[Sequels often get penalized if they don't change enough, but Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander examines BioShock 2 to find an interesting challenge -- and opportunity -- in keeping some things the same.]

The main reservation critics and fans seem to have about the largely-acclaimed BioShock 2 is that it doesn't bring much new to the table, a conservative sequel to a game that didn't really need a sequel.

Wired's Chris Kohler said the game was "stamping on well-trod ground," and Game Informer's Andrew Reiner said the dystopia of Rapture had developed "the familiarity of a local shopping mall." The innovation of Rapture as a setting was part of what made the original BioShock so exciting, and now that players are used to it, the game loses something, some say.

Another recent release, No More Heroes 2, was also said to have been unnecessary -- director Suda51 himself has said he hadn't planned on tacking a sequel on to the story of Travis Touchdown.

Why do games that "don't need sequels" get them? The answer's obvious: the game industry's more hit-driven than ever, and it's no longer enough to make a successful game -- publishers need successful franchises. This leaves two options: conceive every game as open-ended, always setting up for a sequel, or attach sequels to games that "don't need them."

Neither sounds very appealing at first blush. But the major rush to sequelize even those titles that make solid self-contained experiences could create, by necessity, a promising shift in the way developers build worlds and innovate in them.

Although fans were quick to note that that BioShock 2 didn't feel much different from its predecessor, 2K was wise with it. The original title was so strongly received that to significantly change much about it could have been disastrous. Fans loved BioShock for its unique and deeply-realized world and the signatures that populated it: Madness, decay, philosophical frenzy, and the strange energy system governed by the eerie Little Sisters and their hulking protectors.

There's even very little room to improve on the game mechanics. They can be iterated upon, as with the welcome tweak to the hacking minigame, but BioShock's gameplay is well-established and part of its appeal. So much about the game identifies it distinctly that there isn't much that can be changed in a sequel -- there are too many elements without which it wouldn't be itself. But that's not a problem: That's a success and an opportunity.

BioShock is not just a stand-alone narrative. It's a framework. Rapture isn't the story, it's the story's housing. The lamp-eyed Little Sisters and lumbering Big Daddies aren't characters, they're elements of the visual language. Thinking about a sequel for a game with such a strong signature, it becomes clear that its key elements are signposts for the experience, and not the entirety of the experience itself.

And with the framework so distinctive and so firmly-established, there's a unique chance to evolve the expectations of gamers. Where BioShock presented one character of an only loosely-known identity with an objectivist despot as adversary, BioShock 2 presents the same sort of character and an enemy adherent to a different philosophy.

What can BioShock 3 do? It can't change Rapture's look, its citizenry, its rules or even meaningfully change the experience of interacting with the world. But it can present a new quest for self and a new philosophy to test within Rapture's mad power vacuum. In other words, it has no choice but to iterate on story and theme, and this fashion of approaching game franchises will only make gaming richer as developers get better and better at it.

It will be interesting if games start to become franchises by building a strong universe and desirable mechanics first, and then yield sequels that don't overhaul those things, rewrite the design mechanics or tack on new features where none are really needed just so gamers won't complain there's nothing new.

The result will be a new kind of sequelization. BioShock 2 returned us to Rapture in the best way possible: By simply creating a new adventure therein and a new way to look at familiar things. It's perplexing to see critics penalize a game for declining to change what they best loved about it.

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

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

I never miss an issue of Future UK's PC Zone. Sadly, sometimes PC Zone misses me...and, for that matter, the state of Texas entirely, it seems. I hadn't seen an issue on sale locally for months until a single copy of the Xmas '09 edition (above) popped up at the local Micro Center.

Over in Britain, Future decided as of last year to announce its magazine stable's official ABC-audited circulation figures once a year, as opposed to once every six months like before. The move put Future in line with other game-media outlets, but it also served to hide the fact (for half a year, anyway) that every mag but Edge lost readership in 2009.

The biggest loser: Sadly, none other than PC Zone -- already the lowest-circ game mag that Future released, it took a 40-percent dive down to 11,357 copies sold per month, on average. Eesh. I think Computer Gaming World had higher circulation in 1987.

And it's really a shame, I think, because the mag's consistently the one that makes me laugh the hardest and most often. It's one thing for editors to attempt to write a funny game mag -- many try, to some extent -- but it's another to do it well, and so consistently.

It's for that reason alone that I keep spending $15 an issue on this mag, something I often feel a little silly about afterwards. I suppose Future figures that the mag would go belly-up instantly if they removed the pricey DVD from the package. I can't blame them for thinking that way, either, but as their (probably) sole fan in the U.S. Gulf Coast, I will say that I wish it were cheaper. And available a little more consistently.

(The pragmatist in me wants to say 'Why doesn't Future can the print mag if it's a money-loser and have the editors try starting a humorous game blog, like Old Man Murray or something?' However, I've a feeling that Future's advertising department already has an answer to that question for me, and it wouldn't be a cheery one.)

Regardless, after a false start last week, a great many new mags have hit my mailbox now, and here's what I think of 'em:

Edge March 2010

Cover: Crysis 2

It's almost as if Edge and Game Informer swapped covers this month -- GI (below) has the artistic-looking set piece, and Edge's got the "space marine" with guns a-blazin'. The piece inside is the sort of cover story GI would do at its best, too. It's not about Crysis 2 the game so much as Crytek the company, an outfit trying to reinvent itself as a pioneer on all platforms (not just PC) with this project.

Also worth reading: The interview with Ed Fries, one of the Xbox's founding fathers, whose current play at a big business venture is...manufacturing 3D figures of people's World of Warcraft characters. Hmm.

Game Informer March 2010

Cover: L.A. Noire

This cover story was a must-read for me on a purely personal level. Not to sound sycophantic and...well, like a game journalist, but I've always been a fan of L.A. Noire director Brendan McNamara ever since I conducted a nice, long, extended interview with him for GamePro back in 2003, just before The Getaway hit America. I remember him as a huge "ideas" man, sort of like Molyneux but perhaps without as much of a big mouth, and the feature shows me that the years haven't changed him much -- it's mainly McNamara talking about how L.A. Noire is where he's really, finally making his vision come to life, unfettered by hardware restrictions or whatnot.

I'm not sure I'm 100% ready to believe him -- he said all the same things about The Getaway eight years ago, after all -- but the feature's a really fascinating peek into his mind nonetheless.

The rest of the mag is business as usual, with nothing really grabbing me in the Connect section. One exception: a nice two-page look at the legal status of the Duke Nukem franchise, complete with tons of commentary from a real-life intellectual property attorney.

Nintendo Power March 2010

Cover: Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver

My copy of NP was both late and fairly dinged up in the mail. It's also, sadly, bereft of really hot content -- I've the feeling most Pokemon fans already know most of what's discussed in the cover piece, since the game's been out in Japan since September and is now throughly dissected by fansites on the net.

A lot of space is also taken up by a "best games of the decade" piece which is, in my mind, a bit repetitive after the "250 reasons to love Nintendo" blowout in January.

Mark Turmell's always a great interview, though.

Retro Gamer Issue 73

Cover: The ultimate hero

RG is put in the delicate position of writing a big cover piece about the Ultimate Play the Game era of UK developer Rare without having access to Tim or Chris Stamper, the company's founders and main game designers all through those years. It's a nice little piece nonetheless, if nothing new to dyed-in-the-wool retro fans.

Much neater is a 4-page chat with 87-year-old Ralph Baer about his invention Simon, one of the biggest electronic toy fads of the early '80s.

Tips & Tricks Codebook May 2010

Cover: New Super Mario Bros. Wii

T&T continues to rock its little corner of the industry. This issue devotes large amounts of space to longform strategy guides and surprisingly little to code listings -- there's 67 pages of the former and only five of the latter. I think it's a smart move, even if it means T&T can't print that "Over 7,000 Tips!" burst on the cover any longer.

The mag's multipart poster antics continue as well. This issue's packed with part one of a New SMB poster that, when matched with its partner next issue, is claimed to span over five feet across your bedroom wall. Yow!

Game Developer February 2010

Cover:Borderlands

I loved the postmortem for Trials HD in this issue for two reasons: one, I love Trials HD; two, Finnish game programmers are crazy.

GamePro Spring Special Issue

Now that Future US seems to have wound down its newsstand one-off output (I don't think I've seen any specials from them since early fall), GamePro and its $4.99 seasonal are about all that's left. This issue, sadly, appears to be entirely reprint content -- previews, reviews, and a two-page snippet from BradyGames' guide to Darksiders. Ho hum. At least the cover's pretty.

[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 (1)

['Alt Space' is a regular GameSetWatch column by critic and writer Phill Cameron, discussing the relationship between the personal computer and gaming. While attempting to keep a calm head about things, he's taken some time to have a look at the new form of DRM Ubisoft are implementing in their future releases.]

The idea of Digital Rights Management is something that's either completely avoided or at least treated with a healthy distance by the media in general. It's a difficult subject to approach, because we're here to look at the games, not the packages they come in, per say. It's analogous to complaining about an overly-strict usher in a cinema and saying that the film is bad because of it. The only problem with that is that here it's a case of the usher coming with every copy of the game. It has become part of the product, and because of that we arrive at the tricky situation of being forced to talk about it.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem. So far we've seen DRM come in various shapes and sizes, from the oft criticized Starforce and SecuROM services to the mostly accepted Steam platform from Valve. They're there, but for the most part they're mild annoyances that you can ignore, or in Steam's case, you accept and work with. Essentially, they're there to make it that bit more difficult for the pirates to crack the games, and in doing so they reduce the quality of the product the paying customer can enjoy, without being so ubiquitous as to be a constant source of frustration.

However, in the past few weeks Ubisoft have announced and implemented what I think is the most intrusive and thoroughly unacceptable form of DRM yet to be seen. Starting with The Settlers 7 and Assassin's Creed 2, all Ubisoft games will come with a 'service' that does a list of things.

Firstly, it provides, or rather defaults to, cloud saving for all your games. As an option, cloud saving is a wonderful thing, allowing you to play the same single-player game over multiple PCs, but the fact of it is that most people only play their games on the one platform, and so having cloud saving forced upon them is, at the very best, redundant. Cloud saving is only a default option though, and can be turned off in the settings. The main problem with it is when you've got no Internet, you've got no save games to load.

Don't worry though, Ubisoft have thought ahead. Another 'feature' of this service is that your games have to be online. As in, you cannot lose connection with the Ubisoft servers at all during your play time. In the case of the Settlers 7, it'll automatically save your progress when you disconnect, meaning you've just got to wait till your connection re-establishes before continuing. In the case of Assassin's Creed 2, as PC Gamer have confirmed, if you drop connection you lose all progress since the last save point. With the prevalence of dodgy wi-fi connections, less-than-reliable ISPs and even the unconfirmed stability of the Ubisoft master servers, this could mean a huge amount of frustrated PC gamers.

There's a cynical side of me that just sees all this as a 'lesser of two evils' situation. Ubisoft force an incredibly unwanted system upon us, there's a huge backlash against it, and they propose something slightly less horrendous and everyone accepts it, because, by god, it's not quite as bad as they were saying. We're pretty much beyond that opportunity though, because this system is already in their two closest releases. So either they're going to be back-tracking soon, or this service really is here to stay.

It's important to understand that this isn't the developers' fault. This is purely Ubisoft as publishers placing this down. We're not seeing this purely coming out of one of their studios; it's a universal thing, placed on every single one of their PC games. It's all about their bottom-line, and completely not about what they think of the PC gaming audience. They think piracy is hurting them, however well or mis-informed they might be about that, and this is their move to counter that.

And it might work; part of the DRM is that the online connection is required because they're not shipping the entire game with the disc; part of the code is supplied by their servers, which is the reason for the constant online connection. The game disconnects when you do because it simply can't run without being online. It's not like it makes everything all right, but at least there's a reason for it.

The problem is, it's not a reason that we, as consumers, can appreciate or even notice. It's not there for our protection, it's there to stop people who aren't us (the paying customers), from getting their hands on the game. All we know is that we've shelled out money for something that's, at best, a dodgy piece of software. It's completely unrealistic to believe that it's going to be anything other than that.

Recently, PC Gamer managed to have a talk with Ubisoft about the technology. They claim that 'The real idea is that if you offer a game that is better when you buy it, then people will actually buy it. We wouldn't have built it if we thought that it was really going to piss off our customers.' While it might be tempting to call them naive or blindly optimistic, the base theory there is sound; if you offer a better service than the pirates, you'll have more people buying the game. The problem is that here, with Assassin's Creed 2, we're not getting a better game when we buy.

There's an interesting flip-side to this. With Command & Conquer 4, EA are implementing a system that's similar in effect to what Ubisoft is trying to implement. In a recent interview with GameSpot, one of the lead developers of the game, Samuel Bass, stated 'As a nice side effect, since C&C4 requires players to be online all the time in order to prevent cheating, we'll be shipping without any form of DRM.' It's easy to take that completely out of context and laugh at the doublethink of the statement, but EA are actually doing something somewhat clever with this.

With C&C 4, they'll be introducing a persistent ranking system that unlocks units and other goodies that will allow you to play the game with ever widening strategies and tactics. Essentially, the game has to be online all the time so that it can give you new stuff to play with. It's essentially turning C&C 4 into a sort of pseudo-MMO that allows it to sneak under the radar of all those Angry Internet Men who get so worked up about DRM. It's not like you'd complain that World of Warcraft requires a constant internet connection, is it?

What I'm trying to get at is that this is a carrot/stick scenario. Ubisoft is whacking us with a pretty huge stick, while offering us no carrot to munch on to forget about the pain. Cloud saving is not even close to approaching a reward for the punishment of being constantly online. It's a cheap trick to try and make us accept that we have to be connected at all time.

Sure, there might be the very, very occasional time when you want to play your game on another PC, or perhaps your hard drive is wiped and your saves are rescued by the ever-vigilant DRM, but people aren't going to care. All they'll know is that the game they paid money for is stopping them from enjoying themselves because someone's using the microwave again. Or maybe your cat got frisky with your network cable.

To compete with the pirates, publishers need to embrace the customers rather than punishing them. The main problem that they face at the moment is that the service offered by the pirates supersedes the service they themselves provide. When the pirates can provide a game completely DRM free near instantaneously, the developers and publishers need to make it so that the customer gets a better service because of that.

Things like regularly updating your game are a start, even something like Bioware did with the recent MassEffect 2, where paying customers got access to two pieces of content just for buying the game is a step in the right direction. Burdening your players with cumbersome pieces of software isn't going to endear you to them. It's just going to make them more likely to go for the inevitable pirated version, free of mandated internet connection and all the malware that DRM is so often seen as.

[Phill Cameron has begged work off multiple different sources, including the mighty Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the wonderful Resolution Magazine, and the ever stalwart Reticule. You can contact him here, and follow him on Twitter here.]

Posted by Phill Cameron at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[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 delights in this edition include a pair of Gamma IV showcase entries, a clever puzzle platformer with just one level to play, a single-button arcade game created in the span of a week, and a real-time strategy game that features both marines and zombies in the same package.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Attack of the Paper Zombies' (Alex Vostrov, freeware)
"Attack of the Paper Zombies sees a small group of marines going it alone against a horde of the undead. Each level contains a number of enemy hives from where the bad guys spawn, and the job is to fight your way through the masses, take down the hives and capture the points, securing the area."

Game Pick: 'This is the Only Level Too' (John Cooney, browser)
"This is the Only Level Too is the sequel to a puzzle platformer released by jmtb02 late last year, featuring a new set of thirty stages to beat and more achievements to unlock. The objective here is to guide a blue elephant towards the exit pipe safely, but in order to achieve that you would first have to unlock the door which blocks your path to freedom."

Game Pick: 'Pax Britannica' (No Fun Games, freeware)
"Pax Britannica is a hotseat multiplayer RTS game created for the Gamma IV competition, in which up to four players can command their own factory ships and send out fighters, bombers and frigates to attack their opponents' armadas. The type of craft manufactured and shipped out is dependent on how long you hold down the assigned button before letting it go."

