['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 Home and The Graveyard.]

I hate the word "pretentious" in art criticism.

I understand why people use it. Often we call something pretentious when we think the artist might be concealing a lack of meaning or vision behind obscurity, jargon, or a set of conventions currently hallowed by the art establishment. It's a way of saying "I don't get this, and I don't know that there's anything to get" that shifts the blame (if blame even applies in so subjective an area as one's response to artwork) onto the artist rather than ourselves.

Two things I don't like about this approach. First, it operates from an instinct of contempt. Labeling an artist pretentious assumes the worst about someone whose motives aren't knowable.

Second, it says nothing, nothing at all, about the work itself. It's all about the artist.

Recently I've played two games about old age and the approach of death that have been tarred as "pretentious", as well as boring and ungamelike: Home, by Stephen Lavelle, and Tale of Tales' The Graveyard, from last year. ("Pretentious" citations for The Graveyard: 1, 2, 3; for Home, with some discussion, 1.)

I consider these two works edge cases when it comes to criticizing games. Home is very brief and lacks just about everything that might make it appealing on aesthetic grounds. The graphics are the retro-pixellated stuff that has become obligatory for certain kinds of Art Game these days. The dialogue, such as it is, is not especially riveting.

Nonetheless Home does have gameplay, and the meaning of the work arises procedurally from the rules rather than from any exterior framework. It uses its interactivity to express the helplessness of an elderly man as he tries to feed himself, use the toilet, and sleep when he needs to. The player is allowed to try to satisfy these needs, but the timing is such that he will not be able to, and instead will lose control over each function in turn. It's an intentionally frustrating play that spirals into failure and predictable death, with the interactivity giving the player just enough space to struggle against that frustration.

On an adjacent edge is The Graveyard, which has virtually no gameplay. The interaction consists of steering an old lady who walks very slowly towards a bench. Then she sits down (not thanks to anything you do, mind), and a song plays. You can perhaps make her stand up and walk out again, or not. The only real exercise of choice you have is to end the game prematurely without seeing all of the content. Even that option may be taken away in the event that the old woman dies, which she may do at random if you have the game's full version rather than the demo.

To the extent that interaction matters in this work, it is to emphasize constraint: the degree to which the woman is limited in speed and agility, the degree to which the player cannot even control the full range of her limited abilities. But even this matters very little. Tale of Tales has done its best to discourage the player from even thinking the game might be more interactive than it is. Pressing ESC during play will bring up a complete walkthrough that describes everything that is possible to do in the game, lest the player be tempted to try to explore or leave the prescribed path in any way.

On the other hand, The Graveyard is the product of great craft and care in the environment. Though it is in black and white, there is a kind of lushness about the visuals, and the soundscape of animal sounds and fading urban noise is meticulously constructed and evocative. Tale of Tales excels at atmospheric work.

Both Home and The Graveyard are exploring what can be done to express emotions and states not commonly found in games. The positive reviews they've received by and large applaud them for this. I share this admiration. (I've now written up two other works by Tale of Tales, both of which I found to some degree frustrating, so it's perhaps curious that I was excited when I saw the promotion for The Graveyard that allowed me to download the full version for free. Clearly there's a disconnect here between my enjoyment of these works while playing and their long-term value for me. Perhaps I will feel the same about The Graveyard, though of the three it is plainly the slightest in both duration and significance.)

At the same time, I found both pieces unsatisfying, in related ways. I would like to explore why, though with the word "pretentious" off the table.

Home is very simple. It takes only a couple of minutes to play, but that is much longer than it takes to grasp the game's message: that dying is slow, horrible, and undignified, and that our attempts to mediate the process for the elderly may make things even more undignified by stripping them of any agency.

It is challenging to create art around a direct message of this kind and have the result seem like anything but propaganda. And Home is not even very strong propaganda. The most effective procedural propaganda works by presenting the player with what at least appears to be a valid simulation, and allowing the player to discover the rules embedded inside that simulation and to draw his own conclusions. Home, by contrast, tips its hand from the start. The situation is obviously rigged; it is plain that we will never be able to save the old man; there is no point in struggling very hard with the game nor in replaying to try to achieve a better outcome.

By using the extremely basic graphics, Lavelle is presenting Home to be read in context with other entries in the same aesthetically minimal genre of art game -- most notably, Passage and The Marriage. Works in this genre tend to offer some universalized observation about human existence. The format of Home thus offers us a clue about what kind of content we may expect from it, but in practice it lacks the slow reveal of those other works.

The Graveyard does not have a message in the same way. It is more about presenting observations (here is what an old woman looks like; here are what her thoughts might be, presented as song). Instead of being blunt, it is vague, allusive, and obscure. We may hunt for a significance, but we have no way of being sure we've found one. There is not a story as such.

Nonetheless, the presentation of the game -- the black and white images, the deliberately sluggish controls, the fact that a complete walkthrough is built into the instructions -- all indicate that we should expect to read this game differently than we read other games. But it does not (in my opinion) succeed in leading the player toward an alternate mode of engagement. But, to my mind, Tale of Tales is saying to the player, "here, you figure out how to play this work in such a way that you get something out of it!" -- and in doing so, is abrogating one of the designer's responsibilities, which is to offer the player a way in. The most interesting part of the work is the song, which becomes, in the absence of interaction, a quirky music video starring a computer-generated 3D grandma.

So both games involve formal choices that encourage the player to read and understand them in some alternative, not-mainstream-gaming way, but yield deficient or ambiguous rewards when they are so approached. (In my opinion.)

A second point: both rely too heavily on the conceit of interaction denied. There is a tendency in some art games to derive the artistic impact from refusing to let the player change things, from the conflict between what the player wants to achieve (and thinks he might be able to achieve) and what the designer has chosen to allow. At its simplest, the gimmick is to get the player to try to do something impossible, and then wait for him to give up.

But the more art games do this, the less effective the technique is -- especially in works that identify themselves formally with an art game movement. I might feel much differently about Home had it been the first game I ever met in which the rules were deliberately stacked against me. I might even feel differently if it had been dressed as a casual game, with perky cartoonish graphics and a reasonable degree of polish: that's a game genre in which I still expect to be able to win. But with its graphical style, it didn't stand a chance of misleading me. Art games have their own conventional styles, just as commercial games do, and it is possible to be lazy or careless in choosing to share those conventions. Home falls into this trap.

The Graveyard is less derivative, but still suffers from the non-surprise of its constraints and limitations.

This is what happens when a medium ages. What used to be surprising loses its power. (Compare: "Pulp Fiction" viewed in 1994 vs. "Pulp Fiction" viewed today.) We either have to find some new audience expectations to subvert, or use interactivity to an aesthetic effect that doesn't require the audience to be surprised.

(Disclosure: I played free copies of these works. Home is free, and The Graveyard I downloaded when it was offered without charge as a Halloween special. I have had no commercial dealings with the authors of either.)

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

Posted by Emily Short at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

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

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

The goodies in this edition include a third-person stealth action game about a thief, an experimental project from World of Goo developer Kyle Gabler, and a new entry in the Hoshi Saga series.

Other highlights include a freeware multiplayer top-down shooter, a puzzle game created for Game.Dev's 'Coherence' competition, and a free music-making tool with mesmerizing graphical effects.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Hoshi Saga Ringo' (Nekogames, browser)
"Hoshi Saga Ringo is a collection of twenty-five new puzzles designed by Yoshio Ishii, in which players must figure out the correct method to reveal a star that is hidden somewhere in every stage. The difficulty for each puzzle is indicated by the stars shown just below the preview image for each level, although most of them are actually pretty easy to solve compared to previous iterations in the series."

Game Pick: 'Quick as Thieves' (Gentlemen of Fortune, freeware)
"Quick as Thieves is a third-person action game in which you play as a thief out to steal an item called 'MacGuffin' from a museum. Though driven by a single objective that has to be completed in under ten minutes, there is plenty of room in your sack for just about every item you can get your grubby hands on."

Game Pick: 'Sunshine' (Kyle Gabler, freeware)
"Sunshine is a project created by Kyle Gabler (one half of 2D Boy) for the Experimental Gameplay's art game theme, where players are tasked with guiding a plant towards the skies while growing flowers and avoiding rocks. Looping around people causes them to turn into flowers, which gives off more energy for your plant to grow taller."

Game Pick: 'Adrenaline' (Adrenaline Team, freeware)
"Adrenaline is a freeware multiplayer top-down shooter created with the Game Maker engine, featuring a wide variety of weapons to use, four different game modes and support for user-created maps in addition to the official maps that comes with the download. Besides your standard ranged weapon, you can also swing a knife for melee attacks or throw grenades to hurt other players. The latest version of the game even includes a single-player mode with bots and stat tracking for registered Reflect users."

Game Pick: 'ArGeeBee' (Rodain Joubert, freeware)
"Created for the Game.Dev 'Coherence' competition, ArGeeBee is Rodain's attempt at splicing three different genres together. Supplied with three different little men, the green guy must use his match-3 skills to forge a path for the red who uses his vague RPG skills to kill baddies who are the same level as him, level up and defeat the boss. The blue can then use his platforming abilities to reach the goal. On each level, there is always a specific order in which the three heroes need to be moved and each must help the others out."

App Pick: 'Audia' (Davioware, freeware)
"Wonderfully experimental music maker, this. By creating note bars, gates and spawners, then fiddling around with a variety of sounds, noises and effects, Audia allows the user to create some incredibly brilliant sounding music pieces courtesy of bouncing bloom balls. The controls are initially a little difficult to understand, but once you're going it's beautiful stuff. Awesome fun to play around with - and you can even save your compositions for others to listen to."

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

[Some more info on GDC 2010, organized by my colleagues, and here's specifics from the Business track, including some interesting thinkpieces and practical biz, metrics, and community talks, carefully filtered by the GDC Advisory Board.]

The organizers of Game Developers Conference 2010 have revealed major Business Track talks for the March 9th-13th event, including EA DICE's Ben Cousins on "what Wal-Mart tells us about gaming", and the Tripwire and Tiger Style founders on game biz success.

The announcements come as part of the first of a series of GDC 2010 track-specific announcements, this one focusing on the Business & Management Track, which "looks at the game development process from the standpoint of running the business, and offers proven strategies for the developer who needs to understand complex business issues."

The subset of the Game Developers Conference 2010 Advisory Board tasked with programming this track include notables such as Epic Games president Mike Capps, InstantAction CEO and Westwood Studios co-founder Lou Castle, and Warner Bros. Seattle studio GM Laura Fryer.

Some of the highlighted Business Track lectures already announced for the San Francisco Moscone Center-based event include the following:

- Crushing The Overhead: Case Study of A Microstudio Start-Up
In this lecture, Thief designer Randy Smith explains his indie studio Tiger Style released Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor on the iPhone, topping the App Store charts amidst praise from players and press and netting over a quarter of a million dollars. He will discuss "team building, infrastructure, sales, compensation, process, schedule, project direction, product design, marketing, and more."

- Why Owning Your Own IP is a Bad Idea: Giving Up Your Rights for Fun and Profit
Foundation 9 VP Chris Charla presents an interesting argument: "Conventional wisdom says you should always own your own IP. In the games space, we argue that the conventional wisdom is no longer valid. For independent developers to maximize their chance of popular and commercial success (and getting action figures made of your characters!), retaining ownership of your IP may be the worst decision you can make."

- Kings of Convenience - What Walmart Tells Us About the Future of Gaming
EA DICE's Ben Cousins (Battlefield Heroes) presents an intriguing lecture on "using the historical analogy of the rise of the supermarket in the post-automobile world to inform us about a possible future of the games industry." Cousins explains: "How can we apply the technological revolution of the motor car and similar technology-driven business revolutions to our own rapidly changing industry as we react to the technological revolution of the internet?"

- Console Wars Revisited: Are We Breaking the Mold or Reliving History?
Don Daglow has led development teams on every generation of game hardware going back to the Atari vs. Intellivision era, and he argues that "we're reliving many patterns of games industry history" in this business lecture, pointing out "why PS3 and 360 sales are following historical patterns -- and what you can expect to happen next," as well as how to identify a few key elements of any platform and quickly evaluate its potential for developers.

Other notable Business Track talks include Pocket God iPhone creator Dave Castelnuovo on Ongoing User Engagement: How to Listen to Your Community, Tripwire's Alan Wilson (Killing Floor) on Funding Small Studios: So Many Sources of Funds, So Little Cash, and veteran researcher Dmitri Williams on Leveraging Your Data by "modeling user behaviors with data captured from game logs and surveys".

Alongside the full set of announced GDC 2010 lectures thus far comes news on reduced conference pass prices for the event, with the introduction of optional lunch packages. Game Developers Conference 2010 will also play host to the GDC Expo Floor, the GDC Career Pavilion, the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival and the 10th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards.

Early Bird rates for GDC 2010 end on February 4, 2010 -- for more information on the 2010 Game Developers Conference, visit the official GDC 2010 website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For her senior thesis at Middle Tennessee State, graphic designer Cristina Gomez created Plug In, a beautifully executed campaign mock-up seeking to help parents better understand video games and make informed decisions on what releases are appropriate for their family.

"The goal of Plug In is to promote a responsible attitude towards games. Despite the fact that they have been around for decades, video games are still viewed as something unfamiliar, strange, or even corrupt. But lately, games have found themselves in more households than ever and are being played by people of all ages.

With the way things are, people need to be aware of the place that video games are taking in our society and be more educated about the choices they make when purchasing them."

Gomez created a multimedia package for the campaign that includes two posters, stickers, a Flash-based website, family game packs, business cards, and ESRB/parental controls pocket references. Plug In also features a book that gives an overview of different consoles, common gaming terms, ESRB/parental controls, and more.

I've included photos of Plug In's different components provided to us by Gomez after the break. Though the entire package is impressive, at the very least, you should check out the "What are you actually worried about?" poster, which features dozens of icons pulled from popular video games, all of which she illustrated herself.

Plug In Family Game Packs:

Plug In Posters and Close-up:

Plug In Book and Excerpts:

Plug In Flash Website:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Some of my favorite video games are the titles that don't actually exist like Montezano's Quest, Diesel Kiss, and anything on the Raroo Fun System. It's even better when those releases manage to escape whatever parallel universe they originated from and appear in our reality in a playable form: Retro Game Challenge, Star Radish, and most recently Dark Void Zero.

The Winchester Cultural Center Gallery in Las Vegas is currently running an exhibit of video games that didn't phase into existence completely intact. The display features seven game boxarts with a large matching black icon painted on a nearby wall, as if blasted into our dimension from a nuclear explosion that disintegrated the cartridges but permanently flashed their silhouettes onto the gallery's walls.

Dreamed up by Michael Baker, an instructor at the Art Institute of Las Vegas, the video games include Smart Storm: Multiplayer Weather Battle!, in which players "paint weather systems directly on the map" to "restore parched land"; The Implosionist, which asks gamers to "analyze and destroy condemned buildings in a dense urban environment"; and Wings of Deceit, a pigeon simulator that offers "the most advanced robotic avian surveillance device in the world".

You can read reviews of the "Flick of the Wrist" show at Las Vegas City Life and Las Vegas Weekly, where I recovered the images for this post. The exhibition opened on December 11th and will run until February 5th, so head to the Winchester Cultural Center now before they blink out of existence, returned to their original universe or timeline.

[Via Game Culture]

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

[In this in-depth design exploration, Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman lays out some essential, practical principles for making video games more accessible -- without dumbing them down.]

On the weekends my wife and I go visit our friends to hang out and play games. Sadly, this very rarely means video games. Usually it means board games -- stuff like Pandemic or Settlers, not Candyland. They're geeky, complex, exciting, difficult games.

So how come we almost never play video games, if our friends are into geeky, complex, exciting stuff? I think it might be because all video games are unnecessarily intimidating and cater to a very highly developed set of tastes and dialects. This is not a radical idea by any means, but it got me thinking about specific ways to modulate or mediate these exclusive, discouraging aspects of games.

When I talk about accessibility I am talking about removing the sense of frustration that lots of people feel when we try to introduce them to these things that we love: our Castlevanias, our Quakes, even our Shadows of the Colossus. To most of humanity, these games are unplayably hard, but I feel a lot of noise has been made in the past about content being the source of the problem -- that these games require math, or that they feature geeky themes, or that they're juvenile and misogynistic.

I like elves, space marines, and breasts as much as the next guy, but I don't think those are the root of the problem. These things exist in books and film and are devoured by people that shun games. What I hope to do with this article is point out some things that I think are at the root of the problem.

But why bother making accessible games? People have been making these "inaccessible" games for a long time and our industry is thriving. Lately, though, it seems as though games are starting to flirt with some fascinating ideas and themes -- and, as Hal Barwood puts it, "Shakespeare wrote hits." If we are going to make art, why do we keep making it for the same tiny subsection of humanity? Have you met those guys?

Even if you're not a passionate artist trying to express yourself through this new medium, there are some obvious financial benefits to seeking out a new audience (see Nintendo and PopCap). Accessibility is important.

I'm not interested in making games easier, or dumber, or more boring. While Nintendo and PopCap have seen incredible financial success courting casual gamers, much of what they offer is repellent, condescending, boring, insipid, and unfair. We are frequently presented with a choice: you can either play a casual game (and I use the term pejoratively) with your non-gamer friends, or you can play a really rad game by yourself, or you can play board games. I want to find that middle ground where multiplayer video games are as inclusive, fun, and complex as board games.

This isn't a misguided anti-hardcore crusade. Games like Street Fighter IV, God Hand, and Ikaruga are spectacular, inspirational works that could be worsened by taking any of the unsolicited advice I am about to dispense. But they are also really specifically designed for a very small group of people, and the barrier to entry for these games is incredibly high. How many people dismiss Street Fighter as a button-masher because they can't get over that initial hump?

Let's find the middle ground. Let's make cool games that we can play with our friends, even if they don't know what a Halo or a FADC is.

Gravity & Complex Simulations

I've written a little bit in the past about how I am suspicious that gravity and parabolic motion has a tendency to intimidate non-gamers. Games my mom and wife play (Katamari Damacy, Flower, Secret of Mana, Dr. Mario) don't include real-time gravity as an important part of gameplay. Some phenomenally well-designed games have managed to include gravity and still draw in a huge non-gamer audience (Super Mario Bros.) but they are the exceptions, not the rule.

I suspect it is not gravity specifically, but rather complex nonlinear physics simulation generally that is problematic. It requires a certain amount of predictive visualization to interact with it, even in a simple way, and this is an acquired skill, not something at which we naturally excel. A lot of games combine these systems with strict punishments like death, which can be frustrating and intimidating.

Complex simulations are a cornerstone of game design, and we cannot nor should not abandon them. However, they can be vicious when exacerbated by overall game speed or strict punishments. Super Mario Galaxy and Offroad Velociraptor Safari are games that use complex 3D physics in different ways, but neither game really punishes the player for bad predictions.

Complex Input

If you are reading essays on Gamasutra, you are probably not intimidated or confused by the D-pad and double face button combination. Most of us have moved on to a combination of a D-pad, two sticks, four face buttons, four shoulder buttons, three center buttons, and an accelerometer. This is a problem, since the 20-year-old D-pad and two face buttons setup is beyond the comfort zone of most humans.

