English (accented with the UK vernacular) and so on. Amongst all of this, second language acquisition and multilingualism is becoming a powerful asset in the contemporary modern world which demands greater cultural and linguistic sophistication.

Video games, much like anything else caught in this sphere is unavoidably affected by culture, therefore by understanding culture we can better understand how game development, marketing and the games themselves are constantly changing under this phenomena.

Discussion of games in a cultural light has always been slim to non-existent, while at the same time game markets and developers continually become more culturally diversified. It's only been in recent times that this has caught up on us, sparking new awareness on the topic. The realization of potential markets such as China, Korea and Brazil as well as the increase in culturally rich titles including Resident Evil 5, Far Cry 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV are all key contributors here.

How well the listed games portray a (foreign) culture is another matter altogether. Such issues as these raise the inevitable questions among audiences such as “Should developers be held accountable for the cultural messages inferred from their games?”, “What's the difference between selling games to a US, Europe or Australian market?” and “How much do we really know about developing a game for a Chinese, Jamaican or Middle-eastern audience?”. As you can see, now is as good a time as any to invest our thoughts into games and culture.

To bring this point home, I wish to discuss games as influenced by, representative of and a contributor to culture, and then conclude on some light discussion regarding the current cultural landscape.

Game Development as Influenced by Culture

Hopefully I've repeated it enough times already that you'll be aware that culture effects our everyday thinking. Living in a society with rules generated by our culture affects how we ourselves operate in that society. The process of developing video games is then obviously also affected by this culture, while at the same time being an extension into it's own industry culture. Game developers make games that abide by the rules of their culture, fair enough, most of the world lives in pretty humane societies, so the differences are mostly going to be pretty minor, right? True, but while subtle, they're hardly negligible.

Take the Metal Gear series as an example. The Metal Gear series was developed by a Japanese studio, whose influence can be seen throughout. For example, the series features a rather multicultural cast of characters with American, European, Russian, Chinese, African and Inuit backgrounds – an interesting fruit salad of ethnicities, all at the mercy of the Japanese interpretation of these cultures.

The way these ethnicities are represented in game are therefore very telling of the cultural angle in bias (be it positive, negative or otherwise). If you look hard enough the results are clearly apparent, cautious of spoilers, you can find some musings regarding the portrayal of the Chinese identity within the series here.

The cast is just a single concentrated facet of this mammoth series. References to the Hiroshima bomb blast, the way that the US is scrutinized for its role with nuclear weapons and the commentaries on the Cold War are interesting hints of the larger cultural forces at play.

Larger still, the cast, delivery of dialogue and action harkens back to the super-hero-super-villain manga style of story telling, which is particularly Japanese. From these minor observations we can draw powerful insights into the game and use them to better understand the title as well as its development.

The other, more home grown way that culture affects industry is through the culture of the industry itself. That is, the way of life of game developers clearly affects the game development industry. A standout example immediately jumps straight to mind; Heather Chaplin's GDC talk in which she criticized game development culture as being an adolescent boy's club, attributing this to why the medium isn't taken seriously. Funnily enough, my tutor (previously of RatBag Games) for an elective games course I'm taking, said similar things to our class a few weeks prior.

She asserted that game enthusiasts are the core group of people to enter development and therefore create games that appeal to themselves, hence limiting the progression of the medium. Her frustration on this issue as well as the responses generated from Heather's talk speaks volumes as to the effects that culture has on shifting the development process.

Games Representing Culture

Video games are a largely untapped, powerful medium of expression. Culture is an ingrown element of any form of story telling and is only more prevalent in a medium whose core quality is interactivity. The actions and reactions of people is what defines their culture, in a game world they're also features of the game's story telling, hence developing a video game narrative is developing a culture. Story within an interactive experience can be told in various, perhaps limitless ways and forms, with culture underlying every one of them.

It's arguably a faddish fashion statement nowadays for games attempting to be more engaging to set themselves in non-western contexts. In a way it's the always reliable crutch to make a game more culturally deep, well at least on the surface. Popular settings include Africa (Far Cry 2, Resident Evil 5), the Middle-East (Six Days In Fallujah, 50 Cent Blood on the Sand), Chinatown (Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars), Shanghai (Army of Two sequel) and Okinawa, Japan (Yakuza 3).

Locations have a story of their own, and are an easy way for games to convey culture, it's what you see, there's the culture, right in front of you! Culture as environment can be meaningful, but is far too often used primarily for aesthetic reasons, rather than stirring about deep cultural themes.

I personally adore The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for it's incredible portrayal of societal cultural rifts. The Zelda series features three reoccurring fictional races, being the mountain-dwelling, laid-back Gorons, the fish-like Zoras and the exotic, tribal Dekus. These races share similar personal qualities to real life ethnicities, but visually are representative of animals or nature. In previous Zelda titles, Link (protagonist) has always been an outsider to these races.

The mask system in Majora's Mask allows the player to take the physical mold of these three main races, and see the world through the eyes of each. You as the player are now accepted into the membership groups of these cultures, they no longer view you as a foreigner, but as an insider and their actions change accordingly. Take off the mask, and the world reacts to you differently.

As an insider, the game places you in the role of a cultural observer who can bear witness to backstage operations of each civilization as well as par-taking in their practices. The game particularly emphasizes the way these societies rely on the natural environment (which present the game's conflict), and how each race interconnect through the economy of Clock Town.

The mask system is an entrance way into experiencing these three different identities from a perspective that had never before been allowed by the series. The metaphoric depiction of this reality of cultures co-existing in the same space is one of the reasons why Majora's Mask had garnered such a strong individual following within the franchise; it gave the thematic a cold edge of realism.

These two examples of landscapes and identity representation as portrayal of culture are only two techniques in which video game can express culture. There are of course, other ways such as through characters, relationships and cultural symbols. The potential here is boundless.

Games as a Contributor to Culture

Video games also act as their own culture - that's us! The people that play video games are a society in themselves that through interactions within this society craft a culture of their own. Through our social transmission we emit a series of norms, specialized language and behaviour that define the role of the game player. The same is true of any specialized membership group, we are as such a sub-culture. L33t speak, the significance of “All your base are belong to us”, NeoGAF, Metroidvania are all examples of products of our culture.

The gaming sub-culture also feeds itself back into the larger cultural realm. The cultural products and symbols to come out of games culture in turn influence popular culture (and many other facets of different cultures). Pixel art, chip tunes, Machinma, classic iconography (the original Mario sprite, for instance) are all widely known products of gaming culture, spread through popular culture and in turn affecting the state of that culture.

The General Scenario of Culture and Games

Contemporary video games appear to be largely polarized between Japanese and American cultures. These two countries are the cultural powerhouses of this industry as both play the two most significant roles in game production. In recent years the industry has gravitated more towards Americanized games, due to the increase in quality of American developed games, and the decline in Japanese development.

The result of this shift has prompted many countries to Americanize their titles to suit this widening, more culturally dominant market. Previously, after the video game crash of 83, Japanese games controlled the industry. The tide has slowly been turning in favour of western developed titles, to a point where nowadays players are being brought up with the mindset that most of the world's best games are American produced, rather than coming exclusively from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Unlike other industries such as film, the youthful games industry is yet to establish a strong presence of country/culture specific games. That is besides American and Japanese games, most countries don't hold a significant reputation for their own blend or style of video game. It may sound gloomy but smaller cultural niches are healthy in their own right, they just haven't fully grown into their own, nor have the audience even began to adopt the mindset that each culture can produce their own distinct variety of electronic entertainment.

The cultural ethos in Fable 2 is a good example of a European atmosphere present in the games industry. Korean and Chinese games are an industry of their own, the large part of this almost wholly separated from the Western world, but a booming industry nonetheless. Just recently it was announced that India were going to receive a small bounty of Indian exclusive PS2 titles.

So while on a surface level, games may appear predominately American or Japanese, there's no doubt that this medium is also thriving from cultural diversity. In addition to these more apparent examples, there is much cultural subtly waiting to be unearthed. How does a French development team handle a game set during the Renaissance? How is language used differently in games made by developers from a bilingual country such as Canada in contrast to a monolingual country like the United States? These are all tiny nuances that affect the greater schematic, less obvious than the Far Cry or Fable examples.

The coming out party for games and culture hasn't started yet, and it'll no doubt be a long time coming, but it's nice to see some diversity from different corners of the medium. Monetary requirements is also a matter of concern, choking any further cultural diversity. Still, I find the current situation to be an adequate step in the evolution in this medium.

Conclusion

Unfortunately I can only begin to scratch the surface of this important issue within the constraints of this post. From what's been said though, you can see by the various arguments raised that culture is actually a pretty important issue worth discussing. Sure, the issue is messy and difficult to quantify, but the proof is in the pudding as highlighted; games are producers, representers and receivers of culture.

We'll only continue to see video games becoming more characteristic of their cultural origins. This is an entertainment medium after all, cultures shape markets, markets have tastes, tastes ought to be fulfilled, developer's need to meet the demands of their market, market is shaped by culture. We're a medium becoming more sophisticated, it's only a matter of time before the culture catches up to us for good. I hope this article has set the basic premise for you, I'll begin to chip away at this enormous issue in the following weeks, I do hope you'll join me.

[Daniel Johnson studies language and culture, and spends too many late nights conversing Mandarin to friends in Shanghai. He shares most of his video game musings on his blog at danielprimed.com]

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

Steparu, which covers foreign online games, put up a curious review of Nexon's odd MMORPG Husky Express. Created by Mabinogi-developer DevCat Studios, the game doesn't feature player versus player combat or even enemy mobs to grind against -- instead, Husky Express focuses on nurturing your dog-sledding team and making deliveries to different outposts.

The game, however, includes other traditional genre elements, like story quests, equipment upgrades, and resource farming. It also implements cool ideas like reselling items you've bought from NPC stores to nearby towns for extra profit (which isn't common in most MMORPGs), the importance of weather when planning your travels and deliveries, and the special abilities of the higher level dogs -- some can smell goods to determine the quality of products, and others have a leadership instinct that will enable your pack to jump crevices and cliffs.

You can watch a trailer for the game after the break, and see more videos on Steparu's review:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Adventure 2600 Reboot recreates Atari's genre-defining 1979 classic with "16-bit-like" graphics, new sound effects and music, a more convenient front end, and more. The unauthorized remake also tracks players' best time for each difficulty, challenging players to complete quests with the lowest time score and adding an element of replayability.

William Stiernberg and a team that came together and organized their efforts on the Penny Arcade forums released the game for PCs earlier this week. We talked with Stiernberg about some of his design decisions for Adventure 2600 Reboot, including his changes to some of the game's pivotal elements, as well the advantages he sees in the original's simple graphics.

What's your game development background? Have you put out any other previous projects?

William Stiernberg: I don't have an extensive game development background, really. My first experience with programming at all was when I was in middle school, and I taught myself Q-Basic so that I could program some simple text based games. Later on, I would learn how to make custom levels and art for games as mods, although I rarely did any mod programming.

Eventually I sought out several projects over time, offering to do the artwork, because that's what I enjoy the most. Unfortunately, nearly every project I created artwork for fell apart before it could be completed. This is part of the reason I was so determined to bring this game to completion -- after so many projects that fell apart in the past, it kind of fueled my determination to see this one through to the end.

What tools did you and your team use for the project and asset creation?

WS: The Overworld artwork was created through two programs, Mappy and PhotoShop. 16x16 tiles were created in PhotoShop, and then the freeware app called Mappy was used to arrange and low down the tiles to create the overworld areas. I also used PhotoShop for the HUD and some spritework as well.

The Sound effects were done with Audacity, the freeware audio editor. I believe Delphinus also used Audacity to create the Ambient audio tracks. Khavall is a talented music student, and he has a variety of tools available to him at his university to compose and produce the soundtrack to the game, including Pro Tools.

What sort of history do you have with Adventure?

WS: Before I started, I had very little history with Adventure. Everyone knows about Warren Robinett's Easter Egg, and that was the extent of my knowledge until Halkun made the [Penny Arcade forums] thread about it back in August. So, I started reading and learning about the game, and became really interested in it. It's a classic, and many people have fond memories and nostalgia for the game.

After reading Halkun's thread, it seemed like a really great idea for a remake project. More importantly, it seemed possible. Most game projects wind up never getting finished because the project design is far too ambitious. With a remake of a classic Atari 2600 game, not only did it seem feasible to me that a small team of people could accomplish such a project, but all of the game concepts and design were already there.

So, I offered to help Halkun make the art, and he was going to do the coding from scratch. After doing a good amount of artwork, I decided to buy the Atari Anthology for the PS2, which includes the original Adventure. I wanted to get to know the source material better when doing artwork, but later on, I had to play it extensively so that I could code the remake properly. At this point, I know almost everything about Adventure 2600 that there is to know.

How long did you work on the project?

WS: Halkun announced the idea in the Penny Arcade [Games and Technology] forum on August 28, 2008. After reading about the project, I offered to make a few preliminary designs for the Castle artwork a few days later in September. So if the first day I did anything for this project was September 3, 2008, and the release date was April 27, 2009 at midnight, I have personally been involved with the project for seven months. And that's not including the time Halkun spent doing code and making sprites before he created the initial thread.

Why did you decide to recreate its look with "16-bit like" graphics (as opposed to say, "8-bit" or in 3D)?

WS: The original idea was to port the gameplay to modern PCs directly, and then apply 16-bit graphics to it. I personally feel that 16-bit presentation is a good middle ground because it gives you a lot of freedom with color and detail, but it still feels appropriate for the older gameplay.

How the sound is different from the original?

WS: Well, basically, the original game had almost no sound at all. There was no music and there were only some basic beeps/bloops when the Hero collided with an item, dragon, or bat. In the remake, we decided to retain some beeps/bloops for when the Hero acquires items or loses them to the Bat, but we updated the sounds of the Dragon.

Of course, the most noticeable difference in audio is the fact that we added ambient audio and music for the game. Delphinus created some great, high quality, mood-setting ambience for each area, and Khavall composed excellent "16-bit" sounding themes. The audio really brings the game to life when you're playing through it.

What other games did you look to or were inspired by when deciding on the remake's visual direction?

WS: Mostly 16-bit RPGs and action/adventure games. I drew a lot of inspiration from the 16-bit Final Fantasy games, and I also drew a lot of inspiration from Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. There were others that I took for inspiration for various areas, but most of the art direction came from 16-bit Final Fantasy and Zelda.

Can you talk about some of the changes you've made with the Bat and why you altered its behavior?

WS: The Bat represents the biggest gameplay change from the original. It's one of the things that Purists will probably notice first (and slam me for!), and I would have liked to make the bat more accurate to the original.

Basically, while the bat is on-screen, he essentially acts the same as he does in the original. The changes came in when I had to decide how to implement the bat across the overworld. I didn't straight port any code for this remake, and I only had certain resources to work with. So, I observed how the bat worked in the original game, and took some data, and implemented the new Bat as best I could.

He differs in that once he steals an item, he quickly moves and drops it to another area of the overworld, rather than hanging onto it for a long period of time. Secondly, you cannot chase the bat to subsequent screens. The downside is that once the Bat steals your item, you're going to have to track it down. The upside is that you can evade the bat by escaping to subsequent screens before he steals your item; and, if he has stolen one, you don't have to wait for him to drop it. But you'll still have to find it.

You encounter the bat roughly the same number of times on average during normal play as you would in the original, statistically speaking. I figured that this was an acceptable trade-off and that the gameplay remains largely the same despite these changes. It's the best I could do with what I had to work with.

You've been very open with the remake's development, sharing your changes and ideas on the Penny Arcade forums during the process. What role did the community have in the game's development?

WS: The community played a huge role in the game's development. Can't emphasize that enough. Ever since the beginning. It started when I was only doing art. Basically, I would create some art for an area, and post a screenshot. The community would have all kinds of suggestions about how to make it look better or suggest some tweaks to make it more interesting. Other times, I would just flat out ask for suggestions about how to liven up a scene, and I got tons of great responses that I added in.

The artwork of the game came out much, much better as a result. When it came to doing code, I would try to stick to the original, but I would constantly have questions from the fans about nuances of the gameplay, and the community ways always eager to clarify aspects of the original game so that I could make the Remake better.

And then towards the end, I took suggestions from the community about ways to add bonuses and replay value, and so I implemented a couple of those ideas that I could. Ultimately, getting input and making changes due to community feedback really helped flesh out this game in nearly every way, and I appreciate the suggestions and insight that I received throughout the project.

Were there any changes you'd wanted to make but backed off because it'd detract too much from the original?

WS: Yes. When I started with artwork, I wanted to put all kinds of things into each area to give liven it up. I wanted to put more pillars and suits of armor and all kinds of things into the Castles, for example. But ultimately I backed off on that some for the sake of staying a little closer to the original, for which the Castle throne rooms amounted to big empty squares.

I also changed how the Hero places the Bridge; but I received a lot of feedback from the community in favor of having the Bridge be the one item that controlled like the original game. So, I compromised by putting in an option called "Classic Bridge," which can be enabled or disabled. There were other instances, but ultimately I wanted the gameplay to remain largely the same, but alter enough to smooth out the experience.

Do you see any advantages that the original, with its simplified graphics and minimal soundtrack, might have over your remake?

WS: As far as graphics, having simplified artwork allowed the game to have physically impossible maze layouts, and few people would ever notice. With 16-bit graphics, you can recognize unique screens easily, and so when you travel through a maze, you notice pretty quickly when things fit together in a physically impossible manner, and that might throw some people off.

Secondly, some people kind of like how utterly simple graphics leave a lot to the imagination. Also, I'd say it's actually a little easier to see items and dragons against a plain single color background than a full color 16 bit backdrop. So, if you lose an item in-game, it's easier to spot when you're running around trying to retrieve it, since items stand out so starkly against the solid grey background of the original game.

Finally, I guess you might say that lack of graphics and soundtrack in the original kept its filesize down -- unfortunately I couldn't get my remake installer down to less than 65 megabytes!

Any plans for your next project?

WS: No plans yet! I'll be doing something, though. I want to do another game with an element of "randomness," like the Quest 3 of Adventure. The reason is that when you can introduce a well-implemented random element to gameplay, it can greatly increase replay value and player interest in the game, because it's a new experience every time you play. That's something I really appreciate about Adventure 2600, and it's something I want to incorporate in my next project.

If I don't end up doing that, I'll probably seek out another great Atari 2600 game or maybe an old-8 bit or arcade game and remake it in a similar way. I don't have any in mind yet. Part of the reason I was able to take this project to completion was by avoiding the trap of thinking too much about what I would do next; rather, my focus the whole time has been to finish this first, then start thinking about the next project.

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

Textfiles.com's Jason Scott presented an engaging lecture earlier this month at Cleveland demoscene event Blockparty 3 (which he co-organize), beginning the session with an explanation of "platform studies," a growing field of study that examines the context in which games were released.

"It is extremely hard to understand software unless you understand the platform that the software came from," Scott argues. "If you have an emulator, you get a certain amount of knowledge from that game -- often it's rules, how it sort of looks -- but you miss out on other things. and you especially miss out if you don't understand the context in which that game was created."

He uses that as a jump-off point to talk about the history of the Nintendo 64 platform and to take attendees through Super Mario 64, sharing what lessons modern game designers can learn from the seminal 13-year-old game. "There’s a ton to be learned from this game, and the Mario series has really given us a lot to learn from, even if not everyone can get their heads around the idea."

He adds, "We're currently in a very interesting wave of the last five or six years towards nostalgia for these games. But I think way too many times ... we look at them merely as works of art, background dressing, or interesting nostalgic icons to point and go, 'Super Mario! Cool!' and move on without really understanding why Super Mario stayed where he is."

If you have trouble viewing the hour-long embedded video, you can also watch it or download it at the Internet Archive.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[In this Gamasutra opinion piece, designer and Divide by Zero Games founder James Portnow looks at the definitional divides between casual and 'hardcore' gaming, asking whether there's a market gap for core games with casual-style mechanics.]

To date the ‘casual’ market has targeted the ‘casual’ gamer -- but the question arises: "Do the ‘hardcore’ need casual games as well?"

Y’all know I get uppity about definitions, but here’s one term really does need some defining: "Casual Game". Who knows what "Casual Game" means these days? Unfortunately, I’m not really qualified to make a sweeping definition of "Casual Games"(I know there are some guys at PopCap that have put a lot of thought into this, and I encourage them to share those thoughts with the rest of us!) but I’ll give you a little bit of the reasoning that led me to pen this.

This year, Braid won the Interactive Achievement Award for best casual game -- but by the definition I’ve been running with, it’s not a casual game. So I started looking at media use of the phrase "casual games." It’s all over the place, but I’ve really only seen one constant: at this point, casual games are defined in the popular media as "non-violent games," and we’ve begun to adopt this definition.

For the game designer, and for the industry as a whole, I believe this definition to be counterproductive. Non-violent games are great, and they deserve a lot more discussion then they currently get, but to me, "casual" is a play style, and "non-violent" is a descriptor of one aspect of a game’s creative IP.

As a designer, having a definition for "casual" that helps me better understand the gameplay needs of the player I’m addressing is much more useful.

On that note, trying to justify an exacting definition of a casual game could take up a whole article, but for the sake of argument, let’s define a casual game as:

1. A game that can be played in short sessions (10 minutes or less)

2. Lacks finality (there’s no definitive point when you’ve finished the game)

3. Replayable ad nauseam

What does this definition mean? It means that casual gameplay doesn’t just have to appeal to the “casual gamer" i.e. your mom -- after all, let’s be realistic. That’s what most of us think when we think of “casual gamer”, demonstrating that, at this point, that term clearly needs redefinition, too.

Let’s examine some of the games that fall under that definition: Bejeweled, Tetris, Peggle, Solitaire, Trism, Cooking Mama -- But that’s the list we expected. Now let’s dig a little deeper.

The following games also fit this definition of Casual: Galaga, Missile Command, iDracula, Tower Defense, Robotron, Everyday Shooter, Geometry Wars.

Note that half of the games on that list are old arcade games. I postulate that there is a market hole here. "Casual Gamers" aren’t the only ones without time; many hardcore gamers (especially as we, as a group, grow older and have greater responsibilities) are looking for short session experiences.

So why hasn’t this hole been addressed? Because from the death of the arcade to the end of the PS2 era. it was practically impossible to do economically. If we look at casual games as they exist right now, they’ve come to a stable price point capping at around ten dollars -- making production of such titles largely unviable in a brick-and-mortar, box product environment.

The popularization of digital distribution (Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, WiiWare, Steam, &c.) and its ubiquity across all consoles changed all this. If you look at the best-selling games on most of those platforms, you’ll find a number of games that are considered casual under the definition given.

Another factor that has contributed to the viability of this type of title recently is the pervasive nature of handheld devices today. Be it the hundred million-selling Nintendo DS or the fact that every cellphone in the world can now run at least simple games, much more of the population now possesses a device which allows them to play games when they can’t be doing anything else.

It’s the Laundromat principle. Every Laundromat in the United States used to be equipped with one or two arcade games. Why? Because they knew that if people had nothing to do and had the means to do so (in their case, readily-available quarters) they would pay to play games.

So how do we craft great casual games for the hardcore player? Well, that’s a science to be re-learnt. So far we’ve turned to old arcade games for inspiration, and the old arcade games are certainly a good place to turn. Back then, games of this nature were created out of necessity. Replayabilty was vital not only from a technical perspective, but from a financial one as well.

Beyond that, my analysis is: limited but simple mechanics that require a great deal to master seem to be the key to making casual games for the hardcore (this may seem obvious, but it’s all I’ve got).

My purpose here isn’t to teach design principles for games of this nature. I would be a fool to try and do so. My purpose is to achieve a paradigm shift in what we consider "casual". If a person looks at "casual games" from the perspective of what mechanics make up a "casual" game rather than the aesthetics, one immediately sees that there is a vast underserved market segment.

We can confirm this supposition simply by examining the data already provided by the few casual games for a "hardcore" audience and see the market traction they’ve had.

Actually, my purpose is slightly greater than that...

Many of you reading this are better designers than I: it is my hope that reading this brief essay will spark some thought. I speak about casual games for the hardcore because that is what leaps to mind when I begin to think about the term "casual" mechanically (and I see the evidence for the need for such games), but it is my ardent hope that some of you, in thinking about the mechanics of casual games come to leaps that well exceed my own.

[James Portnow is a game designer, formerly of Activision, and now at Divide by Zero Games, where he is also the founder and CCO. He received his master's degree in Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University. He can be contacted at jportnow@gmail.com for comments on this article.]

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

Game designer agj (The Lake) has put out a polished version of his Flash entry for Ludum Dare 14, the 48-hour game development competition that took place three weekends ago. He describes Heart as a "bleak and short 'experience' game", and also put up a postmortem explaining his decisions behind his contest entry.

Though it's a linear title, one which you can finish by holding down the right arrow on your keyboard, its playthroughs are cumulative, offering you more hints at its depressing premise each time you guide your character through the blocky office, struggling to escape the darkness crawling behind you.

Heart's oppressive experience fits the Ludum Dare 14 theme that people voted for: an advancing wall of doom. You can play the 130+ other entries from the competition designed around this idea, as well as read more postmortems for some of the submitted games at the Ludum Dare site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

Midweek is approaching, and with it a mass of new links trawled up at the weekend, and only now being communicated to you, the great unwashed, via the miracle of the RSS feed and the Internets, hurray.

First up is a neat Crispy Gamer piece on character in games, before we move on to trawl through a fun Cory Doctorow editorial in the UK Guardian, some discussion on Free Realms, being rilly, rilly evil in Knights Of The Old Republic, and lots more besides.

For the win:

Crispy Gamer - Feature: Character: The Next Great Gaming Frontier?
'Even in a Game of the Year-quality title like Fallout 3, we're still presented with primary story characters about whom we know virtually nothing, and with whom we have a hard time forming compelling, coherent relationships.'

Cory Doctorow: Game developers find ways to make industry recession-proof | Technology | guardian.co.uk
'The economics of gaming mixes retail psychology, games theory, ethics and legal speculation – and just who's prepared to pay in order to play.'

Cuppytalk: It’s Your World! (Free Realms)
Some interesting non-NDA-ed comment on SOE's Free Realms, This, at least, makes it sound interesting - but can it differentiate from the masses of free-to-play worlds out there, given that its budget (and therefore required player #s) must be on the higher side?

Bastard of the Old Republic Article, Pt.3 - Page 1 // Retro /// Eurogamer
Walker concludes his three-part EG article on being baaad in KOTOR. Good to see EG encouraging some more experimental journalism.

Copperpott's Cabinet of Curiosities.: Indie Games Are Go!
A useful list for the uninformed, yay - via InfiniteLives.

Braid @ Critical Distance
A v.interesting new blog does a giganormous round-up of Braid (tangentially pictured) analysis.

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

VMware's Micah Dowty is working on a neat personal project: porting The Learning Company's logic adventure game Robot Odyssey to the Nintendo DS, possibly with some added touchscreen support. This comes after a month spent playing and reverse engineering the old title, which he says is "one of the games that [he has] the fondest childhood memories of."

For those of you unfamiliar with the 1984 title (released for Apple II, TRS-80, and DOS), it tasks players with finding their way back home from Robotropolis, an underground city full of robots. In order to escape, players have to program their robot helpers to solve puzzles.

Dowty explains the homebrew project:

"Before you ask, this is not a general-purpose DOS emulator for the DS. It's actually a static binary translator which does most of the work in porting a DOS game to the DS, but there's still an awful lot of manual intervention required. I only really developed the translator with Robot Odyssey in mind, so there are sure to be features missing that you'd need in order to use it with other games.

My intent is to turn this into a real port of Robot Odyssey to the DS, not just an emulation. In particular, I'd like to re-do the load/save game UI to support timestamps and thumbnails, and I'd like a soldering mode that makes use of the DS's touchscreen."

Here are a couple shots from the DS port so far:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though never advertised outside of a brief mention in an old Atari marketing tape, Mark of the Mole for the Atari 2600 could have been one of the first music-based video games (if not the first), had it been finished and released.

Developed sometime between 1982 and 1984, the game was based on the Residents' experimental album of the same name, and at least two prototypes were made, an early copy that was given to the band, and a later 75% complete version that former Atari designer Greg Easter lost after he left the company.

Easter explains the game:

"First a line of music plays (one of the songs from the Residents' Mark of the Mole record) - you are a mole with a hammer who travels down into a cave and taps on walls with a hammer. Different parts of the cave make different musical notes, and when you find the next note you need to complete the line of music which was just played.

You are building a song note by note, and you have to remember the tone of the next note you need in order to get it right. Each time you play the caves are different, so you can't just remember where to go. The game actually teaches you what is called 'perfect pitch' in music - the ability to hear notes and know where they are on the staff."

While the game is now lost and perhaps never to be found again, Easter sold off a collection of materials from Mark of the Mole late last year, including sheet music written by the Residents, three polaroids of the game, and a page of programming notes that described how to convert code into musical notes on the Atari 2600.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[In this new opinion piece, BioShock 2 lead level designer Jean-Paul LeBreton looks to the past, present and future of gameplay mechanics, and how designers may use them to adequately reflect true human experience.]

As of 2009, the game industry seems to want two fairly contradictory¹ things:

- Make games, using proven mechanics from the last 20 years, that sell millions of copies.
- Give people a broad range of experiences that affect them as powerfully as those found in other forms of art.

Let's link to two visual aids to help with this:

- The Onion: Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face
- God Of War: Chains Of Olympus in-game video (Ignore the kid yammering over the video, until about 1:10 in, for the quicktime event sequence.².)

We can debate whether encompassing a broader range of human experience is indeed a goal of importance, but if even a God of War game feels the need to have scenes that evoke strong emotions, you might at least concede that it’s something many developers seem interested in furthering.