Game Pick: 'Girlfriend vs Boyfriend' (Shaun Pauley, freeware)
"In Girlfriend vs Boyfriend you play as the guilty partner who had just been caught ogling at another woman, and as a result of this your other half will try to chase you down and punish you for committing the act of unfaithfulness in her presence. Objects on the roadside will be thrown at you to hamper your escape, but you can knock these things away at the cost of stopping for a short moment for your girlfriend to catch up with you."

Game Pick: 'Wavespark' (Nathan McCoy, freeware)
"Wavespark is a simple one-button action game created by Nathan as part of his weekly game release initiative, where your objective can be anything from reaching checkpoints to scoring bonuses depending on which game mode was chosen by the player."

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

Eastern Mind is convinced that One Million Ton Bara Bara -- or Patchwork Heroes, as it will be called when it releases in the U.S. this spring -- is "possibly one of the most interesting games to appear this year" and just as important as other big Sony-published PSP titles like Loco Roco and Patapon.

The site even published a great introduction to the game with lots of screenshots (similar to its other wonderful previews for interesting PSP imports like My Summer Holiday and Zettai Zetsumei Toshi 3), story details, and a run-through of four different levels.

Despite its rave impressions for Patchwork Heroes, Eastern Mind noticed a lack of enthusiasm from North Americans and Europeans for the game. To combat its depression over Western audiences ignoring such a great title, the site produced a cute comic about the upcoming U.S./Europe release using graphics from the game (best viewed by hitting pause on the slideshow, then hitting the arrows).

Oh, and while you're reading about Patchwork Heroes, check out this fantastic cover art for the game's 30-song soundtrack -- with music composed by Hideki Sakamoto -- releasing in Japan on March 24th.

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

Bringing its all-terrain jet hover bikes to space, 989 Studios planned a fourth entry to its Jet Moto series on the PS1 during the late 90s. Jet Moto 2124 had racers tearing across tracks set on Mars colonies and other futuristic settings with new features like slingshot grapples, trampolines and teleporters.

The game never made it to stores for a number of reasons including lackluster reviews/sales for Jet Moto 3, a new company president that didn't see the value in a fourth Jet Moto, and needed changes that required another 6 months of work. Thankfully, PlayStation Museum was able to gather some of Jet Moto 2124's developers for details on the project and a postmortem.

Along with offering insight on Jet Moto 2124 development process, design influences (e.g. Akira), and what went right/wrong with the project, PSM's article discusses contributions from Syd Mead, the famous industrial designer who worked on such film projects as Blade Runner, Aliens, and Tron. You can several pieces of concept art of the game's stages and bikes after the break.

PSM also posted a great Jet Moto 3 article with comments from 989 Studios's former president Kelly Flock and an interview with former programmer on the project (under developer Pacific Coast Power and Light) Ming Lee, the latter of which includes info on the game's engine and other technical details.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In our latest employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from ArenaNet, Sucker Punch and more.

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

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

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

ArenaNet: International Project Manager
"ArenaNet is seeking to hire an International Project Manager for a job opening on the International Product Team. The primary function of the International Project Manager is to manage and coordinate international projects for the ArenaNet Business team and to act as a primary contact for Asian partners. Other areas of responsibility include managing product localization, market research and data analysis."

Konami Digital Entertainment: Technical Artist
"Tencent Boston is a premier game development studio led by industry veterans that are driving the creation of world class online games for a global audience. We are a division of Tencent Inc., one of the largest internet companies in China. For more than 400 million people Tencent is the internet encompassing portal, shopping, community and entertainment services. We are right in the middle of one of the most dynamic and fast growing game markets in the world and we are looking for outstanding individuals with passion, talent and a team focused mindset."

Ready At Dawn Studios: Lighting Artist
"Successful candidates are able to demonstrate both a strong aesthetic sense for lighting, as well as understanding of how to effectively lead the player through real-time environments and gameplay scenarios. The lighting artist is expected to research and adapt to new techniques as they emerge and to propose lighting related improvements to our general art pipeline and proprietary tools and engine technology."

Sucker Punch Productions: Studio Recruiter
"Do you have experience with particle editing in a 3D package or in a 3D engine? Are you ready to bring that ability to execute outstanding FX to our games? Strong sense of dramatic FX and understanding of how to recreate them in a particle editor required. Texture skills required."

Volition: Experienced Project Manager
"Volition, Inc., a video game studio located in Champaign, Illinois, is seeking an experienced Project Manager to manage various areas of development on one of their exciting game teams. Volition is an established game development studio owned by THQ, Inc. and has created the Saints Row, Red Faction, and FreeSpace franchises."

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

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In the latest Road to the IGF interview with 2010 Independent Games Festival finalists, we speak with designer Tyler Glaiel and artist Jon Schubbe about Closure, a finalist in both the Excellence in Audio and Technical Excellence categories.]

Closure, first introduced in a Flash version, is a puzzler that challenges a very basic principle of gaming: That light is always good and darkness is always bad. In Closure, that which is illuminated exists, and that which isn't, doesn't, producing no end of brain-bending environments.

Here, programmer, designer, producer and director Tyler Glaiel and artist Jon Schubbe discuss their design and inspirations -- and the upcoming expanded version of the game's subtly sinister undertones.

What is your background in making games?

Tyler: I've been interested in game development pretty much my whole life. When I was young, I used to draw levels for Mario and Sonic on big sheets of paper and pretend to play through them in my mind, and thought, "man I wish I was the one who designed these games, cause I have so many ideas".

I got to play around with actually making a game when I was 11 (using Flash 4, titled "Pigeon Pooper"), and have been practicing and evolving my skills ever since.

Jon: One of the first games I made was an RPG Maker game called Book of Miseries and Mysteries (Copyright 2002 Jon Schubbe Inc) and from then on, I've been making personal Flash animations and games for Newgrounds.com in my spare time.

What development tools did you use?

Tyler: I use flash all the time for prototypes and web games. The new version of Closure is written in C++ (XCode on the Mac, Visual c++ Express on Windows). And I'm powered by Coffee™.

Jon: Adobe products get me by.

How long did you work on the game?

Tyler: The Flash prototype took two months to make. Following that, we've been working on the new version for about nine months so far. There is still a year or more to go to finish it up, and business stuff can move pretty slowly at times.

What gave you the inspiration to do a game that worked with light and dark contrasts, and how did you come up with the main concept?

Tyler: In most games that have "dark levels", there is a very distinct separation between darkness and light. It's usually "Dark = Bad, Light = Good", or in stealth games, it's flipped.

I hate that dumb division between the two, so this game sorta plays with how, in some situations, you need the light, and in others it just gets in the way. The concept was just an idea that popped into my head during brainstorming.

One thing I noticed about it when I played it was the odd little touches that gave the world in-game more of a sense of place, rather than simply being a puzzle-oriented geometric landscape. Can you talk about that, and why were there mailboxes?

Jon: Tyler's past puzzle games have mostly been very simple, abstract, graphic design-looking. For the Flash version of the game, I came in to animate a character and draw environment assets to enhance the experience and give the game a vague storyline.

Mailboxes are used to represent the fact that you are on a road outside people's homes, and eventually leading you into a forest. In our latest new version, being created from the ground up, I am animating and drawing all new graphics for the new game.

I will also be essentially decorating the landscape this time, creating a whole new abstract appearance for the new game, as opposed to the old geometric pattern in the Flash game.

The title is very distinct. In what ways does it relate to the game concept, and did you mean to give the experience of playing it such a subtly sinister overtone?

Tyler: The word "Closure" means about 500 different things. The way to advance through levels is to go through a door (closing and opening a door), and the storyline and plot deals with closure to an extent, but the main reason the title was picked was because of the gameplay.

I read Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics", and he had a chapter on "closure", and about how it's how the brain connects images together, or how if you see two parts of a bridge obscured (by darkness, per say), your brain connects those images together.

He had a panel in that chapter where he wondered if stuff he couldn't see disappeared (behind him), and the reason the brain actually remembers that there is something there is through the process of "closure". I was like, whoa, that fits my game, except I'm forcing people to ignore that instinct.

That's where the name comes from (and is a way more interesting story than where the idea came from, but everyone always cares more about the idea's inspiration for some reason).

It's also funny, cause the word can mean so many different things, the number of puns that have come about during it's development, like "foreClosure", "bringing closure to Closure", and others too.

Jon: Blair Herter from X-Play: "These two guys were in a relationship at one point and 'Closure' is what they didn't have have in their relationship."

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

Jon: The project IS being started over again! The new version of the game is the one that was entered into the IGF! From the old one, I am including lots of hi-def artwork and smoother animation for loads of new levels with new mechanics and sound.

Tyler: Yeah, the Flash version had a lot wrong with it. I could go over it in super detail everything that went wrong, but it would take PAGES. Luckily, since only two months were invested in it, it was completely painless to just start from scratch for the big version.

No more Flash (it's slow), HD so there's more room for designing interesting levels and creating interesting mood and plot, less "guesswork" puzzles and more "thinking" puzzles, less lag, and more mechanics to allow for more variety of puzzles without resorting to some of the cheap tricks theFflash one did to extend the game. Physics, water, spotlights, and more. It's kinda nice to work off of a base project like that that got a ton of feedback.

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

Tyler: There were a lot of levels I had to trash, and a couple stuff in the Flash version that just wasn't an interesting enough mechanic to redo in the new version. We've yet to implement our riskiest idea though, so stuff remains to be seen.

Jon: As far as graphics go, I'm experimenting with different styles of black and white, keeping the style of the atmosphere as close as possible to the first game, while improving it vastly. Some things that don't work at all with the atmosphere is sometimes my cartoony drawing style to things gets in the way.

I'm keeping the drawings right on the edge of cartoony and creepy to create a unique look for the limited black and white palette of the game.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you particularly enjoyed?

Tyler: I've played Super Meat Boy, a little bit of Rocketbirds' demo, Star Guard, Today I Die, Tuning, and a bunch of the student winners too (Puzzle Bloom, Continuity, and Spectre). Super Meat Boy is great, so is Today I Die and Tuning, and I'm really excited for this year's selection, since there's a ton on the list I want to try, like Vessel and Monaco.

Jon: Of course! Meat Boy's Flash version was a lot of fun because I love masochistic platforming. Shank is a fun game with sweet combos and I like the comic book ink-shaded look to it. It complements the over-the-top action.

I've also played Tuning and Today I Die, which are fantastic abstract experiences compared to your every day 'video games'. I've also played Puzzle Bloom in the Student Showcase, and it was a very fun and challenging experience.

Spectre is another I've played from the Student Showcase and it has a cool unique art direction and way of storytelling. Heroes of Newerth I haven't played, but I have played DotA, a WarCraft III mod that HoN was based off, so I could probably predict that game is amazing too.

What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?

Tyler: It is great. Two years ago all I knew about the indie scene was Gish, Alien Hominid, and Castle Crashers. Then I got involved in it a little (after realizing that what I've been doing for so long IS indie development), and it's been one hell of a ride since then.

It's crazy the people I've met and the places I've been since then, and it doesn't look to be getting stale any time soon.

Jon: I think it's great! There's a lot of dispute over the definition of 'indie' but I think people know deep down that combining the various personal situations people are in as they make the game, and the final product, they can judge whether or not it is 'indie' by intuition for themselves.

[Previous 'Road To The IGF' interview subjects have included Enviro-Bear 2000 developer Justin Smith, Rocketbirds: Revolution's co-creators Sian Yue Tan and Teck Lee Tan, Vessel co-creator John Krajewski, Trauma creator Krystian Majewski, Super Meat Boy co-creators Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, Sidhe's Mario Wynands, who worked on Shatter, Daniel Benmergui, creator of Today I Die, Klei Entertainment's Jamie Cheng, executive producer on Shank, Star Guard creator Loren Schmidt, Miegakure developer Marc Ten Bosch, Joe Danger creator Hello Games, and Limbo partner Dino Patti.]

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

Austin chip music show Datapop returns for a two-day party during SXSW week -- March 16th and 17th -- with 12 international 8-bit acts, many of which we've featured here before: Anamanaguchi, Bit Shifter, 8BK-ok, Henry Homesweet, IAYD, Je Deviens DJ en 3 Jours, Nullsleep, Random, Sabrepulse, Sievert, Starscream, and Trash 80.

Flying all those musicians (and a few visual artists as well) from their U.S. hometowns, UK, France, Stockholm, and Sweden will be expensive, so organizers are hoping to raise $3,000 to cover travel costs through Kickstarter. So, far, they've received $2,452 in pledges with only four days left to go, so they're almost there!

As no Kickstarter fundraiser is complete without incentives, donators will receive exclusive MP3 compilations (with rare/classic songs from past and present Datapop artists), Datapop 2010 VIP access, shirts, drink tickets, movie tickets to the Alamo Drafthouse, LSDJ .sav files from Datapop artists, and more depending on your pledge amount.

You can watch a couple videos of Nullsleep and Bit Shifter performing at last year's Datapop after the break:

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

In demonstrating his level editor for Monaco, Pocketwatch Games's top-down co-op stealth game, indie developer Andy Schatz share a startling sequence of events that might occur at GDC should Super Meat Boy win this year's Seumas McNally Grand Prize at IGF 2010 (a prize that four other titles, including Monaco, are in consideration for).

The above time lapse video shows Schatz re-creating a floor from the Moscone Center, GDC's home, with Monaco's's stage editor, then kicking off a heist with four disgruntled and scheming thieves. The ending, however, is bloody and violent; you might want to bring a bullet-proof vest to GDC this year! (disclaimer: organizers don't actually expect a firefight to break out at the show)

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

As the launch of Pendleton Ward's Adventure Time with Finn and Jake animated series on Cartoon Network nears, Fredarator Studios has been building up hype for the offbeat cartoon by posting production artwork and fanart on its Tumblr blog.

In this piece submitted by pixel artist Alex Campos, Adventure Time's stars -- Jake, Finn, Princess Bubblegum, Ice King, Rainicorn, and others -- are dropped into the title screen of Super Mario Bros. 2, itself a bizarre entry for the platformer series. Now someone needs to make a ROM hack of Doki Doki Panic with Adventure Time characters.

If you've somehow managed to not watch Adventure Time in the past four years, I've included the original animated short after the break. Cartoon Network expects to launch the series this April.

[Via .tiff]

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

[Between feeding chickens and making games, Gas Powered Games' Chris Taylor has been talking to our own Kris Graft about the "go ask mom and dad" relationship between independent game studios and major publishers.]

Chris Taylor has a farm. It's not a big farm, but on that farm he has chickens and horse that he tends to daily. The animals rely on him for food, shelter, and for a few lucky chickens, cuddling - sometimes. The animals are completely domesticated and dependent on handouts.

In some ways, they're a lot like so-called "independent" game studios.

With over two decades in the game industry, Taylor has seen a lot. As creative director and co-founder of independent Redmond, WA-based Gas Powered Games, home of titles like Dungeon Siege, Demigod and Supreme Commander, he has experienced the hardship and toil along with the success.

Now, in the midst of a new project, Taylor wants to remind himself what it means to be independent: to have control of his destiny - to fetch his own chicken feed. He asks, "If you have the freedom that you wouldn't have if you were an internal studio or culture, then why not take advantage of that?" It's a question that he's apparently been asking himself.

"We [independent studios] don't have to go to a committee or a group of executives or people that are going to run a competitive analysis or a market study. I can go from my gut," he says, "which is 22 years in the business, believe it or not, since May 1998, and I can decide if I want to make something. And I can just go ahead and make it."

Taylor says that independent studios often don't leverage their independence in creative or business areas as much as they could, or should. His own GPG has been guilty of under-utilizing the ability to do essentially whatever the hell it wants.

"What we often see, especially being an independent these last 20 years, is that we'd keep our concepts quiet, we wouldn't tell anyone, we'd go out and talk to the publishers, and that might mean 10 or 20 publishers at best, and they decide whether they like the concept or not," he says.