Witness the popularity of Rock Band, Wii Sports, and Wii Fit if you need immediate, obvious, physical evidence. It's not weird or rare for non-gamers to have to look down and make sure they're hitting the correct arrow or the correct face button. Like all the things I am going to bring up in this article, this is not necessarily a fatal flaw, but coupled with some of the other things on this list it can be a real problem.

Simplify input, bank on context, and don't be afraid to provide subtle or optional visual reminders in-game. See Batman: Arkham Asylum or any recent 3D Legend of Zelda offering for examples.

Speed & Reflexes

Like simulations, relatively fast real-time inputs and reactions make video games what they are. They are an essential ingredient. Interaction is a pretty special thing in our art form. But requiring really fast reactions for basic interactions automatically excludes a huge group of people.

I think one reason board games are so much more accessible than video games is that they're turn-based, not real-time. This may be common knowledge, but a basic way of actuating the difficulty of your game without changing damage ratios or level design is to simply change how fast the enemies and projectiles move.

Another facet of reflexes is "telegraphing," the tendency or ability of the game to warn you about what is coming up. For example, a boss might blink or strike a specific pose before attacking the player. Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil, Godhand) is an expert at tuning and manipulating telegraphing.

If this sounds too weird or separate to thinking about speed, it may help to think of telegraphing as a modifier for speed. The farther you can see ahead, the faster you can safely travel. This is why cars have headlights. It is a really simple, fundamental thing that is frequently ignored in game design.

The speed of objects and simulations has a tendency to dramatically exacerbate other accessibility problems like simulations and input. For example, if the player doesn't have the controls memorized, and doesn't have time to look down at the buttons, he or she will not enjoy the play experience.

Play Time

I think it's interesting that movies, plays, operas, TV shows, popular board games, and card games all take roughly one to three hours to consume, but any video game under 10 hours is maligned and considered less substantial than its longer counterparts. This may be less true than it once was; Spelunky and Captain Forever are exploring shorter, replay-based adventures in a really positive way.

That's not to say there is no place for long-form adventures, but the idea that a 30- or 40- hour experience is a standard to strive for strikes me as a little ambitious.

While it may be more correlation than causation, I think it's interesting that a lot of mainstream media is designed to fill up a free slot in an evening, rather than devour an entire weekend (or series of weekends).

Bounding Boxes

This gets a little technical, but I've seen it crop up too often to ignore it. Bounding rectangles or other shapes are how game systems view game objects. To us, Mario looks like a fat dude in overalls, but to the Nintendo system, he is a box. When he crouches, he is a shorter box. This is how the game can figure out quickly and easily whether or not you are hitting a wall or not.

It's really easy and intuitive to just set your bounding box to the maximums of your graphic or mesh. For example, if your character is 20 units wide by 40 units tall, you might set the bounding box to 20x40. Makes sense, right? Unfortunately this leaves very, very little room for error or flexibility. If your graphic doesn't extend all the way to the corners of that box, it can also look like your character or object is actually colliding with nothing, which can be really frustrating when you die from hitting spikes that you didn't even touch.

Shrinking bounding boxes is not a pre-made solution, though. Environmental content especially benefits from a really authentic bounding volume. Projectiles fired at the player are more forgiving when they have a small bounding volume, while projectiles fired at enemies are more forgiving if they have a larger bounding box though. Look no further than the Japanese shmup scene for constant, gleeful, and expert manipulation of bounding boxes.

Carefully tuned bounding boxes lead to more close calls, more player satisfaction, fewer "cheap" deaths, less frustration, and more accessibility.

Positive Permanence

Positive permanence was really popular back in the 1980s and has been totally lost, much to my regret. That's my own made-up phrase for something two of my favorite games, Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, employed to great effect.

Rather than providing save points or quick-save buttons, or auto-saving after boss fights, lots of state changes in Metroid and Zelda are permanent. Every time you unlock a door in either game, it is unlocked forever. Even if you die, it stays unlocked. Picked up a rad item but died at the boss? No problem, you still have the item.

When you die, you are placed back at the entrance of the region -- not all progress is permanent. And enemies constantly respawn in almost every area. But the big things -- the important things -- are not thrown out when you die from some unforeseen danger. You are never placed in a situation where you think, "Oh nice, I got the bombs!" and die a minute later, screaming, "FUCK YOU WHERE ARE MY BOMBS?!"

A nice side effect of this system is it helps modulate the difficulty of game areas. If you're a total rock star, you can Rambo through the dungeon in one go. But if you are not up to it, or have slower reflexes, you can run suicide missions into the area -- unlocking a door here, collecting an item there -- until you've learned enough and powered up enough to handle that region. It serves the same essential function as grinding and experience points, but it is skill-based, not time-based. Grinding can work, but it's a less elegant solution to the problem of modulating the difficulty of your game areas.

Don't take away people's accomplishments and victories! It creates short-term frustration and long-term accessibility problems. Modern grind-and-save systems serve the same purpose but they are clumsy and painful.

The Guide Player

Most board games serve two players or more, and without fail one or two of end up spearheading the learning process by reading the rules and helping explain the gameplay to other players, who may not be as bold.

This is something many of your favorite co-op games (Halo, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Left 4 Dead) already do, only in the most basic way: They have respawn systems that are oriented around regenerating the bad players near the good player. This is a very practical and common compromise for controlling player proximity, but it has the nice side effect of orienting overall progress around whatever player happens to survive longest at any given time.

I would love to see this concept pushed further. You should be able to help your friends get to areas that are hard for them to access, share items with each other, and even temporarily switch roles.

Assistance systems are a fundamental cornerstone of real-time multiplayer gaming and they are largely ignored and unexplored. Skillful players need more stuff to do so they don't get bored, and less skilled players could definitely use the help.

Layering

This isn't so much a specific tip about game design as it is an overarching philosophy of accessible design. Layering is the idea that you can present your audience with both a simple interface and a hard interface at the same time. Layering is how you let skilled players advance more quickly than unskilled players without ruining the game for anyone. In many ways, the ideas of having a guide player and ideas about positive permanence are just different ways of implementing layering.

The easiest way to think about layering in game design is input. Imagine a simple scenario where a game character has two attacks. One is quite weak but very simple to input, and the other does a lot of damage but is hard to do. This is layering! When you first pick up the game and it is new to you, you might only interact with it in a simple way, but as you grow in physical input skill you can interact with it in more complex ways and advance through the game more quickly.

Obviously, the wonderful thing about layering is that you're not excluding anyone. The guide player can help move things along, noobs can get their learn on, and neither will feel the game is too intimidating or too easy. Of course, this isn't nearly as easy to implement as it is to talk about. Too bad! It's absolutely critical to creating games that can appeal to both loyal players and new blood.

The old ways of doing this (difficulty levels, experience points, grinding) require a lot of boring, grunt design labor and testing, and ultimately comprise merely a slightly finer mesh for dividing your players.

Layering is absolutely not about making players unlock better moves or more advanced gear. This is exactly the opposite of layering; this is serial, not parallel. You can only embrace a wide audience by giving them an implicit choice all the time. If everyone has to use the same crappy moves on the first level, then you don't get a guide player, you don't reward people who like the challenge of skill-building, and you are losing your players.

Always provide an alternate easy way to play, even if it is less stylish.

Conclusion

I am suspicious about catch-all solutions and magical cures for game design problems, since game design is such a nebulous and unexplored art form. I really can't make any spectacular claims about how taking my advice will somehow make your project a bestseller or, better yet, a dearly-loved cult hit.

But if it can at least spark a discussion about the worth of accessibility, or get us to take a second look at our work, maybe we can start finding a new, larger audience for these things we're making. When our Shakespeare arrives, maybe he will be able to write a hit.

[Adam “Atomic” Saltsman is an independent game designer, artist, programmer, and entrepreneur whose past projects include Canabalt, Cave Story Wii, Gravity Hook, Paper Moon, and Owl Country, as well as the Flixel Flash game framework. He is also the co-founder of Semi Secret Software (wurdle) and the director of Last Chance Media (Dr. Dobb's Challenge 2).]

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

[Here's the full details on the latest issue of Game Developer mag, with an Aion postmortem, Front Line Award specifics, and some particularly interesting columns thanks to some industry-savvy, discipline-specific folks.]

The January 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to print and digital subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats.

The cover feature for the issue is an exclusive postmortem of NCsoft's fantasy MMO Aion. The article, crafted collaboratively by the game's team, offers insight on the challenges and successes experienced by the internal studio. It is introduced as follows:

"Aion is NCsoft's next big subscription MMORPG, originating from the company's home base in South Korea. In our first-ever Korean postmortem, the team discusses how Aion survived worker fatigue, stock drops, and real money traders, providing budget and demographics information along the way."

Also featured in the issue is Game Developer's 12th annual Front Line Awards for middleware and tools, for which the winners were just revealed -- the full article includes write-ups and explanations from leading developers:

"We're happy to present our 12th annual tools awards, representing the best in game industry software, across engines, middleware, production tools, audio tools, and beyond, as voted by the Game Developer audience."

In addition, Riptide Games founder Brian Robbins explores the relatively new challenges of designing UI for touch-based systems:

"Thinking of making a game for multitouch-based platforms? This article offers a look at the UI considerations when moving to this sort of interface, including specific advice for touch offset, and more."

And as usual, our regular columnists contribute detailed and important pieces on numerous areas of game development -- this issue, we include Bungie's Steve Theodore on tiling, Jake Cannell on voxel tracing methods, BioWare's Damion Schubert on realism in design, LucasArts' Jesse Harlin on the decline of audio loops, and Matthew Wasteland with his monthly humor column.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of January 2010's magazine as a single issue.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you still haven't played Umbrella Adventure: The Castle of Cake (and with a title like that, how could you not?), indie group and Ark 22 developer Hive has put out a new trailer to show some of the features for black-and-white, hand-drawn, hand-animated adventure-platform game. From Umbrella Adventure's description:

"A story of friendship, trust, adventure and confectionery. Travel across land, air and water, through the darkest, deepest corners of the Forest, in wind, rain and snow, to solve the mystery of the theft of over one hundred delicious cakes, through a world brought to life by rich atmosphere, immersive soundscapes and detailed visual effects, presented in greyscale widescreen."

Although it's a big list, we included the game as one of our "99 Best Free Games Of 2009" last week. You can download and play Umbrella Adventure: The Castle of Cake for free at Hive's site.

[Via @ChevyRay]

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

If your looking for an alternative to the Flixel framework for developing 2D Flash titles, Chevy Ray Johnston (Beacon, Skullpogo) has released FlashPunk, his own ActionScript library designed to offer "a fast, clean framework for prototyping and developing games". He's not only put the tool online for free, he's posted some online documentation, written a beginner's tutorial, and setup forums.

FlashPunk is specifically geared toward creators who like to work with with 2D raster/bitmap graphics, as opposed to vector graphics. "It can manage thousands of animated bitmap sprites on-screen at a time without slowing, a lot faster than Flash normally could, because it operates under the assumption that your game primarily uses bitmapped graphics," explains the developer.

As for why you'd want to use FlashPunk over Flixel, Johnston has also shared technical details on the differences and even weaknesses of his framework so coders can decide which tool to use based on the merits of each. There are at least two projects underway using FlashPunk: Johnston's own Fight! MSD (in collaboration with Paul "Pietpiet" Veer) and Matt Thorson's Jumper Four.

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

Celebrating another year of continued existence, two indie game developers are slashing prices on their titles and passing their good fortune to fans. Petri Purho, now 27 years old, is running a "pay what you want" sale for his 2008 IGF Grand Prize winning game Crayon Physics Deluxe. From now until January 15th, can grab the acclaimed drawing/physics puzzle game for as low as $.01 or as much as $999 quintillion.

Swedish developer Nicklas "Nifflas" Nygren, also now 27 years old, discounted his latest title Saira by 30 percent to $12 until January 20th. Released for PC just last month, it's a 2D puzzle platformer that has you exploring different worlds to collect parts for a teleportation device, which will reunite your character with her friend on a distant planet. You can buy Saira and grab a free demo here.

[Via CAG]

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

['The Magic Resolution' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch column by UK-based writer Lewis Denby, examining all facets of the experience of playing video games. As we enter a new decade, a small new trend seems to be emerging in the indie scene: the removal of interactivity. Are we entering an era in which games no longer have to be games?]

When is a game not a game?

I've spent the last few minutes trying to think up a witty response to that question, but actually, it serves more of a purpose to leave it unanswered for the time being. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately: is there a magical line somewhere that separates games from other forms of "interactive" media and, if so, where exactly does it lie?

A couple of years ago, it might not have been an issue. Games could, for the most part, be easily defined by their inherent interactivity. Attempts to create narrative experiences that dismissed this interaction had, in the past, been less than successful. The interactive movie flailed about and quickly imploded, and interactive fiction's few attempts at pure narrative led to most people suggesting they might as well read a book. For a vast majority of gaming's history, the medium has been about doing. But now, as we enter a new decade, is there a chance that could change?

In 2008, Dan Pinchbeck, a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, released a Half-Life 2 mod called Dear Esther. Part of a research project examining novel uses of first-person game engines, it removed all agency from the player, casting him or her as an unidentified figure exploring a desolate island. Randomly triggered audio clips spouted the memoirs of a dying man, and letters to the mysterious Esther, whose presence seems to be felt on the island in an unusual and abstract way.

Dear Esther seems to have spawned a new trend in indie development: the game that isn't a game. Since Esther, we've seen Judith - a low-fi walk around an unsettling castle, a retelling of the opera Bluebeard - The Path - Tale of Tales' controversial and heavily symbolic version of Little Red Riding Hood - Small Worlds - a pure-exploration game, in which the player slowly uncovers a collection of snowglobe-esque environments - and now a couple of my own pieces. My ongoing Half-Life 2 mod project Post Script is an attempt to see how little interaction you can get away with in something that's still ostensibly game-like. Nestlings just gets rid of the game altogether, and simply uses the Source engine to tell a short story.

Critical eye

It was a couple of days after I released version one of the first episode of Post Script that Robert Yang first emailed me. Yang is a designer and writer I thoroughly respect. As well as having developed an entire section of the upcoming Black Mesa mod - a current-generation remake of the original Half-Life - he's the creator of Radiator, a collection of short Half-Life 2 mods exploring unusual and highly personal themes. So to have him very carefully explain to me exactly why he thought my work... well, didn't work was something of a punch to the gut.

Some of his criticisms I absolutely agree with. I'm not a level designer, for example, so my signposting and general architecture construction were less than brilliant. But Yang also outlined what he thought were the three ingredients of successful single-player game design: a strong aesthetic, decent storytelling, and meaningful interaction.

For the most part, I agree. But this got me thinking about that magical line again. And the question I emerged with was: is there an assumption that games shouldn't cross that line, wherever it may be? Are we saying that pieces built in videogame engines absolutely have to be games?

Yang and I have exhanged a few emails since, debating this topic. He sees pure narrative in game engines as an interesting movement, but one that will ultimately lead to a dead end. He's written on his blog about why he thinks this is the case, outlining his ideas about the best game design practice. And while his argument is strong, I can't help but feel we're approaching it from a binary perspective, when in actual fact, that's going to lead nowhere. There's not a compromise. We're talking about radically different things.

Yang is talking about game design. I'm talking about exploring an entirely new form of vaguely interactive fiction. It exists somewhere between cinema and videogames, probably. But while it appears, on the surface, to be closely related to the former, something about the fact that it's you exploring this place subtly sets it apart.

I guess you had to be there

So my argument is not to directly oppose Yang's theory of successful game design. Quite the opposite: I largely agree with it. But I agree with it if what you're doing is something that sits within the traditional format of play. Even Yang's own mods, which have been frequently called "experimental", fall firmly into this mould. You "do" something, and it has an effect on what happens next. You're making choices, acting upon them, and forwarding the experience. By contrast, in Dear Esther, all you're doing is pressing the forward key (or repeatedly hitting the jump button and moaning that your gun's missing, if you're an oaf).

But it's this sense of being a part of the story, rather than being shown it, that sets it apart from non-interactive works of fiction - be they films, or novels, or comics. Yang argues that these non-games largely rely on unfolding a story that happened in the past, rather than one that's happening in the present, but that doesn't have to be the case. I suspect that's been true so far because it's easier to create a world that exists in its final state, rather than one in which the events are happening right now. But there's nothing stopping designers and writers exploring new ways of approaching pure narrative in game engines. Nothing except an assumption that it shouldn't be done.

And that's kind of the crux of my argument. Why should we prescribe what's acceptable in game design? And won't doing so prevent new, interesting forms sprouting from existing concepts? In the end, perhaps it doesn't matter exactly where that magical line resides. Perhaps it's not even as simple as that: maybe, in the future, videogames will fall on a sort of greyscale between pure games and complete non-interaction. Or maybe they'll branch out in completely different directions. Who knows?

Point is, now that various designers have set the wheels in motion, something is going to happen. Either commonly held design ideals will mean this emerging form will be stopped in its tracks, and people won't bother approaching it. Or we'll start trying to make these things, start experimenting, start exploring this new angle to narrative design. Maybe it won't work; maybe Yang is right, and it's dead before it's even taken off. But if we don't try it, we'll never know.

I mean, I think Dear Esther is one of the most astonishing, inspiring and touching games I've ever played. If I like it, someone else will. Right?

[Lewis Denby is editor of Resolution Magazine and general freelance busybody for anyone that'll have him. He's not a game designer, but that doesn't stop him from trying...]

Posted by Lewis Denby at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Looking for a fun iPhone game project, developers Alex Schwartz and Yilmaz Kiymaz decided to host an "Extreme Ramen Challenge" in which they'd create a small title for the handset in just 24 hours, taking design suggestions from the TouchArcade community. To ensure that the results of their efforts turned out as interesting as the game jam itself, they made the design theme of their project "absurdity."

That's how Schwartz and Kiymaz ended up with Super Ramen Bros., a simple but wacky game that has two packs of instant noodles running on a cashier's conveyor belt, collecting soy sauce packets while trying to avoid running into other incoming grocery store items. What really makes it, though, is Alex's cat Link, who makes a Mortal Komabat/"Toasty!"-esque cameo every now and then.

The two devs are also submitting the Unity Engine-powered game to the App Store for free so that anyone, including the community that helped them design the title, can play it. "It's our gift, and something we wanted to do to commemorate the start of the decade," says Schwartz. "It was all for the fans, and we wanted to do this for fun, not profit."

You can read the duo's development log for Super Ramen Bros. at Schwartz's site. I've also embedded a tall video showing off it's awesome intro screens and goofy concept:

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

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, the same demented tinkerers behind the Meggy Jr., constructed a tabletop, mechanical version of Pong out of plywoods, timing belt pulleys, microswitches to detect when the ball hits a paddle, pusher solenoids to kick back the ball, and an ATmega168 microcontroller that powers the paddles.

The result isn't perfect, but it's playable! The steel ball bearing needs a little more push to cross the field, and it sometimes curves instead of traveling in a straight line (a lot like the player-guided balls in Magnavox Odyssey's Tennis). I love the score wheel, though, and that you can direct the paddles with knobs.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has posted photos and details on how it created the tabletop Pong setup, so if you want to build your own, you could probably figure out how with all that information. I've also embedded a video after the break of the machine in action:

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

[In this informational piece, indie game creator and Independent Games Festival judge Jens Bergensten (Harvest: Massive Encounter) discusses the process of judging the IGF to help entrants understand what their game goes through, with personal views from two other 2010 IGF judges and IGF Chairman Simon Carless.]