To cut right to the heart of the conflict I see here, I don’t think we as developers can continue holding our breath and waiting for games that revolve around shooting, driving, running and jumping to someday make a great leap into expressing all kinds of things they were heretofore incapable of.

The problem is that the better versed you are in game conventions, the easier it is to separate the core mechanics of a game from its fiction and theme, and thus say that a game like BioShock is a meditation on free will, the dangers of ideological extremes, and whatever else… despite the fact that you spend about 90 percent of it shooting people in the face.

The world can see this disparity more clearly, ironically by virtue of being less game-literate. For many among the gaming literate, that sort of insight hits pretty close to home.

For a perspective from the other end, I was struck by this comment on io9, a non-gamer blog, from this post about BioShock 2:

"I can see how a first-person shooter would be interesting and entertaining, but I would have to fall short of “compelling” when you have to spend that much time, er, shooting."

This person wasn’t being an unreasonable jerk, or advocating the censorship of games. Shooting lots of insane people in a dark, weird place probably just isn’t their idea of a good time.

The common response to this from developers has been things like, “We just need to hire better writers”, “We need better technology”, “We need better artists”, “We need to spend more time planning out our stories”. However, we’ve been doing this for more than 10 years.

Whereas if you look at the points where this medium has made the most progress, whenever the expressive capabilities of games have expanded significantly, it’s actually been because new mechanics, or significant developments upon existing ones³, have emerged that enable new aesthetics. Those other things are quite important, but we seem to have them covered.

One problem is that, deep down, many designers view game mechanics more as structure (or “form”, if you prefer) than as content, when in fact they are both. If you treat them exclusively as structure when designing, you get all manner of unintended message and context… in a nutshell, ludonarrative dissonance. Which in 2009 means mashing the circle button to overcome an emotional inner conflict.

Another designer’s analysis accepts this completely at face value, which if anything demonstrates that this issue transcends our usual valuations of craft and art. It’s almost invisible to us, but quite apparent to outsiders.

So as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp - which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way.

I’m optimistic though, both because of the progress we’ve made in the first three decades or so of our medium, and because the solutions are right under our noses, deep in the fabric of all games. We must search out, and in some cases rediscover, core mechanics that engender new types of experiences - rediscover, because many have already been done at the fringes, promising yet underexplored. Here are some examples I find especially interesting:

Victory via Self-Enrichment: Culture in Civilization
Sometimes you can triumph over an adversary simply by being better than them. Rivals come to view your achievements as an example to be followed. Each accomplishment that enriches you internally affords you expansion and encroachment via indirect force. Tend to your own garden and you will become powerful and influential without firing a shot.

Social Reasoning: Diplomacy
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Many wargames have a diplomacy component, which gets especially interesting when other humans are in the mix. However in a game where direct force isn’t possible, social standing would be its own capital. This is a large part of why character-driven TV shows are popular; humans enjoy exploring the workings and permutation spaces of social networks.

Hopefully this gives an idea of the breadth of directions available to us as designers. It’s equally fruitful to look to the past, at how certain ideas bubbled up from nowhere to expand the expressive range of games.

Circa 1997, before Thief and Metal Gear Solid, Stealth was one of those underexplored mechanics. Suddenly, as it caught on, there were new play sensations we’d never had before - being some combination of sneaky, clever, afraid, transgressive. It transformed players’ perspectives on familiar game environments. It even brought some new people into the medium.

These are basic changes that everyone feels deeply, from a jaded critic to someone completely new to games. They are interactively “true” in ways that a change in setting can only rarely be, no matter how beautifully realized.

As a medium, we’ve proven we can seek out novel settings, themes, art styles, characters and tropes. We have other media to learn from, after all. New mechanics, however, are uniquely difficult.

The only inspiration we can find for them is human experience itself, and then comes the struggle of synthesizing, systematizing and iterating. This is the central challenge of working in this medium, and it’s never been more important that we embrace it.

[2] I want to make it clear that I’m not disparaging GoW:CoO, or speaking in any sense other than constructive criticism. I haven’t played it; in all likelihood it’s a great action game. I’m simply holding it up as an unwitting example of a much more existential crisis in game design today, much as other designers have held up stuff I’ve worked on in a similar light.

[3] Movement is something that gets re-discovered every so often; Mirror’s Edge being the recent example. Flaws in execution aside, players recognized there was something unique there.

[Jean-Paul LeBreton is lead level designer at BioShock 2 developer 2K Marin.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Cortez " Ferno" Almanza released The Console Wars, a series of beat tapes collecting instrumentals from artists like Darkseid (presumably not the actual DC Comics villain) and Stir Crazy who've remixed memorable video game songs into bass-heavy rap tracks. While they're not the sort of productions you'd hold up against J Dilla or El-P's catalogs, I wouldn't mind if they popped up in iTunes during a random shuffle listen either.

BLU LYC's "Welcome to tha Doom", a track mixing gun blasts with a looped voice sample from Sega's Altered Beast, is surprisingly listenable, more so than Lil' Wayne's flip of the similar "A Milli" beat (which my wife refuses to let me play in the car). Another highlight from the two Console Wars volumes is Chane's "Supa Mario", a laid back tune recalling Super Mario World.

You can download the albums at the following Mediafire links: The Console Wars 1 and The Console Wars 2

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Every week, Gamasutra sums up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by editor in chief Danny Cowan and reviewers Tim Lockridge and Louise Yang.]

This week, FingerGaming details a major upgrade for Metal Gear Solid Touch and reports on the release of 12-year-old Nicholas Weintraut's Moo Cow Fury. Featured reviews for this week cover Flower Garden, Tap of the Dead and Oceanic.

- Review: Flower Garden
"Flower Garden encapsulates the best parts of the simulation genre while avoiding its pitfalls. The daily responsibility aspect of its gameplay made me want to keep coming back to unlock more flowers, and the presentation quality is uniquely charming."

- Metal Gear Solid Touch Gets Major 'Complete Version' Upgrade
"Metal Gear Solid Touch 2.0 features eight all-new missions. One of the new stages features a sniper battle with classic series villain Sniper Wolf, while another pits Metal Gear REX against Metal Gear RAY."

- Free App Roundup, April 18th - 24th Edition
"This week’s free releases include demo editions of Kamikaze Robots and Airport Mania, along with free full versions of Dark Nova and Land of the Lost: Crystal Adventure."

- Review: Tap of the Dead
"Tap of the Dead takes the infamous Typing of the Dead and translates the zombie-filled game to the iPhone. Instead of typing out pseudo-words and practicing your asdf skills, Tap of the Dead has you tapping one of four symbols located on the corners of the screen."

- Top Free Game App Downloads for the Week
"Odasoft's puzzler Catcha Mouse has seen a sharp rise in popularity, and finishes first in today’s free game app charts. The 'Five Finger Fillet' simulator iDare comes in at second place this week, as the recently released strategy title Flood-It! arrives at third."

- Review: Age of Curling
"Age of Curling is well-polished and worthwhile title. If Blackish would push out a more developed audio experience via an update, Age of Curling would be a top-tier sports title -- one that could bring new fans to the sport. As is, however, it's a solid game with a great deal of potential."

- 12-Year-Old Releases Debut iPhone App Moo Cow Fury
"12-year-old Nicholas Weintraut has released his very first iPhone app — the side-scrolling racing game Moo Cow Fury. Weintraut developed the game entirely on his own after spending two weeks studying programming manuals, and additionally created all of the in-game sound and artwork."

- Top-Selling Paid Game Apps for the Week
"iHunt's presence in Apple’s all-time best-selling app chart has boosted the sales numbers of its follow-up title iHunt 3D. The game finishes second in this week's results, finishing just behind reigning champion Flight Control."

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

Super Meat Boy creator Edmund McMillen and programmer Tommy Refenes have big plans for their indie platformer, a PC and WiiWare port of Flash game Meat Boy. Along with the game's new art direction, they expect to include around 100 levels and several multiplayer modes -- co-op, versus, and a four-player party mode.

McMillen revealed earlier this month that he's enlisted 12 independent developers who've donated their characters as unlockables for Super Meat Boy's versus mode, whom players can access by collecting band-aids scattered throughout the game's stages (there may be a PC- or Wii-exclusive unlockable). One of those characters will be Braid's time-tampering protagonist Tim, McMillen disclosed in an interview posted on Wii's Nintendo Channel yesterday.

You can watch the interview, ripped and posted by game weblog GoNintendo, as well as some in-game footage here (the first half of the clip is another Nintendo Channel interview with Ronimo Games about Swords and Soldiers):

Towards the end, Refenes promises with a laugh, "It's just going to be the most epic game ever on WiiWare ... ever, of all games, of all time." I will hold him to that promise!

In other Super Meat Boy news, gaming blogs were up in arms yesterday after catching wind of a Super Meat Boy advertisement McMillen created for the game earlier this month, which you can see here:

He has since replaced the image with a version that doesn't have the Hitler text on the official Super Meat Boy weblog, not commenting on the change, but you can still find the original ad on McMillen's personal site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Continuing a GameSetWatch-exclusive series looking at some of the most interesting alternative games, indie titles and mods out there, Phill Cameron sits down with the folks behind epic Deus Ex mod The Nameless Mod -- to discuss the spectacular fan-created add-on.]

Offtopic Productions are the men and women behind The Nameless Mod, a modification of Ion Storm's cult PC title Deus Ex that was in development for seven years before it was released.

That's crazy long even for a commercial release, so for a small group of what started out as enthusiasts managed to keep it together for so long, you know the end product is going to be something special.

Turns out, it was. TNM has received a good amount of critical praise, and an even more respectable amount of downloads in it's first few weeks, numbering in the tens of thousands. This is no small feat for a modding team, and especially for a game like Deus Ex that's been out for quite so long a time. TNM plays on this, setting itself in a forum based around Deus Ex, to allow for satire and wit to ease the players into the gameworld.

I talked to Jonas Waever, Offtopic Productions' lead man, about how it felt to get the game out, how hard it was to make, and whether he thinks it was all worth it:

For those unaware, what exactly is Off Topic Productions, and what do you do?

Lawrence: Off Topic Productions is a small group of game developers brought together by The Nameless Mod. Strongly influenced by Deus Ex, we’re dedicated to delivering unique, innovative gameplay that allows for an exceptional level of freedom and creative problem solving. The team is made up of individuals scattered throughout six countries and includes these fine gentlemen:

Lawrence: Based in Canada, Lawrence is the producer and general handyman as well as managing the staff recruitment, voice acting department, and public relations.

Jonas: In addition to being Danish, Jonas is the lead designer and has also been functioning as project director for the last several years – he’s had the overall creative responsibility, wrote the story and most of the dialogue and text, designed some of the levels, and has generally been in charge of filling our world with content.

Jason: Based in the UK, our manic modeller man. Jason is the artist responsible for almost all of our 3D assets.

Nick: Nick is American and is one of two exceptionally skilled coders who keep the bits and bytes from staging an uprising.

Shane: Based in Australia, Shane completes the coding tag team and, when not fighting off rabid kangaroos, works furiously to churn out the code to bring our projects to life.

Gelo: Based in the US, Gelo acts as an incredibly astute narrative consultant and sometimes-writer, working with Jonas to knit our worlds into cohesive and believable environments.

Alek: Based in the US, Alek is our lead sound technician and has his paws in everything from sound effects to processing voice-over.

Leo: Our lead musician, Leo is based Chile and works tirelessly to create the music that puts the pièce de résistance in all our environments.

Martin: Based in Denmark, Martin is musketeer number two in our trio of fantastic musicians.

Steve: Based in the UK, Steve rounds out the team of composers.

The Nameless Mod has been in development for seven years, and has finally been released recently. Can you explain quite how relieved you are?

Jonas: Not with words. Perhaps through the medium of interpretive dance, but this doesn’t seem like the time nor the place for that. The greatest relief is that we didn’t let everybody down: Neither the people who’ve been following us since 2002, nor everybody who’s contributed along the way. The latter is especially important to us - all the people on our credits have worked on the game for free, and by releasing, we’ve ensured their contributions were not in vain. That feels very, very good.

Lawrence: It’s a rather odd feeling, actually; lots of relief mixed with some confusion as to what I should now be doing with my time. It’s quite difficult to let go of something that you’ve poured so much work into for such a long period of time, but in the end you just have to kick it out the door and cringe at the thought of all the polish you didn’t have time to add.

With such a long development cycle, and with no money coming from the project itself, how did you keep the team together and working?

Jonas: By tightly balancing business with pleasure. We like to say that for each hour a person spends working on something he or she must do in order for the project to be finished, we had to allow that person to spend 2 or 3 hours on something he or she simply felt like doing. I assume this ratio would be significantly lower if we could’ve paid people, but I still think it’s important to give everybody a measure of creative control in order to maintain their motivation. Unfortunately it also makes the game grow at a frankly ludicrous rate, and at some point you need to stop adding things and focus on finishing the game – thankfully at that point the team had been reduced to the most dedicated members.

Lawrence: Beyond what Jonas mentioned, we also worked very hard to establish a community around the game. To be sure, we did a lot of internal back patting, but nothing beats encouraging words from fans anticipating your work. To that end we put a lot of work into keeping our website updated with interesting news and media to encourage the fans to stick around. We also made an effort to release frequent internal builds. Even if it was just the first map, it’s incredibly encouraging to everyone when you can fire up an installer and see your work in action.

When you began the mod did you have any inkling as to how long it would take you to complete? Were there times when you didn’t think you’d ever release it?

Jonas: Yes, we were fully aware it’d take a year to finish. But then we had to push it another year. And then another. Then we gave up on scheduling for a while and just went with the flow, but eventually we settled on a summer 2007 date. Only, then we had to push it to 2008; and then January, then February, and finally March 2009. I would say that if there’s one thing TNM hasn’t taught us about, it’s scheduling, but actually we’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons about what not to do.

There was never really a time when the core team had no confidence that we’d complete the project. In the beginning we didn’t realize it would take this long, and the further along we got, the more we stood to lose by abandoning the project. There were definitely times when it looked a bit hopeless, but I don’t think we ever faced any challenges that couldn’t be solved by cutting content in the worst case scenario. The closest we came to a crisis was when we realized what a momentous task it was to get our main character’s dialogue recorded. We came very close to releasing the mod without voice-over for the protagonist, but our great friend Jeremiah Costello of T-Recs Studios stepped up and offered to handle it for us.

Lawrence: We had not the faintest idea of the chunk of our lives that TNM would consume when we started out. If we had known, we likely would have laughed at the thought of such a long development cycle and gone out to get PhDs, instead. I have a rather distinct memory of someone telling me a couple of years into the project that we should just give it up as an impossible job. I recall being rather disheartened by the thought of how much work remained to be done, but I don’t believe we’ve ever really seriously considered quitting, or the idea that we would fail to release.

You’ve recently released the first patch for TNM, which fixes a lot of technical issues with the game. Was lack of funding and testers the primary reason for the few hiccups at launch?

Jonas: Lack of testers has been a huge concern. We brought in a lot of people during beta, but only 10 of them were active at all. We were quite taken aback by how many problems our engine additions caused – by and large we’ve stuck to Deus Ex’s engine, but we’ve managed to add a bit of our own native code to e.g. implement ogg music support. Unfortunately the release version of that ogg player has turned out to crash quite a lot for many people, which is a problem our testers never encountered.

It’s no surprise that thousands of players make better testers than 10 volunteers, but this was further compounded by the complicated nature of TNM. We had more possible combinations of plot branches than our testers had time to discover, let alone test. To make sure everything was working before launch, we would’ve needed very thorough and systematic testing, and that’s more than you can ask a bunch of volunteers to do, and more than anybody on the core team could handle considering the pace we were working at just prior to release.

Lawrence: I’m not sure that funding factors in overly much, but it would certainly have made for more motivated testers. We grossly underestimated the story permutations that are possible with the non-linear gameplay we created, and our measly 10 testers just weren’t sufficient to properly tackle it. To be fair, I don’t think we could ever have tested it sufficiently using purely internal testers, the game is simply too large for proper rigorous testing using only the small number of people we could mobilize. However, we’re extremely pleased with how helpful and patient the fans have been as far as reporting, testing, and tolerating the bugs they’ve encountered. With the release of the upcoming 1.0.2 patch we feel that TNM will finally be in the shape we’d have liked it to be at release.

Now that the game is released, do you feel vilified? Was it worth it?

Lawrence: Vilified? Not at all. There have been certain factions of angry internet men (most of whom have yet to actually play the mod) who have unconditionally declared that we must be absolute idiots for spending 7 years on such an odd concept. However, the positive responses have vastly overshadowed the few naysayers. We also realize that with every release, no matter how good, you can never please everyone.

Jonas: It was definitely worth it, this is a fantastic hobby where at the end, you have this product you can look at and see exactly where all your free time has gone for the past several years. It’s also great to get other people’s feedback on our work, positive and negative, as long as they’re being polite about it. We’ve learned an incredible amount of things about game development that we’d love to put to use in the future, so yes: It’s all been worth it.

Did the mod go through several different iterations, or did the vision for TNM stay the same throughout?

Jonas: We estimate that we recreated everything we did during the first 2 or so years because we got better. The plot went through 4 revisions in the first year and was continually tweaked, expanded, and revised. Most of it also simply came about as we experimented with the game and the engine and grew familiar with what we could do – originally we were planning something even more open and free-form than we ended up with, but when we realized how fundamentally the game was built for a completely different type of structure, we reigned ourselves in and adjusted our design.

Even the basic concept of the game evolved a lot over the 7 years as we all grew up with the project and the quality of our work improved. We realized early on that our mod wasn’t going to appeal to a lot of people because it was too exclusive, so we spent a lot of time opening it up to a broader audience. Also, I don’t know if you ever go back and read what you wrote 6-7 years ago, but in my experience that’s a great way to embarrass yourself – I spent a lot of time rewriting old dialogue to be less embarrassing.

While most mods take themselves rather seriously, trying to create something unique with the tools of the game, you’ve chosen instead to satirise Deus Ex by setting your game as a Deus Ex forum. Given that this took you seven years to complete, do you think the fact Deus Ex has drifted from the collective consciousness has hurt people’s enjoyment of the mod?

Jonas: I don’t know if it’s fair to say Deus Ex has drifted from people’s consciousness, in fact it seems a lot of people who never played Deus Ex but heard about it after it achieved status of a classic are using TNM as an excuse to buy Deus Ex and see what all the fuss was/is about. I do think the technological deficiencies of the game is hurting people’s enjoyment of the mod, though – a lot of our problems stem from the fact that Deus Ex runs on a very old engine, and early 3D engines aren’t renowned for holding up very well.

Lawrence: If anything, our association with Deus Ex has been a huge boon. People hear “Deus Ex” and are instantly willing to at least listen to what you’re about. A lot of people have certainly turned up that haven’t played Deus Ex, but they’ve all heard good things and many are picking it up so they can see what all the hype was about and give TNM a go. It’s a great two for one deal!

The humour in the game is often very wry and amusing, and mostly throw away, with comments made by periphery characters. Do you think the humour is necessary to making the game work, or was it just for your own enjoyment?

Jonas: I think the humour is necessary to ease people into the game. It’s a very unusual concept, and people often seem relieved to hear the game isn’t taking itself too seriously. Once we’ve established that we’re capable of self-irony, we slowly tone down the humour in favour of what we think is a reasonably engaging narrative, but in order to get to that part at all, people need to get over the fact that TNM is based on an Internet forum, and I think that’d be a lot harder without the humour.

In terms of our own enjoyment, the humour worked both for and against that. It gave us a lot of freedom to be wildly creative, but it can also be pretty difficult to maintain a consistent tone throughout such a long project. It’s been difficult, but very rewarding.

There’s a colossal amount of voice work in the game. How did you get so much done? Is that’s what’s been delaying the release for so long?

Lawrence: The voice work is certainly one of those things that really bit us in the ass. Being 95% naive and 5% dumb for the first few years of this project, we had no concept of how our massive script would end up translating into ludicrous amounts of work in the acting department. Work on the voice-over began about 2-3 years ago, with most of that first year generating only horrible quality material that sounded similar to a pack of angry cats eating a microphone. In our usual fashion, we simply forged onward and continued trying to locate quality actors. This strategy eventually paid off when the good actors began recommending their equally gifted friends, resulting in a rather pleasant domino effect.

However, the acting department did, in my opinion, result in the largest amount of hair-pulling and head-banging for us. When you’re working with so many unpaid actors (over the Internet, no less) it’s inevitable that many of them will randomly vanish, or take an insane amount of time to actually record their lines. We also discovered that keeping track of thousands and thousands of individual sound files and ensuring that they ended up in the right spots is... challenging.

Despite the rather mammoth nature of the undertaking, we did manage to pull it off to our satisfaction. We utilized our own rather nifty web based tracking system to track the files and eventually just learned how to deal with the occasionally flaky actors. In the end, the voice-over didn’t delay the project, although it was close! In our opinion, the countless hours of work that went into the dialogue were entirely worth it; the extra personality and life it brings to the characters is something we feel brings a lot to the game.

Quite a few of the development team seem to be characters in the game, yet they are not voiced by those they represent. Is it strange seeing yourselves acting within the gameworld?

Lawrence: Fortunately for everyone, I did not voice my own character. At one time we had thought that I would, simply because we were unable to find anyone dedicated enough to voice thousands of lines. Happily, Jeremiah stepped in and did a wonderful job. I did voice a few incidental characters, and the most important thing I learned is that I cannot act. The only character that I really get a kick out of is a crazy cult priest who I was able to use a completely zany voice for; I think he turned out really well and I rather enjoy listening to his inane rants.

Jonas: Many people on the core team have actually recorded their own characters (Nick, Shane, Gelo, our composers, and myself – basically anybody who could get a hold of a good microphone and act well enough to not ruin the game), and let me tell you it’s very weird indeed to hear my own voice coming out of a character in a video game. It’s especially surreal when people log into our IRC channel to tell one of us they’ve knocked out our character and stolen our stuff or blown us up because we were annoying.

TNM is probably one of the most meta games I’ve played. Would you like to explain a bit about what you were trying to accomplish with the mod?

Jonas: Initially, we just wanted to do something we hadn’t seen anybody else do before – a game set in a giant metaphor for an Internet forum seemed like a pretty original idea. As we experimented more with the concept and grew more familiar with our own setting, it became obvious that TNM was ripe with opportunities for intra- and intertextuality and self-reference. There was a period when I was looking for ways to imbue TNM with some sort of cultural relevance, because it felt like we were spiralling down towards self-indulgent irrelevance, and going meta seemed like the best way to realize the potential of our setting. I just hope we managed to pull it off without seeming too smugly pseudo-intellectual.

There’s also the fact that TNM is meta on two different levels: On one level, it’s a Deus Ex mod taking place in a world created entirely around Deus Ex. A lot of plot points in the mod are explicitly motivated in the fact that Deus Ex is the pivot of our setting. On another level, we occasional play around with breaking the fourth wall by having certain characters address the player or muse about the fact that they’re inside a computer game – as opposed to on a forum, which would be well within all four walls. In fact there’s a whole little unlockable subplot about it all being a game, and I think the reason this is interesting is the double-layered self-reference – first we get you used to the idea that you’re controlling a forum avatar, then we make jabs at that by letting on that you’re in a game. But you won’t even find that unless you explore our levels religiously.

Modding communities are often only as healthy as the tools the developer releases with the game. How easy was it to mod Deus Ex? Would you consider modding something more recent in the future?

Jonas: I’ve given a lot of thought to this personally, and I don’t think the difficulty in modding Deus Ex is due to the quality of the SDK or the old technology so much as the ambitions the game fosters. Deus Ex has very complicated core gameplay based around a carefully – and often precariously – balanced mix of FPS, RPG, and stealth gameplay, with a healthy helping of adventure game elements thrown in for good measure. Most people who mod Deus Ex wants to recreate this gameplay and they let their ambitions get out of hand – we’re definitely guilty of that ourselves. You want to create missions that allow the player to make full use of the whole skill set, you want to support exploration, you want elaborate branching dialogue with a real impact on gameplay, and in the end you’re looking at creating a full-fledged game. If people would settle for just making a plain 3-mission action mod, it’d be far easier, but then they wouldn’t be modding Deus Ex in the first place, because there are far better action games with larger and more thriving communities to boot.

As SDK’s go, I don’t think Deus Ex’s is too bad. There are a lot of things we could’ve done better if we’d had access to the engine code, but how many developers allow their fans access to that? I think most of the problems we had were problems Ion Storm Austin also faced during Deus Ex’s development – they had to pull off a lot of hacks because they didn’t have time to rewrite large parts of the engine from scratch, and we had to work with those hacks and add our own on top of that.

Lawrence: Modding Deus Ex had its perks, but it really can’t measure up to the tools and documentation available for newer games like HL2 or Unreal Tournament 3. The Deus Ex modding community is relatively small, which meant that pooling resources to get things done was fairly easy. Of course, with such old tech and no access to any kind of official support, we often found ourselves fumbling around in the dark, using trial and error to figure out what would work, and what would cause everything to explode in our faces.

How popular has TNM been since release? Has it exceeded your expectations or fallen short?

Jonas: I think we set out to get 10,000 downloads during the lifetime of the mod. We’re pretty close to achieving that already. How many times has the mod been downloaded in the first 14 days since release, Larry?

Lawrence: By current estimates, TNM has been downloaded over 6000 times in just a few weeks. In terms of popularity, I think we’ve certainly surpassed our expectations. It’s amazing to see chatter popping up in so many forums all over the Internet, and incredibly gratifying to read all the kind comments from players.

Jonas: Of course as modders, it’s more important that our players like what they get, rather than that we get a lot of downloads. We’ve had a few negative comments here and there, most of it based on the fact that the first release of the game was unstable on some machines, but the response we’ve got has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve even had a few professional games journalists speak very highly of us, which is certainly encouraging. Whether it’s exceeded our expectations... I’d say it’s met them, but I was, perhaps arrogantly, always pretty sure we had something very impressive on our hands.

What are you next planning? Are you planning on making anything commercial?

Jonas: We’d definitely like to take everything we’ve learned making TNM and apply it to a commercial project. In a way, The Nameless Mod has been like a 7 year master class in how to design Deus Ex, and we’re quite eager to see if we can create something as engaging as TNM if we’re not leaning so heavily on a classic, proven design.

The next game will be smaller. We don’t have a lot of art resources, so we’ll probably have to recruit some people. We’re currently trying to work out how we can best leverage our skills and experience from TNM without getting bogged down with another 7 year project or letting the team grow too large.

Lawrence: Jonas covered the key points nicely: smaller, and with a massively better plan/timeline going into it. We’re hoping to take the many lessons learned over the last seven years and kick things into high gear for our next project!

Thanks for your time.

Posted by Phill Cameron at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Taking inspiration from Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, artist Clint Wilson reimagined the eminent painting with Princess Zelda replacing the woman, and lurking creeps and Link's silhouette in the background.

The Triforce over the Hylian's head cover is a bit much, and the earring looks tacky, like something a 'tween would buy at Claire's, but other than those quibbles, it's a neat homage!

The art is available as 24×32 4-color silkscreen prints through online shop Nakatomi, though Wilson only produced 100 signed and numbered copies. There is also a "Gold Cartridge Variant" using all gold metallic ink - only 30 copies of this.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

Further along the GameSetLinks fun and games for the week, and this set of gorgeous RSS-trawling starts out with the diversification of Way Of The Rodent into a piquant weblog - which may have been around for a little bit, but hey, we catch on slow.

Also hanging in here - a discussion on how to curate video games in a museum context, some quixotic rambling, how MMO server farms work, the slight hipster return again, and more.

Time bandits:

World Champion Stances II - the Revenge! | Daily Rodent
The uniquely cheeky, British Way Of The Rodent web-mag has opened a blog now - and it's pretty good fun, as this post (security guards playing NES games) shows.

Versus CluClu Land: Against my Better Judgement, I Discuss Citizen Kane and Maybe Art
'One of the major problems with this discourse is that the are-games-art conversation almost never goes anywhere.'

Patching the Game (Part III) @ Imaginary Cogs
A multi-part series on actually hosting MMOs in data centers - v.interesting. (Via Zen Of Design.)

Vorpal Bunny Ranch: Quixotic Rambling
Freeform thoughts on games, Don Quixote, and more. Uninhibited game discuss is good, abstractly.

The Cure for Hipsters » PixelVixen707
He's already been joshing at me, now the rpgsbebroke guy gets poked at by an ARG product, intriguingly.

Valuable Games » How to curate video games and interactive media?
'The challenge is fitting an interactive and often social medium into the traditionally hands-off and reserved context of most art museums.'

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

Despite its name, Super Ultra Baseball 2 is the fourth entry in the Ultra Baseball series, with the first two games released in the U.S. as Baseball Simulator 1.000 and Super Baseball Simulator 1.000. Translation group VX has put out an English patch that fully translates the 1994 Super Famicom title, also converting metric units to the United States Customary System and correcting minor graphics issues.

The game stands out for its use of ability-boosting power-ups and special moves. Because SUB2 was created without a Nippon Professional Baseball license, it instead features 18 teams spread across three leagues -- Sunny, Paradise, and Ultra. Those actually sound way more fun than the NPB's Central and Pacific leagues.

Developer and publisher Culture Brain intended to release SUB2 in the U.S., but later canceled the localization for unspecified reasons. The studio is still around creating games for the DS, and even recently released Super Choujin Ultra Baseball DS with online support, anime characters, and an NPB license.

[Via RHDN]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Infinite Interactive has released a couple RPG/puzzle hybrids since the unexpected success of Puzzle Quest -- Neopets Puzzle Adventure and Galactrix -- but Puzzle Kingdoms is designed as a return to the Warlords universe that the studio was known for before PQ, with more emphasis on the RPG/puzzle formula's strategy portion.