If no publishers bite, then there's no funding, and then there's the common mindset for a studio that it's best just to ditch the idea it was working on. "So even though we were an independent studio, or the industry was full of independent studios, there was still this 'go ask mom and dad' mentality to it, which to me doesn't really sound independent," Taylor says.

When mom and dad said "no" to 2007's original Supreme Commander, GPG found itself in a position where it could have either given up or soldier on. Before THQ decided to publish the game, another publisher dropped the title while it was in development.

Taylor and GPG decided to take its fate into its own hands. "We went and got a magazine cover. We moved ahead and said 'We're making this game.'" says Taylor. That August 2005 PC Gamer magazine cover -- which declared that the creator of Total Annihilation was returning to change the face of the real-time strategy genre once again -- created new energy around Supreme Commander. THQ picked it up.

Taylor is following his own advice with Chris Taylor's Kings and Castles, which the studio announced just prior to the upcoming release of this March's Supreme Commander 2. He's not keeping Kings and Castles a secret. It's still very early in development, there are no publishing or distribution deals as of yet, but it's already out there. GPG last week launched a video blog that will be updated weekly that gives fans a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Kings and Castles.

The video racked up 20,500 hits in its first day-and-a-half. "That says to me, wow, the world really cares ... which means we need to continue," says Taylor. A video blog can grab attention from not only fans, but also business partners. And, Taylor says, it's fun to make vlogs. "This business is hard, there's resistance pushing you back, and you have to bring that storm and go forward. How do you do that? You capture human energy."

Although there are important pieces to the puzzle missing, GPG knows where it wants to go with Kings and Castles. It's targeted at PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 for digital distribution, and will sell at brick-and-mortar retail and online retail for a global release.

But the studio is still planning on how it will reach those objectives. GPG is considering possible distribution and publishing partners for worldwide territories, as well as attracting funding partners. Make no mistake - being independent also means finding business partners on your own, and GPG hasn't forgotten that.

It's all part of Taylor's renewed mindset on the idea of independence, the realization that in many ways, independent studios should embrace their ability to take calculated risks instead of playing it "safe" all the time, because in reality, safety is a bit of a myth anyway.

"We've always been kind of been like that [independent-minded], but it's always been kind of halfway. We decided ourselves that we'd make Dungeon Siege, we decided to make Supreme Commander, we did Demigod. We've always been like this," explains Taylor.

But halfway isn't enough. Maximizing the ability to make one's own decisions can be the difference between being the farmer and being the livestock. "Independent developers have the ability to maneuver. Think of us as the little ship that gets to maneuver around the big ships. If we don't exercise that ability to maneuver, then we're just giving up on a major strength."

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

Renown DJ Ferry Corsten and developer Virtual Fairground (Club Galactik) have partnered to create Pulse, a new rhythm game for iPhone and PC in which you can play and compose dance tracks. It will also feature seven new music tracks produced by Corsten exclusively for the music title.

In Pulse, players tap the screen (or keyboard) to the beat of the music to reach song samples, play notes to those samples, then integrate those samples into their song. Depending on how closely gamers follow the beat, they'll be able to access more elaborate samples and layer them with their track.

The iPhone version is expected to come out on March 27th, while the release date for Pulse's PC edition, which will include additional online cooperative and versus multiplayer modes, is still unannounced. Both versions will include a feature that allows players to post their scores to Twitter and Facebook.

"I was trying to combine my music and games for quite some time," says Ferry Corsten. "Then I met the guys from Virtual Fairground who showed me a demo of Pulse. With my experience and their game design skills we have been able to shape Pulse into both a great game and something that makes you feel like a DJ. I can't wait to see Pulse in the hands of players."

Hopefully, this will turn out better than that awful horror movie with the same name that came out several years ago. I can't believe I paid money to see that.

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

[Once again, IGF download partner Direct2Drive is awarding $10,000 to a neat indie title at the Independent Games Festival awards in a couple of weeks time, and here's the rundown on the titles competing for the D2D Vision Award - including a couple of games that weren't Main Competition finalists but are still awesome titles.]

Independent Games Festival organizers and sponsor Direct2Drive have announced the finalists for the D2D Vision Award, with games including HurricaneX2 and Nyxquest competing for a $10,000 cash prize at the IGF Awards on March 11.

Digital game distribution site Direct2Drive, the event's official download partner, set up the Vision Award in 2009 to "honor independent developers whose games present the new ideas and concepts that will help spark innovation in gaming."

The winner, picked from the five finalists -- all indie games from the more than 300 IGF main competition entries -- will be presented live on stage by IGN on-air personality Jessica Chobot at the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival Awards.

The awards themselves take place on Thursday, March 11 during the 2010 Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. The winning team will receive a $10,000 prize from Direct2Drive.

The five finalists for the Direct2Drive Vision Award for this year are:

- HurricaneX2, a 3D martial arts brawler from You Yun Tech.
- Joe Danger, a build-it-yourself stuntman simulator from Hello Games.
- Nyxquest: Kindred Spirits, from Over The Top Games, which challenges players to fly, aim and shoot through a world inspired by Greek myths.
- Super Meat Boy, a platform game from Team Meat starring a lovable cube of meat who must race through dangerous obstacles to save his girlfriend.
- Max and the Magic Marker, a puzzle platform game from Press Play with a unique “magic marker” drawing mechanic.

More information about the finalists can be found on Direct2Drive’s D2D Vision Award website, and the digital distribution site has concurrently released a "Best of Indie" PC game bundle of IGF nominees and winners from previous years.

That bundle, released today and only available until March 12, includes ten games, including Osmos, Machinarium, Cogs, Braid, and many more, and is priced at $29.95 -- a savings of more than 75 percent relative to buying the games individually.

"The future of gaming hinges on the ability for developers to constantly innovate and entertain players of all types," said Direct2Drive digital content VP Sutton Trout in a statement. "Indie developers are continuously generating the new ideas and concepts that will help drive gaming forward. The Vision Award is one of the ways for us to recognize the community and these five incredible games."

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dragon Quest's "Overture" is instantly recognizable to almost anyone with any familiarity with the franchise, as it's used prominently in dozens of main series games and spin-offs starting with the very first release. There's even a Dragon Quest Best Dance Mix album that you can grab with a Trance remix version of the music!

In a recent interview with Famitsu translated by 1UP, Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama, who was already a celebrity in Japan for his TV/film work long before he began working on video games, reflected on his 24-year history with the series and revealed that he came up with the melody for the iconic overture in just five minutes.

"It took about five minutes between getting struck with the idea and coming up with the melody [for the overture]," Sugiyama said. "People get surprised when I say I did it in five minutes, but I'd like to think I did it because I had fifty-odd years of living experience up to that point. You could say it really took me fifty years and five minutes."

The veteran composer also shared an interesting story on how Enix initially sought him out to work on its game soundtracks:

"I've always liked video games, and long ago I played a game called Morita Shogi which Enix released on the PC-8801. I wrote down my impressions of it in the little questionnaire postcard in the box, and my family sent it back to them without me realizing it.

Whoever received the note recognized my name and gave me a phone call asking if I could compose some music for them. I said yes, and that was how I began making game music."

See? There really was a point to filling out those silly questionnaire cards that came with your games. You could've been a renown video game composer if only you'd sent yours in!

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

['Battle Klaxon' is a monthly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This month: cruel-to-be-kind indie platformer VVVVVV.]

This time last year the very hippest of the games industry's hip were trying to keep their cool while getting their asses handed to them by indie platformer Spelunky. Part masterpiece, part disasterpiece, Spelunky was and is a game about things going wrong. It's intricately designed to allow you to screw up in a thousand and one forehead-slapping ways, at which point it dumps you all the way back to the start. This is a game so mean that players discover by themselves that the damsel in distress is a viable projectile for fending off monsters.

Now? Now it's the year of our Lord 2010, and we have a new indie platformer with a retro aesthetic and rockin' chiptunes to enjoy. It's called VVVVVV. Like Spelunky, it's mean as a feverish mother in law and utterly brilliant, but unlike Spelunky VVVVVV isn't about hiding from death. It's about turning and facing it. You're no longer Spelunky's cautious, cute, chibi Indiana Jones, but the bold Captain Viridian.

Spelunky was a tease. It had you jumping at shadows and ducking danger, and it giggled as you fumbled with its fat mass of button-presses and items, it snorted every time you accidentally fumbled your weapon into a snakepit. VVVVVV's more zen than that. In VVVVVV you know you're going to die, as all heroes must, and you know you're going to do it with your head held high and no more than three keys on your keyboard.

Pay attention! This could be the best $15 you spend all month.

Here's Captain Verdigris' bad situation: his ship has mysteriously marooned itself in a strange new dimension, and the rest of his lovely crew (Verdigris, Victoria, Vermilion, Vitellary and the lovely Violet) have been scattered all around it. Your mission is ONE: To rescue and re-unite your dear crew. TWO: To explore this odd place. THREE: To escape it. All of them pretty tall orders for a little guy who can't even jump.

But wait! What Captain Verdigris can do in this dimension is flip gravity. Assuming his feet are on solid ground, the tap of a button causes him to either instantly fall up to the ceiling or back down to the floor. He can also move left and right, but that's it. In terms of acrobatic platforming capabilities that puts Verdigris somewhere between Miner Willy, Q*bert and a balloon charged with static electricity. Yet one of the reasons VVVVVV is worth playing is how its potent size and variety blooms out of this single, simple mechanic.

In short, it plays a lot like the final exam of a star pupil at Games Development Academy. You imagine developer Terry Cavanagh swaggering up to his desk, tiny black leather jacket slung over his shoulder, flipping his test paper over with a stroke of his hand. Eyes dusted with stories and sex scan the page.

"Design a platformer where the player is restricted to three actions: Moving left, moving right, and a third ability of your choice which is NOT jumping."

Cavanagh swivels his head and spits as he reads. What is this? This is nothing.

He pulls the chair back from the desk and sits in one smooth motion.

The world of VVVVVV is divided into little more than hundreds of perfectly square rooms. Play works like this: You, the player, walk into a room, surveying it with a pro gravity-flipper's trained eye. You probably smirk at the room's irreverant name which can always be found at the bottom of the screen. The solution of how to cross these rooms is sometimes obvious, sometimes unclear, and sometimes obvious yet such an unbelievable dick that you start groaning before you've even made your first attempt.

Yet soon you've beaten the room, you're stood at the other side of it and then you're eagerly sliding into the next one, which will also contain an idea, a challenge, and a funny name. In VVVVVV Terry Cavanagh's created something that plays like a chocolate box of game developer creativity. You're not struggling through levels, you're popping ideas into your mouth one after another.

The other interesting thing about VVVVVV is, as I mentioned before, how it treats death. Kieron Gillen beat me to most of this when he talked about the game on Rock Paper Shotgun, so I'll paraphrase. VVVVVV strips the punishment from death. You only ever get dumped as far back as the beginning of each room, and this reset happens quicker than it takes you to speak even the most unimaginative of swearwords. The result is that VVVVVV's trickier rooms play like a strange gaming sweatlodge where the only things that exist are you, death and this distant opportunity for success.

There are rooms in this game where you can and will die more than a hundred times before you triumph, and that's stressful, almost hateful, but never, ever tedious. You willingly lock yourself into this recursive loop of trying and failing, inching your way closer and closer to success, catharsis, release and (more literally) the other side of the room. Every room a tiny cycle of life.

This peaks in one entirely optional chamber known as Veni, Vidi, Vici. I won't spoil it. If you're interested, Kieron writes a great deal about it in the above link. What I'll say instead is this: VVVVVV's take on death is actually counterpoint to Demon's Souls, and games developers should be taking onboard the philosophies of both games.

Demon's Souls is an action game that won acclaim from gamers and journalists alike for possessing the cast-iron balls required to force the player to risk everything, from experience points to progress to items. The fact that these things were always at stake when you played turned a cruel game into a riveting one. It didn't matter if you were backtracking and had seen the level before, or were stronger than the enemies surrounding you, or didn't find the design of whatever segment of level you were in particularly interesting, because always you had this spectre of death peering over your shoulder. The game played for keeps.

VVVVVV is the exact opposite. It scythes the backtracking, boredom and fear of loss from the action experience, allowing players to exist forever in the scorching heat of insurmountable challenges, death-defying jumps and split-second dodges, and balances the shortened playthrough time by adding secrets, trophies and time-trials.

Both are forms of development which speak the same message: difficulty does not have to be a tiring, audience-limiting affair. To think of it as such is a failure of imagination and creativity, as nonsensical as assuming a game can't be gripping if it's easy.

A demo of VVVVVV can be found right here, alongside an option to buy the game for either PC or Mac.

You know, if you like it.

(You'll like it.)

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway, as quinns108 on Twitter or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

Posted by Quintin Smith at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Remember that collection of "videogame minimalism" artwork by SCEE's Ashley Browning that simplified an assortment of game character faces? Capcom is now offering several of the Street Fighter characters (Ryu, E. Honda, Blanka, and Sagat) as iPhone covers given out as preorder bonuses for Super Street Fighter IV in Europe.

European gamers without an iPhone can instead opt to receive one of four limited edition Street Fighter shirts modeled after in-game outfits (Guile and Ryu shown above) or a downloadable pack of alternative "Super Classic Costumes" (e.g. Fei Long has a Green Hornet outfit, Blank wears a pink Dan dogi). It's a shame there's no minimalist Vega iPhone cover!

[Via Joystiq]

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

To honor the super expensive but much-salivated-over Neo Geo console's 20th anniversary, SNK Playmore has posted a Neo Geo Museum site to remember the 24-bit AES/MVS. Along with a retrospective article taken from the latest issue of Japan's Arcadia Magazine, NGM offers a full listing of every Neo Geo release and a small collection of Japanese advertisements (a couple featuring mysterious mascot G-Mantle!).

The real highlight for me, though, is the selection of shirts printed for the anniversary; the neat tee above features a shot of an MVS machine on the front and a listing of all the titles sold for it on the back. There's also a totally nerdy shirt with a famous Fatal Fury misprint from Gamest magazine that called the game 飢餓伝説 (Legend of Starvation) instead of 餓狼伝説 (Legend of the Hungry Wolf).

Neo Geo Museum is available in both English and Japanese, so you can still enjoy the site even if you don't understand the in-joke t-shirts!

[Via Andriasang]

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

Painter Jeremy Tinder has shared another piece from Giant Robot SF's returning video game-themed art exhibit. While his last work offered a totem pole re-imagining of Super Mario Bros.'s cast, this watercolor twists a familiar Gauntlet phrase in a new (and very depressing) way. Times have not been good for Blue Wizard.

The third annual Game Over exhibit kicks off at San Francisco's Giant Robot store and gallery this March 12th, the same week as the 2010 Game Developers Conference -- it's just a short drive from the Moscone Center, too!

[Via Gamefreaks]

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

[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham looks at Bayonetta, Mulholland Drive and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, among other notables.]

Eric Swain has continued his tireless efforts of scouring the video game blogosphere for our collective benefit. In a yin-yang pairing, The Game Overthinker proudly proclaims “I heart Bayonetta”, while Gunthera1 writes at The Borderhouse after having played the demo of the game with some friends and concludes that “the game is the perfect visual example of male gaze”.

Swain also had a reaction to the Final Fantasy VIII “Squall's Dead” theory, which he and I encountered for the first time this week, comparing the idea to a similar reading of Mulholland Drive. (Confession time: I’ve never seen Mulholland Drive.) Swain also asked this week, ‘Where is the last 1/3^rd of Brutal Legend?’

Elsewhere, G. Christopher Williams brings his best game this week with two pieces at PopMatter’s Moving Pixels blog; “Is Suda51 the Alfred Hitchcock of Video Games?” as well as ‘How games might challenge the tyranny of authorship.’

Jim Rossignol had a remarkably busy week, announcing his follow-up book to 2008’s This Gaming Life. I for one can’t wait for the as-yet untitled work. Rossignol also talked about online communities, the site Rock Paper Shotgun as a community, including a bit about how the infamous Sunday Papers regular feature ties into and reinforces the community.