This year I had the great privilege to take part in Independent Games Festival as a judge, getting a chance to evaluate the best independent games that have been recently released or that are still in development. (The finalists for the Main Competition were recently announced.) This task has been really fun, even though it took a little more of my time than I had thought.

I wanted to share my experience from this because when we participated in IGF in 2008 and 2009, the process was somewhat of a black box. Your game was dropped into the box and wasn't seen again until three months later, when an e-mail with commiserations and a few judge comments told you relatively little about the process the titles went through.

Of course, this isn't that different to most competitions out there (even judge comments are rare in other contests), but we had no idea what had happened in that time. And we obviously wanted more information and idea of how this was decided, since IGF is among the most important events for small game start-ups like ours.

So I wrote this article with the permission of the IGF organizers, based on my experience of being on both "sides", without ever getting the luxury of a nomination.

Differences between IGF 2009 and IGF 2010

First of all, there were some things that had been changed since last IGF:

- Much greater emphasis on giving written feedback with your scores
- There was a "Nuovo" category. Judges were able to nominate games to this category (a "yes" or "no" option), and those games that were nominated would be evaluated by a committee.
- There were more than twice as many judges (over 150!).

In addition, the IGF judge site (new or not) was working great! Very easy to navigate and you could write messages on any game to the other judges. It was like a small community, except it was not possible to see the list of judges, though you could see their names when they commented on particular games.

Judge Scoring

The scoring method this year was a value between 1 and 100 in each category, with specified intervals for the different scores. This scale is more precisely defined this year, according to comments I've heard from judges in earlier years.

The score ranges this year were:

90-100: Concept and execution are both superb, with no obvious faults. Very strong candidate for finalist in this category. Difficult to imagine further improvement.
80-89: Candidate for finalist in this category, with good execution on a solid concept. Possible improvements are more apparent.
60-79: Still above average, but unlikely to make finalist. Perhaps a strong execution on a less interesting concept, or a neat concept with lackluster execution.
40-59: An average experience. No major defects, but not very compelling either.
20-39: Actively failing on some aspect. Maybe the concept is terrible, or maybe the execution is severely lacking. They tried, but big problems.
1-19: Outright bad. Completely missed the mark.

The different categories were:

Excellence In Design: Scores will be based on the quality and execution of each entry's design, including game mechanic design, level design, and difficulty balancing.
Excellence In Audio: Scores will be based on the innovation, quality, and impressiveness of each entry's music and sound effects.
Excellence In Visual Art: Scores will be based on the innovation, quality, and impressiveness of each entry's appearance and visual effects.
Technical Excellence: Scores will be based on the technical mastery and innovation demonstrated by each entry's game engine and code base.
Overall Rating: Scores will be based on your impression of the game.

Note that the overall rating is not an average score. When I evaluated my set of games, I scored this value based on how the game made me feel. I didn't care if the game was visually stunning or innovative, I mainly cared if the game was enjoyable to play.

Judge Game List

Each judge was assigned a set of games depending on which tools she or he had available. I, for example, did not have access to any dev kits, so I was only able to judge games that had either a Windows or Mac OS X executable. I had been given 14 games to evaluate, which seems to match up pretty well with my friends and fellow judges' Alex May and Erik Svedang's lists. Me and Erik had one game in common, otherwise it was randomly distributed.

It's worth pointing out that the game list was not sorted alphabetically. The order of the games seemed completely random, so having a game starting with an "A" did not give any benefit in this case (i.e. it only helps in the list of the main site).

I was only allowed to score the games in my list, but I could try the other games if I liked so I could gain perspective on the quality of the other titles. It was also possible for me to write comments on the games that would be displayed for the other judges (but not for the game authors). This was quite handy when you needed tips or technical support from the other judges.

Game Information

The game presentation page looked like this (screenshot taken with permission from Jonatan, page with permission from IGF organizers, click through for full picture):

As you can see, the judges will get both the short and the long description, together with contact information and download links. Some long descriptions (for judges only) have a lot of walkthrough and technical information in them.

Scheduling

I think it's worth to point out that game developers are allowed to upload updates to their games while the competition is running. I always made sure I downloaded the latest build when I started evaluating a new game, and sometimes this was several weeks after the submission deadline (which is November 1st). A few weeks is a whole eternity to an indie game developer!

Student Category

Judges who volunteered to evaluate the student games would receive a new list of games after the main competition had finished. This list was also displayed in a random order, and I received 15 games to evaluate. One difference to the main competition was that student games were only rated in a single category ("Overall"). The scores would be averaged among the judges who evaluated the games, and the best ones would be invited to GDC.

Finalist Judging

Following all of the first round judging, the finalists are being given a couple of weeks to upload new versions of their games, if they have any updates. After that, the IGF judges have about a month to play all finalists and simply vote for their winner in each category - quite straightforward.

Second Opinion: Alex May (Eufloria/Dyson creator, IGF judge.)

As a judge this year and a finalist last year, the change of perspective was very interesting for me. I was given 14 games to judge, and less than a month in which to do it. It's a little over two days per game in my case, and judging by the general activity of the judge comments on the individual games, many judges, like me, left it quite late before starting.

Nonetheless I gave each game a good bash and brought in third parties I could trust for multiplayer games when other judges were unavailable. I was forced to leave significant written feedback for each game, which is excellent.

A quick bit of maths suggests that an entry in the 2010 IGF would have around 8 judges playing it, with one or two maybe unable to run it due to particular system and internet configurations (I noticed a few of these cropping up - people unable to connect to internet games etc).

Overall I found the process really easy and fun to use. I could amend my points scoring and feedback any time I liked up until the votes were counted. This was good because sometimes when going back to a game my opinion changed for better or worse and I was able to go back and add more feedback and change the scores.

I would imagine that a 100-point scale would give a good granularity in the results, and this was the reason for choosing it. I personally never went off multiples of 5, effectively rendering it a 20-point scale. Judges were not privy to any statistics beyond whether a game had yet received any scores at all or not.

A few things that I personally felt as a judge:

- I really wanted to make the best feedback I could as I know what it feels like to receive it as an IGF entrant.
- I really wanted more time for each game. Partly my own fault.
- Given more time and a choice, I would have preferred to have more games assigned than have been given more time for the entries I had.
- I felt like the comments system was wasted on most of the judges as many of them failed to make a comment on a game. Also, as a judge, I felt the system of information could have been even more open to us, like who had submitted reviews, who was assigned this game, etc.

I think Jens has opened up the process very well. Hopefully this article will help explain the process better to entrants and interested parties.

Third Opinion: Michael Rose (IndieGames.com editor, judge)

For my games for IGF this year, as a judge I was assigned quite a variety, with a mixture of puzzlers, platformers, shmups and first-person shooters, as well as some... oddities. I remember looking down my list for the first time and spotting some names I recognized and others I had not a clue about.

I decided at that point that the only way I was going to judge this list of games fairly was if I played them from top to bottom, not picking out the ones I had already come across or was previously excited to play.

The first obstacle to overcome is having misgivings about a game before even playing it. We've all done it at some point - be it a screenshot, or a clumsy game description or maybe a trailer of suspect quality, it's easy to conclude that you're not going to enjoy a game before even installing it. Obviously in these circumstances this isn't fair in the slightest, so personally for myself, it was very important to leave all these kinds of thoughts well alone.

My range of titles turned out to be quite the mixed bag, with a number of superb gaming experiences slotted in between some other not-so-fantastic. My personal means of scoring each game was with a pen and paper at the ready, noting good and bad points as I went along, and using them to come to a conclusion at the end.

Along with the scoring, there was also 'Anonymous Feedback' to be given - obligatory for the first time since the competition began. This, I felt, was incredibly important. To understand how important the feedback was, I put myself in the shoes of a developer. I've just submitted what I believe is my best work ever. More than anything now, I want to know what people think. I don't just want a string of numbers thrown back at me with no explanation as to what they mean. If I'm scoring low in the Audio section, I want to know why!

With this in mind, I made sure to give each of my entries a decent amount of feedback, be it praise or constructive criticism. I didn't dance around the subject though - if something was good I said so, and if something was bad I made sure the developer understood that I didn't enjoy that specific area as much as I would have liked.

An area that I felt mildly confused about was the topic of length. I had games in my list which were over in a matter of minutes, then I had other titles which went on and on for hours. Now clearly these shorter games weren't short due to the developers being lazy or running out of ideas - this is just how the developer chose to express him or herself.

But then if a developer has put, say, a month of work in, and produced something short but sweet - but then another developer has slaved away for a whole year, crafting something wonderful with a good few hours of play to explore, should one get precedence over another? It's a tricky one, I believe.

The other feature for judges to indulge in a bit of was the 'Judge Notes'. At the bottom of each game page was a comment box, allowing judges to discuss said game -- with a mix of technical and other comments, although I generally preferred technical-only info to be displayed there.

Overall, I felt that every game had as much chance as any other, which really is a remarkable achievement considering there were 300+ games and 150+ judges to co-ordinate. The judging was a very painless experience, meaning it was easy to slot playing through my games in with the rest of my work.

Simon Carless' Comments (IGF Chairman)

Since the Independent Games Festival is becoming so important to many smaller game developers' lives, we felt it was important to go further than any other game industry awards has (as far as I'm aware), and give full feedback of how we run IGF voting from the judges themselves.

We're committed to transparency, because we know that indie game creators want to understand what happened to their game in the process of IGF judging. The contest is a truly democratic process, and we're proud of that -- and of this year's finalists.

We will be polling judges about some of their comments and continuing to hone the process, and if you'd like to add to the discussion, mail us at chairman@igf.com.

Finally, I'd like to thank Jens, Alex and Mike for stepping up and explaining things, and all judges for spending many hours of their time voting this year. In addition, thanks to Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink for their sterling work on the back end and judging, and Kris Graft for much of the organizational heft this year. And roll on March!

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

Grasshopper Manufacture CEO and eccentric game designer Goichi "Suda51" Suda recently took some time off from working on No More Heroes 2 to try out Just Dance, the unfavorably reviewed Wii dancing game that released last November. I can't think of any other reason for why he'd play a game like this, so I'm presuming it's a favor (or a payoff) to Ubisoft, which also publishes his No More Heroes series.

Though Suda51 tells his Frag Doll interviewer that he prefers to dance to hardcore techno, you can see him in this clip waving his arms and shaking around to MC Hammer's 90s hit and cautionary tale "Can't Touch This". Unfortunately, Ubisoft didn't make him wear hammer dance across the room as part of his publishing contract. Maybe No More Heroes 2 would have enjoyed a much bigger marketing budget if he'd done it!

[Via @rdb_aaa]

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

Love -- the indie, procedurally-generated MMO that's received significant press for its impressionist-style graphics and one-man development team (Eskil Steenberg) -- is now available to the public with an open beta, provided that you don't mind paying €3 ($4.29) for just 30 days of access.

If you're confused about why you need to pay to try out an incomplete game when so many other studios offer their betas for free, the fee isn't to line Steenberg's pockets. "[The donation] will be used to pay for servers and bandwidth," he explains. "If I didn't require testers to donate, I would only be able to take in very few testers. By taking donations, I can give more people the OPTION to test the game."

Steenberg says that testers can expect a large number of patches and updates for Love in the coming weeks, as he's adding a lot of the the game's sound and graphics. Still, the settlement-building MMO has come a long way since we interviewed Steenberg last March. You can sign up for a beta account and see more media for Love at the game's official site.

[Via @jimrossignol]

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

You've likely read about the Microsoft's upcoming "Game Room" virtual environment (developed by Krome Studios) at our sister site Gamasutra or elswhere, but I'd feel remiss if I didn't discuss it here, seeing as classic and arcade gaming are routine topics here at GameSetWatch.

If you missed the CES reveal yesterday, Game Room is a return to Xbox Live Arcade's initial approach of re-releasing retro titles, though this new gaming space is intended for both Xbox 360 and PCs. It will allow you to walk through and play virtual collections of arcade cabinets with your avatars, similar to the arcades in Sony's PlayStation Home.

Microsoft hopes to provide more than 1000 classic titles over the next three years through the Game Room, putting out around three releases each week. When Game Room launches this spring, it's expected to offer around 30 titles. Some of the releases hinted at so far in the trailer above include Tempest, Centipede, Space Armada, Crystal Castles, Yar's Revenge, Star Raiders, Adventure, and more.

As for pricing on the games, you can pick one up for around 240 to 400 Microsoft Points, but there's also the neat option of paying only 40 points for a one-off play, emulating the single-quarter, single-play experience. There also a great feature that allows you to invite your friends to your Game Room (or visit theirs) to show off your machines and even host a two-player game.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Diamond In The Rough' is a regularly scheduled GameSetWatch-exclusive opinion column by Tom Cross focusing game narratives and the ways that play, gaming, and narrative mix. This week, Tom continues his earlier examination of the sexual politics behind games by examining the sexual narrative and characters of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

In my last article, I expounded upon the more obvious and systematic methods of conservative, regressive sexualization that can be found throughout games, the video games industry, game critics, and gamers themselves. While I singled out Prince of Persia as a game that stepped (slightly) outside of these traditional boundaries, I also pointed to Uncharted 2: Among Thieves as a game that both subtly continues these traditions, and blatantly, brashly confounds them. It’s a game that is both safe and radical in its depiction of sex.

This isn’t to say that Drake (and the relationships he is a part of) is not sexual in any way. In fact, he and his various compatriots stand out as some of the few video game characters that are crafted to evince sexual desires and frustrations that are connected to actual human emotions. In that way he, Elena, Sully, and Chloe are similar to the Prince and Elika.

However, their romantic entanglements fall into extremely comfortable filmic roles: the plucky, independent female lead (who will end up with the roguish, devil-may-care male lead even though they have their differences), the lecherous old guy who isn’t really that bad, and the so bad she’s good femme fatale. They may be ahead of the grade by being empathetic, emotionally heartfelt, and sexual, but it’s well-worn territory they’re treading on. It doesn’t turn any heads.

The Prince in the new Prince of Persia, is, as I have argued, cut from a slightly (importantly) different cloth than North's Drake. Likewise, the way he and Elika interact with each other is slightly different from those interactions seen in the Drake’s Fortune games.

The Best of the Best

While Among Thieves creates interesting, fun characters, it still pigeon holes them into stock character story arcs: the good girl, the guy who will become good, and the bad girl, who is allowed to be sexually suggestive because the plot will ultimately remove her as a viable partner for the ultimately good guy. Among Thieves is an example of careful writing, world-building, and characterization, something we rarely see in games.

Among Thieves paradoxically picks one of the older, more clichéd and tired adventure stories (and settings), and turns it into an exciting, cleverly written adventure featuring characters who obviously have heartfelt connections with each other. The story and its characters don’t revolve around meaninglessly repetitive moralistic haranguing (yes, MGS, we understand that war is bad, we just wonder why it takes you a quartet of games to actually “say” something about the subject) and teenage angst surrounding aging and sex (we have the un-self-consciously teenage Braid and the endlessly weighty Final Fantasy series to serve all of our young men their fantasies and failures).

Among Thieves introduces us to characters familiar to anyone who has read a few books or watched a few movies (of the right sort, of course). Even as these characters fit into old molds, they also introduce quirks and wrinkles to the story and the tone of the game, in ways I have yet to see replicated in any other narrative-centric video game. Nathan Drake may have his flaws, as a character and as a narrative creation. This cannot be denied. The game may present us with interesting, fun, wholly realized and independently motivated characters (two are women, in an unprecedented occurrence) but for every step these characters take in the direction of originality, they carefully prop up certain expectations and tired tropes.

What Does it Take to Get Nate to Grow Up?

Chloe and Elena may be strong women who have their own agendas, their own opinions on the game’s many characters and situations, but they, like the rest of the cast, serve to help Nathan come to understand his own situation and responsibilities. Elena may be a kickass reporter hell-bent on revealing the wrongs committed by horrible people to the rest of the world, but she also can’t help but fall for the lovable, flawed Drake.

Of course, part of the orbital nature of the main cast (inextricably attached to or attracted toward the wise-cracking Mr. Drake) is thanks to the fact that this is a game, and a heavily, carefully scripted and structured one. This doesn’t stop the game from using this seemingly inescapable gameplay trope (that all characters revolve around the player) to reinforce long-standing societal notions of race, class, and gender.

Chloe Frazer is (sadly) a first for video games: she is a smart, competent, sexually aware pointedly heterosexual female character who constantly disagrees with and harries the main male character, sometimes out of self-interest and sometimes out of deeply felt connection and respect. While it’s amazing that I can describe a character in a video game as possessing those qualities, it is depressingly astounding that I have just described a woman in a video game.

So Bad She's Good?

Chloe Frazer stands head and shoulders above all video game characters, but compared to most women in games, she is truly unique. Forget, or the moment, the way in which her sexy bad girl status is both facilitated by and neutralized by the game’s traditionally romantic story arc.

Chloe, unlike Elena, starts and finishes the game doing what she wants, when she wants, however she wants. The initial heist, her subsequent allegiance hopping, and her final moments onscreen are all informed by whatever machinations are going on inside her head.

Elean, for all that I love her character, enters the narrative by chance, but she enters it with the express purpose of merging her path with Drake’s. She and her cameraman buddy (Jeff) run into Drake in the middle of a burning city. Drake is on the trail of the Cintamani Stone (and thus Lazarovich), while Elena is pursuing Lazarovich to expose him for the war criminal that he is. They may constantly bicker, but we (and more importantly, Chloe) know that they care about each other too much to let anything happen to each other, even if Drake pisses off Elena.

Chloe, even when she “finally” comes down on Drake’s side, does so not for Drake, but for her own sense of honor and morality (admittedly, Elena does the same). Chloe cares for Drake, but she sees that he cares more for Elena. Chloe understands the situation that her characterization has put her in.

The Good, The Bad, and The Overtly Sexual

Early in the game, Chloe and Drake have what is, for a game, a love scene. Chloe is the aggressor, while Drake the wisecracking, diffident (yet quite willing) collaborator. There is no way that Elena and Drake could ever play out a similar scene. Their romantic scenes have to be light, sexually unthreatening, and focused around a more Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant school of romantic entanglement (not that there’s anything wrong with clever verbal sparing).

Chloe and Drake’s scene sets up several precedents and creates a track for the two characters: they have a romantic past (Drake broke it off), they are still attracted to each other, and both would like to get back together (although Chloe is slightly more verbally effusive on this topic). This dynamic in turn allows Chloe to play the part of the duplicitous (possibly?) moral (and adventuring) free agent.

This allows Chloe to play a dramatically interesting part, to be sure, but it is worth noting that she is enabled in her temporary duplicity by her already established “adventurous” or “promiscuous” sexual behavior. By establishing Chloe as a sexually “forward” character (and despite the fact that she is never judged negatively for this activity, except by Drake, who is in turn mocked for his own sexual profligacy) the story can quickly convince us of her morally worrisome, “gray” tendencies.

Likewise, Elena’s “goodness” and morally right-minded nature mark her as the only possible (final) subject of Drake’s affections, and the story’s attention and allegiance. True, Chloe exits the story gracefully, wittily, and self-assuredly, but she does so with the understanding (on the characters’ part and on the audience’s part) that the sexual, social threat she poses has been diffused.