As with PQ, Puzzle Kingdoms has you matching gems to deal damage and gather mana that can be used for spells against your enemies, except you now command armies instead of a single hero with an ancillary party, and resource management plays a bigger role in deploying your army.

The game is planned for Wii and Nintendo DS, but the PC version is already available online through digital distribution services Direct2Drive and Steam. Though there's no demo, you can preview Puzzle Kingdoms with a short trailer posted on D2D's product page.

"This was news to me too!" said Infinite Interactive head Steve Fawkner, when he found out about the title's availability after fans posted about it on the company's forum. "I thought the PC version was going to be coming out behind the DS and Wii versions."

The game was originally intended for a 2008 holiday release, and was then dated in Nintendo's spring lineup announcement for March 31st. according to Infinite Interactive senior engineer Peter Suwara, the DS version entered the submission process a couple of months ago.

If you haven't heard about Puzzle Kingdoms or its release before, that's likely because its publisher Zoo Games, is relatively smaller than Capcom and D3Publisher of America, who were behind Neopets Puzzle Adventure and Galactrix, respectively. There's surprisingly very little press for this spiritual sequel to Puzzle Quest, especially when you consider the attention Galactrix received when it shipped in February.

Fawkner is currently working on putting up a demo for Puzzle Kingdoms online.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Chewing Pixels' is a semi-regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and Flash game producer, Simon Parkin. Today, a fictionalized account of a real-life tragedy from the heart of Akihabara.]

“IRASSHAIMASE!”

In the fifth minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano allows himself a slight nod at the shop assistant’s near-hysterical greeting. Eyes down, he makes his way to the back of the electronics store, around the stack of dusty peripherals for forgotten music games and idiot train simulators.

In the corner there's a set of crumpled, tragic dance mats, all the bright plastic detritus of a long gone Japanese videogame boom.

In the fourth minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano makes a beeline for the bargain tray, entertainment platter of the student gamer. Clack, clack, clack, he flicks the cases forward in quick succession, making staccato snap decisions as their titles flit past his eyes: no, no, maybe.

Cracked jewel cases holding broken games: the forgotten work of long-gone studios. If their creators could have seen their creations then as they are now, would they have persevered in making them, he wonders? Probably. Everything and everyone ends up on a bargain tray one day or another, right? Doesn't stop us.

In the third minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano’s fingers pause on the second to last jewel case. Tales of Destiny: a middling RPG stacked behind a misfiled two-year-old Idol CD. 200 Yen? With the sidequests he can probably draw it out to sixty hours playtime which works out at, er, nearly 20 minutes per Yen. That has to be the cheapest escapism in all of Tokyo, he congratulates himself.

In the second minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano turns the game in his hands, studying its artwork, tracing the roll of its logo’s serif with his eyes, drawing out the foreplay of the purchase as long as possible.

The boy on the front cover is a pair of blue eyes framed by a blaze of chick yellow hair, a close-up interrupted only by the steel of a long sword held against his cheek. It’s a passable cover, Kenshin Kitano thinks to himself, with the dismissive sneer of an adolescent enthusiast, before turning on his heel and taking his purchase to the counter.

The minute before he is hit by a rental truck, Kenshin Kitano steps out into the Akihabara air, game in his rucksack, a beat of small excitement in his breast. It is a gas mark 3 sort of lunchtime, the June heat intensified by loud fumes and hot noise.

It is Sunday and streams of pedestrians flow against each other along the pavements, wafted along by the barked chatter of aspiration-less middle aged salesmen holding blue megaphones against their lips. Here and there gaijin twirl on the spot, nose in map, salt flecks in a sea of pepper, searching out some obscure hobbyist store or other, no doubt. Too hot. Too many people. Time to go home.

The moment before he is hit by a rented truck, Kenshin Kitano steps out onto the crossing. Five paces in there’s he's hit by a roar, an incredible noise. He looks up into the high-speed, wild but deliberate eyes of its driver. The man is seven years older than he, the truck seven times his size and both are aiming at him. Time slows to one frame a second. Kenshin Kitano feels no thing.

Kenshin Kitano is hit by a rental truck.

In the seventh year before Kenshin Kitano is hit by a rental truck, its driver, Tomohiro Katō, sits at the back of class doodling on the inside of his exercise book. He traces a wide eye with his HB pencil, a flick of the wrist framing it within a shock of hair. His classmate, Emiko Hoshi leans across to get a better look at the doodle. She draws Pokémon in her exercise book. Perhaps this boy does too?

Noting her mild interest in his peripheral vision, Katō lifts his left hand to form a wall, protecting his picture from her view. She mentally shrugs and turns back to face the teacher. Next to the drawing Tomohiro Katō lists some of his favourite things. Videogame: Tales of Destiny. Flower: Rose. Food: Apple. Weather: Blizzard. Word: Destiny.

In the minute after he is hit by a rented van, ghosts hover in Kenshin Kitano’s dark vision, an ebb and flow of shapes in some intangible distance, silhouetted against regular waves of alien red and blue light. More than half of himself is gone already.

The orchestra beneath the silence stills, the silence now bruised only by shapeless words. Kenshin Kitano is unsure if he’s a baby in his cot or a man on his deathbed. He inches his fingers towards where he imagines his rucksack to have fallen: they search blindly for another tale of destiny. Kenshin Kitano’s eyes sink, all becomes chick yellow, he feels the steel of a longsword on his cheek. He feels no thing.

In the week after Kenshin Kitano is hit by a rental truck, Tomohiro Katō’s high-school drawing is shown on Japanese news and printed in tabloid newspapers the world over. The sketch offers a snapshot into the mind of a deranged killer, they say.

The otaku assassin! Likes roses and apples? Irrelevant. Likes RPGs? Now, that there's proof positive of an unhealthy obsession with all of the inscrutable Eastern vices that consume the minds of our young...

In the week after Kenshin Kitano is hit by a rental truck, the Pokémon in Emiko Hoshi’s exercise book rest unseen by the media’s hungry gaze, hibernating forgotten in a sealed cardboard box in her grandparents’ attic.

This column is, in part, a fictionalization of the tragic events that occurred in Akihabara on June 8th, 2008. Kenshin Kitano is a fictional character.

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

"Cheer up, dear friend, or they may come. And take you where the glum is from." Developer CosMind (Justin Leingang) teased gamers with that rhyme at last year's Independent Games Festival, providing little else to describe Glum Buster. He spent the past four years working on the action-adventure title in Game Maker during his spare time, but has for the most part kept quiet about its release.

CosMind contacted us last night, though, to tell us that he has released Glum Buster to PCs for free under a "charityware" scheme that will send money to the Starlight Children’s Foundation, an organization dedicated to "helping seriously ill children and their families cope with their pain, fear and isolation through entertainment, education and family activities."

I won't spoil too much of the game's charm, but Glum Buster features some unique environments and mechanics, and has you controlling a little guy in a raincoat, flying around the screen while using your mouse to shoot light at dark creatures. CosMind described his inspiration for the game in a recent interview with us:

Glum Buster was primarily inspired by the initial play mechanics of the prototype that I built. From there, bizarre as it may sound, it was continually inspired by itself. I was constantly fueled by the development of each component - be it play mechanics and dynamics, graphics, sound effects, functionality, etc.

As a result, inspiration begat inspiration. It was a pretty gratifying reciprocal process, really. Outside of that, the largest inspirations were my constant, thick-as-brick daydreams - I'm pretty much stuck in perpetual daydream - and good ol’ Mama Nature. The decision to make the game stemmed mainly from my desire to learn and work with a new tool set in my free time at home.

You can download the game from CosMind's Glum Buster site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Showcasing highlights from big sister site Gamasutra's Expert Blogs, industry veterans talk about alternatives to the word "game," classic Treasure shoot 'em up love, and Wii's hardcore gaming conundrum.]

In our weekly Best of Expert Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game development community who maintain Expert Blogs on Gamasutra.

Member Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while the invitation-only Expert Blogs are written by development professionals with a wealth of experience to share.

We hope that both sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information about the blogs, check out the official posting guidelines.

This Week's Standout Expert Blogs

How to Replace Levels In MMOs, Part 3
(Brian "Psychochild" Green)

In part three of a series of posts exploring the alternatives to having character levels in MMOs, Brian "Psychochild" Green proposes a system, inspired by Lord of the Rings Online's "deeds," that throws levels out the window completely.

He argues that there are other methods aside from leveling that can give gamers a sense of achievement, solid pacing and relevant information.

Project RS3: I'm No Fanboy, I Just Appreciate Art
(Michael Molinari)

Michael Molinari has already deemed Treasure's Project RS3 "one of the greatest shmups ever created," despite the fact that the top secret game has yet to release.

More than a raving fanboy's soliloquy, he explains why his prediction is probably right, at the same time reflecting on the cult of Treasure -- the company behind Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga, two of the best "shmups" ever to exist.

A New Word for Game
(Tynan Sylvester)

The word "game" is "holding us back." That's according to a blog post by 2K Boston's Tynan Sylvester. Since the days of Pong, Space Invaders and Galaga, the medium has evolved beyond simple packages of action-reaction rules.

Open-ended, virtual worlds of today are a far cry from tabletop games like Hungry Hungry Hippos, but they share the same descriptor. But if we no longer call them "games," what should we call them?

Opinion: Too Much Action and Not Enough Adventure Gameplay
(Reid Kimball)

Reid Kimball says many of today's games rely too heavily on action aspects: acrobatics, combat, taking cover or driving. Meanwhile, developers are missing out on opportunities to explore the narrative possibilities of awkward bathroom encounters...

"Playing to Win" and a Philosophy of Competition in Gaming
(Ian Fisch)

Wii fans have high hopes for the success of the promising Wii-exclusive FPS The Conduit, but recent poor-performing hardcore games on Nintendo's white box aren't exactly confidence builders.

Ian Fisch writes that hardcore gamers, who commonly own a Wii alongside high-powered consoles and PCs, may find little incentive to buy The Conduit, even if the title does push the hardware to the brink. There is room for hardcore success on Wii, but "It just takes the right idea," he says.

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

Now that Jab Strong Fierce -- the Street Fighter tribute exhibition in Alhambra, CA -- is running and will be up until May 11th, the Nucleus gallery has posted all 62 of the pieces from the show online and made them available for purchase.

A lot of the paintings that I previously shared with you have sold since Jab Strong Fierce opened on Saturday, but you can still grab this Dutzy sculpture shown above, titled "Blaunkius, the Protector".

Here are a couple of favorites from the posted paintings that I haven't featured yet:

"Target Practice" by Robert Kondo:

"Untitled" by Rhode Montijo:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Gamasutra's Christian Nutt argues that the road to improving the cultural currency of games lies not in wishing you're making "art", but making small changes to improve products already in development.]

The "games as art" debate is tiring me out. At GDC, after a tiring week, I was at a post-show party. Standing in a circle of developers, the topic arose naturally, as it does.

I didn't catch the name of the guy who spoke up first, but I inwardly sighed as I realized that I was in for another completely naive discussion of the subject. There's nothing wrong with earnestness and naivete; it's just that there's something at least bordering on wrong with not harnessing this intellectual energy and actually turning it into something more meaningful.

Jim Preston, in his Gamasutra essay cheekily entitled "The Arty Party", made light of game developers' pretensions towards art. But he also made a really relevant point that doesn't quite seem to be penetrating:

"The problem with [the idea that there's an art establishment to aspire to] is that it isn't even remotely close to reflecting the state of art in 21st century America. To think that there is a single, generally agreed upon concept of art is to get it precisely backwards. Americans' attitude towards art is profoundly divided, disjointed and confused; and my message to gamers is to simply ignore the "is-it-art?" debate altogether."

Gamasutra columnist Ian Bogost -- explicitly agreeing with Preston -- took this discussion a step further earlier this year by pointing out that in fine art, there are movements and schools, and that's the context in which art can be defined in games; he proposed a school called Proceduralist.

Watch us wildly diverge from what developers generally seem to mean when they bring up the "games as art" thing. That's instructive. It illustrates that the creative impetus to create something worthwhile or more culturally relevant is actually a separate one from the simple concept of creating art -- as it should be.

Shadow of the Colossus and Ico are two of the most reliably cited games when the discussion of games as art looms -- at least when we're talking about games produced by large, professional development studios.

At this year's GDC when director Fumito Ueda was point-blank asked about that, he responded, "My team and I are making a game which is close to art -- that's what people say. Personally I don't think that way. We're making a game to entertain people. Sometimes my personality and my team's might be reflected on the game, and it might look like art, but it is a game to entertain people. That kind of feedback is welcome but it's not what I'm trying to achieve."

Inclusive, Exclusive

Before we abandon from the discussion of what's art and what is not art, it's worth looking at what some incredibly successful creators -- artists? -- have to say about the topic.

More Ueda, from a Guardian interview: "If I was not in the games industry, I would want to become a classical artist. Though I regard not only games but also anything that expresses something -- be it films, novels or manga -- as forms of art." While that seems to contradict what's quoted above, it's interesting to think about what the difference between "forms of art" and "art" is. I think that's kind of where the crux of the argument lies, in a way. It's about the intent of a creative endeavor, versus the outcome.

As Bogost pointed out in his Proceduralist piece, Dada artist "Marcel Duchamp made a urinal into art by putting it in a gallery rather than a restroom." If we put a copy of Postal 2 into a gallery, in other words, it becomes art. That may illustrate the meaninglessness of the question.

Observing the most successful living artist in the world, Damien Hirst, offers up a lot of really fascinating ways to look at this sort of debate through. First, of course, is the news that he is an immense commercializer of his own work.

Said Hirst, in an interview with the Guardian, "There is an attitude that you're not a real artist if you make money, if you're not starving in a garret with holes in your jeans. But me and Warhol and Picasso, we took on the commercial aspect of art. Goya, Rembrandt, Velasquez, all of those guys, they were all thinking about the commercial aspect of their work. It's art first though, money second. I've taken the risk that the art will outshine the money -- I think it will, I hope so."

He would know. He sold a diamond-encrusted skull for £50 million in 2007 -- then approximately $100 million in U.S. dollars. The title of the work is "For the Love of God" -- which may imply it's the pretentiousness of the title, rather than the crassness of the actual item or its inherent commercialization that defines something as art.

Columnist Germaine Greer writes about Hirst's spot paintings: "Hirst is quite frank about what he doesn't do. He doesn't paint his triumphantly vacuous spot paintings -- the best spot paintings by Damien Hirst are those painted by Rachel Howard. His undeniable genius consists in getting people to buy them. Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing." These paintings were mass-produced in his studio by assistants. Few were painted by Hirst. Hundreds of them were sold to collectors.

The most successful living artist is fundamentally concerned with commercializing his works; he creates broadly accessible and obvious products -- like paintings of colored dots, or the frankly banal diamond-encrusted skull -- and we're worrying about if we're producing "art"? It's probably time to let that word go; in 2009, it's more than reached its sell-by date.

This may be why Brian Green, in his essay, attacked from the direction of "legitimacy" than the concept of "art" -- a much more useful distinction.

Incredibly successful author Neil Gaiman isn't a big believer in there being much meaning in the fact that certain works are placed on pedestals and others in wire racks next to the checkout counter.

Writes Gaiman, "I've never been convinced that there's any meaningful division between high culture and pop culture -- I think there's good stuff out there, and there's stuff that's not much good, and that Sturgeon's Law applies to high culture and popular culture: 90% of it will be crap, which means that 10% of it will be amazing."

Of course, proponents of "games as art" will then point out that Neil Gaiman is a pop novelist. At which point I would ask if you the dialogue in your game is as good as the dialogue in Neil Gaiman's comics, and you'd accuse me of being a jerk and say "That's not the point!" and walk away from the discussion. So let's head that one off here -- it is the point.

Finally, What I'm Proposing

Now, if you're Jason Rohrer, or somebody working in a similar space, you can pretty much stop reading. Editorially, though, we tend to assume that most of the readers of Gamasutra work at studios, or at least, on essentially traditional video games. And that's who I'm addressing with this suggestion.

Rather than worrying that you can't turn your licensed kids' platformer or space marine murder simulator into art, think about what you can do to make its creative palate a little bit more expansive; to make its characters and dialogue a little less stupid; to make more concessions to an audience just a smidge wider than your marketing-decreed target.

A while ago I had the idea that making these small but potentially meaningful efforts on products already in the works will have a bigger impact than pining for an opportunity to make some grand gesture down the road somewhere. Fortunately, it didn't take me long to find a developer I knew well who'd already had practical experience doing just that.

But first, a cautionary tale: this isn't always going to be easy. Another developer friend was working on a triple-A game for a major publisher. (The game's canceled now, but he's too busy on his next triple-A game for another major publisher to answer an irritating journalist friend's instant messages, so I can't reveal his identity, the publisher, or the project.)

His (now canceled) game featured an average guy, searching for his wife after a major urban disaster, as its protagonist, alongside an average-looking woman in a supporting role. Word came back from marketing: make the guy beefier and more heroic; make the girl "Hollywood ugly" -- that is, a beautiful woman wearing glasses. The battle was essentially lost. If that happens to you, fight that, please. Do your best.

That said, Double Fine Productions gameplay programmer Anna Kipnis has had some success in this vein, and I think it's one of the most promising stories I've heard in a long while. Brutal Legend may well be tangibly enriched for her efforts, and that means more, in some ways, than another 10 minute art indie on the web.

"My basic point is that devs can have a tremendous impact on the game they're making -- and they shouldn't forget that," says Kipnis. When the game was first pitched internally at the studio, she was a bit worried that the "inclusive" Psychonauts was being supplanted by something with a more narrow appeal.

Working within that context -- the big, cartoony, violent and willfully stupid world of a metal roadie played by Jack Black -- it might seem pointless to make the effort to bring more perspectives to bear. But according to Kipnis, "you have to be very constructive about it, and suggest solutions. So I said that maybe it would be rad to include things that didn't violate the metal setting, but still did something interesting in terms of gender culture."

Like? "Ugly gals, important gal characters, smart gals, sinister gals... because that would be moving away from the stereotypical bikini-clad achetype of metal (and video games)."

"It's really hard to purposely make a game that's going to appeal to women," admits Kipnis, "and isn't a wise undertaking," she adds. But adding unexpectedly rounded characters into an unwelcoming context far from hurts the game.

Working within the context of Brutal Legend rather than trying to change it to something it's not, and working to improve an existing core gamer concept with richer, more complicated characters seems like a lot more practical of road towards improving the medium than most suggestions I've heard. As Kipnis says about Brutal Legend, "I wanted to feel proud of the risks we took with it. I think in order to make progress, you need to catch yourself when you're making 'safe' decisions."

Brutal Legend is -- forgive me, Tim -- unlikely to be the kind of game that proponents of "games as art" look to as an obvious example of one that stretches the medium. But we've just revealed that it's developed in the kind of culture that allows for this subtle growth, the question -- what can developers can do to make games more relevant? -- changes entirely. Do what you can.

In the comments for the article Making Games Art: Designers' Manifesto, the most recent feature article Gamasutra has run on "games as art", Eric Carr had something interesting to say: "I think we want to call games art to give meaning to them. We want them to have more substance and we're finding that too many people consider them to be just games without finding any deeper meaning. It is noble to want that to change. We want people to understand exactly what it is we do and why. But, why must it be art or not? What true difference does it make? If we make great things that people can experience and enjoy -- isn't that really the point?"

Yes. That's the point. Now instead of talking about it, let's find the approach that actually works.

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

"I'd like to continue being on the scene making games until I die," Hideo Kojima wrote in a faux resumé, presented during a Q&A session at the Apple Store in Tokyo's Ginza District.

The Kojima Productions head and Metal Gear creator shared with his fans glimpses from his early childhood, which he spent sitting around all day watching television (he learned how to eat spaghetti by watching TV). Despite his wasteful youth, he emphasized that he did have a girlfriend named Yoshiko.

Displayed on a projector was Kojima's "Path to Game Design" resumé, a timeline of significant points in his life that led to his thriving career at Konami. According to Anoop Gantayat, who attended and reported on the event, one of those milestones was the 1970 Osaka World Fair, where he first encountered foreigners. At some point during the Q&A, Kojima brought up a dream of working with an ethnically diverse group of people, describing the envisioned crew as a "Team Star Trek".

Another dream he had, marked on the resumé by his watching of the Apollo 11 moon landing's live broadcast in 1969, was to one day go into space. He still holds onto this dream, and even joked that the only thing he'd give up video games for is a chance to go into space. Tempting Kojima, one of the event's attendees revealed that he has a friend who works for Virgin Galactic, a company planning to one day offer sub-orbital spaceflights to the public.

You can read Kojima's translated "Path to Game Design" resumé here.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

End of the weekend, it is, and time to hop back on the GameSetLinks train, and, as you folks know, we really try to scout the Internets for the best intelligent, longer-form blogs and writing about games - no matter what the source.

This time, we span everything from bizarre Wired mag puzzles to indie star Terry Cavanagh being quizzed on Don't Look Back and his other blocky, stocky titles - with a side order of that man Meretzky again.

An amazing race:

Wired.com: Game Changers: Brainteasers for Hardcore Videogame Fans
Wow, supergeekiness here - from the rather amazing J.J.Abrams guest-edited issue of Wired. Via Chris Baker!

Technology Review: Author of Play
Hey, more Steve Meretzky interviews - this one quite MIT-related, for obvious reasons.

Charge Shot!!!: Real Time Simplicity: A Talk with Rudolf Kremers and Alex May
The Dyson duo are further quizzed, oh yes.

An Exclusive Excerpt from Friends, Fans and Followers | Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation
'Scott Kirsner, Variety writer and editor of the invaluable CinemaTech blog, breaks it down in his new book by offering case studies of thirty visual artists, comedians, animators, documentary filmmakers, musicians and writers.' Super-relevant to games, too, though I'm not sure any game creators were interviewed... nonetheless!

Wonderland: Commissioning for Attention: games, education and teens
'Public service gaming is wonderful. There should be more of it. There will be more of it.' Amen to that.

Interview with Terry Cavanagh, creator of Don't Look Back | GameCritics.com
Nice indie interview over at the sometimes forgotten GameCritics.

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

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

For the first time in about three years of writing Game Mag Weaseling, I'm going to not talk about magazines at all. Hopefully you will forgive me; I've been on vacation in the lovely CA Bay Area for the past few days, largely basking in the nostalgia, and my mind hasn't been on the subject.

I lived in San Francisco from '01 to '05, working first for GamePro then Ziff Davis, and as a result I spent a lot of time in SF's downtown district, home to some of America's most expensive real estate...and, also, some of its most vacant presently.

I was particularly interested in revisiting the Metreon, the urban shopping center established by Sony in 1999, for the first time in a few years. I always sort of saw the Metreon as the most unique symbol of the PS2/GC/Xbox era of console games, chiefly because I went there all the time for industry events.

Konami and SOE held their big video presentations for their Gamers Day events in the "Action Theater" upstairs; Square Enix and Bandai held big public game launches in the PlayStation Store on the street corner. There is the Walk of Game, a catwalk on the second floor with some tiles that say "Sonic the Hedgehog" and "EverQuest" on them.

For a while in '03-'04, game press and developer rank-and-file gathered in the bar/lounge area for semi-regular industry networking events, which I went to mainly 'cos a new kind of liquor would be half-price every night.

Even at the time, I don't remember much of the Metreon being heavily-trafficked apart from the movie theater. My suspicions were confirmed when I revisited a couple days back. The Metreon, which was bought by mall developer Westfield in 2006, is remarkably empty.

The Bandai store is gone; Games Workshop is gone; the comic-book shop (photographed above) is gone; Sony Style is gone; the PS Store is closing soon; the bar appears to be available chiefly for special events only these days.

The big arcade on the second floor, which also had a bar and used to feature this weird Heavy Metal-magazine theme to the decor, is now more than half composed of redemption games. And I haven't even gotten to the Where the Wild Things Are stuff on the third floor.

Westfield is planning a $30 million renovation of the Metron that'll take the noticeably cave-like structure and make it wide-open, cheery, and a bit more like a typical mall. A lot of the "current structural clutter" will be removed in the process, likely including the Walk of Game (which hasn't seen any new inductees since the 2006 Westfield takeover anyway).

I feel, in a way, like I'm losing part of my history...even though I rarely ventured inside for reasons that didn't have to do with eating free hors d'oeuvres and listlessly taking down notes about games like Sonic Heroes and Nano Breaker.

The game industry may not be in any danger of disappearing tomorrow, but it, like everything else, is changing more rapidly than ever before. Maybe I don't play as glamorous a role in it any longer, but even today, there are few fields I'd rather want to work in. Though, I do admit to being glad that I haven't had to write the words "Sonic Heroes" in about five years until today...

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

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

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

Activision: Associate Producer, Guitar Hero
"The role of the Associate Producer is to assist the producers in all aspects of the production of a game. Associate Producers are generally responsible for taking over whole sections of game production. These sections can be the production of audio, video, and asset management for the Main SKU, or management of the production testing, as well as complete responsibility for derivative products, such as add-ons, ports, localizations, and OEM SKUs."

THQ, Kaos Studios: Animator
"Kaos Studios is located in the heart of New York City and is mere blocks from the Empire State Building and the thrill of Midtown Manhattan. Along with the opportunity to live in one of the most exciting cities in the world, we are also working on one of the most exciting FPS titles to date- Frontlines: Fuel of War (PC/XBOX360) is already receiving great press and that’s just the beginning!"

Ubisoft San Francisco: Lead Designer
"Ubisoft Entertainment, a global leader in the video games and entertainment software industry, is currently seeking a full-time Lead Designer. We are looking for a highly talented, motivated and experienced person to help guide the creation of an exciting new cross-platform music based game."

A2M: Software Developer -- Technology, Online Team
"Founded in 1992, Artificial Mind and Movement is a Montreal based videogame developer specializing in the creation of interactive action-adventure games. A2M's experience developing quality licensed games and original titles have made it one of the premier game developers in Canada."

WorldsInMotion - Online Games

NetDevil: Social Designer
"The Social Designer is responsible for design and creation, maintenance, and oversight of all socialization features in the AAA MMOG, LEGO Universe. This includes responsibility for safety and consumer service issues, in order to provide a premium, trusted online experience for 'kids of all ages'."

Perfect World Entertainment: Community Manager
"Perfect World Entertainment, a subsidiary of Perfect World Co., Ltd. (NASDAQ: PWRD), publishes free-to-play, online games and provides online services in North America. We are currently seeking a creative Community Manager to join our fun and dynamic team in Redwood City. The Community Management Specialist will develop relationships online to create effective partnerships to promote site and build traffic."

Serious Games Source - Serious Games

IPKeys Technologies: Game Programmer - Software Engineer
"IPKeys' I-GAME team supports the mission of IPKeys in delivering world-class modeling and simulation and interactive gaming technology. Our success is measured in the complete satisfaction of our customers, the superb quality of our products, and the adherence to our core principles of integrity and accountability. We operate in a team environment that supports individual growth, unhindered communication, the high morale of our team, the recognition of extraordinary achievement, and the fostering of the creative spirit."

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)

Once again, the weekend's here - so time to recap some of the week's top full-length features on Gamasutra, plus some bonus original news stories and interviews from the site and sister educational site GameCareerGuide.

Some really neat stuff out here - a v.neat Emil Pagliarulo interview about Fallout 3, an in-depth title on the state of iPhone games, a pretty interesting highlights reel for postmortems, Peter Dille on the state of PlayStation, and lots more.

Hey yay hurray:

Exploring A Devastated World: Emil Pagliarulo And Fallout 3
"Fallout 3 lead writer and lead designer Emil Pagliarulo on the creative process of everything from the main game to DLC to understanding and implementing user desires -- and how people saw the game as an Oblivion sequel."

The Three Rs of Audio Leadership
"What are the key things you need to work as a video game audio lead? LucasArts' Jesse Harlin picks the 'three Rs' that he thinks game audio managers need to have."

iPhone Devs: Rethinking the Art of Making Games
"In a Gamasutra special feature, we talk to five leading iPhone game developers, including the makers of hit titles Rolando, iShoot and Flick Fishing, on the state of making games for Apple's explosively popular platform."

What Went Wrong? Learning From Past Postmortems
"Gamasutra sister magazine Game Developer decided to round up every "what went wrong" entry from the last three years of game postmortems, and compiled the most frequently made mistakes (usually over five times each) into this cautionary feature."

Custom Tools: Environment Artists and Game Editors
"In this art-centric article, originally published in Game Developer magazine, Bungie's Steve Theodore discusses visualizing game environments, and why 'an upgrade to your tool chain is a great opportunity to upgrade the relationship between artists and designers'."

Catching Up With PlayStation: Peter Dille On Sony In 2009
"Sony is the company that perhaps popularized the post-cartridge console generation. But running into mixed press and PS3 pricing issues, how does the company itself view its progress? How does it see its business? Gamasutra spoke to Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America."

Bonus: GameCareerGuide features & Gamasutra news originals: 'It Was A Good Time To Make A Change,' Says Ex-Dragon Age Director; Analysis: Mature Titles On DS -- Is The Audience Just Not There?; GameCareerGuide Feature: What I Learned As An Indie; Exclusive Analysis: Console Tie Ratios Reveal Market Dynamics; GCG Feature: Big Hadron Games Mega-Postmortem -- 16 Flash Games In Three Months; Scratch Lawsuit: $6 Million Dev Costs, Legal Battle Over Source Code Revealed; Analysis: On The Wii And DS, Game Ratings Matter.

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

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Jojo's Fashion Show 2, by Gamelab.]

I do love Gamelab.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since Gamelab laid off employees and seems to have de-emphasized or even ceased its casual game production (its site just redirects to the Gamestar Mechanic website now), this article might be a bit of a stealth eulogy for them. Anyone know if they are still making casual games?]