Kirk Hamilton finds out what it would be like “If my games could talk”, with important implications for any backlog of games.

With Bioshock 2 and other sequels having now had time to arrive and settle, sequels in general became a hot topic this week -- with both Mitch Krpata and Michael Abbott talking about the proclivity of the industry towards game sequels. Krpata’s piece, ‘Why we need sequels’, appeared just hours before Michael Abbott’s ‘Sequel 101’, so you’d be forgiven for thinking they were working from the same playbook. As always, great minds think alike.

In ‘On my shoulder whispering’, The Brainy Gamer's Abbott begins with an exploration of the classical roots of modern tales of heroism and conflict, and ends up talking about how Bioshock 2 resonated with him on the themes of fatherhood.

David Carlton has been thinking about the changing dynamic that spoilers have with respect to shorter, independent games. It made me rethink my own policy, as it is something that I wrote about earlier this week for my own online diary/blog.

In other notable blog posts, Chris Livingston wrote about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat this week, recounting an exciting dynamic and emergent story. I actually had a very similar experience at a similar point in the game, having been playing it this week myself (and it is glorious).

Mike Schiller wrote about ‘Video games & art as inspired by Autechre’ - electronic music versus electronic interaction.

Jamin Brophy-Warren -- former WSJ-er and editor of Killscreen Magazine -- wrote at the excellent Killscreen on Good blog about how games are one of the worst media industries for accessibility.

Finally, I want to know when The Atlantic gained such a stable of excellent bloggers that talk about video games. This week A. Serwer wrote an entry called ‘Welcome To Rapture’ and Evan Narcisse hit a homerun with “Wrex in Effect, or, Deep Space and the Negro/Injun/Krogan Problem” (thanks to Kate Simpson for the latter article).

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

Despite its focus on the past, Retro Gamer is looking to current technologies to keep the magazine alive, and is now available on the iPhone. Fans of the publication can download a Retro Gamer Magazine app for $1.99, read the latest issue, and buy back issues for $4.99. There are also options for purchasing 6-month ($21.99) and 1-year ($49.99) subscriptions.

Those of you in the U.S. who've spent crazy bucks on subscriptions or single issues at Barnes & Noble will immediately notice that it's much cheaper than the crazy prices you've been paying for import copies. I wonder if Retro Gamer will be able to get its Videogames Hardware Handbook on the digital store? I spent $20 for that "bookazine" last month.

Those of you who scoff at the idea of reading the magazine on such a small screen (dismissing its zoom, scan, and bookmark features), keep in mind that this will be even better on the iPad! In fact, this is now my primary reason for wanting the Apple device now: cheaper issues of Retro Gamer. All it requires is an initial $499 minimum investment.

GamesTM, another UK-based magazine from Imagine Publishing (which is working with PixelMags for these apps), also has a $0.99 app for the iPhone with an option to buy back issues.

[Via Retro Gamer]

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

[It's insane that there's less than two weeks to go to GDC 2010, and my colleagues on the show are still highlighting a few last-minute neat talk additions - here's the first set.]

As the Game Developers Conference 2010 pre-show registration deadline approaches, organizers have confirmed talks from Spore's Chris Hecker and The Beatles: Rock Band's UI director, as well as a premiere of Civilization V's engine tech.

The near-final additions are helping to round out the March 9-13 event at San Francisco's Moscone Center, which includes two days of summits -- spanning iPhone, indie, social games and more -- and three days of main conference content.

In particular, the freshly highlighted lectures for the show (organized by this website's parent company) include the following notable talks:

- Presenting a lecture called "Achievements Considered Harmful?", former EA fellow (Spore) and current Spy Party developer Chris Hecker tackles an intriguing angle on a major trend: "Achievements, awards, and rewards are ubiquitous in games these days... Unfortunately, more than 50 years of psychology research seems to indicate achievements may be doing subtle but irreparable harm to players and their feelings about playing games."

- In the sponsored lecture "Firaxis' Civilization V: A Case Study in Scalable Game Performance", Firaxis, 2K Games, and Intel "present the world premiere game engine and technology sneak peek of Civilization V, launching this fall." Along the way, according to the talk, "you'll learn how Firaxis developers have used the newly released GPA 3.0 PC platform tools and Threading Building Blocks to offer Civ V playability on myriad systems."

- "The Art of Interface Design at Harmonix Music Systems" is a talk by Harmonix's Kevin McGinnis discussing "an evolution over the years of how the company develops their user interfaces." The description explains: "Using games in their catalogue like Rock Band and The Beatles: Rock Band, a detailed visual thread of preproduction style boards, UI animation mockups, and tool development will be shown in describing their process."

- Finally, in "Guild Wars: The Artists' Vision", NCsoft West's chief art director Daniel Dociu will "explore the role of concept art in the game development process." Referencing art from the award-winning online game franchise, the presentation "will focus on the practical aspects of integrating concept art into game development, such as building an art team, working with game developers, and how art goes from concept to technical implementation."

Other recently confirmed GDC 2010 talks include Blizzard design, Shadow Complex and PS3 Motion Controller lectures, plus notable talks on Deus Ex 3's "cyberpunk renaissance" look, Silent Hill producer Akira Yamaoka's ethos, and Batman: Arkham Asylum's art direction.

Organizers also detailed a talk by Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto, confirmations of Peter Molyneux and Pixar lectures, and a keynote from game design legend Sid Meier (Civilization).

More information about GDC 2010 is available on the official Game Developers Conference weblog, and the GDC Schedule Builder has a complete list of more than 400 lectures for the event. Regular discounted online registration for GDC 2010 is only available until Thursday, March 4 at 1pm PT.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While Valet Hustle initially seems like a standard Diner Dash-style game in which you park cars and pick up customers outside of nightclubs and restaurants, developer Factory Games took an interesting approach to the story for its debut iPhone game: both of its playable characters, Ren and Akira, are gay.

The two protagonists both have wealthy Japanese businessmen as fathers, and both were expelled from boarding school after they were caught kissing another student of the same sex; upon hearing the news, their respective fathers order them to take over the family's parking valet company. As players progress through the game's levels, they'll learn more about Ren and Akira's personal lives.

The game features an electronica soundtrack (with an option for custom tracks), 3D cutscenes, and six levels set in Tokyo and New York. As an added bonus, Factory Games is donating a portion of the proceeds from Valet Hustle sales to the Human Rights Campaign, which is devoted to campaigning for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights.

"It's cool to have been involved in the creation of Ren and Akira, two characters who triumph over prejudice by simply being themselves," says Lulu Magdangal, who served as the story development consultant on Valet Hustle. "I can only hope that Valet Hustle is the start of a trend and more game companies embrace both the gay and lesbian communities."

Introduction for Ren:

[Via Wonderland]

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

[Continuing his 'Sound Current' video game interview series for GameSetWatch, Jeriaska talks to acclaimed Japanese film and game composer Kenji Kawai about his work on soundtracks spanning Folklore for PS3 in the game space, through Ghost in the Shell: Innocence and The Sky Crawlers in the film domain.]

Among anime film composers working today that also write music for videogames, Kenji Kawai is among the most internationally recognized. For instance, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, for which he wrote the score, was the first animated film to be a finalist for the Palme D'Or award.

The film is one in a series of collaborations with director Mamoru Oshii, which includes the anime motion picture The Sky Crawlers. A game adaptation for the Wii, titled Innocent Aces, has recently been localized by Xseed, featuring a game score by sound studio MoNaca.

Kawai's contributions to videogame soundtracks include 2007's Folklore for Playstation 3, a collaboration with Hiroto Saitoh and SuperSweep musicians Shinji Hosoe and Ayako Saso. His most recent film Assault Girls, which opened in Tokyo last month, takes place within a virtual reality game environment.

In this interview following the reception of Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces in North America, Kawai offers his perspectives on the intersection between music for Japanese animated films and videogames, based on his own experiences writing scores for both media.

Kawai-san, thank you for joining us for this discussion. When compared with your experience as a film composer, what challenges would you say are unique to writing music for games?

Composer Kenji Kawai: Technically it's not that different from making music for films, but I'd say the hardest part is finding where to situate the loop. You generally have to write much more music for a game than you do for a movie.

Previously it's been rare to see a recognized film composer enter the game industry, although that appears to be changing. Some critics have said that movies are a form of art and games inherently are not, but what is your opinion?

It can be difficult to determine what's art and what's not, but I do think that medium aside, art is something that brings enjoyment to the audience. I treat any production the same. For Folklore, the director went out of his way to request my participation, so that's why I joined.

Over the years you have had a very productive working relationship with the film director Mamoru Oshii, leading to The Sky Crawlers film. How did you two first come to collaborate together?

I met Oshii for the first time on The Red Spectacles. I was an unknown back then, but he asked me to work on the film. I think he was intrigued by the little recording system I had installed in my house and thought it might save the production some money. They had a very small budget for the film. Luckily he was happy with the results and I've been working on his films ever since.

The Sky Crawlers film animated by the studio Production I.G. is based on a series of novels by Hiroshi Mori about a group of immortal fighter pilots. It is said that the writer only gave his consent to the adaptation upon learning that Mamoru Oshii was involved. As a composer what interested you most about the story of The Sky Crawlers and the director's approach to the adaptation?

The feedback that I received from director Oshii was that he was interested in hearing a harp performed on the soundtrack. However, the challenge of just how to implement that idea was left up to me, and it was a puzzle to solve. As soon as I saw the images of the sky and clouds prepared for the film, it inspired me to write the score.

Your most recent film with Mamoru Oshii is Assault Girls, set in a futuristic virtual reality game. Did having events unfold within a game environment in any way influence your choices as a composer on this film score?

It was difficult to find the right sound for the film because of its minimal use of dialog and numerous abstract images. One particular scene features a close-up of a snail that lasts over 40 seconds. I told the director the shot was too long. “But it's acting!” was his response. Well, respectfully, it looks to me like it's just taking a long time to move.

Concept art from Folklore for Playstation 3

One thing that is often mentioned about your academic background is that at one point you were studying nuclear engineering at Tokai University. How did this experience lead to a career composing music?

I did go to college hoping to get a degree in nuclear engineering. It turned out to be harder than I expected. My home was far from the university and I began cutting classes more and more frequently. Sure enough, my grades turned out poorly. I remember one of my professors took me aside one day and said, "I'm sorry to have to put it to you this way, but this isn't for you." So I dropped out of college after just a year and a half.

When later you joined a fusion rock band, did you feel that you were further along toward accomplishing a goal more within your reach?

Muse wasn't formed in an attempt to accomplish something in particular. Some of us were at a rehearsal studio one day and happened to see a poster advertising a contest where the first place winner received a car and a cash prize. Those of us there spontaneously decided to form a band. We were hoping to win, and as luck would have it, we ended up placing. To this day I still have a fondness for fusion.

After having struggled for some time to discover a calling, when did you first get the sense that you had broken through as a musician?

That would be when I was working on the video series Patlabor. Around that time I gradually began to articulate my own personal style.

There is a haunting female chorus that appears in the intro of both Ghost in the Shell films. Was there a particular motivation behind finding this sound that so many viewers associate with the films?

At first the director had requested primitive drum sounds. I felt it would be even more effective if there were a chorus on top of it, something in a Bulgarian style. There are folk singers with very distinctive voices in Japan, and that's who we found for the vocal roles.

It turned out to be quite different from my original concept of a Bulgarian style. This vocal section was extremely challenging to get right because Japanese folk songs traditionally do not have a chorus. They aren't set to these particular rhythms, either.

Directly after the movie was released I noticed no one mentioned the music. That made me a little worried. Now that I think about it, I guess no one could critique it because it was such an unusual kind of music that no one had ever heard before. Innocence was basically a direct continuation of Ghost in the Shell, so I retained almost the exact same style.

Innocence has a dreamlike sequence which takes place in a mansion fashioned after a music box. This is one example of many from your films in which music is bound together with the storyline and visuals.

Oshii asked me to create the sound of an "enormous music box," but obviously such a thing doesn't exist. We actually had to go about creating a disc-shape music box and record the sound of it. We then added the sounds of cylindrical bells and a Thai gong. Rather than relying on electronic reverb for the vibration and echoing effects, we went to a huge stone quarry and played the sound of the music box from the speakers, then recorded it. It was a lot of work and the weather was bitter cold, making it quite an ordeal.

[This interview is available in Japanese on Game Design Current and in French. Translation by Kaoru Bertrand. Facilitated by Emi Okubo. Images courtesy of KenjiKawai.com]

Posted by jeriaska at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Every week we round up the top news and interviews of the last week from console digital download site GamerBytes, featuring new information about Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, WiiWare, DSiWare and PSN Minis.]

A bit of a quiet week this week. In fact, only 2 major news stories made it out - the fact that Midway's XBLA titles have been removed, and Krome Studios have announced a new title for the PlayStation Network.

But that allows us to have full view of our monthly analysis of Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network sales. To find out what did well last month, give them a look.

Gamerbytes Originals

In-Depth: Xbox Live Arcade Sales Analysis, January 2010
In-Depth: North American PlayStation Network Sales Analysis, January 2010

Store Updates
XBLA Update - P.B Winterbottom, Plus Cheap Battlefield 1943
NA PSN Store Update - Cheap Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, PSOne Games And More
EU PSN Store Update - Wounded Dragons, Alien Zombie Death, Minis Month, Deals Galore And More
NA Nintendo Update - Ace Attorney 2, Sonic & Knuckles, Prehistorik Man, Scrabble Classic And More
EU Nintendo Update - Flight Control, Phoenix Wright, Tales Of Monkey Island 5 And More

Microsoft (Xbox Live Arcade, XBL Indies)

Midway Titles Removed From XBLA
You cannnot download Ultimate Mortal Kombat III anymore.

Sony (PlayStation Network, Minis)

Blade Kitten Episodic Platformer Announced For PlayStation Network
"Krome Studios has announced that their title Blade Kitten will be released this spring in an episodic form, heading exclusively to the PlayStation Network."

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

Similar to Covered, the popular blog in which artists redraw classic comic book covers in their own style, illustrator Lamar Abrams has re-created several boxes for Japanese video games, adding a lot of his playful personality to the serious covers.

Here we have his update of the NES packaging for SNK's forgotten NES RPG Crystalis (larger version after the break); the green monster lurking in the background is my favorite of the re-imagined elements. Video game comic community Life Meter has several more Abrams pieces for titles like Soul Blader (a.k.a. Soul Blazer in the U.S.), Time Soldiers, and Kaizou Choujin Schbibinman 2. More, please!

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

Italian publisher 505 Games announced its choice for the developer of its upcoming Wii game based on iconic film/musical Grease: Zoë Mode, the Brighton-based Kuju Entertainment subsidiary. 505 also revealed Big Head Games (Elefunk) as the studio behind Grease's Nintendo DS edition.

Zoë Mode seems like a perfect choice for the project, as it has a long history of working on music-based titles like Singstar (Rocks! and Pop Hits), Guitar Hero song packs, Disney Sing It, Dancing With The Stars, and most recently XBLA charity game Chime.

Neither 505 or Zoë Mode have revealed much about the licensed game save that it will "take fake full advantage" of the Wii's motion-sensing controls and microphone (not sure if they mean Wii Speak or a third-party accessory) for casual/family-targeted gameplay. As long as there's a scene in which we can serenade Frenchy with "Beauty School Drop Out" as an angelic Frankie Avalon, we're good.

"Grease is an iconic brand that has spanned generations and we are thrilled to be charged with the responsibility of bringing the Grease legacy to a new medium," says Zoë Mode's General Manager Ed Daly.

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

As Aksys prepares the digital download-only PSP release of Cho Aniki Zero for North America this Spring, "neo psychedelic rock band" IDATENTAI put out this animated music video in Japan for the lead single off its album for the testosterone-filled shoot'em up.

The animated video stays true to the Japanese series's wackiness with semi-nude, brawny men flying around and a live action cameo of oiled up hunk "TopGun Tom". There's even an exercise video version for the promotional song (after the break) that features TopGun Tom performing Jowan Lifts and Hyper Media Squats!