What it Takes to Get and Be The Girl

It is an old and sorry trope, that sexual “freeness” or what is deemed as promiscuous behavior are coupled with moral weakness or fluctuation. Chloe herself is shown to be an interesting, fun character who makes some dangerous “bad” choices (less than Drake does, the story thankfully is keen to point out) in search of personal gain and fulfillment. Drake himself makes many decisions based on selfish, unthinking urges. He is chastised by many (including himself) for these decisions and mistakes.

The difference between Drake and Chloe (the one among many that matters, in this case) is that Drake can makes these mistakes and think in this “problematic” way without the need for complimentary characterization. It is assumed, on a subliminal level, that players can accept and ruminate upon the nature of a flawed, selfish man who changes his ways. For a woman to make the same (or similar) mistakes, she must already be established as a problematic female presence, sexually, in this case (sexually promiscuous women are, after all, an almost universally worrisome topic to heterosexual men).

This is one of the many curses video game women suffer under. They are not considered to be strong enough as characters to survive without heavy handed, stereotyped characterization (of course, the dark, troubles male hero is his own, grand stereotype…).

Yet I would be a fool to fail to mention the incredible quality of Among Thieves’ script, story, and acting. The characters and actors sell their work excellently, and the characters of Elena, Chloe, and Drake are some of the most fun, interesting, inoffensive characters in video games. Naughty Dog deserves every single accolade possible in this area: I haven’t enjoyed the company of most video game characters and protagonists. I mostly tolerate them.

The three principal actors of Among Thieves may fall into the odd narrative or stylistic trap, but they’re a joy to play with and listen to. They act like mature, sexual beings, and I wish every game would stop and take note of their charm and wit. I can’t think of another game about which I could say the same things, as emphatically or as honestly.

Tom Cross writes for Gamers' Temple and Popmatters, is the Associate Editor at Sleeper Hit, and blogs about games at Delayed Responsibility. You can contact him at romain47 at gmail dot com.]

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

Heathcliff rights owner Fitz Roy Media has signed an agreement with Storm City Entertainment to exclusively create and distribute video games based on the troublesome orange cat over the next seven years. The deal is part of Fitz Roy's "strategy to extend the Heathcliff brand to new generations of children, tweens and young adults with new entertainment projects and merchandising".

Though Storm City's previous casual game releases are mostly for Wii and DS (e.g. System: Flaw, Vegas Party), the publisher says its Heathcliff-themed games will appear across all gaming platforms, and the first release will hit stores in fall 2011. Fitz Roy also has plans to put out a live-action/CG hybrid film similar to the Garfield movies with Magic Lantern Entertainment in 2011.

"We're thrilled to be involved with this project, and look forward to bringing Heathcliff to life in a series of all-ages games that will entertain and amuse," says Storm City Entertainment CEO Susan Kain-Jurgensen. "In an adventure-driven world of sass and attitude, Heathcliff is a role model, and the gaming possibilities that can be created for him are endless."

Hopefully, someone will pick up the right to also produce games based on Riff-Raff and The Catillac Cats!

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

Now for some more recent CES news. Game controller and accessory company Mad Catz debuted new "fully adjustable" additions to its line of "Premium Cyborg Gaming Mice" at the electronics trade show this week, and they look more like futuristic vehicles you'd race through the post-apocalyptic streets of Neo-Tokyo and less like something you'd use to double click on desktop icons.

The Cyborg R.A.T. line features four different models, ranging in price from $49.99 to $129.99 with variances in DPI, tracking speed, buttons, USB/wireless options, adjustable grips/rests, and removable weights. In at least one of the photos, it looks like the gaming mouse can shoot rockets out its backside (probably triggered by the red button on the thumb space, so take care not to push that).

"Cyborg is best known for ergonomic and fully adjustable flight sticks, gaming mice and keyboards. The new mouse range incorporates the same market leading design principles and applies them to gaming mice. For the first time ever on a mouse, the key points of contact between the gamer’s hand and the mouse are fully adjustable allowing it to be customized for any grip preference," says Mad Catz CEO and president Darren Richardson.

You can find detailed specs on the Cyborg R.A.T. gaming mice (PDF) at Mad Catz's official site.

[Via Engadget]

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

[We're starting to ramp up details on various GDC 2010 summits and tracks, since the final early-reg deadline for the March 9th-13th show is in about a month, so here's initial info on the neat iPhone Games Summit.]

GDC 2010 organizers have revealed the initial iPhone Games Summit line-up for the March 9th-10th event, including tech and biz talks from the creators of Canabalt, Touch Pets Dogs and more.

The notable new summit, taking place on the first two days of Game Developers Conference 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco next March, will bring together top game developers from around the world to explore ideas, share best practices, and discuss the future of Apple's handheld platform.

The two-day program will highlight the best of iPhone development, with an entire day discussing the nuts and bolts of technical and design techniques. The second day will focus on the business and marketing strategies behind successful iPhone game companies.

Some of the heavyweight Summit advisors for the event from the world of iPhone games include Electronic Arts' mobile VP Travis Boatman, Snappy Touch founder Noel Llopis (Flower Garden), and Ngmoco VP Alan Yu.

With other major lectures to be announced soon, a number of significant talks have been revealed on the Summit homepage. These include:

- Falling to Your Death: The Canabalt Postmortem
Eric Johnson, co-founder of Semi Secret Software, talks about making and marketing Canabalt, the hit followup to word puzzler Wurdle. Beginning with its humble Flash roots, the presentation will cover "OpenGL optimizations, shockingly high price points, guerrilla Twitter marketing, reverse-engineering the App Store, and strangely low piracy rates."

- Nuts & Bolts of Internet Multiplayer iPhone Game Testing
Galcon franchise creator Phil Hassey has created successful multiplayer modes for his acclaimed iPhone games, and is part of the iPhone Games Summit this year, giving a technical talk on how "using test driven development, you can develop a solid code base that will both pass the App approval process and work when the masses arrive."

- One Year in the App Store: A Case Study of Backflip Studios
Julian Farrior, CEO of independent developer Backflip Studios, will discuss the company's 13,000,000 downloads and over $2,000,000 in sales of Ragdoll Blaster and Paper Toss on the iPhone Store, focusing on "marketing wins/flops, distribution opportunities, sales catalysts and key takeaways", with special attention given to presenting real-life numbers across sales, in-app purchases and advertising.

- New Dogs, New Tricks: Breeding Social Networking and Virtual Pets
In this just-confirmed talk from Andrew Stern of Stumptown Game Machine, the creator of Ngmoco's microtransaction-powered Touch Pets Dogs "discusses how the game’s design had to grow and adapt as the iPhone game market filled with limitless low- and no-cost gaming and entertainment options. Notably covered are "lessons learned about player behavior in the wild that further evolved the game’s design, marketing and monetization."

More information on the iPhone Games Summit, which can be attended via All-Access or Summit-specific GDC 2010 passes, is available on its official webpage, with a number of additional talks due to be confirmed in the near future.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Over a five-year period in the '80s, Cinemaware (Defender of the Crown) made numerous highly-influential, graphically lush titles -- and Matt Barton talks to co-founder Bob Jacob on the studio's fascinating history.]

In 1985, Bob and Phyllis Jacob founded Cinemaware, a company whose Hollywood- and TV-inspired games are some of the most memorable ever designed for the Commodore Amiga and other platforms of the era.

Classic Cinemaware titles like Defender of the Crown, Wings, and the TV Sports series revolutionized the industry by demonstrating the potential of film and television techniques to make games more exciting.

Cinemaware also pioneered highly accessible games that we might call "casual" today, with low learning curves. But games like Wings and Rocket Ranger go beyond graphics and action, investing the player emotionally in richly evocative dramas inspired by classic Hollywood films.

(A subsequent incarnation of Cinemaware, in existence as a standalone entity from 2000 to 2005 and the producer of a console version of Defender Of The Crown, was unrelated to Jacob.)

In this interview, based on game journalist Matt Barton's original video interview, Gamasutra caught up with Bob Jacob to discuss the history of the company, the Amiga, and several of Cinemaware's greatest hits:

You've had a long and fruitful career in the games industry and made an impact that few others could hope to match. How did you first get involved in the industry?

Bob Jacob: I've been involved in the game industry since 1984. I got in fairly early, started off as an agent, and then did some independent producing of games on the Commodore 64, which I sold to Activision and Epyx.

It was a situation back then when you had a programmer and maybe an artist, and you could do a game. So I would fund a game on the Commodore 64, maybe throw 10 to 15 thousand [dollars] into it, and then sell it, which I did successfully.

Then, in 1985, I got my hands on one of the first prereleased Amigas. And I thought, okay, this is going to revolutionize everything -- this is going to be cool. So I spent a year in Salt Lake City, Utah, talking to Mormon doctors and dentists to raise funding for a series of games and a publication company I wanted to start, called Cinemaware. I raised a few million bucks to put some games in development, and the first set of titles we did all went to number one on the 16-bit charts back then.

Cinemaware is certainly one of the most celebrated of all publishers for the Amiga. Can you tell us about the early days of Cinemaware and the state of the industry when Defender of the Crown was being developed?

BJ: The industry was still in its infancy back then, and games looked pretty lousy. The graphics weren't very good. Most games were designed by programmers and didn't really have a strong mass market sensibility.

I was a hardcore gamer myself, but I developed certain concepts for what I liked about games -- and I wasn't seeing them in the games that I bought. I was a fanatic arcade gamer, and I realized that there were certain things about the fun in arcade games that I wanted to bring to the home marketplace.

I also decided that movies would be a great and creative motif for doing games--people like movies, right? It gave us virtually an inexhaustible supply of ideas. I was smart enough and cynical enough to realize that all we had to do was reach the level of copycat, and we'd be considered a breakthrough.

The original concept of Defender of the Crown was actually pretty simple. It was my original concept. I didn't design the game, but I knew pretty much what I wanted to do with it. Essentially, I took the game Risk -- I loved the board game when I was a kid, and I liked the idea of conquering territories. We replaced the dice rolling in Risk with your success and failure at certain action sequences in the game.

Up until that time, the action sequences lived and died by themselves -- they weren't in the context of a story. If there was anything revolutionary involved, it was the idea of incorporating action into a game where your success or failure actually did have an effect on the story and how it progressed.

The other thing I threw in there was a little bit of RPG -- a small role-playing element, the action sequences. We put the player under time pressure, which I tried to do in most of the games of Cinemaware. And we came up with a hybrid kind of game that looked great.

I was able to get Jim Sachs, who was the artist for almost all the scenes in Defender of the Crown. He was just a fantastic, amazing artist. The results spoke for themselves.

We were also fortunate that Electronic Arts came out with Deluxe Paint, which was really critical for our success. Our best-selling games were not on the Amiga -- they were on the Commodore 64. But we could take the 320 x 200 graphics we did on the Amiga and convert them down to 160 x 200 on the Commodore 64 just by removing every other pixel, and the results were astonishing.

What inspired the famous romantic scenes in Defender of the Crown?

BJ: I was a movie buff. What can I tell you? I really wanted to add a sense of romantic byplay to our games because no one had done it. The whole idea of adding sex was new. No one had ever pulled it off before. But I think it helped the vibe of the game; it was something I was interested in doing, and you know what? I always liked chesty women, so we just went for it.

Can you talk a little about [mob movie-inspired] King of Chicago? I'm surprised that we don't hear more about this game today, especially considering the popularity of gangster movies and TV shows today.

BJ: This game was created by Doug Sharp, a school teacher in Minneapolis. When I was an agent, I had repped a game he created on the Commodore 64 called ChipWits, which had a crude but interesting programming language that people could learn how to use [to move a virtual robot around a maze].

When I put the first four Cinemaware titles in development, no one really knew what an interactive movie should be. We were all just guessing. We tried different things.

The Mac version was interesting because we digitized potato heads, basically -- the characters are all lumpy looking. It was another effort to try to do an interactive movie, sort of a choose-your-own adventure thing. What I thought was great was that whether you were there or not, the game kept playing. If you didn't make a decision, it kept moving right along.

Back then, we did use some digitized voices, particularly in Rocket Ranger, my own personal favorite of all the Cinemaware titles. But when you're shipping floppy disks, there's only so much you can do, even with the great audio compression we had back then.

Rocket Ranger?

BJ: I thought Rocket Ranger was the best blend of everything we really tried to come up with. It was a cool story, memorable characters, a classic kind of 50s serial [feel to it].

There's an interesting story behind Rocket Ranger. I knew I wanted to do a game based on the old serials, so my first thought was to go to Republic Pictures, which existed only as a licensing entity at that time. They came out with all the Rocket Man serials back in the 40s and 50s, like Commando Cody: Sky Marshall of the Universe.

I wanted to license Commando Cody, and I thought I had it all worked out, but then Steven Spielberg stole it from me. He didn't do anything with it, though. Then, the other rocket-suited guy at the time was Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer. So I had conversations with Dave Stevens about licensing The Rocketeer for a game, but then Disney came along and they did the movie.

So I said, to hell with it, we're going to create our own character, our own universe, we're just going to do it. Then, about 7 or 8 years after Rocket Ranger was done, The Rocketeer film came out, and I had lunch with Lloyd Levin, the producer of the film. And he actually admitted to me, that if you go back and read The Rocketeer comic books, there never were any zeppelins, ever. They really took the idea for the zeppelins in the movie from my Rocket Ranger game, which I thought was really cool.

Can you tell us about Sinbad: Throne of the Falcon?

BJ: Sinbad is an interesting story. It was solely created by one guy, Bill Williams, who was one of the holdouts of the "one-guy, one-programmer, one-artist" kind of guy. That's the way he was.

Bill was an extremely talented guy. He was living in a geodesic dome near Flint, Michigan. He was a very sweet guy. He subsequently got out of the video game business and became a priest--went from being a programmer to priest. He also had cystic fibrosis, which he was dealing with. He was just a great guy.

When I was a kid, I was always a big fan of all the Sinbad movies, Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and all. So it's a Sinbad kind of tribute that appealed to me. It was another of our efforts to find the right format for an interactive movie.

The Three Stooges is certainly one of Cinemaware's most recognized titles and has appeal well beyond the Amiga. Can you tell us about it?

BJ: The Three Stooges was a slam dunk. I really wanted to do a game that was 100 percent pure to the license, and that was the only goal we had. The game was designed by John Cutter, who was involved with all the Cinemaware stuff. It was John's idea to design it basically as a board game that we brought to the computer. It had some great digitized voices.

All the arcade scenes came directly from their movies; they were based on famous bits from The Three Stooges. It was incredibly successful. We actually ended up licensing it to Activision [to port it] to the NES. We really nailed it pretty well.

What drew you to the Amiga? Did that platform's steady decline hurt Cinemaware?

BJ: I was drawn to it because, graphically, it was superior to anything else in the world. I really thought it was going to be a successful hardware platform. It had a limited success here in the U.S.; it was more successful in Europe. Probably the majority of Cinemaware games on the Amiga were sold in Europe.

Commodore was a notoriously badly managed company. If the Amiga had taken off it would have been great for us, but it never did. We were late as a company making the move to the PC.

What really killed Cinemaware was that I made the decision to sell 20% of the company to NEC. It sounds great to have this great Japanese partner. The problem is, NEC came out with the Turbo-Grafx 16.

Movies aren't the only inspiration for Cinemeware games; television also played a role. Can you tell us about the TV Sports games?

BJ: What could be more natural than doing sports games based on TV? One of the things that really hurt us was trying to bring TV Sports Football over to the PC; it was a complete disaster.

What is the relationship between games and movies?

BJ: That's a major topic of conversation. If you look at some of the best-selling games right now -- if you look at Uncharted 2, the recent Call of Duty games -- they are extremely cinematic games.

Twenty-three years ago I knew that was going to happen. There was no question; that's the way it had to go. We had to make the games more movie-like. Until Cinemaware, they were anything but.

The first game I bought was Deadline, by Infocom, with a lot of typing. I quickly came to the realization that trying to guess what was going on in a programmer's mind as a form of entertainment was not something I was interested in. That's why I wanted easy interfaces: no typing, get you right into the game, no manual.

As far as games and movies -- there are inherent problems. The basic reason why so many bad games have been made on film licenses is simply because of a business reality that no one has been able to overcome yet. That reality is that the time it takes a film to [hit theaters after being green-lit] is never more than a year. What kind of a game can you do in a year? Generally a piece of crap.

EA can get around that a little bit by throwing a few hundred guys at a project. But for the most part, it's been a pretty sorry history, and until we can solve the basic timing issues it's going to be tough.

We shouldn't forget about Wings, my personal favorite.

BJ: I'm very proud of Wings. Wings was a direct reaction to me going out and buying Falcon. Falcon came with a 365-page manual, and I quickly realized I was not going to invest the time to learn this thing in order to enjoy a flight simulator.

So I thought, "What kind of flight simulator should Cinemaware do?" It'd have to be one that didn't require a manual. The manual that did ship with Wings was all about the history of air combat in World War I; it didn't have anything to do with the controls of the game.

We wanted to do a game that was more than just an arcade game. What do you do? What we came up with was a diary of your adventures in the war to put it into an historical context -- it gave it some emotional context. The other idea was an RPG component and the idea of winning medals, improving your rank.

Of course we had an interesting combination of 3D combat and the strafing done in 2D. It's a title I'm very proud of, and I'm glad you like it!

Finally, how about It Came from the Desert?

BJ: It Came from the Desert was probably the one Cinemaware title that I had the least creative involvement with. It was the brainchild of David Reardon, a guy who had worked at Lucasfilm.

He was into some of the early games like Dragon's Lair. He had a certain creative sensibility, and I loved the idea of a big-bug game like Them! It was a terrific title for the time. We came out with a sequel that was actually embedded in the original game's code.

What effect did illegal distribution have on your company? Did it contribute to the company's downfall?

BJ: Piracy was a problem. Back then, we had a much smaller installed base, so any piracy is an issue. But piracy isn't the reason Cinemaware went down. It went down for many other reasons. Piracy may have hurt our profitability a bit, but it didn't bring us down.

Look, I've got to tell you something here. I had a five-year rush. Imagine being in a position where you could put any game you wanted into development. At that time in the industry, if you were an innovator, you were gold. It was a great time, probably the most fun five years I've ever had in my life. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Do you have any advice for aspiring game developers today?

BJ: The games industry has changed somewhat. It's harder to get into, it's harder to make an impact. But it's not impossible. There is clearly always a market for a truly original concept that has mass market appeal.

Battlefield 1942 is a perfect example of that. Up until Battlefield, no one had seen a real-time combined land, sea, air combat game [in] multiplayer. It was original.

The guys who started that company were 27 guys on the south coast of Sweden [who had been] doing pinball games. They had this idea. That idea eventually made all those guys over a hundred million dollars. It can still be done.

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

[Just wanted to mention that my colleagues at Game Developer magazine - yes, still going strong, thanks to neat, exclusive dev-specific content - have announced their Front Line Award tool winners for the year, with the little-heralded but super-useful Bink Video getting Hall Of Fame.]

The editors of Think Services’ industry-leading Game Developer magazine -- Gamasutra's sister publication -- have named the winners for the 2009 Front Line Awards, the twelfth annual ranking of the best tools enabling game development for professional video game creators.

Front Line Awards are given every year in the categories of programming/production, art, audio, game engine, middleware, books, and the Hall Of Fame.