Jojo's Fashion Show 2 starts off with an obvious handicap, viz. being a numbered sequel. Reviews focused on the repetition and lack of technical innovation from the first installment in the series, and I would have to agree that those are fair complaints.

Several things make it stand out, though. First, the writing is unusually perky for a casual game. I would have said "surprisingly", but in fact this does not surprise me, since several of the people working on this project also worked on Gamelab's Miss Management, a piece so successfully written that I still remember the major characters with amusement and rueful affection many months after playing. The characters in Jojo's Fashion Show 2 aren't quite such a bundle of neuroses, but they are unusually distinct and opinionated.

Jojo also affords a rather larger cast than the average frame-story cast in a casual game. The Diner Dash episodes usually get by with Flo, Quinn, and other cookie-cutter gal pals assembled from various Dash variations, with perhaps Flo's grandma thrown in for color; but I'd have a hard time naming any way in which Flo and Quinn differ in personality (for instance), and adding more members to their posse would just make it bigger, not more interesting.

Besides which, Flo has become such a franchise that we can be safely assured nothing remotely interesting will ever happen to her again. Jojo's Fashion Show 2 does borrow a few popular stereotypes in order to distinguish its characters -- the fashion magazine editor courtesy of The Devil Wears Prada being the most obvious. They've even given her Meryl Streep's hair, lest there be any question about the intended casting.

Nonetheless, there are more distinct personae, and they're more fun, than you'll see in any other game of the same ilk.

Second, there's a plot that involves confict between characters, and this time it's not just a simplistic struggle against some greedy or envious villain, but a considerably more plausible and more engaging conflict between people who care about one another.

The mother/daughter team of Jojo and Ros generates some creative tension, which leads to an argument and a parting of the ways. This is all handled with a fair degree of sensitivity: the player can see the crash coming a little way in advance, but it still has a little sting. And once it has happened, the two of them are left to struggle on without each other for a while.

There are subplots, too -- a romance, an old rivalry going through new stages -- but the story stays most focused on what the designers rightly knew was the most interesting arc, the resolution of differences between Jojo and her daughter.

Finally, the gameplay reflects all of these stages, with inventive level design that lets the player experience and share in the struggles of the main characters.

It helps that the play concept of dressing models to fit a specific style lends itself to a lot of tuning: the game has many variables to play with: what styles the player is trying for; how much time is allowed per model; what pieces are available and how suitable they are, on average, for the target styles; how many times the player is permitted to refresh the wardrobe with new clothes; etc.

Scores are based on how well each piece of clothing matches the criteria of the given style, with some extra bonuses for effective combinations (like jeans with a t-shirt, or boots with a mid-length skirt).

When Rosalind and Jojo of them are feeling out of sync, the player may be confronted with hard-to-reconcile style challenges; for instance, during one of the most stressful points in their collaboration, I found myself trying to create flapper ensembles and casual business ensembles at the same time, where the difficulty is that very few pieces are suitable for both. I was constantly getting stuck with a business woman to dress and a wardrobe full of fringed skirts, or the reverse, and found myself burning through my bonuses to recycle the available clothes, irritated by the incompatibilities.

Then they separate, and the player has the chance to dress shows for each of them individually. Ros, on her own, experiments with some wacky style ideas that become more challenging for the player to throw together on instinct -- requiring more thought and more frequent reference to the style guides to make sure one is on the right track.

When Jojo is lonely, on the other hand, she becomes depressed and her creativity evaporates. Her styles become very simple and predictable, so there are few criteria to match, which means that no one element of an ensemble is ever worth very many points. This leaves the player frantically working the chaining bonuses in an attempt to get decent scores out of uninspired outfit concepts. The game tunes the player's frustration to match up with what the characters feel -- and frustration is one emotion that games are reliably good at provoking.

And when at last mother and daughter are reconciled (I didn't say the plot was unpredictable), their new style concepts are silly, exuberant, and hugely fun to play with. This gives the game a kick of exciting new life. The player gets new and ever-more-fanciful pieces of clothing, and the target styles are more closely aligned. (It's particularly easy to dress the show which includes both Punk and its bizarre relative Flamenco Punk, since there's such a large supply of crossover pieces.)

At the same time, the player finds himself working against a faster clock and with higher point-value expectations. The result is the sensation of being a bit stressed by the higher stakes, but finally in sync over the process -- exactly where the story has taken the characters at this point.

This is strong design. I imagine it requires that the writers be intimately part of the level design process from the outset, because someone on the team must be asking not just "what new challenges can we put into this level to make it more interesting?" but "how will these new challenges shape the experience of play, and how can we line that up with what is happening in the story?" It makes a huge difference.

Jojo's Fashion Show 2 is still definitely using story in support of game, rather than vice versa. The main attraction of play is the semi-zen state one gets into while assembling outfit upon outfit, and the narrative arc is not as dominant as it was in Miss Management.

Nonetheless, Gamelab continues to do a better job than most at presenting character experience through the gameplay, drawing the player into sympathy with their emotional states and struggles. I continue to find theirs some of the best casual game writing on the market.

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

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

[Game designer Steve Meretzky has spent nearly 30 years designing video games, from Infocom classics like Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy to his current social network-based titles, and Game Developer magazine's own Jeff Fleming recently sat down with him for an in-depth chat.]

Steve Meretzky began his career by creating games for seminal interactive fiction firm Infocom, creating landmark titles such as Planetfall and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, as well as working with Douglas Adams on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

As the creative director at WorldWinner, he was an early innovator in the casual games space and is currently designing social network-based games for startup Playdom.

Sitting down with us for an in-depth interview, Meretzky reminisces on his first experiences with what we'd today call casual gaming -- back in the early nineties -- and shares insights from the progression of the casual game space over the course of his career.

He explains how having a "house style" may help distinguish casual titles in a crowded space, and opines on the role of the writer in games today:

At the GDC 09 Casual Games summit you said, "Games are for everyone." That’s an interesting declaration that probably the rest of the game industry needs to be hearing, particularly when it comes to female players.

Steve Meretzky: Right, and beyond female players, look at things like people in retirement homes playing Wii Sports and everyone's parents and grandparents getting DSes and playing Brain Age.

As far as I'm concerned, virtually everyone would play games if they found games that they like. And if they aren't, or at least if they aren't playing electronic games, it's because we've yet to produce the right games for them.

I think the example of casual games over the last ten years and those more recent examples with older players just shows that there's this incredible hunger for gaming of every kind. People just love games, and it's been proven for thousands of years.

You used to design pretty lengthy and complex games. What brought you from that to where you're at now?

Really, the first kind of experience that I had with what you would know as casual games was in 1994. I did a game called Hodj 'n' Podj. It was sort of a board game, but embedded within that board game were 19 minigames, each of which we would now call a casual game, and any of which you could also play standalone.

You didn't have to play the board game to experience them. You could just boot the game and say, "I want to play any game standalone," and then choose any of those 19. Anyway, it was sort of a game before its time.

It was definitely a game that was perfect for a family audience at a time when there wasn't really a family market and there wasn't really any way of marketing to anybody other than hardcore gamers. It sold pretty miserably.

But I have to say, I get more mail to this day about that game then all my other games put together. You know, a lot of people saying things like, "We've been playing that game for ten years, and the disc is worn out. Where can I get a new one?" That sort of thing.

So, that was sort of my first foray into casual games in ‘94. The real genesis for that was that I had many games that I remembered fondly, like the early, very simple arcade games, the Pac-Man and Space Invaders-type games. And simple card games, Solitaire and Pyramid, things like that.

So, really, these games had sort of disappeared from the face of electronic gaming. They had been like fun things to do with computers in the early days, and now, pretty much everything you can play on your computer was some giant time commitment kind of game, and I kind of really miss those simple games.

But the only sort of potential business model for games at that point was to put them in a box and sell them in a store for $40. And you couldn't take a solitaire game, and you couldn't take something like the wonderful, simple little arcade games and put them in a box and sell that for $40. And no one was interested in putting things in a box and selling them for $5 to $10.

So, that's kind of how I came up with the idea for this collection of minigames set as games within a game. I returned to that market again when I joined WorldWinner in 2000. Now, we're in post-internet environment or post-arrival internet environment, and WorldWinner had an online tournament, cash skill games business model.

And the company rightly sort of identified casual games as the proper type of games for that business model, whereas other people were thinking about that same business model but for things like first-person shooters. And so, WorldWinner succeeded whereas those other companies tried and didn't.

Was there something that clued them in to go that direction? Thinking back, it seems like the conventional wisdom would have been to do a Quake-style game.

Right. It really took everyone by surprise when we were doing casual games back in 2000 in that business model, we thought that we were going to have a primarily male audience, even though we were creating the sort of games that women like to play, because we thought that women wouldn't be interested in competing for money in that way, and that that sort of high-stress, high-competition environment was an environment that would appeal more to men.

I think the primary thing wasn't so much that we were thinking casual games or thinking that we were making games with primarily a soccer mom demographic. We were thinking that we need games that can be played in just two, three, or four minutes. And most of those obvious game ideas were casual games.

And then we began to do some that skewed more male, some skewed more female. All the ones that did well were the ones skewing female. And we began to do more analysis of our demographics and stuff, and saw we were two-thirds more women. Obviously, it got more and more of a conscious decision to make these traditional casual games.

With casual games, because they are so quick and because there's always the need to put more of them out, there’s a sense that maybe the business side is driving everything. Does creativity get pushed aside?

The business is really characterized by a lot of the same sorts of things that we've seen for many years on the hardcore side, which is that it's a very red ocean. There are a lot of players, the market is very mature and it's well understood.

Companies have been differentiating not by innovating creatively, but more by raising the bar in terms of production values in the interest of making bigger games, more fancy opening movies and cutscenes, or featuring more different player modes. As a result, budgets are getting higher and higher without sales increasing at the same rate.

Companies get very conservative in their decision-making. They don't want to do anything because more money is on the line, and they want to do something that they know is just like something that sold well in the past.

It's sort of like a self-reinforcing cycle that leads to a real lack of innovation. Really, probably the last major innovation we had within the downloadable space was when hidden object games appeared, which would be like four years ago now or so.

Could someone say, "This is a Steve Meretzky casual game," and immediately know your style?

If I have a style that anyone's going to recognize, it would probably be more in terms of story, character, and writing than it is in terms of gameplay and game design. You know particularly in something that's sort of boiled down to the very basics as most casual games are.

I think more than any sort of individual style, I think you tend to see studio style. For example, take a look at PopCap. I think even with the studio logo removed or whatever, you could sort of take me away to a desert island for a couple years, and come back, and show me ten new casual games, and I'd be able to say, "Oh, these two are PopCap games."

You know, a matter of a certain art style, a certain level of production value, probably a lot of tangibles that I'd have trouble describing or putting a finger on. I think PlayFirst is another good example of a company that I feel has a style. I think to a great extent, that's because their creative director Kenny Shea Dinkin is a very artistically oriented visual person.

So, I think he drives a lot of that. But then, there's, you know, like 1200 casual game developers. There's obviously going to be a lot of pretty generic work among a group that's that big.

Do you think that somebody developing a house style pay dividends, that it can help build an audience?

Yeah. I mean, I think what's really going to build loyalty is just the quality of the games and how much fun they are. And if a house continues to deliver high quality, like both of those two examples have, then they'll build both player loyalty and name recognition among those players.

Whereas I think having a distinctive look is probably sort of a second order effect, or a second order contributor to building brand loyalty and building recognition and building long-term players.

I also wanted to talk to you about game writing. Is game writing really separate from game design? There's a sense that is it possible to have game writing as a job that's somehow different from game design.

It certainly is. There are dozens of people who made their living as a game writer who don't do game design. I think ideally, it's best for the designer and the writer to be the same person, just as ideally it's best for the artist, programmer, designer, and the writer to be the same person.

But clearly, other than an increasingly small number of projects, that's not feasible. As game projects get bigger and bigger and teams get more and more specialized, it becomes not only more common but absolutely necessary to split up the role of writer and designer because it's too much work for one person.

In fact, you could have more than just a writer and a designer... three designers and five writers.

So, the question is that given the necessity of splitting these functions, what's the best way to work? Certainly, I'm a big advocate that writers shouldn't just be someone who you bring on two months before the game ships as a "Oh, the game is almost done; add some writing."

It's much better for them to come early on so that, for one thing, they can be a lot more familiar with the game and do a lot better job when it is time to do the writing, so that they can do the writing in stages and sort of provide almost a sort of first draft of the writing. And that will make the game much more playable for everyone who is playing early builds of the game.

And then polish those drafts, as the game gets closer to release. The writer, by coming early, is then in a position to make a lot more suggestions about the design of the game where they see that will aid the writing or that will avoid hurting the writing.

We recently did an article on Gamasutra where we singled out game writers that we all agreed were good. But in the debate over it, often it was hard to separate the writing from the game, from saying, "This is a fun game, and therefore the writing is good." It was very subjective.

Sure. I mean, look at something like Portal. The writing in Portal, the dialogue particularly, the computer, it was one of those things that made the game for me.

But where do you really draw the line? That certainly wasn't something that was added two days before the game shipped. So, the more integral that the writing is into the game, the harder it is to separate it out as a separate task.

It’s also hard to separate when we’re trying to identify what is good game writing versus bad writing. If somebody thought the story was dumb, that was bad writing. But most video game stories seem kind of dumb, really. So, how do you judge that?

Well, it's hard to tell who came up with what and unless you talk to the people you might not necessarily get to the truth. I'd say probably much more often than not, things like the basic storyline of a game, basic theme and setting, and things like that, were probably come up with long before writers come on board.

Can a writer take something and make it better?

You mean, turn lemons into lemonade? Yeah. I mean sure, within reason. If you have a completely generic story, you can spice it up a little around the edges and add some interesting characters and some interesting sub-plots and stuff.

But at a thousand-foot view, it's still going to be a pretty generic story. Once again, it sort of gets back to the point of what exactly the writer's role is, how early do they come on, where do you draw the lines of responsibility between the writer and other participants in the creative process.

For the most part, I think for the people who do only writing, who do only game writing, it's a pretty frustrating experience because they don't feel like they have enough of a creative role. They feel like they are just sort of being treated as a compartmentalized craftsman, and they don't feel like they were brought in early enough.

I like Valve’s approach of bringing in an established author like Marc Laidlaw to write. What do you think about that? Someone who's already started a career as an author.

The plus, you know, is then you get a good writer, but the minus is you don't necessarily get someone who understands games and interactivity. If a writer isn't familiar with the ins and outs of interactivity and the way that games work and things like that, it doesn't really matter how good a writer they are.

I've certainly worked with a professional writer when I did the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and it was relatively difficult at the beginning because in his case, he was even a computer game player and a text adventure player.

And yet he still had a lot of trouble thinking non-linearly, so he would write scripts for the game kind of with the prejudice or with the idea that the player would always do what he was intending the player to do.

And players almost never do what you intend them to do, and so he wasn't sort of thinking of it that way.

I remember this moment so starkly, we started getting the game implemented so it was still just a little bit of the game that was implement, but he had people over and said, "Oh, let me show you the game version of Hitchhiker's Guide."

And they started playing, and people would do something other than what he'd expect him to do, like, "No, that's not what you're supposed to do," and all of a sudden he kind of got it that you have to anticipate everything, not just what you expect, and that the game can go in lots of directions.

You have to anticipate that—ideally, you want to take advantage of that. Just over the course of the few months that we worked on writing the game, he really kind of blossomed as an interactive writer, as a non-linear writer.

But I was able to see over the course of that evolution the problems that he had in the beginning as some guy who was already familiar with the medium and was a game player and was a text adventure player. So, it takes more to be a game writer than to be a good writer.

Speaking of text adventures, do you think there was something unique about them, or were they just a response to the technological limitations that you had at the time.

Well, I think the reason they were so popular then and don't seem compelling now, is that back then, that was really kind of the coolest and most cutting edge thing you could do on a computer.

The only graphics you could do on a computer, up until say when the Mac, Amiga and regular VGA came along to PCs, the best graphics that you could do were pretty crappy. So, they weren't really all that impressive. And this, on the other hand, was like talking to your computer, and your computer understanding you and answering back.

It was just really kind of cool and impressive, sort of fun to do alone, fun to do with a group, and fun to show off to other people. So, in those days, the bragware, so to speak, stuff that really showed off your computer and made you feel good that you bought it, were text adventure games. So, that's one thing.

Another thing is the demographics of the industry back then. I mean, what percentage of people had personal computers in 1983? Five percent or whatever. And so, the people who had them were higher end early adopters, really techie oriented, and much more male. And these were the sorts of people who liked hard games, who liked games that made you think, who liked games that were cerebral.

As the computer market became broader, the population of computer owners became more and more like the general population.

I think another thing was they were really cool but didn't particularly evolve. And so, text adventures in 1986 weren't that different from text adventures in 1981. Parsing was a little better, and the total game size was a little bit bigger because you didn't have to worry about the TRS-80 Model 1 anymore, but the medium didn't really change all that much.

And again, as far as I'm concerned, the medium of first-person shooters hasn't changed much in fifteen years now, and yet they've retained their population [laughs].

What did you think of [interactory story game experiment] Facade?

I mostly like it. I thought it was pretty limited, but within those limits, I think it did a really good job. I know a lot of people who point out the fact that you can break it so easily by sort of refusing to adhere to the role-playing.

The game can start to behave really stupidly really quickly. But you can break a movie really easily by skipping scenes. You can break a book really easily by refusing to read the first sentence of every page, or things like that.

There's sort of a certain kind of pact we make with any medium to use it the way it was intended, and if we don't use it as intended, then your mileage may vary.

As far as I'm concerned, if you use Facade as sort of the way it was intended, and if you don't break that pact between you and the creator, I think it's a pretty decent experience.

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

[The second in a four-part Chris Remo-authored series on community management features 2K Games' Elizabeth Tobey on defining her role, the success of the "Cult of Rapture" portal for BioShock, and more.]

Over the next two weeks, we are presenting a series of interviews with community managers from four different companies -- publishers, publisher-owned studios, and independent studios.

As a field that is relatively young and frequently loosely-defined, community has not always gotten the amount of coverage that might be due such an integral part of operating in the modern, interactive world of promotion and communication.

The second interview in the series, following our chat to Naughty Dog's Arne Meyer, is with 2K Games' Elizabeth Tobey, who joined the company in 2006 to build community initiatives around BioShock from a "blank slate."

It was actually her first such role -- she'd never worked in the game industry before, and having no diagram on what a community manager ought to be, she invented her own definition.

Tobey created the popular "Cult of Rapture" community site, which in addition to acting as a communications hub, has served visitors and registrants with extras like concept art, music files and even podcasts.

Although she has a background in marketing and PR, Tobey clearly defines her priority is fans first, game second -- recognizing the "blurry line" that often appears between community management and marketing, she here explains why it's important to keep a specific focus, how The Cult of Rapture gained legitimacy and traction, and how she defined her own role.

What is a community manager, in your view?

Community manager and the role of community at 2K is actually interfacing with the fans. The way I look at it is that you are first the advocate for the fans and then the advocate for the game.

And then after that, you are the liaison, the go-between, and you work with the developer, the publisher, marketing, PR, and everybody else. But really, when I think about it, I'm working first for the fans and for the game.

Pre-release, it's all about figuring out what fans want to hear about, want to see, want to get, and giving it to them -- giving them the best experience, getting them the most information, figuring out how to make marketing and PR more dynamic and specific to the community with forums and everything else to really make people happy and get the information they want.

Then, of course, post-release, it's all about having quick, effective support and listening to people. Marketing and PR is great, but one of the great things about blending all those things together and having such an active community is that you get a dialogue and a two-way street -- whereas in the past, a lot of it has just been one-way.

Is that something companies or marketers have had a difficult time adjusting to? How do you modify processes from the more traditional top-down method?

I don't think that it's been difficult to adjust, because you're not going to abandon PR or marketing. I think one of the things that's important is having them all work together. When I came on in 2006, we didn't have a proper community, so we said, let's make one.

It was a blank slate -- dream up what you want and figure out what to do, which is where I think we might be a little un-traditional. Somebody made it up as they went along.

But it's all integrated into it -- I have marketing and some PR background, so I know how those things work. Everybody says community and marketing can be a blurry line. But I think focusing on the particular needs of your audience and trying to figure out how to make people more excited and get them more information -- being focused on the actual consumer rather than a human mass -- is really what defines "community" with a capital C.

You mentioned 2K didn`t have an existing community structure when you came in. How did you get that going?

Well, when I came on, it was specifically to work on BioShock, because that was a new IP and we didn't have anything around it. I first, of course, learned everything that was already out there on the internet -- everything people were saying and desiring for that game, since it was already rolling by that time.

I built The Cult of Rapture, BioShock`s community site, and I started working hand in hand with our marketing director. [BioShock creative director] Ken Levine wanted podcasts, so we started doing the podcasts.

I went and visited the [2K Boston] team every six weeks, and so I saw what they were doing, and just by talking to them and being with them, I started getting all my updates.

As things started picking up with all of that, marketing started saying things like, "Oh, we've got the box art, why don't we throw that your way?" In that way, the community really gained legitimacy and traction, not just with the very hardcore who happened to pick up on it, but with the larger gaming populace -- a lot of the blogs, a lot of the journalists. We became a source of really cool information. Not press release information, but a deeper look at the game.

I think the way we founded it first was through the community site and then by bringing on the forums. That's where the proper dialogue got going.

But I really think our community is a lot larger than just a community site or the forums. It's customer service. It's how you design limited editions, how you design art books, the store, everything.

So The Cult of Rapture was largely the thing that springboarded a lot of your how you went on to run community at 2K?

Yeah. I came in obviously from a gamer background, but I hadn't worked in the industry before. I was involved in communities, but I didn't have any classical community manager training. I probably couldn't have described to you what the typical community manager was back in 2006 if you asked me to, so I made it up.

I think that over the years, community in general has moved in the way that I think anyway. It's increasingly important everywhere. You hear about social networking and everything -- that's community.

I just approach everything literally as if I were the gamer on the other end of this website, t-shirt, art book, or poster. What would I want? It makes your job really, really easy when you're actually excited about something and you are that gamer dork who really wants those things for yourself. That's just what I did. Everything that I saw that was cool, or needed more attention, or that I wanted to learn about, or that I wanted to share that I have learned, I just went with it.

If you want to go to the game's site and just find a synopsis and see the amazing flashy product site, fine. But if you want to keep coming back to it, and keep finding information, and become involved or even just in passing come once a month and go see what's going on in the community, you should allow for that.

The community shouldn't be just a small inclusive thing only for a small group. It should expand out to as many people as you want. And no matter how casual or how involved you are, you shouldn't always just jump in out of it. I think it's the integrated nature of everything that really makes the community special.

Have you done much with actual dedicated social networking sites?

It is an area of focus, and we've experimented with it. I use some Facebook groups and fan pages for Civilization Revolution, and currently BioShock 2 and Mafia II have Twitters. We've got subscriptions on iTunes and RSS feeds, each game-specific.

The thing that is really important about any of that stuff is to know why you're doing it and to not just do it to do it. Don't make a Facebook or fan page or anything just to have it, and put the same stuff that you have on the community page. Have it be different, tailored, and specific to that form.

Twitter is great for interacting with groups, and the replies are awesome. But I think so many people are saying, "We have to use these things. We've got to be on Facebook. We`ve got to be on Twitter." It's about stepping back and saying, "Why are we doing this? What is the coolest thing to do?"

That pervades everything, whether I'm creating Xbox themes or PS3 themes or gamer pics. It's like, "Why are we doing this?" and "What do we want to gain out of this?" and "What does the gamer want?" The BioShock PS3 theme was one of the first paid ones, and it had a really good reception.

I was really nervous about that because once you offer anything that's paid to the community, are they going to like it? Are they going to think it's worth it? I think it's because we sat down and said, it's not just, "Oh, this is a new thing and we have to do it," but rather, "Why are we doing this?" and, "What makes it worthwhile?"

What are some campaigns or features that went over particularly well? Are there any that haven't?

That PS3 theme is a really good example of something successful. Another cool thing that we did that was really successful was that for Civilization Revolution, we did an artist series from Shepard Fairey, who made a special piece of art of Napoleon, and then Aidan Hughes did one of Abraham Lincoln. Those were really, really awesome.

Everybody likes posters of game stuff, but you don't want them to be just, you know, your logo and a screenshot. We like to be artistic and think deeper -- bring in new aspects and look at the game from new angles.

Because Civilization ties into propaganda, those two people made a good fit. That ended up being not just cool for marketing and for the community, as well as a really cool thing to hang on your wall, but it also got a lot of people interested and thinking. And it was really relevant and expanded outside of video games.

I'm trying to think of something that really flopped. I`ve probably stricken those from my memory. I'm always testing contests, sweepstakes, and things like that, and I've had a couple things like, "Take a picture in a wacky situation," or, "Design something for a screensaver or a wallpaper." You get good results, but you don't get that overwhelming feedback. That's good, and it serves its purpose, so I don't want to say it's a flop as such, but...

It's limited in reach.

Yeah, it's limited. One of those things everybody always says and I always say is, "Don't already do what you've done before." For BioShock, we did a Threadless T-shirt competition. That got a ton of praise and a ton of press, but you don't want to do it again. I don't want to run another T-shirt contest, because you don't want to keep doing the same thing and just fall into a routine.

It's really, really easy to do, and it just gets boring. You don't want to be boilerplate. Any time I do something new or push something further, that's when generally you get enough feedback and praise from your friends that it's really worth doing.

How do you measure success of a particular campaign of promotion -- by ear, or is it a holistic sense of things? Do you have ways of measuring impressions or conversions?

There are a ton of ways you can do it. A lot of it is subjective, and some of it is tracked. All of our websites track page hits, uniques, and so on, so I can go in and say, "Something In The Sea -- how many unique people came on the first day? How many unique people came on the first week?" And I'll know how successful that campaign was to me.

But also, to me, it's how many people talked about it -- not just on the 2K forums, because one of the important things about community is that you have to build a hub that everybody wants to come to, but you also have to try and go to them, even if you can't be talking to them absolutely everywhere.

But you need to expand out and reach out. Even if you can't be talking to everyone and be everywhere, obviously, you need to at least watch and listen. I can't tell you how many Google Alerts I have for certain keywords.

Just watch that -- what are people saying? How many people are saying things? How many Google Alerts do I get the first day? How many blogs, how many journalists pick things up? What do they say about it? That kind of awareness is really important.

As big and expansive as my job has gotten, there is that core. A community manager still has to say, "This is what the community is saying," report that, and let everyone know what's going on -- good, bad, and ugly -- and then figure out what to do about it. Be the person who says, "This is what they want. This is what they're saying. This is the reaction."

When we do a big thing, like when the BioShock 2 gameplay footage went out, the first thing I did in the morning was go everywhere, figure out what people were saying, parse what that was, and send that out to people so we knew what to do next. A lot of it qualitative, but that is the nature of it, because much of it is opinion-based.

Any final thoughts for other community managers?

I think one of the best things that ever happened to me was that I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, so I didn't do that. Anyone who is a community manager or is thinking about going into something community-related should think about what that word means and not just think, "Oh, that means I need to run a forum and a website."

Think about what you would want, and don`t be afraid to do those things. If you think, "Oh, that's ridiculous. That's outside my scope," just go ask.

Because of the growing importance of community, you'll gain a lot of traction, and you might have thought of something that, even if you think it may be the purview of PR or marketing, you can still help influence and give valuable input that will benefit the gamer in the end.

Essentially, stop thinking about what you should be doing, and think about everything that you're not doing, or that you want to do or that you would love to see, and just go do it. That sounds really cheesy, but it's right. If you say, "That would be so rad," then you should probably do it.

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

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

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

The goodies in this edition include the release of IGF finalist Zeno Clash, a unique 'Spot The Differences' game, a couple of Ludum Dare 14 competition entries, and a game where you play the anti-hero carrying out evil deeds.

Game Pick: 'Zeno Clash' (ACE Team, commercial indie)
"An IGF finalist in the 'Excellence in Visual Art' category, ACE Team's Zeno Clash is now finally available for purchase from Steam and Direct2Drive. This hybrid melee fighting game sure packs a punch, delivering a surreal world to explore and an eccentric cast of characters well-deserving of the award nod. Some may find issues with the storyline and length of the adventure, but for the asking price you won't get anything else quite like it out there in the market."

Game Pick: 'Mind Wall' (Seth A. Robinson, freeware)
"A puzzler similar to Kokoromi's Super Hypercube, where players would have to fit a coloured block through a wall before it is done automatically for them. The shape in play will always appear as a silhouette at the bottom left corner of the screen, and a one-square hole has to be made somewhere on the wall before this shape will pass through successfully. Also available for the Mac OS X."

Game Pick: 'Tombed' (auntie pixelante, freeware)
"Tombed is dessgeega's submission for the Ludum Dare 14 competition, a short game that borrows one or two gameplay elements from Mr. Driller. Danger Jane is on a quest to raid an ancient tomb, but finds herself running away from a ceiling of spikes that threaten to squash her and end her endeavours prematurely. This is where you step in, as the invisible guiding force assisting her with digging through coloured blocks and navigating the winding passages that obstructs her path downwards."

Game Pick: 'Headspin: Storybook' (State of Play Games, browser)
"On the face of it, Headspin: Storybook is basically a 'Spot The Differences' game, but the way it is all presented is rather lovely. Provided with an open book, all the pop-up on the right-hand page must be the exact mirror image of the left-hand page to progress. There's a time limit involved, of course, and clicking each object will make it spin and face the opposite direction."