I'm having trouble deciding which I enjoy more: this set of Cho Aniki Zero videos or Namco Bandai's surreal infomercial for Muscle March.

[Via Original Sound Version]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 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.]

You will see an occasional GameSetLinks out of us, even with GDC coming up and schedule being all kinds of crazy, so here's the first one in a while, headed out with Spiderweb's Jeff Vogel on getting somewhere in the indie game business - fine advice indeed.

Also in here - some curious Harmonix music licenses, discussion of EmoGame, some totally retro demo-scene goodness, why Playfish did the right thing by partnering with IP powerhouse EA, and various other neat things besides.

Stop stop stop:

The Bottom Feeder: Three Tips For Getting Started In the Indie Gaming Biz
'Let me say something here, and I don't want to put too fine a point on it. You need sleep to live.'

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure: Playfish's Smart Move in the Facebook Gold Rush
Interesting analysis - suggesting 'outbranding' with EA brands will be Playfish's route to success: 'Another flavor of spending your way out of the clouds. Specifically, license IP/Brands, from games or elsewhere, can help your title stand out in a crowded space.'

Apocalypse POW!: Retro Flashback: EmoGame
'EmoGame and its sequels were particularly enjoyable and novel because not only were they clever and well-designed from a gaming perspective, but they were also predicated on a staunchly devoted and surprisingly well-informed knowledge of pop culture.'

Royalty Network Revealing New Harmonix Project? - bemanistyle.com
Very interesting, Harmonix requesting some hiphop and trance tracks? PLEASE let it be the return of Amplitude.

Sonnez Les Jeux Video: During which part of playing a video game does the actual "playing" occur?
'During which part of playing a video game does the actual "playing" occur? Unfortunately, the answer to this question, like the answer to too many other questions, is: It depends.'

8bit today: DATASTORM 2010 PRODUCTIONS
Talking of demo-scene, here's some awesome products of an oldskool party in Scandinavia, including a MP3 on the C64 (!).

San Diego Reader | Sweat Like a Rockstar
Local alt.weekly has a go at the Rockstar San Diego story. 'According to an employee who calls himself “Captain Anonymous,” it’s a workplace that might as well be in Pyongyang, North Korea; he told me, “Employees are being surveilled, and the last person to speak anonymously whose identity was presumed (not proven) was fired.''

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

Tucson-based artist Kyle Kulakowski specializes in video game-inspired black velvet paintings, a medium that uses black velvet in place of canvas, allowing vibrant colors to pop out more against the dark background. You've probably seen a kitschy black velvet piece of Elvis or Jesus sitting in a local thrift store at some time or another!

Kulakowski specializes in painting scenes from classic video games like Pac-Man and Joust (which look great when lit by a black light) as you'll see past the post break, but he also has a couple for more modern titles like the Psychonauts piece above -- noting that Psychonauts is the only video game to prominently feature black velvet paintings.

The artist is selling a few of the pieces on display at his deviantArt profile (contact him for prices) and is available for commissioned work.

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

Cleveland's Blockparty returns this April 15th-18th alongside hacker conference Notacon, now in its fourth year running (out of five promised annual editions) -- making this the longest running demoparty in North America to date. To prepare for the show, organizers have set up a Block Party 2010 site with details on the event.

For those of you still unfamiliar with the demoparty concept, Blockparty 2010's organizers break it down: "set up a stage, invite programmers, artists and musicians from around the world to enter competitions, watch in amazement what comes out, and then hand out prizes to the best of the bunch."

As with previous shows, Blockparty 2010 will feature competitions like demo, HiRez, textmode, music, photography, wildcard (generally animated short films or short visual productions) and more. Returning attendees will want to check out the site for info on the new competition machine, rules, and category changes.

The show will also have seminars and presentations like Guybrush's "Proce55ed Synaesthesia for fun and profit". You can find information on registering for Notacon 7 and Blockparty 2010 (around 135 out of 400 tickets are already sold as of this posting) at the Notacon site.

[Via Demoscene.us]

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

[In this development-oriented opinion piece, Game Developer magazine editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield lays out some all-too-common bugbears that have plagued games for too long.]

With 2009 come and gone, we enter a new decade of new challenges. But some of the old pet peeves still linger in modern games, and most of them can be fixed now. We needn't wait until 2011!

Lack Of Stereo Downmixing

I still play games on a two-speaker television, and so do a whole lot of other folks. Until the entire world has 5.1 surround sound -- which might take a while -- there needs to be a viable two-speaker option.

It surprises me how many big-budget games have this problem. Just the other day I was playing Army of Two: The 40th Day, I didn't realize until halfway through the intro cinematic that there was a narration track, because it was buried so low in the mix.

The in-game cut-scenes were a bit better, but not by much; critical dialog about what to do and where to go was hard to hear unless I turned my character to the side of the character speaking. From blockbusters like Far Cry 2 to smaller titles like BlackSite: Area 51, games continue to ignore the default audio setup of the average consumer.

Contextually-Different UI Buttons

You know those Windows Mobile smartphones that map the same buttons to different options in different contexts within the same program? And you know how everyone hates that? Consider that when designing menus and user interfaces, because a lot of games look a lot like Windows Mobile.

I love Dragon Age: Origins -- I put more than 60 hours into the Xbox 360 version -- but its menus are atrocious. Switching which buttons do what depending in whether I'm in a store or in the field, not allowing use of items in organizational menus but setting them to a separate subset of a different menu wheel -- these are not great ideas.

It says something about the maturity of our industry that a game can have an interface with that level of inconsistency and still be critically and commercially successful -- and which I will play through to completion anyway.

Poor Texture Streaming

Storage has increased over the years, in terms of physical disc media size as well as RAM and hard drive capacity. So why are we still waiting several seconds for normals and textures to properly appear in many big-name titles?

Texture pop runs rampant through the industry, even when it comes to the largest and most accomplished companies. Some teams can do it, some can't. It does depend on what type of game you're making at times, but really, I'm not sure there's a context in which a studio absolutely couldn't fix this, given the time and dedication.

No Tutorials

It's amazing that in this day and age, some games still don't offer proper tutorials. Tutorials that are fun and properly integrated into the narrative are ideal, but even something that just tells me how I should play would be great. Some games simply throw you to the wolves.

To pick on Dragon Age again, the game presumed a certain level of knowledge which, when combined with the confusing menus, led to me not knowing how to use an item to heal my injuries until about 10 hours in. I just decided to fiddle with menus until I could find the option. The game did inform me that I should heal, but gave me no indication of how I should do it.

Some players made fun of the gated tutorial in Halo 2, in which you had to independently test your left and right analog sticks before proceeding into the single player campaign. But just last week I played Left 4 Dead 2 with a person who had never touched a twin-stick first-person game before. For him, such a tutorial would have been useful. Even though he intuitively knew where he wanted to go and where to aim, never having used both sticks before, his learning curve was very steep.

Long Load Times On Consoles

I thought I'd end with something to make everyone feel a little better about themselves, because this is tough to fix, and it's easy to shift the blame onto console makers. Load times are incredibly difficult to get rid of, and I don't expect they'll go away anytime soon. But there are things we can be doing with background loads, loading during cut-scenes, using more advanced streaming, or even reusing or recombining assets as is often done in open-world games.

In the old days, we used to fear the "juggling monkey," the animated monkey that appeared on the loading screens of old Neo Geo CD games. Back then, we were waiting for several of megabytes of data to load. Iin the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 era loading came down a bit, but now it feels like I'm staring down that old juggling monkey once again.

High Fives For A New Future

Games are getting more engrossing, more varied, and more complex, and I think the industry is moving in impressive directions. Every once in a while, though, it's good to take stock of the things we still haven't fixed before we move on to what's next. And this was only a fraction of what we need to work on. As luck would have it, there are only so many words I can fit in one article!

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

With Heavy Rain releasing this week, Europe's PlayStation Blog is sharing the PS3 exclusive's TV advert that will run in several countries over the next few weeks (with variations for each region, naturally). Playing on the game's Origami Killer villain, the commercial uses paper cutouts to illustrate Heavy Rain's branching narratives.

The music accompanying the clips of Heavy Rain scenes is quite dramatic; I half-expected it to turn into Clint Mansell's over-used "Lux Aeterna" song from Requiem For a Dream. Also, I hope Sony knows that its warranty won't cover the water damage caused to that PS3 for leaving it out in the rain.

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

A couple years before Core Design debuted its seminal Tomb Raider series, the UK studio put out Soulstar, a mostly forgotten Star Fox-esque shoot'em up with a 3D perspective for the Sega CD. Players piloted a spacecraft that transformed into three different vehicles: a Strike Craft, Turbo Copter, and Strike Walker.

Core Design planned two ports for the game, one for the Jaguar CD and an enhanced Soulstar X edition for the 32X, both of which were cancelled. The 32X update was slated to include multiplayer support, updated graphics, and a faster experience. Though Soulstar X was only previewed in promotional videos and magazines years ago, someone recently stumbled on a prototype and auctioned it off to collectors.

Just when I'd given up hope that I'd never get to play this game that I never even heard of until last week, Spanish Sega community Sega Saturno -- which has been instrumental in releasing other lost prototypes for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Virtua Hamster, and X-Men: Mind Games -- has obtained the prototype build and released the game to the public for others to try out.

You can download the prototype and see scanned pages from old magazine previews (revealing Soulstar X's high-end rendering technology to create photo-realistic enemies!) at Sega Saturno. I've also included a video preview from this goofy Virtua Fighter 32X promotional clip (skip to 05:45) below:

[Via Unseen 64]

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

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

This week, FingerGaming covers PopCap's "flower defense" title Plants vs. Zombies, Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi's virtual playground Noby Noby Boy, and Capcom's upcoming port of Street Fighter IV.

Also in here - top-grossing iPhone games, the top sellers for free and paid App Store game titles, as well as notes on Rolando 3's cancellation as free-to-play rules at Ngmoco, and much more besides.

Here are the top stories from the last seven days:

- PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies Comes to iPhone
"The zombies are coming, and your gardening skills are your last line of defense against an army of the undead. Players must skillfully plant 49 different kinds of flowers to slow down, confuse, and eventually destroy the approaching hordes."

- Katamari Damacy Creator Unleashes Noby Noby Boy in App Store
"Noby Noby Boy is a game about stretching a little worm-like fellow (named BOY) as far as possible. Players can either stretch BOY manually in the application itself, or enable a GPS tracking mode, which virtually stretches him during physical travel."

- Top-Grossing Game Apps: Plants vs. Zombies Leads in Premiere Week
"PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies takes top honors in its first week of release. Activision's Call of Duty: World at War Zombies also sees a successful week, with sales boosted by a recent content-expanding update."

- Street Fighter IV Coming to iPhone in March
"After testing the App Store waters with safe bets like Cash Cab and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, console games publisher Capcom is set to make a major commitment to the iPhone and iPod Touch with an upcoming port of its hit one-on-one fighter Street Fighter IV."

- OpenFeint X Offers Social Features for Free-to-Play iPhone Games
"Social gaming infrastructure developer Aurora Feint announced the launch of a private beta for OpenFeint X, a social platform focused on free-to-play, microtransaction-supported games for the iPhone and iPod Touch."

- Rolando 3 Canceled as ngmoco Shifts to Free-to-Play Model
"ngmoco co-founder Neil Young confirmed that development for the company's anticipated puzzle-platformer Rolando 3 has ceased in the wake of the company's shift to a free-to-play release strategy for all of its upcoming titles."

- Top Free Game App Downloads: Sunday Lawn Takes First Place
"Donut Games leads this week's chart with its recently released grass mowing sim Sunday Lawn. Last week's chart winner Red Ball drops to seventh place, as a trial version of Digital Chocolate's New York 3D Rollercoaster Rush premieres at second."

- Industry Veterans Crane, Kitchen Launch Smartphone Publisher AppStar Games
"Activision co-founder David Crane and Garry Kitchen announced the formation of AppStar Games, a publisher focused on 'small footprint' titles for smartphones, wireless tablets, and handheld consoles."

- Namco Brings iPhone Hit Flight Control to Mobile Platforms
"Namco Networks has partnered with iPhone developer Firemint to bring the popular air traffic management sim Flight Control to Java, Windows Mobile, Brew, and Android platforms in July."

- Freeverse App Store Sales Top Five Million
"Freeverse's most successful App Store titles to date are Flick Fishing and Skee-Ball, each of which surpassed one million sales units last year."

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Inspired by the recent release of BioShock 2 and Michael Parker's inventive clock part paintings, Thomas "ImaginaryThomas" Girard created his own cute homage to the first-person shooter. I've seen dozens of crafts paying tribute to the game's Big Daddy and Little Sister characters, but this one's certainly unique!

ImaginaryThomas is a self-described tinkerer who enjoys creating art pieces out of "junk, bits, pieces and various miscellania". He has several curious miniature robots that are well worth checking out and are available to purchase through his Etsy shop (the BioShock 2 piece is unfortunately not for sale).

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

['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 Echo Bazaar, a social game using Twitter, by Fail Better Games.]

Echo Bazaar, a web-based card game by UK firm Fail Better Games is a social grind game. Gameplay [here's a review with screenshots] consists of choosing trivial tasks to improve one's stats at four skills: Dangerous, Watchful, Persuasive, and Shadowy. Grinding also typically produces loot of some kind, which can be sold at the Bazaar for weapons and stat-improving hats and other similar trinkets; and players can also work on short-term and long-term goals (called Ambitions).

Success at these tasks depends on chance and your existing stats, which means that you can increase the likelihood of success on a particular challenge by devoting more effort to stat-building beforehand.

There are only a certain number of actions available in a given day, with a maximum of ten available at any given time; that number can be increased by tweeting an ad for Echo Bazaar (once per day at maximum), or by purchase. That structure means that gameplay is more or less a resource-management problem, with more resources available for real money. The player's agency is all about deciding which goals sound interesting enough to spend actions on.

That's not the description of a game I would expect to like. I have little patience for games that are mostly grinding, and I also like to be engaged with a game when I'm playing it, focused on the story and structure -- and then done when I'm done. Games that force you to string out the gameplay over many days tend to attenuate the pacing to the point of tedium. (I've yet to find a real-time game like Virtual Villagers that I get along with either.)

I had some of those issues with Echo Bazaar, too, but I'm still playing with it.

So far Echo Bazaar is a game almost entirely about setting. The premise is that London has at some stage -- perhaps during the Victorian Era -- Fallen. It is now an underground, infernal environment, where mushrooms instead of flowers decorate the hats, where bats and weasels are the most common sorts of pet, where the demonic and the undead can be found at afternoon tea. Con artists wear lace gloves to increase their plausibility. The vestiges of old London -- the street signs, the currency -- are forbidden and are rapidly being censored away.

The idea of an alternative, semi-demonic London is not exactly novel, but Echo Bazaar's version continues to appeal to me for two reasons.

First: the quality of the prose. Even very text-oriented games aren't always solid in this department. The writers of Echo Bazaar use concrete nouns and active verbs. They don't abuse adjectives. They have a sense of rhythm.

An example:

"Unfinished Men are Clay Men who lack something - sight, a voice, a hand, conscience, obedience. You can't really tell a crippled Clay Man from an Unfinished Man, except that ordinary Clay Men are never criminals. The distinction, unfortunately, often evades Constables and citizens alike."

Notice the way the number of syllables increases through the elements of the list, "sight, a voice, a hand, conscience, obedience". Notice that that list doesn't end with the obviously chilling "conscience", but with the more interesting "obedience". Notice how "Constables and citizens alike" sounds much better than "both Constables and citizens", because "alike" gives us a firm ending on an emphasized syllable.

This is not pyrotechnic prose, with lots of flashy words and obvious rhetorical figures. It's something better: it's disciplined.

The structure of Echo Bazaar really requires that the text be worth reading, because the short descriptions of missions and their outcomes (and of objects to buy at the Bazaar) are the chief reward for interaction; there are illustrations, but they are more limited in number and contribute more to style than to content.