This year, Game Developer is pleased to honor RAD Game Tool's practically ubiquitous video codec Bink Video as its inductee to the Front Line Awards Hall of Fame. The codec and associated tools were used in many of last year's top-selling AAA titles, and has served developers for over a decade.

The Front Line Awards Hall of Fame is reserved for those landmark tools that have served developers mightily over multiple iterations and multiple years, including past winners such as Microsoft DirectX, Adobe Photoshop, and Epic's Unreal Engine series. Overall, the Front Line Awards represent the best tools in the game industry, as nominated on and voted for by Game Developer’s expert readership.

Following the announcement of the finalists in December, all winners have been profiled in the January 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine, available now in print and shortly in digital editions.

The editors congratulate the following winners of the 2009 Front Line Awards:

Hall of Fame:
Bink Video
RAD Game Tools

Art Tool:
Autodesk 3ds Max 2010
Autodesk

Audio Tool:
Pro Tools 8
Digidesign

Middleware:
Havok Physics
Havok

Engine:
Unreal Engine 3
Epic Games

Programming/Production Tool:
Adobe Flash CS4
Adobe

Book:
Mastering Unreal Technology: Vol 1 by Jason Busby, Zak Parrish, and Jeff Wilson
Sams Publishing

Game Developer's mission for more than fifteen years has been to provide game developers with information, news, and articles that pertain directly to them. The Front Line Awards are an official way of recognizing one specific aspect of the industry: the tools that developers need to do their jobs better.

As for the Front Line Awards' methodology, Game Developer looks at the powerful lineup of new products and new releases of favorite tools for professional game developers – from game engines to books. Following an open nomination period and consultation with the magazine’s editors, finalists were selected based on criteria such as utility, innovation, value, and ease of use.

The resulting Front Line Award winners represent the most innovative, user-friendly, and useful products from behind the scenes of the world’s best video games. Nominations for this year’s Front Line Awards were open to all new software products (and new versions of software products) related to game development which were released between September 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009.

"As ever, these awards allow developers to honor those tools that actually make their lives easier, and represent the best in the industry,” said Brandon Sheffield, editor-in-chief of Game Developer. “We would like to congratulate both the winners and the also-notable finalists for 2009's Front Line Awards, and wish the industry a prosperous 2010."

For more information and a full list of finalists, please visit the official Front Line Awards website or visit Game Developer magazine online at its website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Gashapon manufacturer Yujin has revealed several ships from its newest line of shoot'em up ship toys, SR Shooting Historica Vol. 4, and it includes a surprisingly modern addition -- Darius Burst's Legend Silver Hawk Burst. The model series typically favors crafts from classic titles like Star Soldier's Ceasar and R-Type III's R90 Ragnarok, but Darius Burst released in Japan for PSP just two weeks ago!

The other miniature ships revealed include Xexex's Flint Lock and X-Multiply's X-002. Import shop NCSX is already taking preorders for the SR Shooting Historica Vol. 4's April 2010 release, and plans to post additional details on the set (hopefully with info on more crafts) tomorrow.

First 4 Figures also debuted a model of its own based on Samus Aran's Gunship in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The limited edition (750) figure features more than 50 LEDs installed on the ship and base, so you can see it glowing in your room even when your lights are off. NCSX is also taking preorders for the model's March 2010 debut, but it's a bit expensive at $289.90 (!).

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

You might have seen Strange Loop Games's Vessel in Monday's IGF 2010 Main Competition finalists announcement, shortlisted for the Technical Excellence award. Up until now, though, there's been little media available for the game, leaving many scratching their heads over what about Vessel it so great.

With its IGF finalist nomination, Strange Loop Games uploaded this new trailer to show off the 2D puzzle platformer, as well as its impressive physics and fluid simulation. The game follows Arkwright, a tinkerer whose "mechanized-fluid automatons" are running amok at different industrial sites, as he collects the creatures while running around with a device that looks and acts a lot like Super Mario Sunshine's FLUDD squirter.

Vessel is the first project from the Seattle-based studio, which was founded by two Pandemic Studios Brisbane veterans, John Krajewski and Martin Farren. Strange Loop Games hasn't announced a release date for the title yet, but says its planned for "console and PC".

[Via IndieGames.com]

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

Just in time for this week's 2010 Consumer Electronic Show, Retronauts/Lost Levels's Frank Cifaldi has uploaded dozens of photographs from the trade show's 1990 Winter event, back when video game companies took up up a significant portion of the show floor and when CES was a semi-annual function.

The images are mostly scans taken from a variety of Japanese, U.S., and European magazines. I've included my favorite shots after the break, like the orange-clad GamePro Man posing with Sunsoft's conservatively dressed booth girls, the Golden Axe booth's shirtless guy with skin just as orange as GamePro man's outfit, and the saddest Cool Spot costume ever.

You can see all of the photos on the Retronauts blog. There also some great CES 1990 magazine reports from The Games Machine and Ace, as well as scans from the event's video game flyers on Flickr.

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

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's semi-regular 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 cult of 2010 continues, we're still unspooling some notable links that you might have missed from around the turn of the year, including some more 2009 round-ups from interesting folks who may (or may not) be off your radar.

Also in here - worrying import games, pics of neat manga studios in Japan, Excitebike World Rally actually gets some publicity on mainstream websites, and a number of other neat things for your delight and delectation.

Cha cha cha:

Fullbright: 09
Yes, more best-ofs, but this one eloquent and with some less-noted stuff (particularly Saira.)

Error Macro: Who Wants To Feel Dirty About Video Games
'Thank God American publishers are finally bringing some of that sweet cartoon porn/tepid knock-off RPG hybrid action to our shores, because we as a nation have suffered too long from the lack of a proper successor to the throne of Cobra Mission.'

Canned Dogs » Blog Archive » Photos of mangaka studios
Cool pictures of manga studios remind me - why aren't there more galleries of workplaces for smaller game devs? (Or bigger ones, actually.)

Core Gamers - The Making of FATALE
Wow, big piece.

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : An Excitebike World Rally Developer Q&A
Good to see _some_ coverage of this game, which is suffering from typical Nintendo press caginess on BOTH sides, sadly.

The Independent Gaming Source: The Niner In Review
A masterful year in review from Derek.

2009 Sleepers: The Best Games You Didn't Play from 1UP.com
Parish does good public service here.

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

Shoe maker Adidas has embedded augmented reality codes into an unexpected place: the tongue of five of its men's sneakers. If you take one of the upcoming sneakers and hold it up to your computer's webcam (with a special site loaded up), a small virtual world will appear, populated with digital people, city buildings, and Adidas logos.

You can control how the world is displayed, too. By tilting the shoe, the on-screen world will change its angle and zoom in/out. Adidas also plans to eventually include three augmented reality game with the virtual neighborhoods. Developed by Dutch studio xForm, the skateboarding, music, and "Star Wars-like" games somehow use the sneakers as controllers.

"The foundation of augmented reality lies in adding a layer to the real world," says Adidas Originals's Digital Marketing head Chris Barbour, according to a report from Wired's Gadget Lab blog. "That’s what we have done. We have taken a real world item and added a fantastic virtual world on top of that."

Adidas will release the augmented reality-enabled sneakers starting February for around $65 to $95.

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

Once Upon A Pixel, the video series from Destructoid's Ashley Davis and Anthony Burch re-imagining game stories into children's books/fairy tales, posted a new episode today that has Mega Man's robot masters helping children learn the alphabet, each letter represented by a boss or other character from Capcom's popular franchise:

"In the year 20xx, a few brilliant minds
will create many robots of all different kinds.
Each one is programmed to do different things.
Some tend to the plants, and some move using springs.
But there is one thing they all can do.
They can help teach the alphabet to you."

As with other Once Upon A Pixel episodes, Davis's playful art is perfect, managing to make even Launch Octopus look adorable. My favorite page, however, is for the mysterious, fluffy robot master from Mega Man 10: "S is for Sheep Man, who looks like a sheep. the others count on him when they can't fall asleep."

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

[From now until early January, sister site IndieGames.com: The Weblog will be highlighting the best independent and freeware games of 2009 by genre - here's the first, focusing on free shoot 'em ups.]

Kicking off the first of the in-depth 2009 Best Of Features here on the IndieGames.com blog (after the overall Top 10 we did for Gamasutra and the 10 Indie Games for '10 article), we're proud to present ten of the best freeware shoot 'em ups released in 2009.

Let's take a look at a couple of naughty and nice shoot 'em ups, featuring titles with names of insects, cephalopods, and even.. phalluses, in this quirky selection of the best shooters we've played this year.

(You can also access the full 2009 Top Freeware Shoot 'Em Ups chart -- with extra screenshots and information -- as part of the IndieGames.com Features section, which includes indie game charts from 2006 to 2008.)

Here's the top freeware shoot 'em ups of the year:

10. Atomic Super Boss (Jan Willem Nijman and Miroslav Malešević) [Flash, freeware]

Originally developed with the Game Maker engine, JW's Atomic Super Boss is a score-based vertical shooter that features only one enemy to shoot at for points. The fragile part of your ship is marked by a small white-coloured square, and you earn more points by sticking close to the boss while shooting at it. The ship also moves faster when no shots are fired.

There are three difficulty levels to choose from, and you can even submit your best scores online at the end of each game as well.

9. Death vs. Monstars (GameReclaim) [Flash, freeware]

You know how sometimes you just want to put down the clever puzzle game and grab a dose of mindless shooting fun? Death vs. Monstars could fill that void. It's a Geometry Wars style blaster containing such silly gimmicks as 'Berserk Mode' and 'Bullet Time' and it's great fun.

Enemies spawn all over the screen and it's your job to destroy them and grab the plunder. Money can then be used to upgrade your little floating skull, making the killing easier. Of course, with each level the difficulty gets ramped up, so making use of the provided Berserk Mode (crazy firing all over the screen to wipe out all enemies present) and Bullet Time (take a wild guess) is essential.

It's even got a Boss battle to deal with at the end which is pretty challenging. So if you're looking for a nice, brain-dead way to pass the time, help Death beat those crazy Monstars over at Game Reclaim.

8. Hell is Other People (George Buckenham) [Unity, freeware]

It has an awesome name. It is an awesome concept. Hell is Other People is an 'asynchronously multiplayer' according to creator George Buckenham. The path that each player takes is recorded and future players are then pitted against their recordings.

This means that no two games are the same. It also means you are technically playing against humans - albeit humans who aren't actually aiming at you. It's a beautiful idea which starts off pretty easy and soon develops into a full-on war. Try taking on 15 ghosts at the same time. Chaos.

7. Squid Yes, Not So Octopus 2: Squid Harder (Oddbob) [Windows, freeware]

Squid Yes, Not So Octopus 2: Squid Harder is an arena shooter created by Robert D. Fearon, featuring glowy graphics and eye candy that (at maximum setting) is guaranteed to push the limits of any computer setup you may have. A host of configuration options are included, allowing players to change screen size, toggle autofire, activate motion blur, or even enable the practice mode where novices could take the game for a spin without worrying about dodging bullets or colliding with enemies.

Joysticks and gamepads are automatically supported, although you could use the keyboard to play as well.

6. GearToyGear (Kenta Cho) [Windows, freeware]

GearToyGear is a 3D tunnel shooter which plays like Kenta Cho's Torus Trooper, although in this mission you are only able to control the speed and flight direction of the ship that you pilot. Shots are fired automatically, and if your initial ship stock isn't enough you can also earn extra lives by scoring more points in the game.

For Windows users, the installation of XNA Framework 3.1 is required to get GearToyGear working. Playing the game with an Xbox 360 controller is recommended.

5. Space Phallus (Charlie's Games) [Windows/Mac/Linux, freeware]

Space Phallus is a retro horizontal shooter with a naughty theme, created by the developer of Bullet Candy and Irukandji. Here you pilot the disembodied head of a dog, fighting against hordes of enemies in the shape of unmentionable body parts with only an assortment of three weapons at your disposal. Thankfully these weapons can blow away anything that stands in your path, just as long as you use them wisely and sparingly.

There are three stages to play in total. The game features an online high score table, a special guest appearance by General Custer himself, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.

4. White Butterfly (Sparky) [Windows, freeware]

White Butterfly is a vertical shooter created by Linley Henzell, developer of the excellent Dungeon Crawl and Garden of Coloured Lights. Players begin the game by choosing one of the four available ships to pilot, with a fifth one only unlocked after you've completed the final stage.

There are three long stages to play in total.

3. Bullet Time (Terry Cavanagh) [Flash, freeware]

Created in 48 hours for Mini Ludum Dare #9, Bullet Time is your standard retro shmup with the added bonus of a 'bullet time' effect thrown in. The goal of the game is to survive as long as you can. If things get too hectic, you can activate Bullet Time, which slows down enemy bullets long enough for you to navigate to safety.

It's a short but sweet experience. Everything from the action-packed playing area to the accompanying dance (by DestroySound and Kontinuum) beat make it all feel very hectic, and the rank-through-survival system works well.

2. Genetos (Tatsuya Koyama) [Windows, freeware]

Genetos is a vertical shooter that pays tribute to many classic and modern day shoot 'em ups, where the enemies and weapons evolve as you progress from one stage to another. The game offers plenty of configuration settings that cater to players of all skill levels, although some of the advanced features like invincibility and the boss rush mode are only available after you've beaten the entire game at least once.

The type of weapons that you unlock is determined by your style of play as well, and a history of your completed achievements are accessible via the history option at the main menu.

1. Captain Forever (Farbs) [Flash, freeware]

In Captain Forever, you're the captain of a ship named Nemesis, stranded in space without a single clue about your current whereabouts. Fortunately an info buoy is around to help, providing you with some information about the sector you are in and supplying repair modules to rebuild your ship.

By destroying enemy ships with your default laser weapon, you can cause them to drop ship parts that can be attached to your own ship. Additional ship plating, extra weapons and increased thruster power are just some of the benefits to be gained from salvaging intact modules.

Captain Forever is a series of episodes to be launched by Farbs in the coming months, with the first game available to play for free.

[Got feedback? Reasons to disagree? Post a response and we'll do a special 'best of reader comments' round-up at the end of our chart countdowns.]

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

[We round up the week's top news and reviews from sister iPhone site FingerGaming, as written by editor in chief Danny Cowan and authors Louise Yang and Jonathan Glover.]

This week, FingerGaming highlights recent releases like Plushed and Running with Scissors, as well as a customary look at top free, top paid, and top-grossing iPhone games during the time surveyed.

In addition, we examine recently issued updates for critically acclaimed iPhone games Fieldrunners and Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, adding new features to both games some time after their release.

Here are the top stories from the holiday weeks:

- Top-Grossing Game Apps: Call of Duty Back on Top, N.O.V.A. Takes Second
"Activision's Call of Duty: World at War Zombies retakes the top chart spot this week, while EA's The Sims 3, Tetris, Rock Band, and Madden NFL 10 also place high in today's rankings."

- Tiger Style Updates Spider, Releases Free Spinoff Hornet Smash
"Tiger Style Games has updated its critically acclaimed iPhone title Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor with new levels and features, and has introduced the free action-oriented spinoff Hornet Smash."

- Fieldrunners Update Adds New Maps, Expanded Social Features
"The latest version of Fieldrunners includes two new maps priced at 99 cents each. Both areas expand the core gameplay significantly with new enemies, new tower types, and difficult layouts that encourage players to adopt new strategies."

- Plushed Blends Puzzles and Platforming
"Blacksmith Games debuted in the App Store with Plushed, a platformer that features a vibrant art style and puzzle-oriented gameplay that takes advantage of the iPhone's hardware functionality."

- Top Free Game App Downloads for the Week
"RuneScape developer Jagex's free iPhone title Bouncedown tops the list this week, after making its chart debut at second place last week. A holiday-themed version of Kiloo's Whac-a-Mole follows close behind, while NBA Live Free takes third."

- Tapulous Reports Nearly $1 Million in Monthly Tap Tap Revenge Revenue
"Citing data collected by research firm ComScore, Tapulous reports that its rhythm-based Tap Tap Revenge games have been downloaded more than 20 million times since the release of the original Tap Tap Revenge in July of 2008."

- Top-Selling Paid Game Apps for the Week
"Freeverse's Skee-Ball leads the paid app charts by sales volume this week, returning to the top spot more than two months after its initial release. Last week's sales champion Cartoon Wars: Gunner drops to second place, as Doodle Jump rises up to take third."

- Running with Scissors: An Action-Strategy Footrace Game
"Running with Scissors: Pre-Season has a little bit of everything. Developer Sleek Games describes it as 'an action-strategy racing game.' With RPG elements. And the occasional gambling sequence."

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Developed by Scottish indies The Gentlemen of Fortune, Quick as Thieves is a third-person action game for the Xbox 360 that has you infiltrating a museum to steal a MacGuffin from a vault. You can play it as a stealth game by hiding in shadows to avoid guards, but it looks more fun to run around the halls and steal nearly everything in sight.

And it's no exaggeration when I say you can lift almost everything in this BAFTA-nominated title -- your "swagbag" has an infinite capacity, so you can fit everything from vintage warplanes to complete dinosaur skeletons. You can even stuff chairs and tables from the building's cafeteria into the red sack!

Of course, having a bigger back will make it more difficult for you to squeeze through narrow passages and limits your escape routes. However, you gain extra abilities with a larger sack, as you can bounce off it to reach higher areas, block doorways to prevent guards from interrupting your looting, and even daze guards by smacking them with the bag.

You can download an early one-stage version of Quick As Thieves (Xbox 360 controller required) from Dare to be Digital, thought it looks like you need to register for an account and the download is only available during certain hours of the day.

[Via IndieGames.com]

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

SNK Playmore's Metal Slug XX for PSP will make the jump from Japan to North America on February 23rd, which was expected considering the series has a following in the States. What's surprising about the announcement is that Atlus will publish the game, not Ignition Entertainment, which has handled most of SNK's recent titles (e.g. The King of Fighters XII, Metal Slug 7, etc) in the U.S.

The game appears to be a remix of Metal Slug 7, which was released for Nintendo DS in 2008. The PSP edition introduces local co-op gameplay and other content additions, now allowing you to even purchase and download Leona Heidern (from King of Fighters), a seventh playable character with unique abilities, for 99 cents.

It doesn't look like Atlus is bringing the run'n gun game's strange preorder bonus, a pair of boxer shorts, to the U.S., but the publisher is holding a contest with the official PlayStation Blog to give away four pairs of underwear and nine Japanese promotional posters to commenters. So, if you want to play the game in a new pair of boxers, you'll probably have to go out to a store and buy them yourself.

Though Atlus announced the PSP version of Metal Slug XX, it made no mention of the Xbox Live Arcade port recently announced by SNK in Japan. Thankfully, the handheld edition is priced cheaply at $19.99, so you won't feel too swindled if the publisher reveals the XBLA release shortly after you buy the PSP one.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Designed as a 16-button USB MIDI Board and controller, Dj TechTools's Midi-Fighter is a DIY arcade-style kit that will surely stand out from most DJing equipment (though probably not as much as the Steel Battalion controller jurry-rigged for VJs).

The $125 package includes everything you need to assemble your own customizable controller, except for the Sanwa buttons themselves. Dj TechTools has a separate order form for those so you can choose what colors you want to use for your setup, as the Midi-Fighter is designed for customization, from its mix of buttons to its removable acrylic cover, which you can add your own design to.