Game Pick: '(Don't) Save The Princess' (Shen Games, freeware)
"A fair princess has been kidnapped, and the valiant knight has been dispatched by the king to save her daughter. Playing the role of the evil-doer, you must find a way to thwart this hero's efforts and prevent peace from being restored to the land. Magical launching platforms have to be placed all over the screen in an attempt to fling him around, eventually landing in the jaws of your pet monster."

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

For several months now, Dutch radiology technician Reinier van der Ende has been taking x-rays of video game consoles, controllers (like the Nintendo Zapper pictured below), and even carts, posting them online in an online photo set with a simple title, X-Ray Funnies. Perhaps it helps pass the time during those slow nights at the hospital?

NYC artist and medical student Satre Stuelke had the same idea of capturing a controller's internals with medical imaging technology, and did a CT scan on the PlayStation 3's wireless controller as part of a Radiology Art project. As Offworld points out, Stuelke also posted a short video that rotates the DualShock 3 and gives you a 3D view of it.

Stuelke is selling "high resolution museum-quality signed limited edition prints" of the image, and plans to soon add a CAT scan for a PlayStation 3 console with a "de/re-construction movie".

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To spice up Super Mario Advance 4, the 2003 GBA port of Super Mario Bros. 3, Nintendo released a series of e-Reader cards which which enabled players to load new stages and power-ups, provided they had a copy of the game, two GBA systems, a link cable, and the gigantic e-Reader+ add-on.

Because of that complicated and expensive setup -- and because different region-specific and region-locked cards were distributed randomly in game bundles and card packs -- it's unlikely that most gamers who picked up Super Mario Advance 4 ever saw all the e-Reader levels, much less played them. It's a shame considering they include elements from Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island, and they're the only Nintendo-designed 2D Mario levels that were released during the decade between Yoshi's Island and New Super Mario Bros.

NeoGaffer Mama Robotnik, however, reminded me that someone ripped and posted full maps of the 30 stages, so that if I want, I can just put my fingertip up to the monitor and pretend it's Luigi jumping through the level and collecting coins. I'm not saying that's something I wasted my entire afternoon doing, only stopping to write this post after I kept dying on one of the Airship stages, but if that turned out to be something I wanted to pursue, the option is there.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[What went right and wrong in making Volition's hit 2008 title Saints Row 2? The April 2009 issue of sister publication Game Developer magazine explains, straight from the horse's mouth, and here's some choice extracts for GSW readers.]

The latest issue of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a postmortem of THQ and Volition's over-the-top, open-world crime romp Saints Row 2, written by producer Greg Donovan.

The following excerpts from the piece explain how the Saints Row 2 team coped with feature creep and game instability, ultimately delivering a well-received multiplatform product.

Says Saints Row 2 producer Greg Donovan: "When everything was said and done, the game was localized into 14 languages across 15 separate SKUs. From a purely quantitative perspective, development was a logistical challenge and it would not have been completed without collaboration across many departments and studios."

Carving Out a Unique Identity

Released in Q4 2008, publisher THQ pit Saints Row 2 against a slew of other high-profile video games during the holidays. Donovan was aware that creating an action game that stood out from the crowd of holiday releases was crucial. In this excerpt, the game's producer writes:

"From the start, the team’s fundamental goal was to create an original open-world gameplay experience that would further distinguish Saints Row from other non-linear games, and carve out a distinct identity in the genre.

We aimed to achieve this by iterating gameplay that worked in Saints Row, and cutting those mechanics and features that did not work. Three years of analysis, collaboration, discussion and hard work followed and concluded with a game that we feel was ultimately able to accomplish these goals."

Mitigating Feature Creep

Donovan was also cognizant of feature creep, implementing a system that would carefully monitor the addition of new features. Through what he calls "Change Management," Donovan made sure that key decision makers were kept in the loop:

"Near the end of pre-production, the team implemented a scope-control process called “Change Management.” Feature creep is common in game development, and it becomes an issue when elements are added without the knowledge or approval of key decision makers. Our process was designed to mitigate this.

Past projects proved that all too often additional features were implemented in a vacuum, without the awareness of all affected team members, or without adequate planning and forethought. Change Management was a valuable process designed to make additional scope requests more transparent."

Wrestling with Instability

During development, Saints Row 2, Volition's first simultaneous release across Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, experienced serious build stability issues. Donovan stated the team eventually worked through the problems and reaching an appropriate level of polish, but at certain points he called the issues "disconcerting":

"Build stability was a real problem. It wasn’t until late in the development cycle that anyone could play the game for more than a couple of hours without crashing. This was extremely frustrating and at times quite disconcerting.

Therefore, Q/A wasn’t able to progress through test plans efficiently, and we couldn’t conduct extended playtests until late in development."

Additional Info

The full postmortem for Saints Row 2 explores "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" during the course of the game's development, and is now available in the April 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes the 8th Annual Game Developer Salary Survey, always a popular and useful feature; a divergent perspective from Rod Green of Intel's Project Offset on the crucial area of art pipelines; BioWare Austin's Damion Schubert on the nature of the design space; LucasArts' Jesse Harlin on dynamic scores, and much more.

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 April 2009's edition as a single issue.

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

Craftster Kris DeGraeve for put up a 16-step guide for creating your own Space Invaders lamp (or chandelier) with glow in the dark aliens, like the piece above. The light source runs on a 9-volt battery, and required a bit of "3D modeling/printing, laser cut acrylic, resin casting, UV reactive pigment, LEDs" and simple wiring to bring it all together.

It sounds like the type of afternoon project that somehow morphs into an entire-weekend affair! Once you've got it working, though, you can slowly sway the lamp side to side, pretending the aliens are approaching the surface of your soon-to-be subjugated end table. Here are some larger shots of DeGraeve's lamp:

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

"The Hero" by Christian Ward

As previously posted, the Nucleus gallery in Alhambra, California will host Jab Strong Fierce, a Street Fighter tribute art exhibition opening tomorrow and running until May 11th. The show is sponsored by Capcom, i am 8-bit, Udon Entertainment, and several other companies, and will feature pieces from over 40 talented artists. You can see the full artist lineup and find more details on the event's official site.

Rather than wait for photos and reports from the exhibit's opening night, I've gathered photos for over two dozen of the pieces that will appear at the show, and have collected them here for those of you who want an early look or who won't be able to attend. My favorites are definitely Ward's paintings and Khylov's Japanese bamboo mats, but they're all fantastic. Enjoy!

"The Monster" by Christian Ward:

"Adios Mama" by Jorge R. Gutierrez:

"El Fuerte es el Mas Macho" by Jorge R. Gutierrez:

"The Red Cyclone" by Derek Yu:

"Chun-Li: Modern Woman" by Kevin Dart:

"Hunt for Red Panda" by Brianne Drouhard:

"The Civilian" by Eric Fortune:

Ryu painting (cropped) by Leong Wankok:

Rufus and Dhalsim sculptures by J. Shea:

"Chun Li and Blanka" by Bobby Chiu:

"Street Fighter Kids" by Kei Acedera:

"Sakura Sake" by Mari Inukai:

"Flash Kick" by Anthony Wu:

"FOighT!" by Anthony Wu:

Chun-Li by Rodney Fuentebella:

Ryu by Rodney Fuentebella:

Sagat and M. Bison by Roland Tamayo:

"Hyakuretsukyaku" by Luke Chueh:

"Thank You for a Gorgeous Time" by Becky Cloonan:

"Elena" by Khylov:

"Dhalsimer" by Khylov:

"Metaphysique" by Khylov:

"Ueno-chan" by Khylov:

"Dhalsim" by Adam Alaniz:

"Oh! My Car" by David Jien:

"Street Fight" by Francis Vallejo:

[Via Vinyl Pulse, Arrested Motion]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Colleagues Brandon Sheffield and Christian Nutt recently caught up with Arkane's Harvey Smith to talk about his work on the recently debuted KarmaStar for iPhone, his current "first-person game with depth" main project, and more.]

Arkane Studios' Harvey Smith has a heritage in titles like Deus Ex and Blacksite: Area 51 in his time with Ion Storm and Midway, but at Austin GDC last year he revealed he was well into developing a strategy title for iPhone as a "side project."

The result was card-based KarmaStar, published by Majesco, and part of Smith's work at the Austin office of the French-headquartered Arx Fatalis developer.

Smith has been publically discussing the cultural transition from large-scale development to a small team on a small -- but deep -- small-platform title, explaining his strategy of always-on video conferencing to keep teams connected.

Now, we catch up with Smith to talk about KarmaStar, possibilities for genre depth on the iPhone platform, distributed development and more:

What were your inspirations, strategy-wise? What card-based titles influenced you?

This side project was an odd undertaking, since I didn't start out with any game template in mind. I think Uno is a classic, I like Munchkin, and once in a while I get hooked by a board game like Settlers of Catan. I played more Chron-X than Magic.

But that's not how KarmaStar came about. It was more abstract and driven by the fact that I just wanted to make a little strategy game for the iPhone.

If you leave video conferencing on all day, doesn't that feel a little weird? People could be watching you pick your nose or eat your lunch.

Ha, yes. One of our animators works from home, with a vid-conf system in his office, so we're constantly joking with him about installing additional cameras in other parts of his house. (He's also the guy who made the System Shock 2 mod called Rebirth, so he's sensitive to cameras...)

But in terms of leaving vid-conf on (nearly) all day from office to office, things like watching someone eat lunch is actually part of what makes it work.

I can comment on my French co-worker's t-shirt or new haircut, or the poster on the wall behind him. It enables the mundane, human social interactions that help people become a team.

This is a leading question, but as a designer do you feel that switching genres like this helps you get a fresh perspective?

For me, it wasn't so much the (temporary) genre switch that gave me perspective. I feel like the small team size, the autonomy and the motive for making the game were much stronger influences in terms of giving me a fresh outlook. I personally could have cancelled the project at any moment. I could have scoped it in any way necessary.

I was in control of when we took risks and when we cut features in order to stabilize and polish. And we were making the game because we thought it was cool to design strategy systems for a small game, and because I found it invigorating to engage in a creative project with more freedom.

What were the main challenges of scaling your design small? Did you ever find yourself over-reaching your means, or the constraints of the platform?

Supporting wifi multiplayer consumed a lot of our resources. For the last part of the project, Matthew Rosenfeld (our lead engineer) spent a lot of time fixing out-of-sync multiplayer bugs.

To get the level of polish we wanted, we had to trim some wildcards and cut short some of the experimentation. If the game had been purely single-player, we could have invested more time in creating more cross-interaction between players.

How do you think the distributed development model would work for a larger title, based on your experience so far? What would need to change?

We're working on larger projects in much the same way. The article I did [for Edge Online] includes a bunch of tips learned from that work.

I think the difference in scalability comes down to this: Wherever you've got a larger cluster of people, instead of an individual, you need someone on site with good organizational
leadership skills.

iPhone has massive opportunity but also massive competition. Things have been going for a while on the platform - how do you feel about entering it now? What do you think you learned from observing things up till now?

It's been great to watch. Interesting games pop up all the time. I love Zen Bound. I keep waiting for flOw to come to iPhone. The first time you launch a game on a new platform, you learn a lot about the process.

The App Store, pricing model, user reviews, the impact of timing all your initial press and materials "just to chart" initially, the later impact of updates...these are all interesting bits of information that publishers and developers are still assembling.

You had some notably public issues with creative control with Midway. Does working on a smaller project like this address those issues for you personally?

On a small game, it's more likely that the creative desires of the individual contributors translate to the screen. That's a joy. Even 10 years ago, a much smaller team could make an interesting game. Working on Deus Ex, in the map editor, on the story and on game systems, there was far less influence and approval process from outside the team than there is at some companies.

It's not just size...even some large companies are organized in ways that give a development team the autonomy to enhance certain features and to cut others; to make personnel decisions not based on a departmental/silo approach but in a way that serves the specific goals of the game; and to break off from external tech or time dependencies when the time is right.

What about genre and target concerns of the iPhone platform? Coming from a background of creating very deep and complicated games on PCs and consoles, how do you view the audience for iPhone? Are those differences appealing to you creatively?

Every day with Arkane Studios, Raphael and I are working with teams of people on a project that is very complicated and that hopefully will be very satisfying to players with tastes like ours.

This type of game is why I came to work here; it's a return to first-person games with depth, specifically at an independent company, where I believe it's possible to invest creatively.

My favorite games of the last few years are Fallout 3 and BioShock, but the iPhone is another platform altogether. When I play games on my iPhone, I've got 10 minutes to kill. For that, I love games like Drop7, Primrose or KarmaStar.

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

I spent too many quarters on the original Mad Dog McCree arcade game than I care to admit, beguiled by its live-action video and terrible acting. I hated myself everytime I walked away from the machine, knowing those quarters should have gone to a game that deserved it, like Time Killers or Pit Fighter (these games didn't actually deserve my money either).

Substantiating GameFly's rumors that the shooting game would see another release 19 years after its arcade debut, the ESRB has rated Mad Dog McCree: Gunslinger Pack, coming to Wii courtesy of Majesco. The title's use of Pack leads me to assume that this will be a disc release that will also include sequels Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold. And here I thought Konami's release of Target: Terror last year was an awful idea.

For some reason, I don't remember these offenses that the ESRB pointed out for its Teen rating: "In [one] scene, a woman says to the camera, 'You're my type, everyone is,' while a man in his long johns (i.e., underwear) moves past her. There is also a reference to "dirty peeping toms" and occasional depictions of women with exposed cleavage."

[Via Penny Arcade Forums]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

As the weekend looms ever-larger, it's time to take another wander around the RSS for our GameSetLinks roundup, starting with Game Informer's chat to seminal Activision co-founder David Crane and friends - always good to see sites talking to the people who made the game biz what it is today.

Also in here - a nice chat with Phil Fish, a random nod to upcoming game-related movie Citizen Game (pictured), a neat article called 'A Thousand Deaths Is A Statistic', and rather more things besides.

It's totally on:

Game Informer: 'Old School: Talking Games With David Crane, Steve Cartwright'
Man, I forget about GameInformer.com sometimes, but they do some really nice features - this one with some seminal Activision devs.

CrispyGamer: 'My Sister Annotates Blazing Prattles Ep. 21'
'I just had the following, unsolicited instant messenger conversation with my 15-year-old sister (pictured, right).' Certainly new, and game-related, and journalistic...

Kotaku - Going Indie: Fez Creator Phil Fish's Moment Of Clarity - fez
'Those IGF nominations didn't hurt. "I pleaded with my boss to let me go to GDC — not even send me there, like they were doing for so many other employees, but just let me go," Fish recalls. "They wouldn't give me clearance to leave." IGF Fez awards or not, Phil Fish, you are not going anywhere. "So I had to quit right there and then," he says. "That's when I became indie. It felt good."'

GI.biz: 'WiiWare threshold misinterpreted // News'
'Earlier this month, it was reported that many indie developers struggled to meet the sales threshold.' To be fair, we actually said - in our original report - that 'at least one' had. So GI/EG is apparently debunking its own inflation? Hee.

Citizen Game - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
'Citizen Game is an upcoming science fiction action thriller film written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. The film stars Gerard Butler as an unwilling participant in an online game in which participants can control human beings as players.' Interesting because they're the Crank creators, and that has a lot of video game references in the credits sequence, etcetera.

Game Informer: 'Indie Week: Day One - What Does It Mean To Be Indie?'
The website of the world's biggest game magazine does a whole week speaking to IGF finalists - v.neat. (Also they speak to me, boo.) Also see Pt.2, Pt.3.

A Thousand Deaths Is A Statistic | Resolution
A really nice article on death in video games for a UK game site that I wasn't aware of, and appears neat. (Via RPS.)

TIGSource forums: Dutch Tv special on GDC/IGF
Hey, v.neat!

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

Every month, God bless them, New York City venue The Tank hosts Pulsewave, an event focused on "experimental and lo-fi music, with an emphasis on the burgeoning neo/retro art scene around chipmusic." Previous Pulsewave headliners include micromusic giants like Trash80, Starscream, Anamanaguchi, Nullsleep, and Minusbaby to name a few.

With the approach of each show, organizers put out a video flyer with original graphics and music to promote the upcoming party. Appropriate to the audience and Pulsewave's theme, the flyers are presented with 8-bit graphics, like an attract mode or title screen for an NES game. In fact, you can even download a ROM and play the flyer in an NES emulator (or on a real console, if you're one of those odd sorts who have an NES flashcart).

Here's the newest clip, a skyline scene invoking memories of Punch-Out!! and River City Ransom, and advertising this coming Saturday's show, which will feature French acts Je Deviens DJ en 3 Jours and Dr. Von Pnok, as well as Larry (a duo consisting of Graffiti Monsters's Louis Shannon and Anamanaguchi's Ary Warnaar):

You can download the ROM for this piece here.

Seeing as I'm located nowhere near New York City, these nicely produced flyers are the real highlight for me whenever I think of Pulsewave. Programmer Don "No Carrier" Miller codes the slick production, chiptune artist Alex Mauer composes the wistful music, and illustrator Alex "enso" Bond (only 19 years old!) creates the charming graphics.

Bond also runs Pixelstyle, a fantastic Tumblr site celebrating "the aesthetic of pixels, whether from games, demos, original artwork, or anything else."

Here are two more of the group's recent Pulsewave flyers -- even if the advertised events are now past, the videos are still enjoyable months later. In fact, I still load up this first clip at least once every other week, whenever I need an artificial sunset and tranquilizing chiptunes to take the edge off a stressful day.

[Via enso]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rock Paper Shotgun's Alec Meer has written a sharp ode to that vilest video game enemy, the scourge that's tormented you in hundreds of games across dozens of genres for decades -- the indestructible locked door:

"I hate the way you are resistant to knives, to guns, to sledgehammers, to rocket-propelled grenades, to weapons that rewrite the very laws of physics, to dark unearthly magic, to punches that can knock a man’s head clean off. ...

I hate the way you are so often an easy shortcut for developers unable or unwilling to devise more satisfying obstacles and challenges.

I hate the way you so often lead to nowhere, how you are nothing more than decoration for a wall."

As this excerpt indicates, the rant is just a much a criticism of these bothersome devices as it is of the designers who fill their worlds with locked doors and gates to guard the rest of the game (or often to guard nothing at all). You can read Meer's full diatribe here.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Continuing his voyage through the video game audio world, Jeriaska contributes this GameSetWatch-exclusive interview with Gas Powered Games and RAD Game Tools veteran Casey Muratori on the intriguing indie title with an interactive soundtrack.]

"When a baking mishap disrupts the traditionally balanced diet of the spirit world, a young samurai must learn to master the art of sushi preparation to bring flavor and nutrition back to the afterlife."

This is the premise of Sushi Bar Samurai, a game by the independent production studio Molly Rocket, founded in 2004. A PAX 10 finalist at the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo, one designer served as the main programmer, art director and composer.

Casey Muratori not only champions the role of the videogame auteur through the example of his PAX 10 game, but by uploading video lectures to his website. (Got unwanted blending problems in your animation system? Watch the talk on using the quaternion double-cover property.)

Encouraging the indie community is not just a hobby. The founder of Molly Rocket sees it as a prescriptive response to an industry he maintains is dominated by impersonal development processes. In this interview on the interactive soundtrack for Sushi Bar Samurai, he offers a case study on how his culinary game title was recognized for its totally unique flavor.

Casey Muratori on the show floor of the Penny Arcade Expo

Sushi Bar Samurai is all about preparing traditional Japanese dishes for lost and wandering spirits so that they can transcend. What kind of research went into all the varieties and uses of sushi that you brought to the game?

Casey Muratori: I actually did a substantial amount of research for Sushi Bar Samurai, but only a very small percentage of that research is actually used in the game now. If you have too large a set of ingredients, it becomes impossible for anyone to remember what they all are, what they do, or how they relate to each other. The game then has to degenerate to recipe-following mechanics, and I don't find that to be a very interesting or rewarding type of design.

I worked the design down to the point where there are eight ingredients, with around 150 recipes, and I think that's roughly the sweet spot for what people can understand and work with in an interesting way. I think if you go above that, you're starting to be more of a sushi simulator and less of a game. While that would be an interesting thing, it's not what I was going for.

That said, everything you can make in Sushi Bar Samurai is a valid Japanese dish, and in general I have tried not to disallow any combinations of ingredients that would result in a valid recipe.

To lend a dose of verisimilitude to the supernatural game setting, did you talk with chefs, food critics, fishermen?

Verisimilitude wasn't something I was shooting for. I wanted the game to feel like a Japanese fable, and sushi is more of the artistic seed from which the game mechanics and art grow, rather than being what the game is "about." Another way of saying it might be that the game is inspired by sushi, but it is not about sushi.

In your research, did you find out whether it's true what they say about fugu?

Good question! Thankfully, I've never been eating at a sushi bar where someone has suddenly dropped dead, so I suppose I can only go by "what they say" as well. Here's hoping I can never answer "yes" to your question from personal experience!

Did you experiment with various software programs before arriving at the tools that were used to create the music for Sushi Bar Samurai?

I tried a number of things before deciding that commercial audio programs are basically useless. I tried Digital Performer, Cakewalk, Cubase, etc. They are all terrible.

These programs just don't work the way music works, so you're constantly manhandling everything and it's just very tedious. It's very strange coming from a background in 3D, where people always complain about tools like MAX and Maya. If they ever saw just how far behind these music packages were, they'd stop complaining! Even the worst 3D animation package is lightyears ahead of the best music editing software if you make the analogy.

So there is no commercial software involved in the production of the Sushi Bar Samurai music. I wrote a completely custom editor which works with the music the way I want it to, and I'm much happier. It still needs a lot of improvement, because I don't have that much time to spend on it, but I'm hoping over the course of a few products it will become quite spiffy.

You mentioned at PAX that music theory guides the structure of the Sushi Bar Samurai soundtrack. How strictly are these rules enforced?

Theoretical correctness is always strictly enforced, and the music system never violates the rules for the sake of better responsiveness.

The reason I chose that tradeoff is because the worst thing to have happen in the score is for something musically jarring to occur that draws the player's attention away from the game. The whole point of a good musical score is to reinforce the action. If instead it's detracting from the action by distracting the player, that's the worst possible situation. So if the music system has a choice between an immediate response that would violate a core musical rule, or following the rule and being a measure late, it's going to choose to be a measure late.

I've tried to employ a number of new techniques to minimize that number of times when a tradeoff has to be made in the first place, but it's never going to be perfect because the music system doesn't know what the player is going to do until after they do it. Perfect scoring requires that knowledge. That's the advantage a movie composer has over a game composer, and unfortunately we will never have that advantage assuming we want games to respond quickly to player input.

In creating the soundtrack to the title, to what degree did you determine that every person who sits down to play the game would be influencing the audio component of the experience?

All of the music in Sushi Bar Samurai is fully interactive. It responds to literally every action that the player takes, and across multiple players in co-op play. So to a large degree, the player is controlling the score as they play just as much as they are controlling their in-game actions.

This was very important to me. From a presentation perspective, music is one of the most crucial elements to have synced with the events in the game. It's always very jarring to me when I play a game whose music largely ignores what's happening on-screen. So I made sure the music system in Sushi could respond to everything, right down to the individual moves the player makes from second to second. Sometimes it's not perfect, because unlike a traditional score for a movie, it doesn't have the benefit of knowing what the player will do ahead of time, to make sure crescendos and transitions occur naturally over time.

That said, the final music compositions aren't done yet, since that's one of the last things that I'll do before the game is complete. So I still can't say definitively how well all the experimental music technology in the game will work. From the smaller test scoring that I have in there now, I don't foresee any problems when I expand the score out into its final size. But, one thing I've learned with experimental tech is that you never can tell what could go wrong!

Have you found it challenging to balance this motivation of handing over control of the sound composition to whomever sits down to play Sushi Bar Samurai with retaining your own personal vision for the soundtrack?

I don't really think about it as handing over control. To me, it's just the best way to do my job as composer on the title. I think about it this way: if I recorded someone playing the game, I could compose the proper score to accompany that specific play-through. The process would be identical to scoring a movie. So obviously there is a mental process going on in my brain that's allowing me to look at what's happening, consider the musical options, and put together each piece of the score such that it matches the on-screen action.

The interactive music system is just my attempt to capture that mental process in an algorithm, so it can be applied by the computer as the player plays the game. If I've done my job as a programmer, then it will create a score for any given play-through on the fly that's similar to what I would do if I looked at a recording of that play-through and composed the music for it specifically.

Do you feel it would be possible for you to release the music to Sushi Bar Samurai as a stand-alone item following the release of the game, or does the interactive nature of the audio mean that it's pretty much a different song you encounter every time around?

I haven't thought about how you would release a soundtrack, because the music is meant to be continuous from the start of the game to the end, and of course that may take many more hours than the typical length of a CD. So you would have to do a process whereby you decide on some representative play-through segments, and you'd have the interactive music system play back those segments, maybe with a proper prologue and epilogue to make it a track suitable for a soundtrack CD. That might work well, but it's not really something I'd thought about until you just asked!

As for the soundtrack being different each time around, that's true to a certain extent. But it's not going to be different in terms of the melodic identity. I set up the motifs that are used, the types of instruments that are going to be playing, the types of chord progressions, etc., and that's all fixed because that's what makes it the Sushi Bar Samurai soundtrack and not something else. So the music is very specific to this game. No two play-throughs will have the same music, but they will always sound identifiable as the Sushi Bar Samurai themes.

Overall, what personal experiences would you say have been most influential in contributing to this game?

Demoing the game at PAX was, without question, the single most important experience that influenced the design of the game. Prior to that, I felt very disconnected from the people who actually play games. Having worked in the mainstream game industry for a decade prior to starting on Sushi, I think the prevailing tendency to treat players as a market rather than as individuals was still affecting me, even though I have never liked that notion.

PAX really changed that. It was three straight days of wonderful people coming up to play Sushi, and they all had sophisticated and interesting reactions to it. It established this very intense emotional relationship in my head, replacing an abstract, faceless concept of "the player" with a very real and tangible notion of the kinds of people who will be playing the game when it is completed.

And frankly, I felt like I wasn't giving them everything they deserved. Here were these fantastic people, approaching the game with an open mind, immersing themselves in the world, thinking deeply about how it worked, and I felt like they were ready for much more richness than Sushi was delivering.

So immediately after PAX, I decided to completely rework the game with a fresh outlook on the audience. It's pushed out the release a ways, but I think it will be well worth it. The game is now deeper and more rewarding to play, and it gives people a lot more freedom to explore and to choose their own unique strategies and tactics.

I won't know how Sushi will be received in the end, but if it turns out to be a great game, it's going to be because of those people at PAX. Of that much I am certain! And to a large extent, I suspect that the games I do in the future will all also be informed by this experience.

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

Persuasive Games designer and frequent Gamasutra contributor Ian Bogost posted about an intriguing project he's working on with a group at Georgia Tech Computer Science (where he serves as an associate professor) to modify the Stella Atari VCS emulator to "better reproduce the visual effects of a CRT television of the late 1970s and early 1980s."

Similar to NFG's argument that modern monitors have difficulty displaying games the way we remember them, Bogost believes that our huge, sharp LCD monitors fail to give an accurate impression of what Atari games looked like in the 1970s, missing the texture, afterimage, color bleed, and noise of older televisions.

"Many of today's players may only experience Atari games in emulation," he laments. "Indeed, many of my students may have little to no memory of CRT televisions at all. Given such factors, it seems even more important to improve the graphical accuracy of tools like Stella."

The Georgia Tech Computer Science capstone group has modified Stella to add in those absent characteristics, and is working with the maintainer of the free and open-source emulator to include their CRT-emulating changes into the main build, where they will be available as a configurable option. Bogost hopes that the software will eventually be extended for use in other emulators for systems that relied on televisions for their primary output.

You can see some examples of the modified emulator in action after the break, as well as on Bogost's site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[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.]

It's been a busy two weeks for GamerBytes. We've looked at the sales on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and XBL Community Games in the month of March, with in-depth analysis on each of the new titles that came out in the month.

In addition, both Microsoft (via its Japanese event) and Konami had huge blowouts on upcoming XBLA, PSN and WiiWare titles as well - as I said, it's been a busy two weeks. Here's the top stories of the fortnight:

Microsoft Spring 2009 Preview

MS Spring '09 Preview: Fatal Fury: Mark Of The Wolves Made Official
We called it - the final Fatal Fury game is making its way to the XBLA.

MS Spring '09 Preview: Taito's Bubble Bobble Neo! Announced
A port of Bubble Bobble Plus! on WiiWare is making its way to Xbox 360s soon.

MS Spring '09 Preview: King Of Fighters Skystage -- A Shoot'em Up?
This makes no sense, and yet it could be great.

MS Spring '09 Preview: Square Reveal 0 Day Attack On Earth
Square Enix creates a giant alien city destruction game?

MS Spring '09 Preview: Project CUBE Is Bloody And Confusing
Square consumes and shoots bullets at you in this twin stick shooter.

MS Spring '09 Preview: King Of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match Hits XBLA In 2010
But you're going to have to wait until after KOF '98 Ultimate Match.

MS Spring '09 Preview: Space Invaders Extreme, Arkanoid, Virtual On Given Release Dates, Prices
Games coming much sooner than expected.

MS Spring '09 Preview: 0-D Beat Drop Melds Music With Drop Puzzle Action
It's Tetris meets Columns meets Lumines.

Xbox Live Arcade

XBLA Update - Lode Runner And EXIT2, Domino Master DLC
Get your Lode on.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 All But Confirmed For XBLA
Achievement unlocked - taken for a ride.

Death Bringer Resurrected As Puzzle Chronicles For XBLA, PSN
Sideways Columns with spells!

OutRun Online Arcade Now Up On Xbox Live Arcade
It's a Sweet Sound Shower this week.

PlayStation Network

A Peek At PomPom's Gemini Rings
A shooter that is not a shooter.