Moreover, the text comes in small pieces, from a single sentence to a short paragraph. Not every one of these pieces is individually memorable, but most are fairly effective, hinting at a larger world and more depth than the player can immediately see.

The second point: despite my apprehensions, the world building feels reasonably consistent. I was afraid on first playing that it would be a grab-bag of images and concepts that had struck the authors as cool, with no connecting tissue. After playing for several weeks, I'm still not certain how much core world-building was done, but the new tidbits that I learn do seem to fit; the structure doesn't feel slapdash.

I think an engine like this could be used for something plottier. So far, though, such plot as there is is provided by the various long-term and short-term goals. These are pretty linear: the player has little control over how their pursuits turn out, only on whether they make progress.

Characters tend to be generic archetypes rather than specific individuals, too: you're generally casing "a jeweler's shop" or making up to "a rich widow", not robbing or seducing a specific person. This makes the story feel oddly lonely even though most game activities are about social interactions of one kind or another.

So it's the writing and the world that keep me tinkering around with Echo Bazaar weeks after I was initially invited to look at it. I am still having fun dipping into the environment it provides, and the daily time investment to do so is slight enough that I can forgive the slightness of the gameplay.

Disclosure: As a reviewer, I received free in-game currency (ordinarily available for pay), enabling me to see more of the game more quickly.

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

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

Carnegie Mellon University professor Jesse Schell delivered a riveting "Design Outside The Box" presentation at DICE Summit last week, in which he delves into the "big, strange, and terrifying" world of Facebook games and discusses the psychological tricks behind the success of unexpected breakout hits like Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Mafia Wars.

Our sister-site Gamasutra posted a great write-up with key quotes and excerpts from the talk, but G4 has now put up a video of Schell's presentation, allowing you to enjoy his entertaining delivery on the magic behind trend-changers and on the value of "realness" rising in video games ("We live in a bubble of fake bullshit, and we'll do anything to get to what is real.").

You can read more of Schell's thoughts on video games, books, and many other topics at his personal blog.

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

Though you might have ever heard of them, Disgaea developer Nippon Ichi Software has put out a number of jigsaw puzzle/battle titles in Japan (one of them, Jigsaw Madness for PS1, actually made it to the States under XS Games), the last of which was 2008's Jigsaw World: Daigekitou! Jig-Battle Heroes for the Nintendo DS.

Nippon Ichi teamed up with frequent partner Idea Factory (Generation of Chaos, Spectral Souls) to produce what looks like an adaptation of the DS game for Japanese arcades titled Jigsaw World Arena. Like the dual screened version, JWA features Disgaea's Etna as a playable character, as well as the super cute/delicious cat-bread.

As its playable characters imply, JWA is far from your traditional jigsaw puzzle game; its unconventional setup centers on multiplayer puzzle battles that have you racing against up to three other opponents to pick up puzzle pieces and drop them into their appropriate spots. With each correctly positioned piece, you build up a power meter for special attacks.

Idea Factory has been running JWA location tests in Japan for several months now, but it recently demonstrated the game at last weekend's AOU 2010 amusement expo. While it's doubtful that either Nippon Ichi or Idea Factory will ever announce this for the U.S., you could always import the DS game (it should be playable on U.S./European systems)!

[Via Arcade Heroes]

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

Kyoto-based artist Baiyon has just announced the third installment of his collaborative music series. This time the art and music director of PixelJunk Eden will be joined by legendary Metroid and Dr. Mario composer Hirokazu Tanaka, performing under his live music handle "Hip tanaka.ex."

Previously Baiyon has teamed up with Shane Berry and August Engkilde for the first two volumes of In the Collaborations. The singles were published on the musician's private label Descanso.

Baiyon will be discussing the music series next month at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where he will also be collaborating with Naughty Dog's Richard Lemarchand (Uncharted 2) on a session entitled "Micro or Massive: It's Fricking Tough to Achieve a Vision."

In an article for GameSetWatch, Baiyon conducted an interview with Hip Tanaka on the musical influences underlying famous tunes for the NES. The talk followed a similar discussion with Keita Takahashi on Noby Noby Boy, and a roundtable chat at GDC 2009, as part of the GameSetBaiyon interview series.

In the Collaborations 3 is due out on iTunes in time for GDC in early March.

[Baiyon.com]

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

Driving a vehicle decorated with Mario Kart Wii logos and characters, race car driver Joey Logano and the No. 20 GameStop Toyota finished fifth at yesterday's Auto Club 500 race at the Auto Club Speedway. Commentators speculated that he would've placed much higher if he'd received more useful items instead of the banana peel at several critical item boxes.

Though he didn't finish first, the 19-year-old driver described the race as a significant victory for the team. "The first time I came here was last year and we sucked," said Logano. "We ran 35th to 40th the whole time. Last time we came here we ran probably 20th to 25th and this time around we were within the top 10 and sneaked out a top-five there at the end. You got to be pleased with that."

Logano's car displayed a BioShock 2 paint job last week at the Nationwide Series, when he disappointingly finished fifth after leading most of the race for 130 laps. GameStop will sponsor 21 of the racer's 35 races this season, with 19 of those left to go.

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

Even if it weren't a finalist for the IGF's Nuovo Award this year, there are plenty of other reasons to feature this new trailer for Ian Bogost's A Slow Year here, chief of those arguments being its lead platform, the Atari 2600.

In a recent interview with UK-based PC game site Rock Paper Shotgun, Bogost described A Slow Year's premise of game poems for the different seasons, which draws on Imagism and the Atari 2600's limitations for inspiration:

"A Slow Year is a set of four small games about attention and the experience of observing things. I wanted to explore the kind of condensation and compression one usually finds in poetry, particularly in Imagism, but also in those poets’ inspirations in east Asian literary traditions, including the haiku. I’ve been calling them “game poems,” and the four of them together form a little collection, like a chapbook.

... each of the four games is limited to 1k in size (4k is a standard Atari ROM size), and each represents a season of the year. As games, they each offer a challenge about a familiar, banal idea: watching leaves fall or prolonging a morning cup of coffee, for example. They’re all played in the first person, but in unfamiliar ways.

One requires first-person coffee drinking. Another involves closing one’s virtual eyes in the game. As poetry, they evoke rather than clarify. As images, they are visually evocative in spite of the apparent primitiveness of the Atari as a platform. I hope the game makes the Atari seem beautiful."

Bogost will release A Slow Year as a "limited edition cartridge and poetry set" for the Atari 2600 later this year, and also plans to put out PC and Mac versions via a custom Atari emulator.

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

[Here's the final announcement regarding the Game Developers Choice Awards, run by my GDC colleagues -- great that John Carmack will be at GDC to get the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Warren Spector is hosting this year, giving things a nice creator-centric focus once again.]

The 2010 Game Developers Choice Awards, the highest honors in video game development, will bestow John Carmack, the technological patriarch and co-founder of id Software, with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the art and science of games.

The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes the career and achievements of developers who have made an indelible impact on the craft of game development, as Carmack has done for his more than two decades of groundbreaking technical contributions, and his role establishing the first-person shooter genre with landmark titles like Doom and Quake.

The recipient is chosen by the elite Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which includes game industry notables such as Ben Cousins (EA DICE), Harvey Smith (Arkane), Raph Koster (Metaplace), John Vechey (PopCap), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), Clint Hocking (Ubisoft), and many others.

Former Game Developers Choice Lifetime Achievement Award recipients include Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright - who will be presenting the award to Carmack at the ceremony on March 11, 2010 during Game Developers Conference 2010 in San Francisco - and other legendary game creators.

John Carmack and his team at id Software, the company he co-founded in 1991, pioneered real-time 3D graphics in game, setting the pace and the standard for other developers to follow. Carmack and his colleagues at id are credited with essentially creating the modern-day first-person shooter (FPS) genre with the PC game Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, and helping to popularize networked multiplayer gaming on PCs with the release of Doom in 1993.

id has gone on to create other major FPS and action game franchises such as Quake, and Carmack and id Software are currently in development of a number of projects, including the free-to-play, web-based title Quake Live, the upcoming new franchise RAGE, and Doom 4.

As a largely self-taught technology purist, Carmack has devoted himself to pushing the limits of hardware and software. He's helped to set the technical and gameplay standard for modern 3D gaming - and in the process, created some of the most popular video game franchises in history, which is why he's being honored by the Game Developers Choice Awards this year.

"It's no exaggeration to say that John Carmack and id Software have had a monumental influence on all modern 3D games, but especially the first-person shooter genre," says Meggan Scavio, Event Director of GDC. "John is one of the key figures in the history of video games, and we're delighted to be giving him the Lifetime Achievement award this year.”

Alongside this announcement, Awards organizers are delighted to reveal that Warren Spector will be hosting the Game Developers Choice Awards this year. Spector follows in the footsteps of previous much-loved figures who hosted past Awards such as Double Fine's Tim Schafer and Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin.

Spector has been developing role-playing and computer games for over 20 years, working at seminal studios such as Origin Systems and Looking Glass Studios, where he produced System Shock. He later founded Ion Storm’s Austin studio and directed the development of its genre-bending, award-winning game Deus Ex. He then oversaw development of Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows. Spector founded Austin's Junction Point in 2005, and the now Disney-owned studio is working on the much awaited Wii title Disney Epic Mickey.

Presented by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) -- part of the UBM Techweb Game Group, as is this website -- this year's awards ceremony, held immediately following the Independent Games Festival Awards, will be hosted on Thursday, March 11, during GDC 2010 at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center.

For further information about the Choice Awards, please visit the official Game Developers Choice Awards website. For further information about GDC and to register for attendance, with pre-show registration ending on March 4th, please visit the official Game Developers Conference website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DSiWare continues to push out indie gems that hardly anyone notices (see Glow Artisan and Escapee GO!), this time releasing Flipper, a 3D puzzle platformer built with an attractive voxel engine by Goodbye Galaxy Games -- a one-man outfit comprised of Dutch developer Hugo Smits (partnering with Paul "pietepiet" Veer for the graphics).

In the game, you lead a young boy through 20 stages across four different worlds, avoiding enemies and overcoming a range of obstacles while trying to retrieve his stolen goldfish Flipper. The voxel engine has you altering the environment with different power-ups; you can blast holes in the stages, build platforms, or restore sections you've obliterated.

Priced at 500 Nintendo Points ($5), the game is a steal, especially when you consider that Flipper was initially intended as a retail game before its original publisher went bankrupt. Luckily, Smits was able to partner with Dutch company Xform to save the colorful platformer and publish it as a downloadable title on DSiWare.

You can watch a trailer below and see screenshots at Flipper's official site. Smits has also maintained a great development blog for Flipper that shares a lot of insight on his design decisions and hopes for the game. North American DSi owners should be able to purchase the game starting today.

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

As we compile larger stories from elsewhere on our network, here's 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.

Highlights include an immaculately detailed NPD analysis for January 2010 from Matt Matthews, an interview with Square Enix CTO Julien Merceron, a neat in-depth piece on crunch, Silent Hill character artist and art director Takayoshi Sato on making video game characters with feeling, and more.

(Besides these pieces, a number of us were at the DICE 2010 executive summit in Las Vegas this week - you can check out the Gamasutra write-ups of talks spanning Bobby Kotick to Randy Pitchford.)

Go go go:

Ten Vicious Years: A Retrospective Interview
"North Carolina's Vicious Cycle (Robotech: Battlecry, Matt Hazard, the Vicious Engine) was founded 10 years ago, and in that time the company and the industry have changed drastically -- Gamasutra spoke to its founders, Eric Peterson and Wayne Harvey, to find out more about that journey."

The Dust of Everyday Life: The Art of Building Characters
"Silent Hill character designer and CG artist Takayoshi Sato examines the art of creating believable computer-generated characters in this in-depth feature, originally created for Game Developer magazine."

The Art Of International Technical Collaboration At Square Enix
"When Square Enix acquired Eidos, it didn't just get IP and a distribution network -- it got a Western understanding of game technology in a generation where Japan has lagged, and new group worldwide technology director Julien Merceron here speaks about taking the helm of this global organization."

A Closer Look at Crunch
"Dave Prout approaches the oft-discussed topic of crunch from a different angle as he searches for the root cause. "When a team is already in production without a compelling, fun gameplay experience, it's in trouble," he says."

NPD: Behind the Numbers, January 2010
"Gamasutra analyst Matt Matthews reviews NPD Group's January 2010 sales figures, which reflect evergreen Nintendo-published titles and how Sony is headed towards a single-platform focus."

GCG: What Are Game Designers Trying to Do?
"Educator Lewis Pulsipher offers an analytical breakdown of the possible aims designers have in mind when creating games."

GCG: Concurrent Programming in the Design of a 3D Game Engine
"UC Santa Cruz senior and independent game developer Jarret Tierney covers the ins and outs of developing parallel programming in a paper written as part of his studies."

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

['The Magic Resolution' is a regular GameSetWatch column by UK-based writer Lewis Denby, examining all facets of the experience of playing video games. Having played the PC version of From Software's Ninja Blade, Lewis discusses console to PC game conversions, and what can go horribly wrong.]

I recently played the PC version of Ninja Blade. The Xbox 360 original released around a year ago, and the PC version - launched in North America late last year - finally hit the UK last week. The day I spent reviewing it became one of my least favorite of the year so far.

Ninja Blade is an insane game. It's generic and predictable, but you almost suspect it wants to be, and it magnifies those genre quirks into something utterly overblown and ridiculous. I'm not really into that anyway, and even without the impenetrable wall of PC-specific problems, I still don't find Ninja Blade to be anything above utterly mediocre. That's fine, though - a lot of people will be okay with the game's approach. It's okay for players to disagree over a game's quality.

Except, I must admit to being completely dumbfounded by the handful of positive reviews this PC version has received. That's because, as a PC game, I found it to be borderline unplayable. With a 360 pad plugged in, it basically works - aside from a couple of controller glitches here and there. But to what extent is it acceptable to release a game for one format, while essentially demanding you use the controller from another one?

Just as a quick guide to what we're dealing with here: when you create a new save file at the start of Ninja Blade on the PC, it warns you not to "turn off your console." Yes, Ninja Blade is one of those conversions: not so much converted as made to perfunctorily run on a different machine.

In-game, you're asked to press A, B, X and Y in various sequences as part of Ninja Blade's extraordinary abundance of quick-time events. Whether you have a 360 pad plugged in or not, the game captions these button icons with text describing the PC equivalent controls. Only it doesn't always do that. Sometimes, you're left staring at a giant, pulsating, green letter A, and no idea what to do with it.

It's true that many PC gamers now have a 360 pad set on the desk next to their mice and keyboards. And there are games on the PC that I would never have dreamed of playing without a gamepad. Batman: Arkham Asylum certainly relies on the ease of combo-chaining that a more traditional PC set-up simply would not be able to provide.

But the PC version of Arkham Asylum still gave you the very reasonable option of playing it with that format's default control mechanism. The game remained entirely playable, and the on-screen prompts adjusted depending on which input you'd opted for. The latest Tomb Raider, for all its quirks, was another hero in this respect, seamlessly altering its instructions and icons the second you plugged in or removed that 360 pad.

With that pad plugged in, Ninja Blade becomes more than playable - and although I have heard reports of controllers glitching and not recognising, I only experienced a couple of minor problems myself. The game, while uninspired, effectively does work as a game. It's fit for purpose.

But, actually, is it? That label on the front tells me it's a PC game. The minimum system requirements don't mention a 360 pad. I can play it, because I happen to have one, but what if I didn't? Would I still be stuck on that first level, trying to work out what on Earth the game meant when it told me to waggle the left stick? And would that be my fault for not owning something increasingly widespread in PC gaming, or the fault of those responsible for such a catastrophic port?

I can't help but feel it's the latter. When you're creating a game for a particular format, it makes absolutely no sense not to optimise it for that format. And there's this nagging, though perhaps overly dramatic, voice in my head that says: that product is not fit for the purpose for which it's sold. It is described as a game for my PC. Unless I own a peripheral designed for a different system entirely, one not mentioned in the game's accompanying literature, I cannot progress past the first level.