In the demonstration below, you can even see how DJ Ean Golden expanded the controller's hardware to add in a joystick! Dj TechTools has already sold out of its initial 150 DIY units but is already taking preorders for its next batch of 100 shipping out later this week. You can learn more about the Midi-Fighter and see a mock-up of a planned Special Edition design at Dj TechTools's site.

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

It's 2010, and I have been drinking heavily every day so far this year -- something I should probably knock off, before that streak becomes both longer and more fearsome.

I thought I would kick off the new year by discussing a magazine that's trying to be very new indeed. I talked a bit in the past about how GamePro is making a serious effort to reinvent itself in 2010, under the direction of new boss and ex-Ziff Davis standby John Davison. John pins down his mag's festering crisis perfectly in the editorial from the February '10 issue: "In truth, GamePro hasn't been focused on a young audience for many years, but it also hasn't firmly declared itself as standing for anything in particular for a while. As the industry has struggled with its identity, so too has GamePro."

It's a testament to the ironclad laws of branding that GamePro, long after the the 8- and 16-bit eras have become ancient history, is still seen as "kiddie" by so many people. It's also a testament to IDG's tenacity (or, maybe, bullheadedness) that they kept the magazine sailing along throughout the past decade without doing a heck of a lot to discourage this image. Now, with a book size that's under 100 pages and a rather tiny pool of advertising, GamePro may not have had much time left unless something serious was done to it.

That "something serious" took place with this February issue, one that carries over nearly nothing from the old design except for the name. There is no previews section in this magazine any longer, a move that I've been hoping some print title or another would undertake for years; the few preview-y pieces are small and fit into the "Spawn Point" front-end section.

Everything is cleaner than before, with the main content font a bit larger and care taken to keep everything orderly, and the features take a bit of an Edge-like bent in look. (The only visual fault I found is that GamePro uses the same picture of Tim Schafer three times this issue, once in stylized form to kick off a feature about writing comedy in games.)

This cleanup job extends to the reviews section, which emphasizes one really big review (New Super Mario Bros. Wii this time around) up front. Only a few pieces in this bit are very tiny, which allows writers to turn each one into a sort of narrative about their experience instead of trying to play the old-style GamePro "voice of authority."

And on that note, I should emphasize that revised visuals are not the main focus of this redesign. Game Informer's revamp a few months back involved a refreshing of the print-mag externals and a brand-new website; GamePro's involves the writers taking a completely different approach to covering the video game industry from the one they preferred before.

Davison pointed out in his editorial that he wants GamePro to "endeavor to shine a light on the talents that build the experiences we all love so much, and also on the people that play them and are inspired by them." It shows. Nearly every non-review piece in this magazine places names on the forefront, from the piece on Street Fighter character design up front (with Mike Kime, who works at Epic Games) to other bits on MAG, Mega64, the charity group OneBigGame, and an outfit that sells game-themed wine.

That's a huge difference from the old GamePro, which in my mind (and in my experience, working there in 2002-03) had been about being some kind of all-seeing authority that covered everything equally expertly, sort of like Life and Look and the other general-interest magazines of the mid-20th century.

This, despite the fact that the Internet had long shattered any illusion that the editors of GamePro were anything besides human, like anyone else -- a group of hardcore gamers who just happened to be better than average at keeping deadlines and schmoozing game-pub PR. In making GamePro about people (either involving industry folks, or in the way it makes previews/reviews about the writer as much as about the game), Davison has truly put a human face on the brand that wasn't there before and had never been.

You could conclude, if you were a bitterer man than I, that this new GP is basically trying to be Edge USA. But if GP can survive, and keep covering the human side of the industry without becoming too pretentious, it has the potential to become far more than that. Already it's a massive step forward for the brand and a sign that there's no excuse to treat it like some also-ran in the business any longer.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

DSiWare is fast becoming the go-to platform for developers to release great downloadable games that receive little-to-no recognition. Call me a Skip Ltd. fanboy if you want, but it's criminal (criminal!) that Art Style: PiCTOBiTS and Art Style: Boxlife didn't end up on more "game of the year" lists for 2009.

Q-Games's Trajectile (or Reflect Missile, as it's known in Europe) released on the handheld's U.S. download service this morning with little to no promotion from the studio or publisher Nintendo of America, which is surprising considering the positive press the developer's PixelJunk series has received. Starship Patrol, another upcoming DSiWare release from Q-Games will likely suffer the same fate.

Anyway, the great DSiWare title I hoped to talk about actually came out last week, when everyone was still too busy playing with their new Christmas games and preparing for their New Years Eve celebrations to notice Glow Artisan, a small puzzler from New York City-based Powerhead Games.

This is not only the studio's first self-published game but also its first title not based on some other company's license. Powerhead's catalog is filled with casual Ubisoft and Konami titles that most "core" gamers would turn their noses at -- Imagine: Movie Star, Petz Catz 2, Winx: Mission Enchantix, etc. -- making it even more depressing that most people are ignoring their first original IP.

In Glow Artisan, you try to re-create puzzle "blueprints" on the touchscreen by drawing with and mixing three primary colors -- red, yellow, and blue. It's more challenging than it sounds, as you need to draw entire lines instead of laying each tile out individually, and you need to take into account obstacles on the grid.

The downloadable game offers more than 100 pre-built levels, over 300 medals, a Randomizer puzzle mode, a Time Trial mode, an auto-complete feature for skipping up to three difficult levels a day, multiplayer modes using either multiple DSi systems or a single DSi, and even a Colorblind Mode that differentiates the blocks with symbols for players who difficulty telling certain colors apart.

Glow Artisan also allows you to create up to 40 of your own blueprints using the touchscreen, the DSi's outer camera, or photos from your handheld's internal memory. You can then swap those user-created levels with friends (local wireless only). You can read more about the game's puzzle creation capabilities and other details in Nintendo Life's enthusiastic review for Glow Artisan.

Unfortunately, there aren't many other reviews or even discussions about the title. Why not grab a copy from Nintendo's DSiWare Shop (priced at 500 Nintendo Points, or $5) and help spread the word about Glow Artisan?

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I thought it was silly for Ontario developer Big Blue Bubble to announce Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for the iPhone almost immediately after the game's Nintendo DS version's launch, prompting many gamers to skip the dual-screened game for the mobile edition, but it turns out the App Store release is completely different.

While the DS game was a real-time, first-person dungeon hack, the iPhone version is more like Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s original Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, taking you through a text adventure with original illustrations and dice-based mechanics. You can tap the screen to flip pages, shake the handset to roll the dice, and manage your inventory with the touchscreen.

Big Blue Bubble says it isn't stopping with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (now available for $2.99 on the App Store), as it's planning to release four more titles from the series. One of those games, Deathtrap Dungeon, will come out later this month.

Hopefully, the iPhone edition is more approachable than the DS game, which received positive user impressions but dismal reviews from professional critics. 1UP's D- review for that title was so devastating, one of Big Blue Bubble's developers personally attacked the critic on GameFAQs!

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

[As we finish our set of 2009 roundups, our own Leigh Alexander takes a look ahead at the 2010 game industry events we can't wait to see -- from delayed titles through motion control and beyond.]

With the 2009 Christmas holiday finished, it's time to reflect on the year in video gaming behind us and think about the year ahead.

And the game industry has lots on the horizon -- so let's finish up our month of roundups with a look ahead at the 2010 game industry events we can't wait to see, the questions we expect to have answered, and a little gleefully speculative crystal ball-gazing.

Money, Money, Money

It's been a grim year for retail gaming's financial comparisons, and most analysts say it'll take a holiday miracle for this Christmas to help the retail game industry post growth over 2008.

The NPD will reveal the final U.S. results in January, so we'll finally know for sure the damage of a year of retail declines.

But social network and other digital download games are booming, console hardware price cuts are well in effect, and big console games will be distributed more evenly throughout 2010, thanks to late-'09 title delays. So perhaps the industry can bounce back in 2010 -- is the recession's impact behind us?

Are We Gonna Get A New...

No year in games would be complete without a few surprises, like major titles announced at E3 or revealed in publisher financial results. The guessing game is more fun when you factor in the fact that, the higher a property's profile, the closer to its chest the publisher keeps it.

For example, analysts have been wondering when Take-Two will announce the next full-scale Grand Theft Auto -- given that the publisher can take as much as four years to develop one, they theorize late in 2011 is the earliest one can possibly expect it.

But given the volatility in its finances during non-GTA years, maybe 2010 will be the year the publisher decides to mollify its investors by letting us all know when we can expect the next one.

To take another example, the demand for a new Zelda for consoles is so constant on the part of Nintendo fans that the company is wont to joke about it every time it takes a podium.

But new comments from series honcho Eiji Aonuma have suggested that not only is the fabled next Wii Zelda underway, but that it might even be ready to show at E3 2010. It will, of course, excite patient fans if that's the case -- but then, what will they find to clamor for next?

Can Games Be Meaningful?

Quantic Dream has made no secret of its ambition to advance the art of gaming with Heavy Rain; its high talk about interactive narrative and gaming's equivalent of sophisticated film drama have set expectations high.

Who knows whether Heavy Rain will be the game that can change gaming? But it's symptomatic of some of the more lofty ambitions currently infecting the game industry at both AAA and indie levels, our trend to watch our for next year.

And after some of the intriguing discussions from Quantic Dream's David Cage and co-CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiere, audiences look forward to finding out whether emotion-inducing game storytelling can work when designers shoot for the moon -- or whether Heavy Rain will end in a messy ocean splashdown.

Those Delayed Games

2009's bad news becomes 2010's good. Those looking forward eagerly to franchise titles like BioShock 2 or Splinter Cell: Conviction this season got a little lump of coal when publishers shunted titles back into early 2010.

But now, as "next year" is about to become "this year," those even more-awaited, even more-polished titles are close enough for franchise fans to start getting excited -- with original IP like Bayonetta and Singularity also due next year.

We've previously discussed many of the notable titles to be pushed to next year, and it's going to be very interesting to see whether the wait is worth it.

The Gesture Tech

Microsoft and Sony surprised everyone at E3 this year with their motion control solutions. So this year, we'll get to see whether Project Natal can put its money where its Milo is, and we'll get to find out what Sony's weird-ball-orb-glow-wand is actually called. Perhaps we'll even have answers in the debate about whether on not it's better to have buttons or "be" the controller.

More sincerely, developers have already begun working with this largely NDA-ed technology, but the revelation of their results will be important. The theory that this will be the longest console cycle yet thanks to these late-game shakeups will be tested by how the tech holds up. Gimmicks or game-changers? We'll see.

What are you most looking forward to in 2010? Leave your comments here, and have a wonderful New Year!

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

Even if you don't remember seeing his uncommon name, you've likely played some of Nasir Gebelli's games. The famed programmer first attracted gamers' attention with his Apple II titles for Sirius Software like Space Eggs and Gorgon, and later worked at Square, where he helped create 3-D Worldrunner, Rad Racer, Final Fantasy I-III, and Secret of Mana.

Game industry veteran John Romero, a self-admitted Nasir fanboy (he even made a poster with a collage of photos to hang in his office), brought the programmer in for an Apple II Reunion event he hosted in 1998 and recorded a chat between them. In the above clip, you can hear Nasir's disbelief that people actually remembered his work.

I've embedded another clip after the break, from the same interview but uploaded years ago, in which the former Square developer talks about how he started working at the RPG publisher in its salad days. You can also read Romero's praising of Nasir and criticisms of Secret of Mana at his personal site.

[Via Derek Yu]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This tiny Out Run cabinet is the latest project from Pocket_lucho, who you might remember for his Neo Pocket Arcade, [PC-]Engine Arcade, and Pocket [Mega] Drive Arcade machines. He spent the past three months on this mini-arcade and isn't finished yet, but the controls, cabinet art, and illuminated sign already make for an impressive machine.

Pocket_lucho stuffed a mini-itx Zotac Ion board, a PSOne 5" LCD, a 250 GB HDD, 2 GB RAM, and other hardware into the cabinet to make it all work. The unique wheel controller was pulled from a Sega Saturn Hori Zerotech SS controller. You can see more details on the machine's construction in the video past the post break and in this forum thread at ElOtroLado.

It's a shame this mini-arcade is based on Out Run's upright model and not the deluxe sit-down cabinet -- that way, if he ever gets tired of the miniature machine, he can turn it into a small drivable car for his action figures.

[Via Dusan Vlahovic]

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

If you're looking for a new wallpaper to replace the serene, autumnal piece Capy released last October, or if you just want something new to decorate your desktop for the new year, the Toronto developer has put out another pixelart background featuring characters from several of its games -- Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, Critter Crunch, and Super Shove It -- exchanging snowballs.

The artwork, created by Capy's talented Vic Nguyen, is available to download in 1600x1200 and 1920x1080 sizes. Even if you decide not to use it, make sure to scroll to the bottom of Capy's site to see an animated version of the snowball fight, which shows a stray ball smacking a poor blue capybara on the side of its head.

Superbrothers, whom Capy (and singer-songwriter Jim Guthrie) is collaborating with for the Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery project, released its own wallpaper over the weekend depicting a pixelart log cabin hidden in a forest, originally created as location concept art. You can see a preview of it below and download the background at the project's official site.

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

The Independent Games Festival has announced the Main Competition finalists for the twelfth annual presentation of its prestigious awards, celebrating the most innovative creations to come out of the independent game development community this year.

Nearly $50,000 in prizes in various categories, including the $20,000 Seamus McNally Grand Prize will be awarded on stage at the Independent Games Festival Awards on March 11, 2010 during the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The record-setting 306 Main Competition entries represent a 35% increase over last year's record 226 entries, many of them striking new titles from leading indie developers.

This year's finalists are led by multiple nominations for several notable games, including three nominations for innovative light-centric puzzle platformer Closure, Krystian Majewski's gestural photographic adventure game Trauma, and Ratloop Asia's cinematic avian action title Rocketbirds: Revolution!.

There were two nominations each -- including a Grand Prize nomination -- for Pocketwatch Games' stylish co-op heist game Monaco, Hello Games' polished stunt motorbike title Joe Danger, and Team Meat's cartoon-gory 2D action title Super Meat Boy!.

To ensure the highest-quality judging for the IGF, more than 150 leading indie and mainstream game industry figures -- from 2D Boy's Ron Carmel through Spore's Soren Johnson to ThatGameCompany's Kellee Santiago and beyond -- were recruited to choose finalists via a carefully constructed empirical process.

The Festival is particularly keen to give constructive, written feedback to Main Competition entrants -- even if they did not place as a finalist. As a result, over 1500 written, anonymized judge comments will be passed along to entrants in the next few days, an important part of deriving value and takeaway from entering the IGF.

In addition, for the first year, the IGF's Nuovo Award, intended to "honor abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games", was judged by a separate, smaller juried panel of notable game and art world figures. These spanned previous IGF Nuovo winner Jason Rohrer (Passage), Area/Code's Frank Lantz, N+ co-creator Mare Sheppard, EA division head and art-game creator Rod Humble, and more.

The jury for the $2,500 Nuovo Award, which allows more esoteric 'art games' to compete on their own terms alongside longer-form indie titles, has released a statement about the chosen Nuovo finalists, including several 'honorable mentions', on the official IGF website.

The finalists for the 2010 Independent Games Festival are:

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:
Joe Danger (Hello Games)
Monaco (Pocketwatch Games)
Rocketbirds: Revolution! (Ratloop Asia)
Trauma (Krystian Majewski)
Super Meat Boy! (Team Meat)

Excellence In Visual Art
Shank (Klei Entertainment)
Owlboy (D-Pad Studios)
Trauma (Krystian Majewski)
Limbo (Playdead)
Rocketbirds: Revolution! (Ratloop Asia)

Excellence In Design
Miegakure (Marc Ten Bosch)
Star Guard (Sparky)
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard For Gravity (Dejobaan Games)
Monaco (Pocketwatch Games)
Cogs (Lazy 8 Studios)

Excellence In Audio
Super Meat Boy! (Team Meat)
Shatter (Sidhe)
Closure (Closure Team)
Rocketbirds: Revolution! (Ratloop Asia)
Trauma (Krystian Majewski)

Technical Excellence
Closure (Closure Team)
Limbo (Playdead)
Heroes Of Newerth (S2 Games)
Joe Danger (Hello Games)
Vessel (Strange Loop Games)

Nuovo Award
Today I Die (Daniel Benmergui)
A Slow Year (Ian Bogost)
Tuning (Cactus)
Closure (Closure Team)
Enviro-Bear 2000 (Justin Smith)

All 2010 Independent Games Festival finalists will be awarded passes to GDC 2010 in San Francisco this March, where they will attend the 2010 Independent Games Summit - featuring two days of lectures and presentations from leading indie game developers. They will also be presenting playable versions of their game to all Game Developers Conference attendees at the IGF Pavilion on the GDC Expo Floor from Thursday, March 11th through Saturday, March 13th.

The IGF 2010 winners will be announced on stage at the major Independent Games Festival Awards on Thursday, March 11, 2010, at the Moscone Center. The IGF Awards, which kick off in North Hall D at 6:30pm PST on the 11th, are held immediately preceding the acclaimed 2010 Game Developers Choice Awards, honoring the best games of the year from mainstream developers.

"We’re happy to report that the IGF has seen another record-breaking year in volume and diversity of entries, another symptom of the continuing explosion of high-quality titles from smaller development teams and emerging creators," said Simon Carless, IGF Chairman. "Congratulations to this year's outstanding finalists -- we're looking forward to playing their games and honoring the overall IGF winners at Game Developers Conference this March."

The IGF was established in 1998 by Think Services to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers, in the same way that the Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community. In addition to the IGF 2010 finalists announced today, the D2D Vision Award finalists from download sponsor Direct2Drive -- honoring what the digital distribution service believes are the most innovative and forward-looking IGF titles -- will be revealed in the near future. Following on from that, the ten Student Showcase award winners will be announced during the week of Jan. 11th, with the finalists for the handheld indie gaming-specific IGF Mobile competition following in late January.

For more information on the Independent Games Festival's Main Competition finalists, including extra specifics on target platforms and availability, please visit the official IGF Finalists webpage -- and for those interested in registering for GDC 2010, which includes the Independent Games Summit, the IGF Pavilion and the IGF Awards Ceremony, please visit the Game Developers Conference website.

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

Alongside the announcement of 2010 Independent Games Festival finalists, the IGF Nuovo Award jury has revealed its finalists for the $2,500 award, which is intended to "honor abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games."

The Award, which was won (when called the Innovation/Nuovo Award) by Jason Rohrer's acclaimed abstract multiplayer title Between in 2009, allows more esoteric 'art games' to compete on their own terms alongside longer-form indie titles. For the 2010 Independent Games Festival, the IGF Main Competition judges, numbering over 160 in total, recommended games entered into the IGF Main Competition this year to be considered for this award.

But a separate panel of notable game and art world figures -- spanning previous IGF winner Rohrer, Area/Code's Frank Lantz, N+ co-creator Mare Sheppard, EA division head and art-game creator Rod Humble, and more, have decided the finalists (and will decide the winner) for the Nuovo Award in discussion-based, juried form -- mirroring similar, artistically important awards in other industries. All five Nuovo finalists will exhibit their games at GDC 2010 in San Francisco in the IGF Pavilion, and a Nuovo Award winner will be revealed at the IGF Awards Ceremony on the evening of March 11th, 2010.