Pinball FX Wizards Bring Zen Pinball To PSN
It's not the Terminator 2 Table, but it may be just as good.

Blitz Arcade's Droplitz Goes Multiplatform, Reveals Publisher
One of the Blitz Arcade 5 finds a publisher.

NA PSN Store Update - PixelJunk Eden Encore, Magic Ball DLC
Expansion to PixelJunk Eden now available.

EU PSN Store Update - Outrun Online Arcade, PixelJunk Eden Encore, Magic Ball DLC
OutRun Online Arcade makes it to Europe on PSN - and only Europe.

EU PSN Store Update: Flock, Worms, Chimps, Rag Dolls And Anniversary Sale
Get ready to Flock some sheep, shoot some Worms and battle a variety of animals.

NA PSN Store Update - Flocking Ragdolls
Flock and Rag Doll Kung Fu now available.

WiiWare

Get Off Road With Driift
Super Off Road is back, kind of.

Ant Nation Burns Tiny Creatures With Rocket Launchers
Toughen up your army by putting a blow torch over them.

NA WiiWare Update - Crystal Defenders R1, Wonder Boy III
Desktop Tower Defense title with Final Fantasy characters now available.

NA WiiWare Update - Party Fun Pirate, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure
Stab a pirate in this E10+ friendly game.

EU WiiWare Update - Bubble Bobble Plus!, Family & Friends Party, Equilibrio
Burst some bubbles while rolling marbles.

GamerBytes Originals

The Road To NPD - Xbox Live Arcade Sales For March 2009
We look at March's 5 weeks of Xbox Live Arcade sales. How well did Watchmen, Peggle and Family Game Night do?

The Road To NPD - PlayStation Network Sales For March 2009
Only two new releases made it to the PSN Top 10 in March. What happened? Find out inside.

The Road To NPD - XBL Community Games Sales For March 2009
Some XBL Community Games may not be selling too well, but we can at least see what is popular on the service.

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

As part of a recent contest for Persona 4 prizes, Matthew "Fort90" Hawkins invited readers of his blog to send in artwork with characters from Atlus' offbeat RPG series. The grand prize winning entry, a beautiful illustration by, um, Poop-mouth, shows the heroes of Persona 3 and 4 rummaging through a moonlit room cluttered with Shin Megami Tensei props..

I've attached the full piece after the break along with a couple other favorite entries, but before you look at those, treat your eyes to this Persona 4-themed arcade stick, a Mad Catz SE FightStick modded by Scottind with new and matching Sanwa parts. Finally, a controller with the responsive buttons and high-quality directional input an RPG requires.

By Poop-mouth:

By Nemi:

By Adam Gouveia:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Our own Leigh Alexander recounts observations from Warren Spector's recent NYU Game Center lecture to illustrate the philosophy conflict between user-created experiences and designed authorship.]

Should a designer's objective be to build an environment where players can drive events and experiences, or should the game determine the objective, with responsibility for leading player behavior in meaningful ways?

This philosophy conflict between user-created experiences and designed authorship is one of the most interesting issues emerging in next-gen games. I first started getting my head around it when I recently heard Warren Spector giving a lecture on his approach to design at NYU. His talk was followed by an informal but fascinating Q&A with Area/Code's Frank Lantz -- if you're familiar with both these guys, you can imagine how interesting the discussion was!

In case you're unfamiliar, Lantz and Area/Code are very well worth reading up on -- Lantz is, last I checked, a professor in the Tisch School’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and heads up NYU's Game Center. But if you're a Facebook user, you probably know Area/Code best for Parking Wars, which played a major if not defining role in turning the spotlight on FB as an emerging platform for social play.

Whether or not Parking Wars is a "video game" is open for debate, of course -- but it is interactive multi-user play imagined by traditional game designers, and it's significant because it reached users where they were already interacting, rather than demanding they enter the designer's world in a traditional way.

You also may or may not know that it was created as a cross-media extension of an A&E reality show -- I sure didn't, at first -- which provokes some interesting thoughts on how game design can help IP be media-independent.

These kinds of ideas about games are less-known to the core video game audience, of course, but at Austin GDC last year, Lantz said Parking Wars pulled 400,000 users in its first two months -- close enough to twice what EVE Online has got now, if I'm not mistaken.

Hopefully you can see why it was so interesting to see someone like Lantz talk with someone from Spector's world -- Origin, Looking Glass, Ultima, System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief -- about the role designers play in the kind of experiences players have.

I've always tended to fall on Spector's side of the fence -- I've never been a fan of multiplayer games, because really, I want to interact with a guided vision, not my pals from the internet. Spector would rather have you talk around the water cooler about the moments you discovered in his game that he didn't plan for, and discuss amongst yourselves the way you all experienced the same thing differently, rather than hear a recounting of what was essentially your group social outing (involving headshots).

I get it. Say what you will about the BioShock "choice," for example, but we're all learning from the differences in one another's experiences of the same event. Meanwhile, the story of your WoW raid is solely personal, and interesting only to you and your guild.

One thing Spector said during the NYU discussion was that he feels multiplayer games are "lazy." This is the designer in him talking, of course -- his theory that in letting players build stories via Left 4 Dead-style happy accidents in open worlds, the designer doesn't have to tackle complex challenges like making choices meaningful, or making characters believable.

Spector wants to take on those challenges, and he doesn't like the idea that user-driven play, from his standpoint, effectively allows game design to bypass them. It's actually an idea I relate to a lot as a writer -- I was raised in an era of authoritative media, when individual voices drove culture, opinion and information. The internet's changed everything, of course; the authoritative voice has evolved into a conversation between writer and audience, and the writer now leads the community discussion rather than acting as a single determiner, a unilateral judge.

And it doesn't take a professional writer to lead a community -- many feel that the rise of citizen journalism and the core concept of crowd wisdom means that individual authority in media will eventually disappear altogether.

Naturally, as someone who makes her living as a journalist, I reflexively dislike this idea -- is this why I am a Spector-sympathizer? If the game designer insists on authorial authority, is that his self-interest in the way?

Lantz actually called Spector out -- politely, of course, as it was obvious that both gentlemen respected their differences -- because one of the advice items Spector had offered the primarily-student audience was that the design process shouldn't be ego-driven, and that designers shouldn't try to impose their will on players. Why then, should Spector want to fight the apparent trend toward user-governed gameplay in order to build the experience from the game design power seat?

As with most divergent perspectives, it's unlikely that reality will skew solely to one side or another; the rise of social games and user-generated content doesn't mean the author-driven video game will just poof away. But questions of control are still fun to think about -- do you want to drive the community yourself, or do you want to interact in an environment that's been created for you?

Are all of us together as good at game design as one Warren Spector? And what might we see taking place in the games industry if in fact the answer is yes?

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

This editorial cartoon by Steve Breen appeared in The San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this month, re-imagining President Barack Obama's gift to Queen Elizabeth from when he visited Buckingham Palace several weeks ago.

In this alternate universe, Her Majesty never received that iPod filled with Broadway tunes and video footage from her 2007 U.S. trip; instead, she's wailing on her new copy of Guitar Hero, as Prince Philip looks on disapprovingly. It's not that much of leap to imagine this scenario (the actual gift, not the Queen playing Guitar Hero), considering First Lady Michelle Obama recently presented a Gibson acoustic guitar to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, France's First Lady.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 5:55 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.]

Up for the further RSS goodness, and wandering in here is Crispy Gamer's really nice longform Haden Blackman chat - part of some of the most well thought-out alternative game coverage around right now, I think - try to keep keeping an eye on 'em.

Also hanging out in here - more Final Fantasy fun with Mr. Mielke, game designers and pr0n, all kinds of IGF-related things, Playfirst's CEO on casual life, a very strange Pixeljam interview indeed, and lots more.

Go go go:

1UP's RPG Blog : My Life In Vana'diel: A Crystalline Prophecy Conquered!
Mielke's FFXI love is kinda adorable, making his write-ups puppydog readable.

Crispy Gamer - Interview: Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 1
Really good, progressive discussions on reviews for The Force Unleashed, the Star Wars franchise, etc - there's also a Part 2. Also, XYZ Bar has (had?) a great tuna sandwich.

Game Developers and Porn Stars | Kill Ten Rats
'They are hired in young, generally in their late teens and early twenties. They are energetic and excited about getting paid to do something they really enjoy (and probably have been doing on a small scale for years without pay).'

Artsy Games Incubator » Blog Archive » Round 4, Session 1 Recap
Neat, it's baaack!

Interview with IGF 2009 Winners by Game Tunnel
Just posted: 'In the midst of the hubbub that was Independent Games Festival, I was fortunate enough to yank a few developers away from their games and talk to them. No easy task.'

Interview with Mari Baker, PlayFirst | Gamezebo
The new CEO on where the often interesting - though quite VC-controlled - casual company is going.

On The Media: 'DIY Gaming'
A U.S. public radio segment: 'Video game sales are astronomical, but like the music and film industries before it, the game industry has become dependent on predictable and expensive blockbusters. But now, as writer Clive Thompson explains, creative independent games are adding to the gaming ecosystem.'

Exclusive Pixeljam Interview: Porn, Fetuses, and Rich’s Super Developer Origin Story | Ripten Video Game Blog
Complete insane interview. (Via InfiniteLives).

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

As Rap Song Excel Charts proved last year, quantifying and graphing ridiculous things is hilarious. Gaming blog First-Person Shouter applied that assumption to a series of charts measuring the writer's gaming experiences, such as this bar graph of his Counter-Strike capabilities:

Yes, it really is funny because it's true. If Counter-Strike's scores were tracked by how often you spammed "Storm the Front" audio messages instead of by your kill/death ratio, you would see [GSW]XxEricIsAwesomexX at the top of the player list whenever you hit the Tab button, without fail.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bruno de Figueiredo -- the Portugese writer behind Antagonism and Continuity, a fantastic essay exploring the design and meanings of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus -- recently picked up the Chinese edition of SotC after hearing it described as the definitive edition, seeing as it includes subtitles in Chinese, Japanese and English.

He compared his new Chinese copy to the Japanese release, Wanda To Kyozou (Wander and the Colossus), and found that the titles printed on their manuals didn't quite match:

Yes, the Chinese title, Shadow and the Colossus, sounds more like the U.S. name, but it doesn't make sense at all! The same baffling text was also printed on the game's disc, dropped in after the break.

"I remind you that this is an official product with a proper Sony serial number, not some knock-off from a Hong Kong dealer," says de Figueiredo. "If that had been the case there would be no reason to take this seriously." Strange that no one noticed this until three and a half years after the Chinese edition's release!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Following up his XBLA and PSN analysis, sister console download site GamerBytes' [RSS here!] editor Ryan Langley looks at Xbox Live Community Games charts for March, including new standouts like Little Racers and ZP2K9.]

With the March NPD U.S. game sales numbers just debuted, GamerBytes looks back at the last month of sales for downloadable spaces, with the data available to us and the public.

Specifically, every week, Larry 'Major Nelson' Hryb posts a Top 10 for the Xbox Live Community Games, which gives us somewhat an inside look at which games are selling better than others.

It's no secret that the XBL Community Games are not selling as well as some developers hoped. But many of the games that appeared in the Top 10 list were not a part of the analysis we did.

Below, we have a look at the new titles for the month, look at the comparison between the sales of ZP2K9 and its positions each week, and then finish it off with a bit of armchair analysis and hard opinion.

Let's start out with the top 10 rankings, as revealed by Major Nelson, for the month on XBLCG, followed by more detailed analysis:

Standout Titles

The list has not changed a lot from month to month. For the most part, new titles such as Fading Memories, NextWar, Tank V.S or ZenHak have appeared for a single week and then dropped off quickly.

The 3 standout new titles for the month were ZP2K9, Solar and Little Racers, all which got past a week of being in the Top 10. While ZP2K9 was released at the very end of February, it has stayed in the Top 10 for the whole month of March. Solar has kept itself in 2nd place for two weeks running, and Little Racers has continued to stay in the lower parts of the countdown for two weeks now. Considering its price of 400MSP, that's not too bad.

Speaking of price, there are few games in the list that are above the 200MSP price point, which is not surprising. Besides Little Racers, the only other titles are Supercow, ZenHak and the return of Colosseum after a price cut at the end of the month. As all these games are twice as expensive, they would have made twice as much money, so being 400MSP or above and not being on the list doesn't mean they're doing badly, relatively speaking.

ZP2K9 Sales And Position

A few weeks ago we delved into the sales of ZP2K9, and going by those statistics, we can see how other games are doing, based on its position in the Top 10.

On the week of March 2nd ZP2K9 sold 769 units and got 6th place. On the week of the 9th it sold 1,177 units and reached 4th place, and on the week of the 16th it sold 1,130 units and fell to 8th place. So it's not doing so bad at all, and the stats mean that those games above it are doing more units than that per week.

RC Air-Sim, for example, has as of today been on the top of the list for 10 of the last 11 weeks, so going by that it has done better than any other XBLCG title. We'd speculate that it could have done at least 20,000 units, and Aquarium HD has been sitting quite high as well for 6 weeks, and should have hit at least 5,000+ units as well just during that time.

So it's perhaps not too bad for some developers, but it still looks like a lot of developers looking to create more "core" games -- rather than cheaper software toys -- might have some work ahead of them if they wish to make a good amount of money off of their title.

[We thank Major Nelson for releasing these statistics, as well as James Silva for releasing his statistics for ZP2K9 to us. We also thank our colleagues at Gamasutra and on NeoGAF for spurring discussion and bringing more analysis to the table.]

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

Along with a team of writers, 1UP's Jeremy Parish has published GameSpite, an online magazine featuring long-form articles devoted to gaming, since November 2007. He recently put out GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 (pictured), a 352-page book collecting articles from the periodical's first year running.

Parish announced that instead of releasing GameSpite's 14th issue online as usual, he's transforming the magazine into GameSpite Quarterly, now publishing articles in a print format first before posting them on his site, instead of the other way around.

"I already make a living doing online game writing for a company that has no interest in taking us into print, and this site already has lots of great content that will eventually be bundled into collected print volumes," he reasons. "So we've decided to reverse the process a little and do print first: thus, GameSpite Quarterly, Issue 1."

This change was likely influenced by January's shuttering of Electronic Gaming Monthly, as well as by the previous closings of Ziff Davis' other gaming magazines, which the 1UP editor previously wrote for.

"I really miss print," he admits. "I miss the substance of physical media, and I miss single looming deadlines, and I miss pages of content without animated roadblock-style Flash ads bordering them. No one's going to make a profit publishing a game magazine, but I realized we can do it here without a loss, and that's good enough."

GameSpite Quarterly will be modeled after Japan's niche magazine Continue, and will be purchasable through DIY-publishing site Blurb. The first issue will cover the Game Boy's 20th birthday, and will be available "by the time E3 rolls around."

You can GameSpite Quarterly's first issue cover below:

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

[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 editor in chief Danny Cowan and reviewers Tim Lockridge and Louise Yang.]

This week, FingerGaming details the premiere of the iPhone's first MLB-licensed baseball title and the release of an upgraded version of Through the Looking Glass. Featured reviews for this week cover Hysteria Project and Oceanic.

- Review: Hysteria Project
"For Hysteria Project to fully realize its potential, Bulkypix will have to re-envision narrative gameplay with the same sort of progressive thought that they’ve brought to cinematics and visuals."

- Top Free Game App Downloads for the Week
"WordSearch Unlimited Lite swipes the top spot from last week's chart leader iFighter, which falls to third place in today's rankings. Namco's Galaga Remix Lite lands at second place this week, as the recently released Mafia clone Ninjas takes fourth."

- Free App Roundup, April 11th - 17th Edition
"This week’s free releases include demo editions of Freeballin’ and Balloon Headed Boy, along with free full versions of Find Junk and Spirit Board."

- Officially Licensed MLB World Series 2009 Debuts in App Store
"MLB World Series 2009 features 30 official MLB teams (but no player names, strangely) and four different stadiums. Multiple career modes are included -- players can either play through a full season or skip straight to the postseason leading up to the World Series."

- Review: Oceanic
"I really wanted to like this game. The visuals are bright and colorful, and the characters are whimsical. The screenshots just remind me of Saturday morning cartoons, when they were good."

- Apple Reveals All-Time Top Paid App Sellers
"Topping the chart is Vivendi's Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, an early App Store release that won a sizable share of the iPhone's audience with simple gameplay, impressive graphics, and effective use of the device's accelerometer functions."

- Steve Capps Rebuilds Macintosh Classic Through the Looking Glass for iPhone
"AliceX's presence on the iPhone is significant, as many consider the original version to be 'the Macintosh's first great game.' It was also the only first-party title Apple ever released for the platform."

- Top-Selling Paid Game Apps for the Week
"Firemint's air traffic control sim Flight Control finishes at the top of the charts for the third week running. The recently released Scorched Earth clone Bowman arrives at second place this week, pushing the tile puzzler ParkingLot down to third."

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

Long celebrated for their arcades and minigolf courses, Golfland Entertainment's "family fun centers" are familiar stops for many gamers in California, many of whom are likely unaware that the chain donated over $35,000+ to support California Proposition 8. The campaign for the proposition, which raised $39.9 million last year, helped changed the state Constitution to limit marriage's definition to opposite-sex couples, preventing same-sex couples from marrying.

Personal blog Guy Dads uncovered that the family-owned business's vice president, managers, and others chipped in a total of $10,459 to the ballot proposition, while president and chief executive Fred Kenney's wife, Cynthia Kenney, contributed $25,100 to the cause.

In an impassioned post at niche gaming site Insert Credit, which brought Golfland's donations to my attention, writer Joel admonished other gaming sites for not covering this controversy: "I wasn’t particularly surprised to learn this, but I am surprised it was only reported on activist blogs and not on any videogame related ones. There is a website called gaygamer.net. They run banner ads for gourmet food and Subaru cars (literally, this is not a generalization), but they didn’t report this. I guess I don’t understand the purpose of a gay videogame site then."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

[Malheureusement, Game Developer magazine's production editor Jeff Fleming is a little 'fifth Beatle'-ish - he does awesome work, but it sometimes gets lost under the carpet. Not so with this fine Suda51 interview he did at GDC this year - bravo, Sir.]

As the director of Grasshopper Manufacture, Goichi Suda - aka Suda51 - has overseen the creation of games that are unique in their subversive wit and style.

Suda recently talked to us about how his experience previous to Grasshopper informed the studio's strategy of balancing aggressively original projects like Killer7 and No More Heroes with more publisher-driven commercial work like Fatal Frame IV and Samurai Champloo.

We also discussed the distinctive Grasshopper style, the Unreal Engine, and matters of art, horror and... therapeutic chair-smashing?

Do you have a special affection for the horror genre? A lot of Grasshopper's games have a sinister quality to them.

Goichi Suda: It's not that I consciously think about horror during the creation process. When you're making a horror game, of course, that's a different story. I can't deny that I like a lot of movies in that genre, though, so from that standpoint, you could say that. Horror is one of the easiest story genres to express within a video game, but it's also one of the most difficult emotions to invoke within the player.

It's undoubtedly an interesting and vital storytelling tool in games, so from that aspect, I do have something of an affection for it.

Grasshopper has a very distinctive style that is easy to spot -— the way that it looks and sounds. But many studios are not as successful at developing a recognizable style. What do you do to ensure the Grasshopper look and feel?

To be honest, I didn't realize that the style was so distinctive until I began hearing it from other people worldwide. That's when I first became cognizant of it, and certainly I realize it today. It's not something that we deliberately set out to realize with each new project, although there's naturally going to be a lot of the development staff's own minds in any final product.

If you asked me what I consider to be Grasshopper's most unique trait, it's that we create games not by crafting individual parts and building them up like blocks, but by first considering what sort of emotional response we want to get from the player. That's a big part of what makes a game Grasshopper-like, the message we try to send.

Did you have a chance to look at any of the games in the Independent Games Festival? They have a very strong visual style. Very small teams make the games and they're generally not making much money at them, but they're very challenging works. I'm wondering what Grasshopper does to be commercially successful while retaining a somewhat confrontational spirit.

Well, I didn't get my career start in video games until I joined a publisher called Human when I was 24 years old. I left school at the age of 18 -— actually, I was in school for one more year after that, so it was 19 -— and in the five years between, I did all sorts of jobs, none of which had anything to do with games. Through that, I think I got a very personal insight into the ways of the world, and how our society is built.

I had that experience before joining the game industry, and in the beginning I was working on previously established games and series -- first a pro wrestling game, then I joined midway on another development team's project.

I was a designer, but I also had a team to direct, dealing with the dev team on one end and the main brass of the company on the other. There was a balance that had to be struck in order to keep every side happy with each other.

So with all that previous experience, I think we at Grasshopper have become adept at not only pushing our own style, but being able to work alongside partners, producers and publishers on an equal basis, being able to listen to their opinions and work alongside them. There are games like Killer7, of course, but there are other games we've worked on that were a great deal more publisher-driven.

I think that production style is something we've been able to preserve throughout our history; keeping up that sort of relationship is one important part of that.

With these other projects that you take on, like Fatal Frame 4 or Samurai Champloo -- how much time do they take away from productions like No More Heroes or Killer7? Is it a matter of setting aside time from your personal projects for these more commercial ones?

The original titles definitely take more time. When you're working with IP that previously exists, then your top priority is to make fans of that IP happy. It's the same story in the anime business, and naturally when you make a game based off anime, job one is to attract the fans of the original property.

In a way, a lot of your job in a non-original-IP project is done for you in advance. In the case of Fatal Frame, there are naturally a great number of wonderful games in that series already, so it's our job to create the game that series fans are hoping for, not necessarily to inject every creative idea we come up with into the project. That's the reason projects like that take less time -- it's a more compact and pointed development process.

Are you able to talk about your work with the Unreal Engine? I saw the session that Square Enix had at GDC where they discussed using Unreal for Last Remnant, and the results seemed mixed. They were saying that it excelled in some ways, but in others it didn't meet their expectations.

I actually attended the session too, and certainly I've heard a lot of the issues in that session brought up by other people in the industry I've talked with. In my experience, I think ourselves and the companies we work with both know how to use Unreal and what we expect to get out of it.

We knew what to pay close attention to during our own preparation, and now we've got the pipeline down for the creative process. The decision to use Unreal was made at the start, and it's been a smooth process.

Certainly, mastering the system has taken time and it took some experienced people to help, but since we prepared ourselves for the worst case that we've heard of, it hasn't been a problem.

Grasshopper games always have such outstanding music, and I'm wondering what influences you when you're deciding on how a title should sound.

I want to make sure I don't give people the same impression all the time. We want to avoid, for example, having a Killer7-like song play in the middle of No More Heroes, because that'll wind up making players remember Killer7 instead of the game we want them to pay attention to. Since it's a new game, we want it to be a new experience for the players, and that's something we consciously think of for any soundtrack.

We don't want to repeat what we've already done in the past; instead, we want to give something new and interesting to the players. That's something that applies for the whole design process, of course. We always want to do something fresh.

Do you follow American wrestling?

I have to admit, I probably don't know much about more recent WWE stuff. The last guy I really followed was John Cena.

Do Japanese wrestlers have face and heel personas?

It's a pretty different story in Japan. There are promotions that work in a similar way, but in Japan it's more of a pure contest to see who's the strongest or the most popular.

Certainly, after a long workweek, it can be relaxing to come home and watch someone get hit with a chair.

(laughs) Definitely. The game business keeps all of us really busy, after all. While I'm here in the US, I took the opportunity to buy THQ's latest WrestleMania game, and that helps too, certainly.

[Special thanks to Kevin Gifford for interview translation help.]

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

Chiptune group 8 Bit Weapon, who you might have heard on Nokia's Reset Generation Soundtrack or seen on Attack of the Show, just put out a new sample and loop library with sounds recorded from "the most venerated micro-computers and game consoles of the '70s and '80s," including the Apple II, Commodore 64, NES, Gameboy, and the Atari 2600.

Titled 8 Bit Weapon: A Chiptune Odyssey and released by Sony Creative Software, the collection can be imported into ACID, Ableton Live, Cubase, Garage Band, Logic, and other applications. Each system library features royalty-free samples for drums, bass, synth, special effects, and more.

The library is available as a packaged product or as a downloadable, with the latter version including a full MP3 release of the band's new Electric High EP album and a bonus track. 8 Bit Weapon also made the six-song album available as a limited edition physical release that comes in a real 5.25" floppy disk and sleeve. Only 500 copies have been produced, and each copy is hand-numbered.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

We're going to be stepping up the GameSetLinks going up to the weekend, since we seem to have acquired a bit of a link backlog, woops - and this set of eight or so is headed out by a good discussion of tools for beginning game developers to make neat games.

Also in here - a neat behind the scenes on Dungeon Keeper, a fun discussion of Bit.Trip Beat, an Octomom game, and a Ghostbusters retrospective, and more.

Oh dear oh dear:

God at play - spiritual games» Suggested Tools for Game Designers
'This article is targeted to... designers interested in creating computer-based games, have a little programming experience, and have some familiarity with common development tools, like Torque or Game Maker.' V.neat - hoping there's going to be something else to add to this soon.

The Ludologist » Blog Archive » On the Game Studies Download 4.0 at GDC
The full listing of the top papers, which I don't remember seeing online before.

The Making of Dungeon Keeper | NowGamer
'In Dungeon Keeper, the game born of Molyneux’s aforementioned grievances, you were the dungeon master as envisioned by Gygax – the all-powerful, world-sculpting mastermind whose plots are only ever undermined by the incompetence of his minions, who always fail to see the big picture.'

Bit Tripping And The Art Of SD Card Maintenance » Murderblog 3D
'If I were to rank my favorite gaming moments, my first time entering the nether in bit.trip Beat would easily be number one.'

The Milk Machine - News Games: Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project
'Editorial games show up in the strangest places. Take The Octuplet's Game, an editorial send-up up of the duties of the now-infamous "octuplet's mom," Nadya Suleman.'

Podfeed: 'GDC 09: To Catch an Editor Video Podcast, Episode 36 from the IGN Games Podcast'
Just found this audio discussion, and well worth linking: 'Kick off GDC with the Holy Trinity of art games: Jonathan Blow, Rod Humble, and Jason Rohrer.' Thanks Malvasia Bianca!

Press The Buttons: Nearly Every Ghostbusters Game In Seven Easy Bites
'I give you your tour guide on this magical history tour, 1UP's Bob Mackey, and his seven-part series of Retro Revival Retrospective articles.'

SLRC - Creative Responses to Videogame Questions: The Raider, The Prince and The Assassin
An interesting discussion on pacing in games.

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

Released in May last year, the original Phosphor Dot Levels DVD (Level 1) took viewers through the evolution of video games -- covering games for arcades, home consoles, and computers -- "from 1971’s 'Computer Space' through the dawn of the NES era." The product includes game-by-game profiles with footage and history/trivia, as well as a menu system for searching year-by-year to find particular games.

The PDF team has followed up on its first release with Level 2, a new three hour-long DVD with all new material and improved picture and sound quality. This sequel follows the industry from 1972 through 1987, reaching further into the NES era to show off "some of the most influential games (and a few dark horse contenders) of 1987."

Like the original DVD, Level 2, will have a collection of vintage commercials with restored sound and video quality, many of which PDF claims haven't been seen in over 25 years. It will again feature game clips, notes, and trivia, but will also cover "non-A-list classic consoles and computers" like the Fairchild Channel F and the Emerson Arcadia 2001.

The region-free NTSC discs will come with new features, too, like Retro Makeovers, side-by-side comparisons of classic titles with their modern-day reinventions. And Truth In Advertising Moments will compare released games with their pre-release publicity artwork to see if there's any resemblance between the shipped product's graphics and arists' promotional renditions.

Here are several shots from Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2, which have their text and certain portions blurred out for some reason:

With Level 2's release, the PDF group also put together the Brown Box Collection, a two-disc set with both the original Phosphor Dot Levels DVD and its follow-up. The bundle comes packaged in a case with special woodgrain artwork inspired by the original Magnavox Odyssey's Brown Box prototype. PDF, PDF Level 2, and the Brown Box Collection are all available for purchase online through TheLogBook.com Media.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eurocom founder and director Neil Baldwin is offering a rare look at the history and process behind his soundtracks for the British studio's NES games. Along with sharing streaming and downloadable versions of his NES music, Baldwin has been posting track by track analyses with technical details, as well as overviews of his inspirations and ambitions for each particular game.

So far, he has posted breakdowns for Magician, James Bond Jr., and Lethal Weapon 3, the last of which he admits was a lackluster release in this honest paragraph:

"Sometime around 1992, Eurocom was in trouble. We had no money (actually, make that negative money) and the relationship with the publisher of what would've been our third proper NES title deteriorated to the point that the game was never released (more on this in future updates). We couldn't afford to really pay ourselves and Lethal Weapon 3 was one of those projects that came along that we had to do just to pay the bills. This didn't go unnoticed."

Baldwin intends to add more examinations of his game soundtracks, documenting his work and experiences in roughly chronological order.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Pixel Journeys is taking a break this month while I continue my reviews of all 25 of this year's in-challenge 7DRL winners - here's the first part.

I should mention, before we resume, that I was preceded in this by the guys at Cymon's Games. If I had known that they had done this when I started I probably wouldn't have bothered, heh. I agree with most of what they say, and where our opinions differ I at least can see why they differ. Each of my own 7DRL reviews contains a link to the page on their site so you can quickly see their take on the game. And to the folks at Cymon's Games, please allow me just to quickly say: good work.

This column's a week late, so let me waste no further time in getting to the games. This time, we look at Cypress Tree Manor, Domination, Backwards Gravity, The Favored, Persist, TetRLs, Expedition, and SpiritsRL.