Picking specifically on Ninja Blade might be a little cruel. It's happened a great many times before, with conversions of some of the finest games around. Resident Evil 4's PC release famously omitted a menu option to quit the game, such was the laziness of the conversion. There have been countless occurences of this type, and there will undoubtedly be more. And it's time we start getting a little bit irked about it, each and every time the issue crops up.

But these good reviews of Ninja Blade? Bizarre. I cannot understand them. I've yet to read a review that doesn't at least mention the sloppiness of the conversion, but I have read a couple that suggest it doesn't really matter. Try as I might, I can't get behind that. It's a PC game that doesn't work properly with PC hardware. Whatever Ninja Blade's merits as a game may be, it utterly fails as a product.

[Lewis Denby is editor of Resolution Magazine and general freelance busybody for anyone that'll have him. If he'd been paid for such a shoddy conversion job, he's not sure he'd be able to live with the guilt.]

Posted by Lewis Denby at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

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

Now would be about the time to write another Mag Roundup column, but since I've received only one new game magazine in the past two weeks (oh US Postal Service, why hast thou forsaken me), I'd instead like to show off some of the game-media archaeological work I've been up to lately.

Frank Cifaldi pointed out to me earlier that Google has incorporated the archives of the Milwaukee Journal, the Wisconsin evening newspaper that was folded into its hometown rival and renamed the Journal Sentinel in 1995, into its news search. Why should you care about this? Because it means that Google's put online a nearly-complete run of "Video Adventures," a weekly game-biz column written by longtime Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Ed Semrad for the Journal between October 1983 and December 1991.

Semrad, described as "a Milwaukee-area technical writer and video game whiz" in his Journal bio, provided some surprisingly in-depth industry coverage for his hometown paper. His first column dove immediately to the then hot-button topic of programmers embedding their names into their work (the first Easter eggs), and after that he settled down to a steady diet of console hardware and game reviews. Very timely ones, too; since he was writing on a short-lead weekly deadline, Semrad's column is a great way to tell exactly when your favorite classic-era games were released...and when the industry started falling apart in the mid-80s.

Video Adventures had a bit of an eccentric schedule for much of 1985, perhaps owing to the fact that there was simply nothing to write about. "It is hard to believe that the video game industry has come to an end," Semrad wrote in his April 27, 1985 column. "Just a few years ago the big companies like Atari, Coleco and Mattel were making hundreds of millions of dollars [...] Who would have believed that the end would come so quickly?"

Semrad reviewed The Dam Busters for the Colecovision in that April column, a title he rather dramatically called "the last video game made." Lucky for his newspaper-writing gig, then, that Nintendo showed off the NES at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show two months later, releasing it to test markets in mid-October 1985. Semrad was one of the first (and only) mainstream reporters to cover the system from its release, and he had some very prescient things to say about it: "Overall, if anybody can bring video games back, Nintendo, with its new fourth-generation game system, will be the one. The games I saw in June equal or surpass most computer games not only in playability but in graphics. With the robot, light gun and 17 games Nintendo is giving its best shot."

The column grew more regular as the NES ballooned in popularity, of course, and by the time the TurboGrafx-16 and Genesis rolled around, Semrad had a picture next to his bio and more space to work with than a lot of his compatriots in the monthly video-game mags. His stuff is really well written, too, and there's little doubt that his Journal work is part of the reason why Steve Harris hired him on for EGM.

Sadly, Google News doesn't make it terribly easy to browse through individual columns. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, use the advanced search, choose the Journal as your source, then search with generic video-game terms and see what happens. Let me know if you find anything else juicy!

[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 (1)

[Only a couple of weeks until GDC 2010 and the 2010 Independent Games Festival now, so we compiled some of the neat coverage of the finalists over at the official site, and have crossposted here.]

As the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival at Game Developers Conference 2010 rapidly approaches, we're delighted to note that a lot of prominent video game outlets are covering this year's finalists.

In fact, the coverage is coming thick and fast, even before journalists get to chat to creators in-person at the IGF Pavilion, attend the Independent Games Summit, and see who wins at the IGF Awards on March 11th.

In particular, we wanted to highlight the following articles and series from third-party sites, and thank them for their coverage of IGF-honored indie games:

- UK-based PC game site Rock Paper Shotgun is also interviewing and speaking to a plethora of IGF finalists, with a dedicated landing page for each of the games discussed so far, including Shank, A Slow Year, and many more.

- Kotaku, the world's biggest video game weblog, is doing a daily 'Road To The IGF' feature, profiling each of the Main and Student Competition finalists, with ten articles looking at games from Owlboy through Monaco already posted.

- Several sites have individually profiled the IGF 2010 finalists, with Joystiq sister site BigDownload.com looking at each category in turn, and seminal blog Boing Boing creating video-filled guides to Main Competition finalists and Student Showcase winners.

- Long-time dev-centric destination GameDev.net is continuing its multi-year profile of Independent Games Festival finalists by talking to 2010's crop, with the creators of Vessel and AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! discussed so far.

- Last but not least, IGF sister website Gamasutra is supplmenting its multi-year set of 'Road To The IGF' interviews, with this year's in-depth Q&As already spanning Miegakure, Star Guard and beyond.

In addition, many other sites are covering IGF games in-depth, with DIYGamer talking to IGF Student Showcase winners and sifting through many other entries, for example. Once again, thanks to you all for covering independent games and the IGF.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[‘Design Diversions’ is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Andrew Vanden Bossche. It looks at the unexpected moments when games take us behind the scenes, and the details of how game design engages us. This time--Capcom's Haunting Ground and the design of empathy.]

In order to explain why Capcom's Haunting Ground is an important game, I need to relate a discomforting story.

My college was surrounded by corn for miles and miles so when there was nothing else to do on a Friday night, we would wander around town. On one particular night, we went to the cemetery. It is eerily close to a golf course, which I imagine makes from some awkward moments when golfers hit balls in the wrong direction.

The way to the cemetery is surrounded by nice neighborhoods and Victorian homes and is only a few blocks away from the south end of campus. I wandered around in this area with my friends until I remembered I had to meet my girlfriend so they, who had been planning to stay, offered to walk me back.

"I think I'll be fine," I said.

"Oh yeah," my friend said, "I guess boys don't really have to worry about getting raped, do they?"

I didn't know what to think. She hadn't really meant for it to shock me. But it wasn’t something I had ever seriously worried about. The worst thing I could think of happening to me on the walk home was getting mugged and since I was broke that sounded more like an inconvenience. It shocked me that they had to be afraid, that walking around alone at night was a completely different experience.

I hadn't given any thought to the fact that I could walk out without that sort of fear, just for being me. I didn’t think it was fair that she had to be afraid. I also felt a little guilty that I didn’t know, and hadn’t thought of it.

This is why Haunting Ground is, despite its problems, something unique. It is not just a narrative about the fear of assault, something that can be and has been accomplished in literature or film (and also more adeptly). Haunting Ground is the experience of fear itself and its strength is that can place anyone in the role of Fiona.

The gameplay itself is its primary artistic element, and from the way it defines Fiona's strength and movement to the way it handles injury and death, it forces the player into the role of the victim and to experience her fear. It is a flawed game that is like few others in the way it allows the strong or privileged a glimpse of what it is like to be without. In Haunting Ground, the player doesn't watch a victim; the player is the victim.

3.1 Person Perspective

Haunting Ground is unusual as a third person game for how much it relies on visual cues that are based in the first person. Exhaustion and injury change both the way Fiona moves and the visual style of the game. Initially the camera presents a clear picture, but as the stalkers wear her down the camera transitions will become blurred and a sepia tone settles in. At the height of fear, when Fiona breaks into a run, the camera shifts to a stark monochrome.

Of course, Fiona doesn't literally go colorblind when she's scared. The style shifts are there to convey the disorienting, disturbing and surreal fear she feels to the player. The visual shifts are solely used as an empathetic tool. Rather than convey the same information that Fiona is experiencing, it conveys the same emotion. This state prevent the player from calmly watching Fiona while she's being chased, so the chases are tense instead of voyeuristic.

The monochrome that soaks the screen during this state is especially powerful because while it lasts, movement is the only thing that is visually distinct. All the details of the environment fade in visual importance, while the movements of Fiona and her pursuer stand out. As a player, you can clearly see from her desperate movement this isn't the time to fuss around with a puzzle. The monochrome impairs the player's ability to interact with the environment, not Fiona's, which is necessary for the player to share her experience.

Out Of Control

The controls in Haunting Ground's design take a multi-layered approach to emotion. The first layer is conveying Fiona's emotion to the player. These cues are represented by Fiona's movements, like her shortness of breath or her wild gait when fleeing. From this information the player can tell what Fiona is feeling. The second layer consists of emotional cues that are meant to inspire the same emotions in the player. The first layer shows Fiona being frightened, the second is directly frightening to the player.

In the case of movement, this second layer comes in the way Fiona responds differently to the controls. When she panics she's faster, but she also slips and falls and responds to input almost as if she was on ice. This gameplay element is extremely disorienting as the player's control is jeopardized. Fiona responds differently under stress but always consistently. The intensity of the speed and the slippery controls increases the likelihood that the player will make a mistake. So when Fiona falls, it's because the player has panicked.

Watching Ground

Haunting Ground has voyeuristic themes, and part of the problem with it is that it sometimes includes the player as voyeur. However, during the chases it does quite the opposite, which is why the visual devices like the monochrome are so important. The more she's attacked, the further the game shuts down the player's ability to see her. It literally won't let the player observe her like a voyeur.

During the cutscenes which often show off her chest or impossibly short skirt, there's almost always another observer watching her through peepholes or stroking her hair while she sleeps. Fiona's outfit is clearly ill-suited for the situation, but it's her attackers who make her wear it in the first place. So as much as the game shows her off, it can feel really uncomfortable for the player knowing what kind of other people are watching at the same time.

Visions of Death

A certain study showed that players feel a sense of release and relief upon dying in a game, the rationale being that death provides a relief from the tension of gameplay. Haunting Ground has no in game penalty for death, other than restarting, so the sounds alone are more than enough for players to understand exactly what the consequence of failure is, without voyeuristic connotation of watching her die. We don't see her death in part because the implication is that it is the viewer's death as well. Players don't have the luxury of externalizing their death on a virtual body.

Haunting Ground is very explicit about what's at stake: to make Fiona's fear believable, and to identify her fear with ours. The shifting of screen and camera does nothing for Fiona's perception. It's purely for the viewer, to experience fear as if it was hers. This is a powerful technique that allows for a sort of first person immersion in a third person game.

[Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance writer and student. He has a blog called Mammon Machine, where you can PRESS "X" TO NOT DIE, and can be reached at AndrewVandenB@gmail.com]

Posted by Andrew Vanden Bossche at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[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 full-length freeware RPG, a lo-fi exploration platformer, a tower defense number, a physics-based word game, and a puzzler centered around the concept of dipping balls into paint.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: ''The Spirit Engine 2' (Mark Pay, freeware)
"Gorgeous pixel art, engrossing gameplay, captivating soundtrack and engaging storyline - this side-scrolling RPG by Mark Pay has pretty much everything going for it. Originally released as a commercial title, the developer had recently decided to update the status of TSE-2 to freeware so that more people could enjoy the full game."

Game Pick: 'Darkfate' (Kevin Soulas, freeware)
"Darkfate is a lo-fi exploration platformer which tells the story of Chris Freeman, a man who suffers from a bout of amnesia and doesn't recognize the wintery tundra that he is in. The only way Chris will get any answers is by venturing forward and braving whatever challenges that he might find, in hopes that he could somehow recover his memory if he encounters things that he has seen before."

Game Pick: 'Balloon in a Wasteland' (John Cooney, browser)
"Balloon in a Wasteland takes the tower defense wave attack and upgrade system and puts a nice little spin on it. Having crash landed in a terrible wasteland where evil beasts roam, your job is to fix your hot air balloon up whilst killing anything that comes your way."

Game Pick: 'Uchuusen' (Chris Nimmo, freeware)
"Uchuusen is an arcade game that puts you in control of a ship with two rockets attached to each side, and by selectively activating the thrusters you can navigate around tight corridors and obstacles in this twenty-level challenge. Fire both thrusters and the ship will float upwards, and collect the shiny yellow objects to unlock the portal to the next area."

Game Pick: 'Factory Balls 3' (Bart Bonte, browser)
"A third in Bonte's series of puzzle ballers, the idea of Factory Balls 3 is to decorate each ball exactly how it looks like on the box using the tools provided. For what sounds so simple, it's pretty difficult stuff. Tools like paint, hats, sunglasses, belts and gardening tools need to be used in a specific order to achieve the right effect."

Game Pick: 'Prose and Motion' (DeeperBeige, browser)
"Prose and Motion is a physics-based word game. Given a bunch of letters, the task is to rearrange them in order to make a word - you do this by grabbing them and putting them in place. The first few levels ask you to stick the letters next to each other to progress, but very soon you're being asked to build bridges and sit your word across them, or shuffle pieces around to make space available."

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

In our latest employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Tencent, Epic Games and more.

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

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

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

BlackRock Studio: Lead Animator
"When a company the size of Disney steps into European development, it's pretty big news. Disney employs over 100,000 staff. It’s one of the biggest Entertainment companies in the world and it's getting serious about original games. We're a strong studio of just over a hundred people, based at the heart of beautiful and cosmopolitan Brighton, UK. Just a quick train ride away from London in an office where pretty much everyone gets a sea view. The atmosphere is relaxed and friendly but focused and our role is to create original racing game franchises."

Tencent Boston: Composer/Sound Designer
"Tencent Boston is a premier game development studio led by industry veterans that are driving the creation of world class online games for a global audience. We are a division of Tencent Inc., one of the largest internet companies in China. For more than 400 million people Tencent is the internet encompassing portal, shopping, community and entertainment services. We are right in the middle of one of the most dynamic and fast growing game markets in the world and we are looking for outstanding individuals with passion, talent and a team focused mindset."

Crystal Dynamics: Concept Artist
"Crystal Dynamics is looking for a Concept Artist who will responsible for working with the Art Director on the visual development of existing titles as well as new IP within the studio. The concept artist is expected to provide the teams with inspirational illustrations as well as production artwork, including; character designs, environment and object exploration, paint overs, storyboards, color and lighting compositions. This position will be reporting to the Art Director."

Epic Games: FX Artist
"Do you have experience with particle editing in a 3D package or in a 3D engine? Are you ready to bring that ability to execute outstanding FX to our games? Strong sense of dramatic FX and understanding of how to recreate them in a particle editor required. Texture skills required."

Terminal Reality: Senior Network Programmers
"Terminal Reality Inc, is an independent Dallas-area developer devoted to developing top-quality games and technology. Since opening its doors in 1994 Terminal Reality has developed & shipped over 28 game titles including the recently released Ghostbusters: The Video Game on XBox 360, PS3 and PC."

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

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

Granted, I've done plenty of filching from the (terrific!) Sprite Stitch blog and forum over the last two weeks, but I'm going to do it just one more time. And I am mostly unapologetic about that, because, look. Just look at this detail from an incredible, embroidered throw pillow.

All told, 26,000 stitches were required to render this scene from Hideo Kojima's Snatcher (Sega CD, 1994):

Our hero, Deckard-lookalike Gillian Seed, is crouching, very obviously ready to spring into action, with little Metal Gear at his side. It took Sprite Stitch forumgoer klammyq about eighteen months to complete this painstakingly detailed pillow. I mean, have you ever seen such a tautly-plotted pillow? (I'll answer my own question: No. You haven't.)

[Snatcher Cross Stitch Pillow]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

PixelJam, the fiery minds behind Gamma Bros and Dino Run, have combined forces with the equally flammable Messhof for their latest, the inspired Adult Swim flash game Cream Wolf. Everyone told me it is a must-play, and they are not wrong. While the subject matter could be construed as skeevy (you play a werewolf, luring the neighborhood kids to your ice cream truck), the game itself is surprisingly hi-octane. And melodious!