The Nuovo Jury's finalist statement discussing and justifying their picks - also adding a number of 'honorable mentions' for games that were just outside the finalist selection, but had fascinating characteristics - reads as follows:

"To start, we wanted to thank everyone who submitted their games to the Independent Games Festival this year. All of you were in consideration for this award, and there were over one hundred games recommended to the Nuovo Jury by the Main Competition judges as being potentially worthy to be a Nuovo finalist. This shows the breadth of talent out there in independent games right now, and especially those looking to push the boundaries and produce new ideas and new concepts.

The Nuovo Jury has selected games that deliver two kinds of 'newness': Firstly, does the game have a new game design mechanic, element, or idea that makes they jury think: 'Wow, I really haven't seen that done before in this way'. Secondly, does the game make the jury feel something new -- something that a game rarely or never has, emotionally or otherwise?

With this in mind, we discussed the games that were most-recommended by Main Competition judges, as well as putting forward our own picks from IGF entrants. We have decided (via jury voting) on the following finalists for the 2010 IGF Nuovo Award, each of which will receive all-access GDC 2010 tickets and the opportunity to exhibit their game in the IGF Pavilion there:

Finalists

- Today I Die (Daniel Benmergui)
The jury was struck by the evocative game mechanics of of discovery and exploration in Daniel's experimental Flash game Today I Die. The game uses words and poetry as a gameplay mechanic in striking, emotion-inducing ways, and while short in length, leaves a lasting impression.

- A Slow Year (Ian Bogost)
This newly coded set of mini-game experiences -- made for the distinctly retro Atari 2600 console -- consists of "slow-moving meditations on time and attention". And A Slow Year made it to its Nuovo finalist position due to its charmingly retro art and thoughtful, deliberate, determined gameplay, which a number of jurors found relaxing and genuinely evocative.

- Tuning (Cactus)
The jury found praise for Cactus' platform game thanks to its bold style and its "uncompromising exploration" of almost psychedelic abstraction. Although the title can be frustrating as times, one juror noted that "you have to see the visual distortions and transformations as gameplay", and under that lens, the game seems even more charming.

- Closure (Closure Team)
Tremendously evocative in its audio and visuals, and with some genuinely new gameplay concepts that come with the complete absence (or presence) of light, Closure was praised by the Nuovo jury for twinning robust gameplay with rarefied atmosphere and a fully realized game world.

- Enviro-Bear 2000 (Justin Smith)
Enviro-Bear 2000 blossomed from its 'constrained competition' origins to a Nuovo finalist, thanks to two things that struck the jury. Of course, the first is the joyfully off the wall, grin-inducing concept and art direction. But the second is the genuinely novel gameplay idea of having a 'time management' approach to limited player controls (steer or eat fish or attack badger?).

Honorable Mentions

There were a number of titles that were recommended or advocated for by judges and received multiple votes in our final tally, but did not make the Finalist list due to insufficient votes. Nonetheless, we're happy to mention and recommend these titles as Nuovo 'honorable mentions', that those interested in alternative independent games should certainly check out:

- Hazard: The Journey Of Life - a genuinely interesting philosophy-based abstract first-person action game mod.
- Trauma - an atmospheric photo-based evolution of the adventure game with gestural elements.
- Fig. 8 - in which you ride a bike through technical diagrams, with clever wheel-based gameplay elements.
- Lose/Lose - as you destroy aliens, you destroy files on your hard drive. Controversial, but still thought-provoking?
- Flywrench - extremely tricky, rewarding vector-ish art game with a cunning central gameplay mechanic.
- Art Of Crime - a semi-procedural detection game with an interesting, alternative illustrative style.

Thanks,
Clint Hocking, Eric Zimmerman, Eddo Stern, Frank Lantz, Rod Humble, Jason Rohrer, Carl Goodman, Marcin Ramocki, Mare Sheppard, Jesper Juul, Simon Carless.
[IGF 2010 Nuovo jury]."

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Continuing the GameSetLinks wonder and delight, we start off with an interesting G4 chat to the folks behind Uncharted 2, who are featuring all over the place right now - looking forward to checking out their [DISCLAIMER: I'm involved!] GDC 2010 lectures, too, of which there are a number.

Also in this round-up - Tale Of Tales on their IGF picks, discussion of a potentially racist Flash game and its media reception, more on the AI for the Sherlock Holmes ARG, a good round-up of iPhone game events for the year, and more.

Somewhere else:

Reaction Time: Naughty Dog's Evan Wells Reflects on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - G4tv.com
A really nice interview from G4, who are starting to get some really nuanced writing on their website, perhaps oddly. (Perhaps not oddly.)

Tale Of Tales: My Selection For The IGF
A fascinating alternative selection from the creators of Fatale and The Path, showing the depth of great games in IGF this year.

BoingBoing: Ten for 2010: the 10 most-anticipated games coming in the new year
An excellent list with attendant video from Mr. Boyer, including a number of games I'm personally amped about.

Ching Chong Beautiful Exposes Racism in Video Game Design | Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture
Intriguing, but one comment is quite possibly correct: 'CHING CHONG BEAUTIFUL EXPOSES RACISM IN VIDEO GAME DESIGN isn’t descriptive of your article at all. It reads as an indictment of the entire industry, but the article is about a bunch of immature flash developers publishing their own trash on their own sites.'

Beyond Rockett and Purple Moon: Gender, Gaming, and Stereotypes - Video Games - Jezebel
'While it feels almost sacrilegious to criticize the work of one of the first people to re-evaluate who plays games and why, Brenda Laurel's one TED talk cannot be the be-all, end-all of discussions on girls and video games.'

BBC News - AI aims to solve in-game chatter
Some interesting notes on chatbots in the Sherlock Holmes ARG/game here...

iPhone Gaming: Looking Back on 2009 and Forward to 2010 | Touch Arcade
Nice round-up, here.

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

[GameSetWatch is teaming up with game criticism weblog Critical Distance to present Christopher Hyde's round-up of the wealth of excellent games being produced outside the realm of 'AAA' titles in 2009, compiling his take on the best 99 free to download video games released this year.]

This past year will go down for me personally as the year in which my spending on video games plummeted, due to personal dissatisfaction with the costs in money and time demanded by most of the AAA products out there on the shelves.

To that end, I’ve since turned my eyes towards the burgeoning free games scene and to be honest what I’ve found is pretty darned spectacular. Creative talents all over the world are out there spinning out downloadable, browser, Flash and Unity games that you can while away enjoyable hours on without having it cost you one red cent. Now sure, you do need a computer as a platform, and might also sometimes have to suffer through some ads to get to the games. And you may even want to donate a few bucks to a budding game designer who has put his or her sweat equity out there for you to play at no cost.

But otherwise, the sheer number and quality of the games available for nothing is a simple testament to just how broad and active the development community outside the corporate AAA space really is at present. This is a very, very good thing - for games, for players and ultimately for your very own wallet.

The following is a list of 99 free games (in no particular order) that I’ve enjoyed this calendar year, nearly all of which have been released in 2009 or very late in 2008. So why don’t you take a break from big-budget games and see just what a feast there is out there in the wide world below the big ticket level - all you can lose, really, is just a little bit of time:

1. Fig. 8
Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a lovely riding-a-bike-thru-a-technical-drawing game and it’s got a sweet soundtrack to go with it as well. Fig. 8 apparently got its start as an art exhibit by one of the designers and that sort of aesthetic pervades its philosophical approach. Turning takes a bit of getting used to, but once you’ve got the hang of it you’re sure to find from Intuition Games’ an enticing offering.

2. Minotaur China Shop
You know how you’ve always wanted a game where you play a clumsy mythical beast in a glass shop that occasionally flies into a rage and smashes things to pieces? Well, your wait is over—so head out to Flashbang Studios and get a taste of the rubbery and imprecise control scheme that fits the hybrid lead character here just oh so well.

3. Guardian Rock
A colorful and engaging block puzzler that is probably not going to be the most innovative thing that you try this year but that still manages a take on classic gameplay that’s well worth what you’re going to lay out for it. With a design sense that echoes age old Nintendo while smoothing out some rougher edges and a relaxed approach that will keep you guessing, Guardian Rock makes for a brisk and fun little item for your gaming calendar.

4. Judith
Really not a whole lot of game here, but a very interesting experiment in lo-fi 3D tale telling nonetheless. Judith is apparently loosely based on/inspired by the Bartok opera “Duke’s Bluebeard Castle”, an intellectual bonafide that alone sets it right high in the rarefied air of the indie art game. It’s very much more an exploration of story and character than anything else, and though flawed in some ways—the issue of player control, especially—the end result is thoughtful and pertinent.

5. Boxgame
A mind bending puzzle platformer by Sophie Houlden which is not at all recommended if you’ve got a headache. Rotate a mazelike cube that your androgynous avatar stands on and navigate to the exit. A greyscale venture that demonstrates a nice use of the (now free in itself) Unity 3d platform for game makers.

6. Evidence of Everything Exploding
Jason Nelson’s art game for browsers takes cue from dada and surrealism as your arrow avatar navigates its way through mazes backed with historic documents such as pizza box patents and art flyers. The best intellectual deconstructivist flash game I’ve played this year.

7. Harmony
It’s back to the nineties in Harmony, a Doom tribute game that took its creator a stunning 8 years to complete. All that time has paid off in an outing that’ll have you flashing back to playing FPSes like Wolfenstein and Hexen on your Pentium 90. The difficulty bar has been set way hard here and the game includes those outdated tropes such as key/door combo-ing and endless map wandering—but a lot of that stuff is half the nostalgic fun.

8. Aubergine Sky
Experimental game about an evening walk. No arrow keys, no button pushing, no mouse clicking. It’s very calming for a change, given that games are so often frenetic and sort of stressful. Some neat ideas here.

9. Downhill Bowling
This one plays just like it’s named—arcadey and enjoyable, in a we’re-not-taking-this-too-seriously fashion. Just the thing to while away and idle quarter of an hour or so, rolling down hills and knocking down pins in the Unity engine.

10. Today I Die
Daniel Benmergui’s playful rumination on games and language isn’t perfect, but it forges ahead and treads where few games have gone before. Anytime that this developer puts up something for nothing you should run right over and check it out, and this time is certainly no exception to that general rule.

11. Miami Shark
You are a shark. A shark that leaps from the water and eats planes. This should be pretty much all that you need to know.

12. Parasite
This sweet 2d platformer oozes charm even as you play as its evil protagonist. Developer Nitrome is a prime mover in the free games environment, consistently churning out candy colored puzzle games and 2d gaming done right on a regular basis.

13. Gravity Bone
Two level, fifteen minute adventure game built on id’s Quake engine that’s way more fun that the endless trudging many longform games make you suffer through. Gravity Bone left me wanting more, just like the old circus/vaudeville adage says entertainment is supposed to do.

14. Post I.T. Shooter
If you were to argue that there’s not a lot of good gameplay in this Petri Purho toss off, I sure wouldn’t disagree. There’s not much in the way of actual play involved at all, to be honest. But dang, it’s just so pretty. And it sounds so nice.

15. Don’t Look Back
A super minimalist shooter with myth based storyline from brilliant indie game designer Terry Cavanaugh. Many of the games on this list seem to be about paring back the excesses inherent in the big budget games developed by huge teams and replacing their overdone graphics with simple gameplay presented in a straightforward, lo-fi manner. Don’t Look Back does this all stylishly and with the sort of constant checkpointing tht allows even less skilled players (hello, self!) to enjoy the adventure.

16. Silent Conversation
Gregory Weir’s jumping on text outing intersects videogames and reading in a thought provoking way. There certainly aren’t too many games that frontload poetry the way this one does, and that by itself makes the game one that warrants a closer bit of inspection.

17. Saut
Created for Game Jolt’s minimal compo in the fall, Saut is a one-button platformer that utilizes only the spacebar for jumping as a control scheme. Given that I personally consider the constant learning curve of ridiculous button presses to be one of the scourges of modern video games, any countertrend towards lessening that is OK by me. Since Saut also piles on some nicely shadowed graphics and a zippy jazz rock score, it stands as a great example of just how successful a bare bones effort can be.

18. You Only Live Once
Be real careful at the start in this seemingly unassuming platformer. You have been warned, because if you botch things early on you may well find further progress somewhat difficult. Conceptually, though, this game should be considered a real triumph.

19. Saira
While only the first six-level demo of this 2D puzzle platformer is available as a freebie, that’s plenty when it comes to anything made by Nifflas—who has previously made the brilliant Knytt and Within a Dark Forest. This one is even a bit more polished than those previous efforts, and it ramps up the mechanics to create an interesting and enticing world that might have you laying out some cash for the full package.

20. Spelunky
Derek Yu’s latest is a procedural platforming roguelike that it’s very possible you may see pop up as the dark horse choice on some end of the year best of lists. It’s polished, addictive, frustrating, and almost endlessly surprising, and unlike so many freebies it has almost no great flaws. A must play for anyone interested in the form.

21. Closure
Extremely inventive black and white puzzle platformer with a totally unique style. One of the very best games on this entire list—there’s really nothing quite like it out there and I think that both developer Tyler Glaiel and lead artist Jon Schubbe are talents to keep an eye on.

22. Jetpack Basketball
From the mind of Messhof comes this insanely beautiful looking and sounding pickup hoops game for one or two players. Just like on the playground you compete to be the first to score 11 baskets, and though it’s slightly unfortunate that you can’t swipe the ball from your opponent there’s enough going on visually that this isn’t a huge flaw.

23. Minecraft
This game is eventually getting some sort of release that you’ll need to pay for, but testing it out and just playing around in the blocky sandbox simply needs a java enabled browser. What’s most fascinating is the lively community that’s growing up around Minecraft, as users create all sorts of assets and areas for others to utilize and explore—one build goes so far as to render the Reichstag in all its pixelated glory.

24. Shy Dwarf
Cute and stylish quickie platformer by one of the Machinarium developers, which though a bit slight overall has a rare and tasty look that sets it apart from the free platformer pack.

25. Devil’s Tuning Fork
Fascinating outing here from a student team at DePaul University, wherein you play first person as a comatose child that can only navigate via sound wave. Eerie dreamscape environments create a unique world that’s very much unlike anything I’ve ever seen and the sonic gameplay mechanic is the sort of innovative work you hope to see from budding designers.

26. Bunni Game
A pick up ‘n play island strategy game that’s way deeper and more engaging than it looks at first glance. The flat graphics belie that at base this is actually a fairly comprehensive strategy game, and something that for a freebie offers a surprising amount of thoughtful gameplay.

27. Tower of Heaven
This super minimal, rule changing platformer was a bit more challenging than I can generally hack, but twitch skilled gameplayers should really love it. An excellent effort and a solid design.

28. Below the House
Anna Anthropy’s cavern game for Ludum Dare 15. I’ll play anything she makes—even if they’re often too much for me to handle—and while this does not have the level of polish of many of her other projects as always there’s a thoughful bit of consideration behind all of her design choices.

29. Tasty Static
This one’s a new clone of some old PC game called Sky Roads that I’ve never played but that I’m sure has a great following out there. I’ll admit that I am pretty terrible for the most part at this one, but it’s really sharp looking overall and I even had fun while I died many, many times.

30. Star Guard
There’s nine levels of 2D platformy shooter retrominimalism in this spiffy little number, and it all brims with a flair and verve that’s lacking in many commercial ventures. Additionally, for a game with very little graphic power it succeeds quite well in creating a sense of dank ambiance to its surroundings. Mega-twitch gamers may find it a bit too forgiving, but it’s right in the sweet spot for others.

31. Continuity
Ragtime Games’ Flash student project is a mindbender of a game, utilizing the arrangement of sliding tiles to solve the seemingly ubiquitous video game key/door puzzle combo. From the looks of this one it would seem ultimately destined for the mobile phone environment, where it certainly will put to shame much of the shovelware clogging up that particular platform.

32. Pizza City
Browser based, floaty driving game sort of in the Crazy Taxi mode as you bust ass around the city missing pedestrians and delivering ‘za. Developer Pixeljam—who are also responsible for Mountain Maniac lower down in this list—have shown themselves to be among the best free developers active today in bringing classic styled but updated video games to a browser near you.

33. Turn Based Battle
A truly great JRPG parody that hilariously eviscerates the corpse of an utterly warmed over old genre. This is much, much better than actually playing your typical JRPG.

34. Johnny Two-Shoes
Solid browser game that combines a bit of management with top down driving as you build your heist team and try to make enough cash to retire. The interesting mechanics combine in a well thought out manner that entices the player to keep at it.

35. Walkie Tonky
Though a bit rough around the edges, this platformer’s cool graphics and friendly gameplay make it worth taking a shot on. The art style is really polished and stylized, bringing a fresh graphical take to the genre.

36. Jumpman
This one is fantastic, a lo-fi old school platformer that’s loaded with inventiveness and creativity. Most games that are difficult in this manner I just find plain annoying, but this particular outing is so special that I just kept trying.

37. This Is the Only Level
As the title says, there’s really only one level. But what’s utterly brilliant here is how the rules change each time so that guiding your immobile elephant to safety stays fresh every time and forces you to constantly and carefully consider the set of rules under which you are operating. John Cooney’s absolutely genius Flash game is the sort of thing that makes it worthwhile to play games, and is easily one of the ten best games I played this year.

38. 78641
78641 is a totally and completely insane, hysterical and sometimes crude RPG that is so much more fun to mess around in than those 75 hour grindfests I stopped playing some time back. I really have zero idea just what the heck is going on in the heads of these developers, but that’s a good thing. You can have your elves and orcs, I’ll stick with this.

39. Canabalt
This one-button control scheme game has you dodging objects, running rooftops and scaring pigeons. Simple and sharp, with a great soundtrack. Resets also randomize, so you don’t ever quite know what’s coming. Excellent.

40. Where Is My Heart
This odd little platformer splits the screen into multiple panels and forces you to use combinations of your characters to suss out what needs to be done. Unpolished, but a promising start for developer Bernie Schulenburg.

41. Clockwords
A cartoony word game ostensibly set in Victorian London, this game tests both mental alacrity and typing skill as you attempt to form words to destroy spiders out to steal some sort of secrets. Letters that appear at the bottom of the screen open new cells if you use them all, and as things speed up it all gets pretty frenzied. Nicely put together.

42. Beacon
An atmospheric little platformer made for Ludum Dare 15 where you need to follow a lit beacon to navigate thru some blackened caverns or you fall into the endless darkness. Dev ChevyRav really did yeoman’s work with this little 48 hour gem—I’d love to see what he can do with more time to play with.

43. Scary Girl
This toylike action/puzzle/platformer is very pretty—in a sort of J. Otto Seibold/Henry Selick kind of way—and though there are some definite gameplay issues that many carped about upon its release, I personally found it engaging enough to put up with those flaws.

44. Use Boxmen
Awesomely animated 2D platformer by Greg Sergeant lets you multiply your character into doppelgangers that copy your actions to work your way through its 13 levels. Starts out deceptively simple before accelerating into a mind numbing difficulty.

45. Headspin: Storybook
This mirror puzzle visual alacrity game by developers State of Games is really just a wonder of gorgeous Flash animation. A casual change of pace from the hardcore gaming grind, the game is both beautiful and strangely addictive.

46. Nevermore 3
A Flash based adventure game that has some of the most unique art of any freebie I played this year. A wonderful attention to detail in the sound design also boosts this entrancing effort above the norm.