10. Cypress Tree Manor
Written by Nils Fagerburg in Python 2.5 with PyGame for Widows and Mac OSX
Homepage: http://fagerburg.com/nils/stuff/games/cypressTreeManor/
Another opinion: Cymon's Games
Victory post: rec.games.roguelike.development

This game is not real-time, it is presented in simulated ASCII, and it has no experience or inventory system. It is a short game that starts fairly easy and remains so. It is mostly fair.

Description: Zombie survival roguelike after the apocalypse. Get away from the zombies, get into the single-occupancy bunker, and get rid of anyone trying to stop you!

Be warned, it uses the vi keys. You should also check the readme for additional keys. It also warns that a level generator bug means that not all games are winnable.

This is a fairly nice short game. Each level is full of zombies and humans. The zombies only want brains, but all the humans are trying to find the bunker key by any means necessary. There are more zombies (at least on the bottom level), but the human opponents are rather more dangerous.

On the bottom-most level is the bunker, which the player will have to enter then close and lock the door of with the bunker key to win the game. The key is hidden in one of the many furniture items scattered throughout the mansion. There are other keys as well (which tend to be less valuable) and also many weapon, health items and food items. Food can be used to distract zombies to cause them not to fight back while you kill them, health items replenish your appalingly small number of hit points, and weapons are, of course, useful to fight back. All the weapons are melee. The best one appears to be the chainsaw, which is fairly rare but powerful. Whether chainsaws should be horded to preserve them or used the moment they're found... this question I leave to you.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can carry unlimited items; the display on the bottom of the screen is just the first few in inventory. It appears that you have no way to drop things. To use items, press their number. If you have too many items to fit in the eight visible inventory slots, use [ or ] to cycle them until you see the item you're interested in. Although the game uses the Nethack pick-up key (comma), it uses more of context-sensitive system for other things. Pressing space both searches objects and takes stairs.

Weapons are of varying attack strength and durability. All weapons eventually fall apart when used enough, and it seems that other humans using them also depletes their uses. This brings in some fairly interesting resource management, since without a weapon you're fairly weak. All this combines to make loot scavanging the highest priority: having more weapons means you can do more damage, and longer.

You also will have more health items. You start at maximum health, five "hearts." You don't heal naturally over time it seems, but using medical items (health packs or boxes of pills) restores one heart.

The best strategy seems to be to scan each level as much as possible for items. At first you have nothing, which is when you're at your most vulnerable. After you find an axe or chainsaw you are more than capable of surviving on your own, but you must always be careful of your weapon. It's easy to miss a break message and inadvertently pound away with just your fists for a while.

By the way, the game is written in Python 2.5, which is not the most recent version. Python recently had a big version update that broke backwards compatibility, so versions 2.6 and 3.0 probably will not run the game acceptably. 2.5 is probably the fastest and most stable version at the moment. To run it, make sure the Python 2.5 directory is in your path, start a command prompt and cd to the game's directory, then enter "python.exe run.py" (without quotes, of couse).

Verdict: Surprisingly playable and challenging! A keeper.

11. Domination
Written by Numeron in Java
Homepage: http://www.users.on.net/~rossn/
Another opinion: Cymon's Games
Victory post: rec.games.roguelike.development

This game is not real-time, it is presented using tile-based graphics. It has no experience system, but does have a very limited form of inventory. It is a short game that starts fairly easy and gets a little harder. It is fair.

Description: It's single-player, turn-based, team-oriented, roguelike capture-the-flag, complete with line-of-sight and weapons (in the form of spells).

The player, joined by four AI-controlled teammates, are on the green team on the left-hand side of a five screen battlefield. The player only controls his one character, who has an oval head; the others on his team are autonomous. On the right-hand side of the playfield are five blue players, the opposing team. Every screen is color-coded by the side which controls it, or is gray if neutral. This doesn't seem to matter for anything except progress towards winning and ensuring the teams capture bases in order.

In the center of each screen is a base square. By spending ten turns on a base, the player and his teammates can move it one "state" closer to their side's control: if it's blue it will turn gray, and if gray it'll go green. However, a base's state can only be changed if the base one screen left belongs to that side's team. That is to say, the player's team must capture bases in order from left-to-right. The opposing team is under similar constraints in capturing bases from the other end of the battlefield.

At the corners of each screen are magic spells that can be picked up by characters from either team. A given character can carry two of these. When collected the actual spell bestowed is chosen randomly from a set. There are healing spells that replenish a character's health bar (shown over all characters in sight), haste spells that double movement and combat speed, and shields that ward against damage for a short while. Fireball is a moderately-powerful ranged attack spell, and web spells freeze nearly characters (friend and enemy) in place. There are interesting tactical nuances to the spells: invulnerability makes capturing a base a snap, but it doesn't protects against webs and haste spells don't speed base capture.

Combat is done in the traditional bump-into-enemies way. When a character, including the player, runs out of health he's out of the action for a few turns then reappears at his side's base. This means defeated characters have less distance to travel to get back to the contested screen when they're losing, a subtle but effective difficulty adjustment. There are no items other than the spells, but that works well for this game, keeping the focus on the tactics. All carried spells are lost when a character dies.

The game is not too hard really and can be easily defeated with practice, but it's not a pushover either, and bases at the Line of Scrimmage tend to change sides back and forth a couple of times before the focus of the battle moves down the field.

Verdict: A surprisingly engaging game. Multiplayer could actually work out very well for this, as could higher difficulty settings, more spells, additional battlefields, multiple character classes... er, not to try to turn this into Roguelike Team Fortress. Heh.

12. Backwards Gravity
Written by Elig in C++ for Windows, using the curses console library
Homepage: http://backwardsgravity.blogspot.com/
Another opinion: Cymon's Games
Victory post: Dreamhack Devblog

This game is not real-time, it is presented using console ASCII graphics, and it has no experience or inventory system. It is a quick game that starts very easy and remains so. It is fair.

Description: A experimental side-view, platformer roguelike. With variable, Mario Galaxy-like gravity to boot.

Some slack, of course, should be extended to 7DRL games for the severely-limited time frame of the challenge. Just because some of the games turn out to be amazing, it doesn't mean that this is guarenteed to happen, or even that it is entirely the fault of the developer whether it goes one way or the other. Some of the people who participate are not experienced programmers, either.

It is difficult to recomment Backwards Gravity as a general game, that anyone might want to play. It shows some nice ideas, but it's just too incomplete and lacking in play value. Elig didn't even offer a binary download for play; the version linked to above, and the one I tested, is a version compiled by Cymon's Games. (I tried compiling it myself, but failed to get it to emit a binary.)

There is a hint here, however, of something nice. The player is the @ sign in what first looks like an overhead-view world, but is in fact viewed from the side. Mostly, the player can move left or right, but he can also go up and down anywhere there's a period, which represents walkable spaces. Think of them as ladders the player can grab onto. The player cannot move diagonally with just keys, but if he's jumping or falling he can move left and right in the air, which is effectively diagonal movement.

In addition to movement keys, there is a jump button (helpfully reminded by the game when jumping is available). This causes the player to jump "away" from the ground below or above it. When the player reaches the top of a jump, however, gravity reverts to down.

Verdict: A creditable effort, but really too buggy for play. It's an awesome idea however. With some more work this could be ready for play. Until then, it's probably best to stay away.

13. The Favored
Written by Joe Larson (of Cymon's Games) for Windows
Homepage: http://retroremakes.com/forum/index.php/topic,392.0.html
Other opinions: Cymon's Games (guest reviewer), IndieGames
Victory post: rec.games.roguelike.development

This game is not real-time, it is presented using console ASCII graphics. It has no experience system, and only the barest form of inventory. It is a quick game that starts at moderate diffi ulty and gets harder. It is completely unfair, but on purpose.

Description: Progress upwards through four levels. Progress if you DARE! Kill helpless rabbits and climbed their piled corpses to reach the next floor. It would be easy, except....

There exists a game, a kind of quasi-roguelike, called robotfindskitten. Actually it's not so much a game as a kind of joke-delivery medium. The original developer (it's been widely ported) calls it a "zen simulation." The game consists of a single screen filled with letters. Among them is the player, the Robot. One of the letters is a Kitten. The idea of the game is to bump into things, which reveals what kind of thing they are in a status line on-screen. When the thing that is Kitten is bumped, the game ends in victory. There is no combat, and no way to lose. The entire point is to see and laugh at all the "things that are not kitten," of which there are hundreds. Many of them are quite funny.

The Favored is a game only slightly more than Robot Finds Kitten is a game. Each of the levels contains a large number of rabbits. Rabbits move around diagonally and have no attacks. When one is killed, its corpse appears in ASCII-art at the top of the screen; the player can only carry up to four of these, and more being lost. Running into the up-stairs when carrying a dead rabbit piles it there. Six dead rabbits means the player can go to the next level.

There is a catch, however. One of the rabbits on the level is special, a bunny favored by the gods. If this rabbit is harmed, the player is treated to a short ASCII animation of his character being killed by a lightning bolt and the game ends. The player, to win, must avoid touching this perilous hare. It would be simple, for none of the rabbits does a single thing to attack or avoid the player, if it weren't for the fact that there is no indication, in the game, of just which is the deadly bunny.

Later levels have fewer harmless rabbits, thus increasing the chance that the kill switch is thrown. There is a tiny amount of strategy in that extra dead rabbits can be carried over from level to level, but it is fairly simple. The real reason to play this game is all the funny, random death messages with which the game rewards players for killing rabbits.

And that's it. It is completely possible to win, but it's entirely a matter of luck as to if that will happen.

Verdict: More of a joke than a game... but it is a funny joke, nonethless.

14. Persist
Written by jab for Windows and Linux, probably in C++
Homepage: http://code.google.com/p/persistrl/downloads/list/
Another opinion: Cymon's Games
Victory post: rec.games.roguelike.development

This game is not real-time, and it is presented in console ASCII. It has no experience system, but it does have an inventory (without item scrambling). It is a short game that starts hard and get a bit easier. It is probably fair. (But even so, I made little progress in it.)

Description:
A survival game, in a strict sense. No monsters, no mazes, no treasure. Just a large forest, some incredibly deadly rivers, and you struggling to figure out how to live.

I think I see the point of the game: to utilize the various resources at hand to make yourself sustenance and keep yourself hydrated, and live as long as possible. Sadly, other than "picking up" some grass to munch on and (somehow) water to drink, I didn't get very far into this. I did notice, though, that other than a little freestanding liquid here and there, water is incredibly deadly in this game. Also, gathering up a lot of grass enables the player to combine them into various pieces of clothing. Unfortunately, the game liked to crash whenever I picked up too many items, so I wasn't able to get much further than this.

I went over to Cymon's Games to see if he had any insight into it, and it seems he was almost as stymied as I was.

Verdict: Hard to get into and harder to make sense of. I was unable to determine if there is any more to this game than just wandering around making survival tools. The idea of a roguelike take on Lost In Blue is intreguing, though. Hopefully the next version will be a little more discoverable.

15. TetRLs, formerly TetrisRL
Written by Sir_Lewk for Windows, probably in C++
Homepage: http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~jlg95/tetrisrl/
Another opinion: Cymon's Games
Victory post: rec.games.roguelike.development

This game is not real-time, it is presented in console ASCII, and it has no experience or inventory system. It is a very short game that starts easy and gets a little harder. It is fair.

Description: A Russian scientist who seems to have learned English from Yakov Smirnov forces the player to shove oddly-shaped crates around a bin-like warehouse. While doing this, the player is pestered by rats.

This game's name recognition has gotten it a bit of play in the blogosphere, and the character of the Russian scientist is humorous, but I really wasn't too overwhelmed by this one.

The main play is more like Sokoban than Rogue. Blocks are generated one at a time at the top of the screen. Instead of falling, the player must get behind them and push them across the floor until it gets to the spot he wishes it to stay, at which time he can lock it into play with 'D' (the capital letter) and get another one. Blocks need not be anywhere near the bin before being "dropped," and making solid horizontal lines doesn't remove anything, which only serves to further the simularities to Sokoban. The player can "rotate" pieces with shift-R, but it will be returned to its start location if he does this. This can be abused to get pieces out of stuck corners.

A certain number of blocks must be dropped to proceed to the next level. While he's doing this, rats are randomly generated in the area, who walk up to and try to bite the player. So long as he focuses on killing them when they appear they're not too much of a problem, but they do provide a reason to place pieces efficiently; placing each piece heals the player for a small amount of health. Also, if they're not packed in solidly there won't be room for an additional block, making it impossible to proceed.

The player gets rewarded in a minor way for completing lines, but they don't disappear or anything. It doesn't even look like they're recorded for score. Progress is entirely measured in pieces dropped.

I wish there were more to say about the game than this. While competently implemented and polished, the game is really too simplistic. It's fun to place once for the joke but it's not hard to win. After you're done, you're done.

Verdict: It's cool... once or twice. The secret super-power of roguelike games is replayability, but this game doesn't seem to have a lot of that. Definitely worth going through once, however, to experience the entertaining Russian Scientist character. Further development might be interesting to see, but I'm not sure where Sir Lewk can go from here. I know I really shouldn't complain about this; I've been spoiled by the large number of surprisingly polished games I reviewed last time.

16. Expedition
Written by Slash in Java
Homepage: http://slashie.net/page.php?27
Another opinion: Cymon's Games
Victory post: rec.games.roguelike.development

This game is not real-time, and it is presented in simulated ASCII. It has no experience system, but it does have multiple types of inventories. It is a long game that starts moderately hard but seems to get easier. It is mostly fair.

The version reviewed, 1.6, is a later version from the one that won 7DRL.

Description: Our intrepid @ sign has explored countless dungeons, fantasy realms, castles, vaults, and even spaceships. Now he faces his greatest challenge yet: the New World.

Developer Slash is one of the most prolific 7DRL participants, a multiple-winner responsible for such strange productions as CastlevaniaRL, MetroidRL, ZeldaRL, and MegamanRL, an ASCII-art platformer, which deserves some kind of prize for misguided fidelity to the concept.

Converting popular console games into a roguelike format is not an idea that really impresses me, but Expedition, a rather nifty Christopher Columbus simulator, is quite a game. The player begins in Spain where he buys supplies and equipment and hires men. After stocking up it's time to set sail. (Hint: you'll want at least 180 days of food just to survive a round trip to the Americas, and some more to live on once there.) The process of crossing the Atlantic amounts to leaning on the left-arrow key for a minute or so. Once there and landed, the player transfers supplies to his land expedition to keep them alive on their way. Natives are everywhere, who the player, in the traditional roguelike fashion, sets about slaughtering and taking their stuff, which tends to be easier if you bought good weapons and hired strong fighters back in Spain. (This is honestly a little disconcerting; the game provides no means of peaceful interaction.)

Some of their stuff takes the form of valuables like gold bracelets and pottery, and some in the form of additional food. After looting the land for as much as you can carry, it's time to load everything onto the ship and sail back to Spain (by leaning on the right-arrow key). Provided the player can find Spain again (it helps to remember that your home port is at 38 degrees latitude), you automatically sell your look upon entering port and can begin the process all over again with more men and equipment.

The sense of wonder in the game is, admittedly, a bit lacking. I haven't found any hidden cities, ancient temples or cultural artifacts other than the simple trinkets that get sold upon entering port. This doesn't necessarily mean they're not in there, but I've yet to see them. The game's primary concern is keeping your men from starving; if you don't prepare well with excess food upon leaving Spain/your ship, it's easy to lose most of your men to hunger before you can make it back to port/your supplies. Provided that you err on the side of caution both when deciding on how much food to take with you and in picking fights with the indigenous peoples, it shouldn't be too hard to get a good toehold established in the Americas.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the game is that it is poorly documented; some important controls are not mentioned in the Readme, and one that's mentioned in help, 'r' for ranged attacks, has another function besides that, and doesn't seem to do any attacking either. Fortunately there aren't that many keypresses to learn, and a little experimentation makes it easy to figure them out for yourself. (One that I remember is 'i' for inventory.)

Verdict: Holy smokes, it's roguelike Seven Cities of Gold! Well okay, it doesn't seem to be quite that deep. It skews a little too heavily towards building efficent wealth-harvesting routes and away from wonder and awesomeness, but the infrastructure is here for a truly incredible game. The ghostly Hand of Bunten can be seen at work here.

17. SpiritsRL
Written by Xecutor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, mostly likely in C++
Homepage: http://max.eyeline.mobi/skv/spiritsrl.html
Another opinion: Cymon's Games
Victory post: rec.games.roguelike.development

The version reviewed is 0.4.21. The version resulting from the 7DRL Challenge was 0.2.11.

This game is not real-time, and it is presented in simulated ASCII. It has something of an experience system, but it doesn't have a real inventory system. It is a fairly long game that starts out challenging and gets harder. It seems to be fair.

Description:
You got your roguelike in my Shining Force! You got your Shining Force in my roguelike! Two great things that go great together.

What if if you took a roguelike but made it so you could directly control multiple characters instead of just one? And, so that it didn't get annoying to have to switch contexts so much, it bunched each character's moves together? And to make it more convienent, it let you decide what order to move your guys in? And so your uncontrolled guys didn't get swarmed by monsters, it bunched their moves together as well, allowing you to get your guys in formation to prepare for their attacks? Of course, so you can't take advantage of your maneuverability, each character can only attack once per turn.

But wait, you object, that sounds an awful like a turn-based tactical game? Indeed it does, and that's really what SpiritsRL is: a game that takes advantage of the simularities between rougelike games and grid-based tactics wargames to blur the line between them. It's actually probably more wargame than roguelike, but it's got ASCII characters and was made for 7DRL, so I'll let it slide.

It's not a bad game either.

Setting aside the premise (which I frankly couldn't make much sense of), the player starts off by selecting from a number of fairly generic choices. He picks from two sets of moves to take with him (which are named after Greek letters), and also chooses two "guardian spirits" from a list of numbered selections. Then he begins the game, which is a series of set level layouts. Levels are generally composed of walls, monsters, doors and switches; the switches, when stood upon, and be flipped, which can open or close doors elsewhere on the level. These can often be used to control the flow of opponents, helping to stop the player's party from being overwhelmed.

The player has a cursor overlaid upon the game screen, controlled with the arrow keys. With this, he selects his characters, moves them around, and gives other orders. The game, it should be noted, is a bit slow; one of the big advantages to using console graphics is that it's fast. If you're going to use ASCII characters for everything in your game, does it really matter if they smoothly slide around the board?

The player can move use any or all of a character's movement allowance at any time in his turn, and also use its attack at any point. A legal move can consist of moving two spaces up to a monster, attack it, then three spaces in retreat and flip a switch, and still finish out the remainder of its move. Characters can even mix their actions together. This kind of flexibility in movement is rare in computer tactical wargamming, in which generally the player attacks at the end of a move but not before.

Characters have shield strength, health and power scores. Power can be replenished by absorbing it from downed opponents, and killed guardian spirits can be revived. Enemies are largely generic, and vary in power by their representing letter (with later latters of the alphabet being stronger, and capital letters much stronger). Guardian spirits don't have shield, but can replenish their health by absorbing those defeated enemies. After a map characters have the opportunity to raise their various useable skills and stats.

I'd like to say more about the game, but really, roguelike tactical strategy is nearly a perfect description. The game is fairly complete now relative to the length of its development. All I can suggest at this point is go; go forth and play.

Verdict: As the inestimable Cymon notes, this is closer to being a tactical wargame, ala Fire Emblem or Shining Force than a roguelike. This is hardly a point against it, but it should be noted that the game is not really a dungeon crawl.

In around a week's time we'll finish up the last eight games, or as many of them as I can get to running. Say this because I've had trouble getting one or two of them to run. If I can't get some to work, I might substitute some of the out-of-challenge 7DRLs to fill out the list....

Posted by John Harris at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Previously, we featured the Metal Gear Solid 4 skit and the two IGF-themed videos done by the San Diego-based Mega64 japesters for Game Developers Conference 2009, huzzah - here's the third post in that series.]

The fourth Mega64 skit debuted at the 2009 Game Developer Choice Awards, this video brings Team Ico's Shadow of the Colossus to life. Of course, this was weeks before Sony Pictures revealed that it's working on its own, presumably much longer film for the PlayStation 2 game, written by the same talent behind Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

Mega64's budget for the clip doesn't quite match Sony's, so the comedy group needed to scale its colossus down to human-size, which makes it more difficult to convey Wander's progress as he climbs the walking, ancient structure. The scenes are also more populated than I remember in the original game...

The team's latest podcast has additional insight on the skit's filming, including how it relates to an old Awesometown bit from The Lonely Island.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Following up on his XBLA analysis, sister console download site GamerBytes' [RSS here!] editor Ryan Langley looks at how PSN's March debuts fared, from Red Baron through Burn Zombie Burn and beyond - interesting to see how PS3's downloadable service is going.]

With the March NPD U.S. game sales numbers just out, I thought it would be interesting to look back at the last month of sales for downloadable spaces as best as we can with the available data.

For the PlayStation Network, we delve into the Top 10 PSN games of the month, brought to us courtesy of the Pulse video show released online, and through the PlayStation Store -- which releases a new list every month.

We also have a deeper look at Keita Takahashi's quirky Noby Noby Boy and the web stats based on the amount of people reporting to the GIRL in the sky, and then finish it off with a bit of armchair analysis and hard opinion. Here's the full list, followed by in-depth analysis:

In March, the North American PlayStation Store received 7 new titles - Watchmen: The End Is Nigh, Astro Tripper, Buzz Junior: Jungle Party, Red Baron Arcade, Wheel Of Fortune, Worms and Burn Zombie Burn. But as you can see above, only two made it into the month's Top 10. So what happened to the rest of them?

Watching The Watchmen

The first release was Watchmen: The End Is Nigh, the $19.99 title available through the Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and PC. Despite the movie hype, the game on PSN did not chart for the month. The title's lower sales could be due to the higher price and lackluster reviews, but considering the hype around the movie, I would have expected it to at least make the charts.

Like the Xbox Live Arcade version, Watchmen has a second chapter planned -- which will likely not sell as well as the first. Assuming the development was all based on code porting, the PSN version probably didn't cost a whole lot of manpower to create, and any additional sales would be a bonus - but it's a shame that it appeared to do the worst on PSN. I expect that we might see both chapters appear at retail stores, some time after the second episode has been released.

On Red Barons, Astro Tripper and Buzz Junior

Red Baron Arcade, Astro Tripper and Buzz Junior: Jungle Party all came out during the next week, but only Red Baron was able to chart for the month.

Red Baron Arcade has a strange history, initially set for Xbox Live Arcade, and later announced as an exclusive for the PlayStation Network. With the Sierra fallout following Activision's merger with Vivendi it disappeared, only to suddenly pop up on the 13th of March. It's somewhat surprising to see it chart at all, considering the dismal reviews -- but that might be based more on name recognition, or the interest in a simple and cheap multiplayer title.

Buzz Junior not being on the list is somewhat expected - the buzzer peripherals are required to play, so it's a somewhat limited audience, much like the PSEye camera-utilizing games.

The sore spot here is Astro Tripper, a neat shooter, which has nabbed some great reviews and only costs $4.99, but didn't make it to the list. With the announcement of another title coming to the PSN, we hope PomPom are satisfied with their sales for this release.

Spinning The Wheel And Burning Carcasses

The real mind bender here is Wheel Of Fortune. Poorly reviewed and costing $15, it made it to the second highest selling game for the month.

Considering its sister game Jeopardy cut a third off its price after 3 months of release, I would have expected Wheel Of Fortune to go down the same road, but despite all odds, it's beaten every other new release this month.

While Burn Zombie Burn and Worms are not on the list, neither were expected to chart, as both games were released very late into the month.

Flowers Blooming, Booty Calling Back

February's late release of Zuma, which did not reach the charts last month, again does not make the list. Flower has continued its reign at the top, and NHL 3-On-3 Arcade continues to stay in the Top 10, much like the Xbox Live Arcade version has.

Age Of Booty and Ratchet & Clank: Quest For Booty returned to the Top 10, most likely due to Age Of Booty's Trophy patch and new trial version -- as well as R&C getting a week long 33% price cut.

BOY And GIRL Trying To Reach Mars

Noby Noby Boy, the strange game from the mind of Katamari Damacy's creator Keita Takahashi, has continued to rank in the Top 10 on PlayStation Network. Unlike the other titles, we do have some sales data (or at least, user data we can extrapolate from) thanks to the updated BOY count on o--o.jp.

The web statistics have been collected together by user Alts on the NeoGAF forums, and crafted into an excellent application which grabs the BOY (user) count every night. Using this data, we can see that during March Noby Noby Boy had 19,115 new BOYs reporting data to GIRL.

As this is pretty much the entire purpose of the game, we could say that this is roughly the amount of sales Noby Noby Boy achieved in the month - though it may be marginally inflated due to game sharing and multiple BOY accounts per machine. This would be for all of the world, but the North American segment would be a large fraction of that.

Takahashi was quoted as saying that Noby Noby Boy was not selling as well as he had hoped - and yet despite that, it still beat most other releases. It's a little worrying for all the other titles - if Noby Noby Boy isn't selling, everyone else appears to be doing even worse. Total BOYs logged so far via the stat tracker are around 63,000, but you have to specifically submit your BOY to get on this list, so the actual total for sales is difficult to extrapolate.

On another note, it was recently revealed via GamesIndustry.biz that Sony will match the development cost for PlayStation Network games in the exchange for exclusivity, starting with Burn Zombie Burn. It allows the companies to own the IP and control their product, but the resulting game will only be available for PSN.

If the sales are not nearly as good as some would hope, it will be very beneficial to those developers who want to take full advantage of the PlayStation 3 hardware. PlayStation Network may not be in completely rude health, but as long as it continues to get interesting new titles that expand the audience like Flower, then there shouldn't be any worry for gamers and top developers.

[We thank Sony and the PULSE Program for releasing these statistics, and I'd like to also acknowledge my colleagues at Gamasutra and on NeoGAF for spurring discussion and bringing more analysis to the table.]

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

Sierra On-line fan Martin Kool has launched Sarien.net, a portal for playing the historic label's (now absorbed by Activision) graphic adventure games in your browser. So far, the site's selection of Sierra's 1980s classics include Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter, Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, with more forthcoming.

One unique twist to the posted titles is that you can see other players in the games, represented with a character similar to your own. While you can't interact with them, you can talk with them and observe their actions, picking up tips on how you should proceed. I noticed a few glitches when I tried out some of the games, but it's still a really neat concept!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Originally running over on Gamasutra, this v.neat series of interviews conducted by Chris Remo are going to delve into the state of video game community management -- something that definitely gets underdiscussed right now.]

Over the next two weeks, we will be presenting a series of interviews with community managers from four different companies -- publishers, publisher-owned studios, and independent studios.

As a field that is relatively young and frequently loosely-defined, community has not always gotten the amount of coverage that might be due such an integral part of operating in the modern, interactive world of promotion and communication.

The first interview is with Arne Meyer, self-described "community and PR guy" from Uncharted and Jak & Daxter creator Naughty Dog Studios. A subsidiary of Sony, Naughty Dog retains a strong studio identity and reputation that comes along with the company's track record -- and with that, comes a fan community.

Meyer began working in the games industry at a PR firm working with Microsoft on the launch of the Xbox. After getting involved with community tactics as well as the OurColony alternate-reality game surrounding the launch of Xbox 360, Meyer moved to Seattle to work more closely with Microsoft on community PR.

Following a pre-merger stint at Vivendi, Meyer ended up at Naughty Dog, where he works with Sony on product-facing campaigns and drives the direction of Naughty Dog's community efforts.

In this interview, he speaks on the growing role of community, its broad sphere of influence, and the necessity of facilitating discussion rather than driving a message:

What is a community manager, in your view?

The biggest issue is that it means a lot of things to a lot of people depending on what you do. The commonly-accepted meaning is someone who interacts with the players in public spaces, or within a game if you're an MMO.

I think that's been expanded to involve any sort of direct to consumer PR initiative, like inviting consumers to events or coming up with a broader strategy, as opposed to just the tactical aspect of talking to people. For some people it also means interacting with what PR would call non-top tier online sites, like blogs and fan sites or other media.

How has that expansion affected the role?

In general, the industry is trying to still wrap its head around what bucket community should go under, and whose responsibility it is.

Community is a really catch-all word for a lot of people, and there are a lot of touch points. People are realizing it's not just being on the message boards or being a GM in the game -- it really encompasses every aspect of communication, PR-wise or direct-to-consumer, or even community-specific marketing you could do. Posting any sort of video is a marketing tactic or a PR tactic, but it can involve community and social media as well. Anything that could be more of a direct line to consumer could fall under the community umbrella.

How well-understood is social media? Are companies using it well?

I think the understanding of social media is getting to be very sophisticated. People will see it as the next big thing, but they need to realize it's just one tactic in the overall media strategy. It's still a very important tactic, as that's where a lot of the innovations in communication come from, and it's a very important facet of what you're doing, but you need to take a step back and see that it's just one tool.

You need to keep in mind what you want to achieve, and how you want to interact with your fans -- not just throwing Twitters out there or something like that.

Is there a particular angle to community you've found to be effective?

Answering your question in a very big way, it's really about being part of the conversation, rather than driving the conversation, in an authentic and transparent manner.

Does that ever cause friction with more traditional and entrenched PR and marketing attitudes of controlling the message?

I do think that philosophy runs counter to what's typically considered the PR function, which is controlling the messaging. In the age of social media, everyone in community is starting to learn that you're not really in control of your message. You need to let the consumer run with it. I think that's a little scary for some people, myself included, but that's what it's really about. It's not about controlling the message.

How do you stay effective? Do you try to at least drive the message in some respect?