47. Mind Wall
Here’s a simple idea put to good solid use: chop holes in a colorful block wall so you can fit your own blocks through it. Not much more to it than that, and in this case that’s OK as the handful of levels offer a progressive challenge. The whole effort seems a little prototype-ish, but really: what do you want for nothin’?

48. Portal—The Flash Version
A great idea that should be done more often, this one deconstructs Valve’s well known AAA entry into a 2d flash game. The video game remake reductionism genre seems to me to be ripe for lots of further exploration—with big time corporate games headed down the path of ever finer graphical detail, we’ll hopefully be looking more and more for independent devs to outline the underlying mechanics and structures that are really what make these things work. [EDITOR'S NOTE: This title wasn't actually released in 2009, readers note, but we'll leave it in with that disclaimer, since it's still excellent.]

49. Pyroblossom
Six levels of frenetic and pretty shoot-em-up style madness here in this Flash based outing. Play as pilot Red Rage taking on advancing and colorful hordes of planes and choppers and resort to the psycho mode when things get to be a bit much for you. Captivating.

50. Ergon/Logos
Another one from the Experimental Gameplay Projects minimalist competition, this one is like a browser based Flash version of futurist Paul Marinetti’s typographic experiments. If there was more interactive fiction that combined that sort of thing with an odd soundtrack that sounds like a Balinese gamelan band gone haywire, I’d be much less likely to flee in terror when I see that phrase come up.

51/52. Waker & Woosh
A pair of prototypes from the ever interesting Singapore/MIT GAMBIT Game Lab designed to explain physics concepts to middle schoolers. One uses a narrative to get its points across, but the other is entirely abstract in nature. As you might expect, the gameplay is fairly simple, but these are efforts that might actually convince me that “edutainment” might have some use after all.

53. The Thing With 40 Eyes Girl
Ron Carmel of 2D Boy’s entry for the EGP minimal games compo, The Thing With 40 Eyes Girl is a Michael Jackson tribute involving flashing blocks you try to follow with mouseplay. It’s pretty disposably entertaining for a couple of playthroughs, but also a bit hard to follow at times. But for quickie minimalism with a beat, it’s just fine and dandy.

54. Upgrade Complete!
Do you ever get sick of the video game trope that requires you to buy and add more equipment for your character to beat enemies and advance through its space? Well then, how about a metagame that pokes fun at that annoyance and requires you to buy everything - and I do mean everything - to reach the final screen? Antony’s wonderful tossed off commentary on the often pointless side of gaming speaks volumes about the pastime that we all lavish so much time on.

55. The Mushroom Engine
An experimental Mario-type platformer that starts with the conceit of beginning at the end screen and progressing—or is it regressing?—from there. You need to un-collect coins and un-kill enemies to finish. Reversing the arrow of time forces you to rethink the way you approach some standard game situations.

56. Effing Hail
Meteorological time wasting in this little Flash game by Intuition Games where your one mouse button goal is to make bigger and bigger hailstones to crash into planes and buildings and the like. I’ll echo the commenters’ notion that a sandbox mode would welcome, but even the time limited levels have enough entertainment value to keep one occupied for a time.

57. Iji
Am I cheating on this one since it mostly came out in 2008 even though version 1.5 dropped in July of ‘09? You bet your ass I am, because far too few people played Swedish developer Daniel Remar’s lightly philosophical platform shooter last year. The mechanics are fairly standard 3rd person platform shooting and the story a typical alien invasion thing, and yet…Remar’s subtle and humorous ways of making you question the way you’re playing will have you wondering just who is the enemy here. Don’t miss.

58. Demolition City & Demolition City 2
Fun physics based demolition games that raise the question: why isn’t there a AAA sim or at least PSN/Xbox Live game that uses this idea? You can’t tell me that a console version of a game where you roleplay as a dynamite setting team that brings down buildings could possibly lose money. In any case, both of these are ideal little while-away-the-time outings that keep the player into the action with a steadily ramped up challenge utilizing a drop dead simple mechanic.

59. Rabbit Wants Cake
Wind up rabbit seeks tasty cake in record/playback button puzzle venture that requires you to record your actions with the arrow keys before hitting play to see if you’ve properly guided your mechanical lagomorph to over to the yummy dessert. In normal mode you can also adjust your actions with sliders above the field of play—which admittedly sometimes feels more like editing than gameplay. But the bunny is so happy when he gets his cake, so that makes it all worth it.

60. Warfare 1944
Sure, OK, war is not a game. But this resource management WWII RTS that allows you to play as Allies or as Axis really delivers the goods for a freebie. Challenging, well made and downright f-u-n.

61. Puzzle Bloom
A stylish puzzle game for the Unity web player that was made by students at DADIU in a single month, which makes the outcome especially impressive. The puzzles are well constructed and the whole outing has a really heartfelt manner to it that renders it likable and engaging. Can’t wait to see what these people go onto in the future.

62. Nice Cave!
A Ludum Dare cavern entry that sports excellent blocky graphics and seems to be a bit of a Doom/key collectfest parody. I loved the amusing dialog and the style in general—but I’ll admit that just like most FPS key hunting games, it made me a little motion sick and I eventually ended up running around yelling “where is the $#!?#%$@! orange key???”. Still fun.

63. The Walls Are Not Cheese
Created for the “Caverns” compo at Ludum Dare, this awesomely named little number distills its gameplay down to some of the most basic structural elements that mark the essence of the medium. Play as a colored square, battling other differently colored squares in a mysterious land below the earth!

64. Let’s Jump!
Flixel based platformer in which you jump from a plane and attempt to make it to the ground while avoiding all sorts of winged foes trying to do you in. The controls are wonky and a little tough to get a handle on, but the pure platformy goodness makes it worth a whirl.

65. Alchemia
Odd point and click platformer from Springtail Studios has interesting graphical style and a sonic landscape that combines minimal low key music with incidental sounds to great effect. Mainly about setting with not a lot to the dialogue, it’s a pretty to look at puzzler that’s intriguing for the time it takes.

66. Run, Elephant, Run
Yet another creation from the seemingly limitless mind of jmtb02 (aka John Cooney), this one is a bit more straight ahead than his meta-games (Achievement Unlocked, This Is the Only Level) but packs an entertaining wallop nonetheless. Get the ubiquitous elephant cross country to win in another lovingly crafted entry from one of today’s best Flash game designers.

67. Left 4k Dead
This one’s a true reductio ad absurdum that boils down a Valve classic even further than Hen Mazolski and Ido Tal’s Flash Portal does. The zombie shoot ‘em up is taken and crammed into a puny 4 kb, and though that limitation means it’s not always that faithful an adaptation it remains an attention grabbing outing even so.

68. Primrose
The free version of Jason Rohrer’s tile and grid puzzler for the iPhone seems ridiculously simple at first but becomes more and more addictive and complex as time goes on. What I like most about this one is the lack of time limit in placing your colored tiles—it gives a leisurely and casual feel to a type of game that is generally more frenetic and stressful.

69. Fat Slice
An excellent diminutive Flash puzzler where you slice down shapes with your mouse without running into the bouncing ball inside it. The 16 or so levels available make for a nice quick lunchtime spin through.

70. I Love Traffic
Test your timing and wreak havoc on the roads in this auto mayhem crashfest. It’s really as simple as that, and there are sure times that we all just need some basic arcadey action from this pastime.

71. Icebreaker
A physics based browser game from Nitrome, Icebreaker utilizes a drag-your-mouse-to-cut mechanic which you then use to free Vikings from ice in an escalating series of challenges. A fairly straight ahead brainteaser but performed well—though I could have lived without the slight pseudo steel band/reggae soundtrack.

72. Ore no Ryomi 2
Along with the “deconstructed games” model evinced by things like Flash and ASCII Portal, another freeware trend that I’d like to see more of is something like this—a sequel to an older game whose development seems to have halted. (Hopefully someone out there is working on a freeware SSX or Rayman platformer). The game in question here is a Japanese restaurant/business sim for PlayStation that never got a domestic release. While Vertigo’s graphics for this are pretty crude, the gameplay mechanic is action packed and engaging as you manage customers in a food service sim.

73. Chessmine + Chessmine II
While dev Event Cascade claims not to even like his own games, from this corner a repurposing of chess into a puzzle game that uses the set of rules you’ve already internalized for the historic game is quite damned brilliant. Though these efforts are short and a bit scattered, there’s enough of a nugget of genius herein to make you wish he’d buckle down and give these games the attention they would seem to deserve.

74. Money Seize
The concept of this platformer breaks little new ground—your money grubbing character needs to collect coins while avoiding creatures that kill him when touched—but the execution is spot on enough to make the endeavor a blast. It’s slightly unforgiving since a single mishap in a level will result in a coin spewing death, but the game’s verve and humor will keep you reloading time after time.

75. Time Fcuk
Edmund McMillen’s existential dystopian platformer is a thoughtful puzzlefest that has you playing as a robot able to manipulate dimensions who is also trapped in time and constantly texts you from the past/future (?).The difficulty ramps up a bit abruptly at times, but TF’s a good solid freebie with a unique mise-en-scene. Add in the fact that the game allows for user generated content and you’ve got yourself a real winner.

76. The Company of Myself
Eli Polinen’s clever platformer stars a lonely soul who states in an opening allegory that “I used to find joy in the company of others. Now I have only the company of myself”. To that end, this hermit must navigate the world and overcome its obstacles by duplicating his own self, using the shadow runs that result to bootstrap himself past whatever comes his way. Clearly inspired by Braid, this quality piece nonetheless has its own charms—thoughtful puzzles, a fitting piano score and touching narrative among them.

77. How To Raise a Dragon
Greg Weir’s lo-fi dragon raising RPG pares the genre down to the sparest elements possible but also brings his digital storytelling skills to the forefront. As the titular character, the choices you make through the tale’s four chapters vary the narrative in different ways with everything unfolding with an affective and amusing air. Another success from a game designer whose every outing seemingly moves the medium forward.

78. Cursor Chaos
Ninjadoodle’s pure, unadulterated arcade reflex challenge is made up of 42 rapid fire levels for the player as you race through attempting to garner the fastest time. The essence of a good, solid pickup and play lunchtime game.

79. Plants vs Zombies Flash Version
Now this here, THIS is like giving out free samples of crack to schoolkids. Popcap’s evil genius surfaces again as the Flash version of their brilliantly balanced tower defense game draws you and leaves you needing more when you get cut off. We’ll see if you have the willpower to resist the purchase version after you play through the 14 levels the company is giving away here.

80. Runman; Race Around the World
Tom Sennett and Matt Thorson’s candy colored platformer is a wonder to behold, a no holds barred excursion into sidescrolling excitement. A simple, childlike art style and brilliant old Americana tune soundtrack backstop gameplay that allows any entrant to pick up and play but still gives the hardcore a means to prove their twitch-worthiness. Spectacular.

81. Sowlar
An Indiecade finalist that came out of a Digipen team’s assignment to create an ASCII style game, Sowlar is a casualesque farming sim that hearkens back to the earlier days of computer games with its stripped down aesthetic. While Sowlar doesn’t do anything remarkably unique, the attention paid to details like ease of use and interface design make this a fine take on the Harvest Moon style genre.

82. William and Sly
In many ways, the basic platformer is really my most favorite type of video game, and this one is a heartfelt and eminently playable piece about a man and his fox. It’s all a bit twee, but its evergreen montane setting is note perfect and the attention paid to the sound design aids greatly in making the surroundings work.

83. Crush the Castle
A browser based trebuchet game that reminds me a fair bit of Demolition City, in that the levels are based on figuring out the physics of knocking down structures. The creators also allow players to build and upload their own castles, adding some user created fun into the mix.

84. Protonaut
A really unique chemistry based physics platformer that has you collecting gases while avoiding bonds and metals. The faux mouth harp soundtrack thing sure gets pretty old right quick (though it is mute-able), but the game itself is fresh and fun in its own little way.

85. Finwick
Pure platforming goodness here from developer Jackson Lewis as he gives away the first 26 levels of this leisurely paced mail delivering game. High quality art spruces up the somewhat warmed over gameplay mechanics and helps make this intro to the game well worth taking a shot on.

86. Small Worlds
David Shute’s entry into Casual Gameplay Competition #6 is an enthralling 15 minute minimal exploration game featuring beautifully blocky graphics, well paced wayfinding that draws you in and a fitting background soundtrack. The ending is a little problematic to my mind, but the rest features some of the most tempting exploration that I found in any game during this calendar year.

87. Gretel and Hansel
A fine example of interpreting public domain works into videogame form, this one takes the classic Grimm fairy tale and weaves it into a nice point and click adventure. The experience of the world is conveyed beautifully with foreboding, oboe-dominated music backstopping some lovely drab paletted artwork that echoes early cut-out animation in style. Altogether a great and interesting little package from developer Makopudding.

88. Calligraphic
A light little platformer by Mateusz Skutnick where you are an avatar working your way through the usual jumping puzzles to get to the exit without dying. The main attraction here is the substitution of a word-as-the-thing-in-itself in representing the sorts of objects you are used to encountering in this type of venture.

89. Super Karoshi
Episode 5 in Jesse Venbrux’ suicide series again has you acting as a salaryman out to impale himself on spikes thru 60 levels of business office hell. The design here strikes me as looking at games at much the same way as Cooney’s This Is the Only Level—there’s a constant assessment of the rules involved to pass a particular stage, and only sizing up the situation will allow you to die and move on. This is, of course, itself a complete and total subversion of the normal approach to advancing in video games—that alone recommends this one.

90. How My Grandfather Won the War
The beautiful cardboard cutout look and low key, two chord music belie just how tricky this “casual” game really is. Piloting a plane that can spew paint which turns treacherous ground to blue sky, you’ll try to maneuver your craft through some of the most original videogame environments you’re likely to see this year. Unfortunately, you’ll also die. A lot.

91. Neverdaunt 8-bit
Now in beta, this amazing indie MMORPG has some issues but transcends with style and approach. Traipse around a boxy pixelated world building things and swordfighting with others, earning tokens by building out cells and learning how to perform actions like megajumping. It’s all a bit confusing and not a little buggy (though it is a beta, so this is to be expected), but even simply signing up just to take a stroll around the fantastically imagined world is well worth the cost in time.

92. Turba
While chances are this’ll eventually be some sort of paid game, this entrant into a 2Bee games contest packs enough musical block puzzling in it to warrant a mention here. The gameplay involves selecting colored blocks to the dulcet tones of whatever music you choose and eliminating them before the screen fills up. Other obstacles are thrown at you along the way, and the end result is a nice puzzler to while away the time.

93. Underworld Trip
Extremely lo-fi platform browser trip to the Land of the Dead by Japan’s Nekogames. The absurdly crude graphics end up quite charming and the game’s funeral soundtrack adds the right touch of background for your stint in the land below the earth.

94. Little Wheel
A nice ten minute adventure game with a slick look to it. Very well executed and with a sense of honest simplicity that infuses the whole venture.

95. Umbrella Adventure
From HiVE, creators of the excellent free time management game Waxy’s Sushi Party now comes this gigantic and beautifully hand drawn platformer. There are some gameplay issues—for one, I don’t really want to engage in the sort of endless collectathon that got tiresome in platformers years ago—but the quality of art style and amount of free content on display here make it a game deserving of perusal.

96. Mountain Maniac
Here’s a nice, relaxing retro flash game that acts largely as a sort of pixellated quincunx board. Your lumberjack avatar hammers out big rocks that then course down the side of a mountain pachinko-style, pancaking everything in its path. Players who want everything to be skill based may object to the general amount of luck involved in the outcome, but gamers willing to give a little control over to chance should find the destructive gameplay a diversionary enjoyment.

97. Balbodro
Indonesian dev Yohanes Suyanto brings us this well crafted ball-drop game, a casual pleasure in which you draw boxes with your mouse causing colored balls to drop on squares of the same hue. Surprisingly habit-forming for such a simple concept, the maker’s creatively minimal score also helps to make Balbodro a chromatic pleasure.

98. A Mazing Monk
Though it’s a pretty short venture, A Mazing Monk displays great thought and high quality animations throughout its short stint. Created by students at DADIU and a 2010 IGF Student entrant, the game is a smart puzzler in which you seek enlightenment by rotating a Rubik’s cube-esque platform around to avoid obstacles and seek an exit.

99. The Black Forest
Pixelated’s December 2009 experimental episodic game is an attempt to put together 4 weeks of games with differing mechanics to—in the developer’s words—“create emotional experiences that are more personal and different from the ones traditional game design has to offer”. It’s happily tutorial-less, and though as I write this only the first two exploratory worlds have been released there’s enough even there to allow for inclusion on this list.

Finally, if you liked the 99 games on the list above, here’s a whole bunch of other spots that you should check out to keep up with what’s coming for free:

Bytejacker
Indie Games: The Weblog
JayIsGames
TIGSource
Game Jolt
Pixel Prospector
Reasons Why Its Worth to Be a PC Gamer
Play This Thing!
Kongregate
Newgrounds
Armor Games
Adventure Game Studio
Adult Swim Games
Yo! Arcade
The Experimental Gameplay Project
Toronto Game Jam
The RPGDX forums
Ludum Dare

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As the new year wanders along its merry path, it's time to go through the top full-length features of the past week on big sister 'art and business of gaming' site Gamasutra, plus our GameCareerGuide features for the week.

Some of the notable pieces include our mammoth reader Top Games Of The Decade, with both honorable mentions and a Top 12, plus a postmortem of neat WiiWare title Swords & Soldiers, a really smart interview with game magazine pioneer Arnie Katz, and rather more besides.

Ha ha ha:

Postmortem: Ronimo Games' Swords & Soldiers
"In this in-depth postmortem, the Dutch independent developer Ronimo Games discusses what went right -- and wrong -- in creating critically acclaimed WiiWare side-scrolling console RTS Swords & Soldiers."

Gamasutra's Top 12 Games of the Decade
"After yesterday's honorable mentions for Gamasutra's 'Game Of The Decade', as voted and commented on by hundreds of our readers, we're counting down your Top 12 games of the last ten years, from Wii Sports through The Sims all the way to the top-voted title."

Sponsored Feature: Restless Entities Never Sleep -- The Back End of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
"In this Intel-sponsored feature, part of the Visual Computing section, the technical experts behind Mythic and EA's Warhammer Online discuss the mechanics of keeping the MMO running across multiple servers and data centers."

Gamasutra's Games of the Decade: Honorable Mentions
"Ahead of tomorrow's list of Gamasutra's 'Game Of The Decade', as voted and commented on by hundreds of our readers, we're publishing some of the most-voted on titles that didn't quite make the Top 12 list, from Katamari Damacy to Vagrant Story and beyond."

Electronic Games: The Arnie Katz Interview
"In this in-depth interview, Gamasutra sits down with Arnie Katz, the co-creator in 1981 of Electronic Games magazine, the first ever magazine dedicated entirely to video games, to discuss his history in the biz and the state of game journalism today."

GCG: Crossing Ships
"In this feature, developer Alan Abram recalls the difficulties he faced in crossing over from university life to a full-time work placement year in the games industry."

GCG: Game Design Foundations: Game Concepts and Ideas
"Here, GameCareerGuide presents an extract from Game Design Foundations by Roger Pedersen, entitled Game Concepts and Ideas, which is designed to help you with kickstarting your own project."

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