I don't even think of it in that way, because you really can't control what's being driven, you can just put it out there. I know this sounds really vague, but when you're communicating with the public, as with anything else, you need to be smart, thoughtful, and deliberate. That is the proper way to communicate publicly and be effective.

Are there ways to measure that effectiveness among the community?

There are a lot of ways you can measure what you're doing. The challenge with community, if you take a broader view, is how to measure that effectiveness in terms of what marketers would call conversion or product purchase. That's never a solid line, that's a dotted line. But if we're effective with what we do, there are ways to measure that.

Can you describe any of those?

There are a lot of tools that are available, whether looking at YouTube Insight, or companies and products that measure conversations and buzz on a broad scale and compile that for you. Really, unless you're working with an outside vendor or have an internal analytics team, it's just up to you to compile the data and analyze your results and takeaways. There's no real proprietary way, unless you're a specific metrics firm.

Can you speak on a particularly successful campaign with which you've been involved?

The work we did with Microsoft to build their community for the Xbox was something that has really reaped them benefits in spades. They were a company who was really hungry to take this to the next level -- they built up an internal to work with our external team, and really mapped things out. They basically just had that level of support for everyone internally and externally to do the right thing for community and the products we were representing.

Is your work at Naughty Dog relatively in line with what you've done in the past?

It's been an extension and expansion of my responsibilities from before. I like to feel that in my position, I not only have the ability to think about community, but to make it happen on a budget level, or by acquiring the resources to do so.

Before, I was sort of limited with what was existing within the overall company goals. I like being able to drive what I think will work -- which was really my role at Vivendi also, my stint there was just too short to get it off the ground.

What do you do at Naughty Dog on a day to day basis?

Some of it's fairly boring, but I still interact on the forums using all these social community tactics. I've come up with a community plan and strategy we want to take long term -- in case something bad should ever happen to me, someone else could understand what I was trying to do. I also work with my counterparts at SCEA on the plan for our products, and I focus on what I'm trying to do for the studio itself.

Can it be a challenge to interact with the individual community members themselves? I imagine that could get overwhelming at times.

It definitely is a challenge, a lot of it because of the time management perspective. You could spend your entire life just working in that area and never getting around to everything else you want to do. But it's one of those things -- you're putting yourself out there; you have to have thick skin; you have to accept that there are people who don't like you or your product; you have to not be overly emotional.

It's just like if you're soliciting opinions from your friends -- not everyone is going to like what you do or have your same opinions on art or media or books or anything else. If you take a step back and look at it that way, it will keep everyone a little bit saner.

Do you have any final thoughts for other community managers?

Everyone in a community manager position, or around it, needs to realize this area is where the conversation is going. While there will still be a need to be cautious or thoughtful, hesitating or having trepidation to engage with your consumers is going to be a shortcoming if you don't start thinking about it.

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

This week's Nintendo Channel update brought two new developer interviews shot at the Game Developers Conference, one for Deep Silver's survival horror title Cursed Mountain, and the other, embedded above, for Nicalis' IGF finalist and physics-based WiiWare puzzler Night Game (tentative title).

The video interview features producer Tyrone Rodriguez, creator Nicklas "Nifflas" Nygren, and composer Chris Schlarb, all sharing their perspectives on the game and Wii's digital download platform. If you haven't read it yet, we recently posted own interview with Schlarb, which goes into detail on Night Game's randomized ambient music. We also recently talked with Nygren and Rodriguez on how development is coming along for both Cave Story and Night Game.

Nicalis expects to release Night Game exclusively on WiiWare this September.

[Via GoNintendo]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

You can now get access to the newest, neatest GameSetLinks, and it starts off with some fun discussion of indie title Dyson from the other one of the duo thus far interview by TIGSource - it's heady stuff, m'dears.

Also in here - Benj Edwards examines Game Boy oddities, Wil Wheaton discusses classic Atari, the demo-scene awards for 2008 are decided over on Scene.org, and plenty more.

Chu chu chu:

The Independent Gaming Source talks to Rudolf Kremers
The other half of the Dyson creators, and another smart, literate indie.

Game Boy Oddities | Technologizer
'After seeing the items I rounded up for this extravaganza, you’ll probably agree that the public’s infatuation with this classic handheld has grown far beyond Nintendo’s wildest dreams.'

Xtranormal: A Glimpse Into the Future of TV Animation Production | Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation
Def. an interesting discussion, if only because ex-video game and CG guys made Xtranormal, according to blog comments by one of the creators, and it prefigures discussions in the game space about making authorship easier.

SuicideGirls News > Geek > As a Matter of Fact, I Have Played Atari Today
SFW Wil Wheaton program about, yay, classic 2600 fun.

Scene.org Awards - 2008 winners
The best of the demo-scene for last year, always worth checking out for real-time effect insane goodness.

insertcredit.com: 'Link: New heights in game journalism'
My colleague Brandon Sheffield gets grumpy at Joystiq. And I see why!

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

Modeled after a Horde hut, the WoW pod is designed to be an "immersive architectural solution" for advanced World of Warcraft players with in-game responsibilities that keep gamers chained to their computers, unable to step away from the MMORPG for even a couple minutes.

In addition to housing a computer and its necessary peripherals for playing the addictive title, the WoW pod offers canteens filled with spring water, a toilet built into the seat (which has surround sound speakers), a hot plate, and food packs.

When hungry, the gamer selects a food item (‘Crunchy Spider Surprise’, ‘Beer Basted Ribs’, etc.) and a seasoning pack. By scanning in the food items, the video game physically adjusts a hot plate to cook the item for the correct amount of time. The virtual character then jubilantly announces the status of the meal to both the gamer and the other individuals playing online: “Vorcon’s meal is about to be done!” “Better eat the ribs while they’re hot!” etc.

The in-game avatar will be set as AFK ("away from the keyboard") once the food is cooked, and when the player resumes, he or she will find their character's behavior affected by the meal they just consumed, sometimes sluggish from overeating or full of energy.

As loony as it all sounds, the project is real, created by artists Cati Vaucelle & Shada/Jahn, funded by grants from the Council for the Arts at MIT and other organizations, and is on display at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from March-September 2009. You can see a video for the project here, as well as a WoW blueprint and prototype sketches here:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just a few months after Shining Force Feather's release in Japan for the DS, Sega is already planning to add another entry to its 18-year-old fantasy franchise, Shining Force Cross. The upcoming title won't follow the console strategy role-playing game formula that most gamers associate with the Shining moniker, and instead will be an action RPG (think Shining Force Exa) released to arcades -- given the state of the U.S. arcade industry, don't expect this to hit your local Dave & Buster’s!

Shining Force Cross won't at all resemble the arcade RPGs that usually come to mind in the West, Capcom's 2D Dungeons & Dragons beat'em-up hybrids; the game looks more like Monster Hunter or Phantasy Star Online. The ARPG will have a single-player mode, but up to four gamers across Japan can form a party locally or online, cooperating to fight enemies and bosses together. Players can also save their stats and equipment onto arcade IC cards.

An internal group at Sega AM2 (Virtua Fighter, Shenmue), specifically the team behind Japan-only arcade dungeon crawler Quest of D, is working on Shining Force Cross, expecting to have the game out by Winter 2009. So far, the only revealed details behind the game's story is that players will take on the role of a treasure hunter on Eden, a floating continent. The prosperous but now lost Istria civilization once occupied the continent, and have left their treasures behind.

Famitsu has artwork and screenshots of the game's Sora-esque hero and massive end-level bosses:

Sega will hold location tests for Shining Force Cross from May 2nd to May 4th at three Tokyo arcades (Club Sega Akihabara, Ikebukero GIGO, and Club Sega Nishi-Shinjuku), according to arcade gaming news blog Versus City. Perhaps one day, we'll hear news for a console port coming stateside!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In this analysis, sister console download site GamerBytes' [RSS here!] editor Ryan Langley examines stats and success factors for March's XBLA launches, from Peggle through Watchmen and beyond - short, snappy, neat digital console games are v.relevant to GSW readers, so... here we go!]

With the March NPD numbers just debuted, at GamerBytes I thought it would be a good idea to look back at the last month of sales for downloadable spaces -- as best as we can with the data we can get. For Xbox Live Arcade sales, we've gathered the Major Nelson Top 10 lists for weeks that the NPD covers for March.

Alongside that, we've been able to gather some Leaderboard statistics which give us a fairly decent idea on how popular a game might be, and then finish it off with a bit of armchair analysis and hard opinion. We'll take a look at the 10 different releases for the month, and see how well they did.

March was perhaps the most experimental Xbox Live month we've ever had, with 6 of the 10 games released being quite different to your standard release. Did they fail or succeed? Let's look at the results, starting off with the rankings for the month according to Major Nelson, aka Microsoft's Larry Hryb, and follow up with analysis:

Watching The Watchmen

Watchmen: The End Is Nigh started off the month with a bit of bang - a kind of game that only the PlayStation Network has previously attempted. Essentially, it's a title that looks as good as a retail title, is over the Xbox Live Arcade file size limits, and one of the two titles to be released at 1600MSP - the equivalent of $20USD.

Being that Watchmen was meant to be Warner Bros' first major movie hit of the year, and the only way to get Watchmen was through digital distribution, it looked like a game which could have brought a lot of attention to the download space. Despite it hitting the top of the charts in its debut week, it quickly slipped down the chart in favor of newer releases, and disappeared 3 weeks later. The game was also released on the PlayStation Network but as we'll discuss later, it didn't fare well either.

It was quite a risk for Warner Bros. to make Watchmen digital, from all accounts it was never intended for digital distribution either - the lack of Leaderboards and online multiplayer as well as the giant file size point towards it initially being a retail title with some wheeling and dealing with Microsoft to allow it to be digital.

Part 2 of this episodic game is intended for release later this year, presumed to be around the release of the DVD and Blu-ray versions of the movie. Later episodes in an episodic title tend to do less than the original, but if they can get both XBLA Watchmen episodes to collectively crack the 100,000 mark, and add on the PSN and PC sales, than it likely will have been worth the development.

I would expect that Warner Bros. will eventually put both episodes on disc and release it as a package, or at the least partner with Microsoft's Deal Of The Week for a cheaper first episode when the second is about to hit.

On Peggle, Defenders, Basketball

The second week of the month had three releases in the same week - Peggle, Crystal Defenders and NCAA Basketball MME.

Peggle did very well, and it's not too surprising. Peggle has been a smash hit on the PC for PopCap Games, and there had been a lot of buzz about the XBLA version hitting, with additional online multiplayer modes. It hit the top, technically for two weeks running. The title has begun to slow down a little bit, but it will likely be one of those steady-selling games that occasionally pops back into the Top 10 listings, assuming the new releases don't push it out.

According to the Peggle single player Leaderboards, as of April 11th, it's now cracked 100,000 entries. Exceptional work for an Xbox Live Arcade title, something we haven't seen for quite some time. Unfortunately, we do not have the data for the people who bought the PopCap Volume 2 retail package, which includes Peggle, Heavy Weapon and Fishing Frenzy 2, but I would assume most of those sales were through the online store.

Crystal Defenders, released the same week as Peggle, did okay, but clearly not as well as Peggle did. Crystal Defenders is a strange one - a game based on an iPhone and mobile title, ported to the Xbox 360, as well as PS3 and WiiWare in North America soon, with little to no effort. The game feels like a mobile title on the Xbox 360 with no real enhancements added to it.

Despite the lack of Final Fantasy branding, it didn't do too badly. The game made it to second place on its opening week against Peggle, and stayed healthy for the next two weeks, until it eventually dropped off. Most dual weeks see one title dramatically beat the other, while this week was a little closer.

With the announced Wii and PSN versions coming fairly soon, the market for this game could have split between the three for those with multiple systems. And since it's been ported to everything under the sun, this quick-and-dirty port would have been well worth the effort for Square-Enix.

NCAA Basketball MME is another one of the game changers for the Xbox Live Arcade. It's a game which does not even consider itself an XBLA title, has no demo, is over 2GB in size, has no online support and due to its NCAA focus is only available in the United States. The game was announced just the week before its release, and the only marketing by EA is through the Xbox spotlight section on the system itself.

Despite all of this, the game ended up in the Top 10 for the first week of release, but only hit the 5th spot. To be honest, I don't really understand the thinking process behind such a release - a stripped down version of a retail game, released in only one region. Sure, it was an experiment to hit a demographic of gamers who aren't willing to pay your standard $60USD rate for games, but limiting it so much just doesn't reach the wider audience that it should be hitting.

With the success of NHL 3-On-3 Arcade, which continued to be in the Top 10 throughout all of February and March, you would think that EA would have been working towards a simpler basketball game with the same mechanics.

Possibly EA could have tried something like NBA Jam or NBA Hangtime, which could be easily released across the world and accessible to regions who generally would not care to buy a $60USD equivalent of a basketball game.

Instead, they stripped down a retail title and gave it a limited release. Considering its short stay in the Top 10, I don't see how the effort would have really been worth it, but I'd imagine the development time for this wasn't too long either.

New Style - Family Game Night

This wasn't EA's only foray for the Xbox Live Arcade this month, however - Hasbro Family Game Night was also released, and again used some ground-breaking measures that we hadn't seen on the Xbox Live Arcade previously. Instead of downloading each of the board games separately, you download the Hasbro application for free, and then buy each title from within it.

Originally FGN was released on the PS2 and Wii at retail, so this new development, complete with several new game types added, was a change of pace. The pricing structure for the games raised a few eyebrows, though. FGN was a $40USD game on the Wii with 6 titles, but each title on the XBLA costs $10, or 800MSP, and with 7 titles that's a total of $70USD.

But it doesn't look like that's stopped players. It appears that EA's plan has worked - people have generally bought only one or possibly two titles that they're interested in, which in the grand scheme of things is less money than they'd pay for the full retail set - plus you get the addition of online multiplayer.

Unfortunately, due to the strange ways that Hasbro FGN deals with new games, the Major Nelson blog was initially unable to represent the games with a combined total of all Family Game Night titles. In the third week, it did return, though, thanks to a resolution to the stat tracking issue.

With a little bit of digging through the Hasbro FGN's Leaderboards, we can see that over 25,000 players have played Yahtzee, and over 33,000 players have played Connect 4, and over 41,000 have played Battleship. Even if the sales numbers are somewhat below that, that's still some very good sales for the price that they're going for.

Going by the Top 10 list, Family Game Night is still collectively doing very well for itself - and only four of the 7 titles are available, with Sorry!, Sorry! Sliders and Boggle on their way sometime in the next month or two, so it's ready for a big return to the top soon.

Rush-ing To The Samurai

Carbonated Games' and Microsoft's UNO Rush was again, a bit controversial. The original game was a huge success, still in the Top 10 on a consistent basis. UNO Rush is a new variant on the card game. The difference? A $5 price hike.

It's no surprise that the game shot up to the top spot for the first week of release, but in its second week it has fallen straight away, down to 8th spot, and only a little higher than than the original UNO.

The game has served a little more than 20,000 players, according to the Leaderboards, and will probably do alright in the long run. It's certainly not the sensation that the original UNO was, but I feel that a lot of people were put off by the price point. Its main draw now might be its ability to play the game offline with other friends, rather than being a online only experience.

The final game of the month was the XNA based The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, a game entirely done by James Silva of Ska Studios. It jumped to the top of the charts in its first week, and looking at the Leaderboards, has also done very well.

The game unfortunately does not have Leaderboards for the single player story, only for the extra "Arcade mode". Over 20,000 people have played the Arcade mode in the one week of release, so it's safe to say the amount of people who have played the single player mode blows that number out of the water.

The March numbers see two titles finally make their way off of the Top 10 for their first times - Super Street Fighter II HD Remix, having lasted 15 weeks in the Top 10 list and A Kingdom For Keflings, having lasted 19 weeks. It would not be surprising to see them make a return however, especially if Keflings release new downloadable content, which it has yet to do.

Both Braid and Alien Hominid HD made a return to the Top 10 through the new Deal Of The Week promotion. These discounts, similar to that of the Steam weekend specials, do dramatically boost sales for a short period and would give more revenue to the developers than they otherwise would at their regular price.

The regular additions of Castle Crashers, UNO, Worms, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Marble Blast Ultra as well as the triumphant return of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade complete the list. It should be noted that all those games outside of Castle Crashers are 400MSP, but due to the way the list works, those titles are most likely not earning as much as the lower 800MSP games.

Next up, we'll be discussing the PlayStation Store Top 10 titles. Due to the lack of official data released by Nintendo, we are unable to do the same for WiiWare sales. Meanwhile please, tell us what you think of our analysis. Thanks to Exu for helping with the Hasbro Leaderboard numbers.

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

Travelers flying Delta have an interesting alternative to the classical pieces and smooth R&B tracks for their in-flight music -- 13 songs from Fallout 3's soundtrack. The airline is featuring selections from the first-person ARPG's 1940s and '50s tunes, such as "Easy Living" by Billie Holiday and "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" by The Ink Spots, interspersed with short Bethesda interviews explaining the soundtrack's direction and how it fits into the Fallout setting.

Several outlets posted about this late last week, but I actually grabbed the full playlist (scanned from a stolen issue of Sky, Delta's in-flight magazine), shown after the break.

Also, this gives me an opportunity to share with you Ilmondodeirobot's chiptune tribute to Fallout, a dirty, industrial track with samples from the original PC game -- it's totally boss.

And if you haven't heard about it yet, Bethesda and Obsidian announced Fallout: New Vegas earlier today, a new title for the franchise releasing next year on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. More details at Gamasutra.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Showcasing highlights from big sister site Gamasutra's Member Blogs, we hand out a lifetime Game Developer magazine subscription for an examination into the evolution of Western "art," and why it may be irrelevant to games.]

In our weekly Best of Member Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game community who maintain Member Blogs on Gamasutra.

Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals.

Our favorite blog post of the week will earn its author a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra's sister publication, Game Developer magazine. (All magazine recipients outside of the United States or Canada will receive lifetime electronic subscriptions.)

We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines.

This Week's Standout Member Blogs

- The Problem With Choices
(Craig Stern)

One of several responses to James Portnow's Gamasutra piece about the nature of choice in video games, Craig Stern's post takes issue with Portnow's characterization of "choice" and "problem." Not all decisions are created equal, argues Stern, and removing disparate consequences from games doesn't model real life in any meaningful way.

For his effort, Craig will receive a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine.

- I Would Never Do This In Real Life
(Adam Bishop)

Games allow the player to virtually do things he or she would love to do in reality if given the chance, but they also afford virtual actions that most sane, reasonable people would consider morally reprehensible. Adam Bishop considers where the line is drawn.

- GDC 2009 Coverage
(Kimberly Unger)

Minigames are becoming increasingly prevalent as subsystems in "hardcore" games, frequently as ways of streamlining actions that might previously have been represented by much more complex mechanics. Artist Kimberly Unger wonders whether this type of game-within-a-game design might demand its own team role or even specialty?

- Console Continuation Means Sometimes Going Beyond Default
(Edward Vertigo)

Why do console games still largely eschew button-by-button custom mapping options? Edward Vertigo looks at this and five other common console game usability concerns (some more practical than others), and suggests fixes.

- Top 10 weirdest IGF 2009 games
(Davide Coppola)

By its very nature, the Independent Game Festival tends to spawn titles that are off the beaten triple-AAA path -- but even so, the IGF has its own spectrum of normality. Here, Davide Coppola rounds up what he sees as the ten weirdest entries, including Three Forks VS. the Crab Creatures From Neptune and Dark Room Sex Game.

- Plus, the thrilling conclusion to Jim McGinley's Epic GDC Coverage.

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

Though Nintendo doesn't have a stellar reputation with Greenpeace, its games still have potential to deliver environmentally aware messages. This video prototype, for example, takes inspiration from the Wii version of microgame collection WarioWare to share ways players can save energy.

"My aim was to demonstrate that one can mediate specific serious information through entertaining games without compromising on fun nor gameplay," says developer Marek Plichta, an Interface Design student in Potsdam, Germany. "When concepting a serious game it can be very seductive to put in a lot of meaningful information on the surface for the player to 'understand.' While this can be good for training software, it's less suited for entertainment."

Plichta says that he combated that by designing the Eco Wario Ware prototype so that its primary goal is not to teach energy saving tips, but to "tint the subject of sustainability in a 'cooler' tone." The above clip shows only three out of 15 potential microgames Plichta has concepted.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['The Interactive Palette' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Gregory Weir that examines the tools and techniques of the digital games trade with a focus on games as art, using a single game as an example. This time - a look at adventure game interfaces in Hotel Dusk: Room 215.]

The graphical adventure game has fallen from its former prominence among video games. In the 1980s and early 90s, Infocom, Sierra, and LucasArts produced best-selling games that are still referred to today. However, with the rise of high-budget, technologically advanced games and the accompanying increase in the complexity of the average game's storyline, traditional adventure games have lost their prominence. While point-and-click adventure games are still produced (with TellTale Games's Sam & Max episodic series as a prominent example), they have mostly been reduced to a niche product.

One of the reasons for the fall of the adventure game is the detached nature of the gameplay. As interesting as the story and puzzles in a game may be, the player is still just pointing and clicking to control an avatar or disembodied first-person protagonist.

There's not much gameplay there, when compared to a Mario Kart or Grand Theft Auto game. The experience is very cerebral, and a player used to more action-packed games will tend to become bored with a game where she doesn't do anything. It's a shame, because there's no other kind of game that offers generally non-violent, mind-focused gameplay.

One way to make an adventure game more accessible and interesting to the modern player is to involve her more directly in the game's events. Cing's Hotel Dusk: Room 215 does this in an interesting way: thanks in part to the Nintendo DS's unique hardware, players are provided with a hands-on approach to puzzle solving that feels much more involved than other adventure games.

A Clever Touch

Like its predecessor, Trace Memory, Hotel Dusk is an adventure game that uses the hardware of the DS to great advantage. The game is played by holding the game sideways, like a book. In exploration mode, the "top" screen displays a rendered 3D view of the environment, while the touch screen is used to navigate from a top-down view.

In conversation mode, the two screens show the protagonist and the character he is speaking to, and the touch screen is used to select speech options. In search mode, the player can rotate a 3D view of an area, and tap on objects of interest. These all provide a very direct, accessible method of control. Where the interface shines, however, is in the puzzles.

Periodically, the player will be called upon to solve a puzzle. She will be presented with a close-up view of an object or group of objects, and will need to use the capabilities of the DS to accomplish a task. Some are purely interface-based puzzles, where the challenge is not in figuring out what to do but how to communicate the actions to the game. Others are traditional puzzles like you'd see in other adventure games, from assembling a literal jigsaw puzzle to picking a lock with a coat hanger. The best puzzles are the ones that require both logic and interface cleverness.

The first "puzzle" in the game is of the interface-based variety. It requires the player to ring the bell at the front desk. There's nothing too tricky here; just tapping the button on the bell with the stylus makes it ring. These sorts of so-called puzzles are scattered throughout the game, from sewing up a torn doll by drawing the desired path of the stitches to dragging the lid of a toilet tank to open it.

The cleverest of these requires the player to flip two switches in a circuit breaker box at once. The DS touch screen isn't multi-touch like the iPhone's, but with some smart coding the game appears to recognize two simultaneous points of contact on the screen. This is a puzzle that is harder the more clever you are; being aware of the DS's limitations makes a player less likely to quickly figure out the solution.

The more traditional puzzles have straightforward interfaces, but require a certain amount of logic. Besides the aforementioned jigsaw puzzle, there is a set of matchstick-arrangement puzzles, a figure-out-the-obscured-combination puzzle, and a simple handwriting-comparison puzzle. These challenges tend to be simpler than the ones you'd find in other adventure games. They seldom require a big leap of logic, and the solutions are often heavily hinted through dialogue or internal monologue.

The Key to the Problem

The true potential of the game's puzzle approach occurs in the challenges which combine cerebral puzzle-solving with interface trickery. One excellent example occurs a little way into the game, when the player is presented with an engraved fountain pen. The pen is worn, and the inscription is unreadable.

In order to find out what it says, the player must figure out that she can use either chalk dust or flour to fill in the inscription. The interface challenge comes in when executing this maneuver. Rubbing the powder on the pen and blowing it off (using the DS microphone) just blows away all the powder. The solution is to gently tap or rub the pen to remove the excess without disrupting the inscription.

By incorporating logic and a clever interface into the challenge, this strengthens the player's identification with the main character. She's not just clicking on the flour then the pen to USE FLOUR ON PEN; the player is involved in the entire process, making it feel like she's actually finding clues herself. This sort of approach is shockingly rare among adventure games; it really only appears in "casualized" games like Hotel Dusk or Zak & Wiki. However, it may be the key to revising adventure games for the modern video game world.

All an adventure game needs to do to take advantage of this technique is to add an extra step to each puzzle solution. Just as Oblivion has a lockpicking minigame, adventure games can have puzzle-solving minigames, where the player physically manipulates the components of the puzzle to solve it.

By including this sort of hands-on gameplay, developers can enhance player character identification while simultaneously breaking up the often-monotonous gameplay with fun interludes. It does require more planning and implementation time to have a separate screen or interaction mode for each puzzle, but the gains in accessibility and interesting gameplay outweigh the costs.

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

Posted by Gregory Weir at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Select Button forumer NFG, who was also behind the wonderful Arcade Font Engine, posted a primer on aspect ratios, scanlines, and modern displays as they relate to video games, explaining why typical LCDs and plasma screens have trouble showing games the way we remember them.

"Modern fixed-resolution displays don't do a very good job of displaying older games," he argues. "No matter how they're displayed, some changes are made and compromises have to be accepted. Some of those problems, which NFG says CRTs are able to work around, include stretched or compressed sprites, blurry resampled pixels, and inconsistent resolutions for different consoles.

NFG isn't asserting that everyone should ditch their expensive modern displays, but he does see some intangible value in approximating the look of older games on CRT monitors. "Trying too hard to replicate the failings of old hardware is probably a sign of mental illness, but we do it anyway," he says. "I can't abide the idea that it's better or that the games were designed that way, or even that the designers intended them to be played with scanlines... It's just a silly pursuit which we engage in because we are chasing a personal ideal, a fleeting and enjoyable memory."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

Continuing with the RSS links after a blessedly relaxing GameSetWeekend, the first link on this returning combination is the (fairly) new VersusCity blog, which I was delighted to see precisely because there's very little good English-language coverage of the fascinating Japanese arcade game scene.

But there's other goodness in here, including Amped 3 for cheap, the v.silly 'rpgsbebroke' blog, and The Godfather II pointed, counterpointed, and counter game set match serve ace pointed, apparently...

Hur ray yay:

Versus City
_Really_ good blog about the Japanese arcade game scene, which is always written up poorly in English... until now!

Amped 3 (XBOX360 NEW): N02-008435 iNetVideo.com - Movies, Games, Music
I wrote about this back in 2005 (!), but seriously overlooked, is Amped 3 - and INetVideo has it for under $20 new.

Inside The Soviet Arcade Games Museum | Edge Online
Oo, this museum looks very neat indeed, if you're in Moscow.

dobbschallenge2.com - Dr. Dobbs Picks: Best Level Picks (13th April)
Continuing the user-created level fun on the Silverlight-based platformer produced by me and developed by Adam Atomic.

RPGs be broke
Extremely funny blog on game journalism from someone who is writing in a style below their IQ.

Crispy Gamer - Column: Dissenting Opinion: The Godfather II
Fun counterpoint indeed to a Gus Mastrapa original: 'While we're all shaking our fists with righteous rage, let's try not to recall that Mario Puzo wrote his novel "The Godfather" after his first two novels sold poorly, with the express purpose of creating a book that had commercial appeal.'

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

[Every day during GDC, Everybody Dies creator Jim Munroe blogged for GameSetWatch discussing the creative process for the GDC-related text adventure he'll be building for us. Here's a post-GDC update, following Monday's, Tuesday's, Wednesday's and Thursday's and Friday's entries during GDC.]

Skeletons are scary. I'm about 60 hrs into making the GDC text game -- which should be done in the next couple of weeks -- at this point.

There's a bunch of randomly generated convention-goers wandering around the Moscone Center, annoying and impressing each other, talking about things they know about and things they know nothing about, and as the player character you can stand there and watch it happen or jump in.

But because I haven't written more than one or two actions/behaviours for each situation, they still feel pretty robotic. I just try to keep in mind something Raigan and Mare told me -- when they were making N, adding the animated ninja at the end of the process immediately made it much more fun. Up til then it'd just been a physics simulation.

So I'm still keeping the faith. I think social interactions will be compelling in a text adventure context because prose can communicate a haughty look or an adoring gaze way better than the most advanced 3D model with the most talented face puppeteer in the business.

I've also been thinking about the creative authorship that goes into the creation of systems.

I've created plenty of systems in the various communities I've been a part of -- the latest of which is the Artsy Games Incubator, which is currently being run by Miguel Sternberg.

For me making this game (which I'm calling a social simulation) has been recognizing that every variable decision is an expression, of a creative or opinionated type.

Sure, extroverted characters are more inclined to talk to people and make friends -- but they're also inclined to talk about stuff they're completely ignorant about, and thus make enemies too.

One part in my previous game, Everybody Dies, asked the player to decide if he wanted to threaten a racist with a knife or turn the other cheek. There were no game-altering consequences either way, and partially this was because I was uncomfortable with judging the player and dictating behaviour.

It's the same way I would feel super-bossy telling someone that they had to make a game in six weeks, and that these are the tools you should use to make it.

But I had no problem setting up the AGI, hanging out a shingle, and signing people up to do just that. Setting up a system allows people who are engaged by it to participate, and if they don't want to they don't have to. It's not the only game in town.

[Jim Munroe will be demoing the beta of his GDC-themed interactive fiction game at the next Hand Eye Society Social this Thursday, if you happen to be in Toronto.]

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

['Game Mag Weaseling' is