But what does the future hold for PixelJam?

Artist and musician James Kochalka took to the Internet to announce -- suitably, in comix form -- his upcoming PixelJam collaboration.

Exciting stuff!

UPDATE! Mr. Kochalka recommended that we mention the Glorkian Warrior Kickstarter fundraiser, and we agreed it seemed like a pretty good idea.

So: PixelJam and Kochalka hope to reach their goal of $10,000, and they've assembled a variety of worthwhile perks for their donators. And the PixelJam team has a sense of humor -- a donation of $2500 or more, for instance, yields a 30-minute conference call with James Kochalka and the PixelJam guys.

Do visit the Glorkian Warrior Kickstarter page for plenty more background information about the game, its artists, and their plans.

Cream Wolf [Screengrab from TIGSource]
Glorkian Prototype [Via Tiff]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Alt Space' is a regular GameSetWatch column by critic and writer Phill Cameron, discussing the relationship between the personal computer and gaming. Trying not to giggle at virtual dongly bits in a character creator, he's been delving into the obtuse and utterly compelling world of PC online game Mortal Online, the would-be successor to the Ultima throne. That's if it ever figures out how not to get killed by a wild rabbit.]

When you get past the uncomfortable hilarity of seeing your character's genitals on the creation screen, you start to realise exactly what Mortal Online's main design ethos is. This is not a place of half measures. Starvault, the developers, aren't planning on appeasing anyone, and aren't going to chase a rating a few slots beneath what they want for the game just to get a few extra sales. No, this is a game where your characters have genitals. And that takes balls.

That's not to say it's attempting to accurately portray a Feudal system of Medieval Britain or anything as trite as that. Mortal Online is a fantasy MMO through and through, complete with dragons, magic and chainmail. It's not trying to simulate our lives any more than fantasy should, but instead creating a layer of truth that makes being in that world contain a little more fidelity than we're perhaps used to.

You're thrown into the world with little more than a few rags and a hatchet, and given absolutely no indication of what you're supposed to be doing. The list of skills gives you a little idea, with simple things like woodcraft and mining lying there dormant, waiting for you to expand and build them. So you approach the nearest tree and begin to hack.

It's from here that everything starts to make sense. You cut down wood to turn into a bow, or the handle of a weapon. You mine stone and that allows you to make the head of a hammer, or a crude axe. You then use these new found tools to kill yourself some animals, and suddenly you've got leather and fur, and you can make some clothes.

From here you do whatever any businessman would think; harvest them into materials that you can sell on in trade for things that you need. There is a money system in MO, but it exists purely to equate worth of two differing items. So when you buy from a vendor, you're placing down your wares and picking up some of their's. Money doesn't change hands, only goods, only encouraging the feeling of living in some sort of tribal village.

I've sunk quite a few hours into such manual labour, and I've not yet felt the urge to set off from this quiet idyll, if only because right now the world of Mortal Online is a somewhat empty wasteland. It's there to fill, and due to the ongoing beta-state, players are struggling to advance far enough before they're wiped to begin to set about building houses, towns and cities. Right now they're somewhat confined to the compounds that exist as starting areas.

Somehow, though, that's all right. There's an element of frontier here that I've not yet witnessed in gaming. In less of a 'colonising America' way and more of a 'coming out of the stone age' one. As you discover bow craft and hunting, you manage to clothe your way out of rags and shod your feet in leather. In a way, it's advancing through the primitive towards the civilised. And of course, civility means war.

Mortal is a game with violence at the forefront, as with so many, but Starvault are doing something slightly interesting here, too. What with the entire game being in a forced first-person perspective, this isn't a matter of targeting an enemy and clicking the auto-attack. You have to instigate every swing, each lunge, and all the blocks. These are dictated by your stamina, bringing to mind a system similar to the one present in Demon's Souls, where each swing takes away a lot of your energy, but it's quick to refill. And here, as with everywhere else, when you start out you're little better than a feckless lamb. The only thing separating you is that you've got an axe, and all a lamb can do is bleat.

You swing, and suddenly you're panting. Absorbing a block from someone will all but knock you from your feet. But the thing is, and this ties back to how the game encourages you to start off as a hunter-gatherer, by chopping all those trees, and mining all that ore, you've started to develop these big bulging muscles. They build your strength, your constitution, and suddenly you've got more stamina, more strength with which to swing. It's crazy, but things really start to make sense at this point. Meticulous logic in my game? Now there's a thought.

I'm tempted not to encourage too much, because of the utter obfuscation of how Mortal Online works. It's not easy to get into, and it's not friendly, at all. The interface is archaic to say the least, and the entire game is completely open-pvp, which means that any idiot can run up to you and start hacking, before stealing all your stuff when you die. Of course, if you're in a town, you can yell 'Guards!' (literally, just type it into chat), and the idiot gets skewered by the nearest man-in-armour. Of course, step outside and you're anyone's.

And that's not the half of it; there's been a somewhat resurgence of difficulty in games, most notably with Demon's Souls, but at least there there's something resembling a direction given to you. The levels are mostly linear, and so it's usually pretty clear where you're supposed to be going. Mortal Online, by it's very nature, offers you no advice, no helping hand. You'll find no quest givers, or helpful village elders who've got a problem with rats in their basement. The idea is that players will build their houses, their basements, and get their own rats. As the FAQ on the Mortal website claims:

'The overwhelming majority of MMORPGs today belong to the Theme Park category. Like a real theme park it always looks the same and chances are you grow tired of the rides after 20 times or so, unless the theme park creates new exiting rides to keep the park entertaining. In a Sandbox game you are able to create your own rides. Mortal Online is a true sandbox game.'

It's that unique nature that makes it so alluring. Even the smallest occurrence in your game will become infinitely more special, because it's the only time that has happened. Just by the nature that you're the one it happened to and so you're reactions where wholly original. Once, when I logged in, I was instantly attacked by a small, domestic pig. I'm still not entirely sure why, but because of a fight I'd had before logging out, he killed me in a few hits.

What followed wasn't pretty. It wasn't dignified in any way, and it ended badly for the pig. And its brothers, and probably quite a few of its distant relatives. Through some glitch in the game, my axe didn't return to my inventory, and so I was forced to craft myself a hammer from the wood I had in my inventory. That there was a niggle in my head that this wasn't entirely justified, and I'd probably attacked the pig the previous day, made it all the more questionable when I was malleting my way through his family tree.

It was only later, when I'd figured out how the taming system worked, that I realise what 'domestic pig' actually meant. This was a player's animal, and either they couldn't control it, or they'd ordered it to attack me. That I even found it again without its owner is a miracle, and it suddenly washed away all my anger. But it left me with an excellent pig-based vendetta story.

And that's easily one of the smaller things that's happened to me in my time in Mortal Online. It's important to stress that the game is far from finished, and while it has recently gone into Open Beta, it's still very much in active development, with huge patches being rolled out on an almost daily basis as systems are implemented and tweaked. Really, though, it doesn't matter; the game shows such raw promise, and so many completely new and novel ideas, that what's there is more than enough to squeeze a considerable amount of enjoyment from.

[Phill Cameron has begged work off multiple different sources, including the mighty Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the wonderful Resolution Magazine, and the ever stalwart Reticule. You can contact him here, and follow him on Twitter here.]

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

Gargamel is a small, but prolific, Japanese designer vinyl toy company; among collectors, limited releases tend to go for a lot of dough. The company actually specializes in neo-kaiju figures, but it does dabble in other genres of vinyl toys, even teaming with US artists to make -- OK, I just realized what I'm doing. I'll try to rein in all this nerdy effusion. (But it's tough!)

Still, what a set of figurines!

Eagle-eyed Adam Robezzoli somehow spotted these Gargamel toys over at METEOR, then found an even better photo of the final painted versions (above).

And there's still more! The man behind Gargamel, toy designer Kiyoka Ikeda, has a marvelous entry at his blog detailing his nearly lifelong hobby as a collector of Mario Bros toys and gashapon. If you have any sort of interest in that kind of thing, his toy collection doubles as an especially charming retrospective. (I do wish Mr. Ikeda's photos were larger, though!)

[Mario Bros. and Sidestepper soft vinyl figures by Gargamel]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Readers, our journey is almost over! Your faithful interim editor (me) has had a lovely time interimming these last two weeks: at the end of today, though, we must part ways. We had some crazy times, didn't we? Remember the time I posted that thing about an arts-and-crafts project I was impressed with? Or the time I dug up something wacky on YouTube? I'm sure it was wonderful.

Simon has been great, and so supportive -- I feel like I got away with a lot -- and, with bittersweet feeling, I will return Eric to you promptly on Monday morning.

OK! Some news:

- Gamasutra - DICE 2010: Kotick Talks Passion For Industry, Debuts Indie Contest
The Activision Blizzard CEO's keynote had a few salient takeaways: Foremost, he's sorry about the misconstructed remarks from before -- they were made in jest. Secondly, he wishes he'd partnered with Harmonix, in lieu of Red Octane, when he'd had the chance. And finally, $500K to America's Next Top Indie Designer! I think that covers everything. (But read Simon's coverage just in case.)

- Gamasutra - DICE 2010: Uncharted 2 Leads AIAS Winners With 10 Awards
Farmville wins, you guys! And on Twitter, there was plenty of real-time gaiety for Scribblenauts -- I like to imagine that, at that instant, the awards ceremony was totally illuminated in the glow of cellular phones.

- Joystiq - Steve Wiebe reclaims Donkey Kong Jr. world record
Twin Galaxies reports that, as of his February 14 performance, documented underdog Steve Wiebe is once again the reigning Donkey Kong Jr. champ. Time will tell whether Wiebe can also best Donkey Kong, Sr.

- YouTube - Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown
So, er, Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown was just announced. We're excited, right? Oh, fine. Maybe I am posting about this more for myself than for you.

- Massively - An introduction to Myst Online for newbies
Suddenly, quietly, Myst Online: Uru Live relaunched and is now free to play. I'm delighted! I missed my opportunity the first time around, but in my girlhood, I actually read all the Myst books. Ask me anything about Atrus! Go on!

- FingerGaming - Katamari Damacy Creator Unleashes Noby Noby Boy in App Store
Man, I'm glad this finally happened, because Boing Boing contributor Brandon Boyer was about to crack from the stress.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: We've really enjoyed having you around, Jenn. Don't be a stranger! - Simon.]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Still winding up for GDC 2010 here - look for a neat Choice Awards announcement on Monday, too. But here's info on our social games sub-event at the show, with lots of info on how to overcome the 'clone wars' and make great games.]

Organizers of the Social & Online Games Summit at GDC 2010 have rounded out their line-up for the March 9th-10th event, with Facebook and Playfish keynotes and three tracks of sophisticated content on what's next in this exciting space.

The major new Summit, taking place on the first two days of Game Developers Conference 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in just three weeks, has been designed to educate and inspire on the rise of socially connected gaming.

Summit advisors include notables like Metaplace's Raph Koster, Habbo's Sulka Haro, and Playdom's Steve Meretzky, and the Summit homepage has now revealed the two event keynotes and a complete line-up for the event.

The first confirmed keynote is 'The Relentless March Toward "Free"... And What it Means to the Video Game Industry', by Playfish VP and GM Kristian Segerstrale, the co-founder of the EA-acquired social game firm will "critically examine what the future holds for the creation, distribution and consumption models in video games -- and suggest what your company needs to do to prepare for the era of free."

The other keynote comes from Facebook platform manager Gareth Davis, who will speak on 'How Friends Change Everything', in which the social network "at the forefront of massive disruptions in who plays games, how games are discovered, distributed, designed and operated" discusses their view on where the social game space is headed.

With almost 40 other major sessions in the social and online game space, including speakers from Zynga, Playfish, Playdom, Habbo, Mind Candy, Schell Games, IMVU, PopCap, and many other major companies, the Summit is packed full of relevant, concrete information.

Notable new talks include a major VC panel including Trinity Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners about how to get funded in the social game biz, Diner Dash's creator on how to break out of the 'clone wars' of designing games, and Jesse Schell on parents and kids playing games together.

In addition, two extended sponsored sessions elsewhere at GDC present insights into the market, with Live Gamer's V-Con 2010 presenting a March 10th sponsored event with major players in the space, from EA Online's Nanea Reeves to SOE's John Smedley, and Offerpal's social and mobile sessions on March 12th including execs from Digital Chocolate, Crowdstar, 6 Waves and more.

The GDC 2010 Social & Online Games Summit -- part of UBM Techweb's Game Group, as is this website -- can be attended via All-Access or Summit-specific GDC 2010 passes, available online until March 4th -- and then onsite at the event thereafter. (Sponsored sessions are attendable by any GDC ticket holder able to attend lectures on that particular day.)

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham looks at art game history, QA, and The Beatles: Rock Band, among many other things.]

This week Frank Lantz was at the Art History of Games conference and he reports back to say that, ‘Doom is too Rock ‘n’ Roll to ever be confined to a museum, man’! But not in quite so many words.

The AHoG conference was talk of the town this week, and Charles J Pratt wrote up some of the speakers he heard, covering the opening panel and a talk by the above mentioned Mr. Lantz and John Sharp on ‘avoiding the domestication of game art’ for GameSetWatch.

As a response to some of the things that came out of the conference, Corvus Elrod talks about how dictating what games aren’t through manifestos, etc, can only reduce their cultural relevance.

But if you’re looking for a more satirical take, you really can’t go past Matthew Burns’ “The new debate on games as ert” (sic). In the same week he also comes back to finish his series for Edge Online about QA testing ‘In the Dungeon’ with parts two, three and four.

Another new blog began its life this week, by one Amanda Cosmos, and her first post talks about the Global Game Jam and her team’s game ‘Quest for Stick’.

Elsewhere, Michael Abbott writes about Mass Effect 2 and what it says about the evolving nature of video game genres. Abbott notes: “Bioware knows what we who write about games ought to know better. Genre classifications are essentially meaningless, and it's time to drop them and move on.”

It’s a sentiment echoed to some degree by Jim Rossignol in Rock Paper Shotgun’s latest podcast, episode 38, and the resultant audio includes a great contextualized discussion of game genres throughout history.

Gus Mastrapa at Wired’s GameLife blog says ‘21st-Century Shooters Are No Country for Old Men’, noting: "Young gamers are somehow better than older gamers. Is it because they have fewer responsibilities and more free time? Or is it their youth that keeps them sharp?" At a mere 23, I think even I count as old in this scenario.

Via fellow blogosphere overviewer and synthesiser Erik Hanson comes a tale of ‘Myst as mythology of the hyperlink’.

LB Jeffries adds to the previous week’s discussion of No More Heroes 2, picking out some of its problems. Also on NMH2, Chris Dahlen writes for his Edge column that what the sequel is missing is really ‘the loser mechanic’ from the original.

Denis Farr this week examined the rather baffling choice Bioware made with regard to male-male relationships in Mass Effect 2. Farr highlights a quote from executive producer Ray Muzyka in which he explains the choice to limit any and all Male commander Shepard’s to an essentially straight male role. As Farr notes: “This tells me that I can create my Shepard, but he or she isn’t mine, actually.”

In other commentary, Grayson Davis uses a discussion of Uncharted 2 to argue quite convincingly that our vocabulary for discussing video game graphics remains an ephemeral, hard-to-pin-down thing.

Davis wonders: “…why can I quote decade-old reviews of a game that's only distantly comparable to Uncharted 2 and find the exact same statements, almost verbatim, that I find in today's criticism? These statements aren't wrong, but they're shamefully insufficient.”

Peter Kirn at Create Digital Music runs down the new music based game ‘Chime’ that I’ve been hearing good things about. The game is part of a charity-based collective, OneBigGame that aims to raise funds for children's charities.

After a negative piece early in the week explaining how difficult the Bioshock 2 hacking mini-game is for people with colorblindness, Dan Griliopoulos (who is colourblind himself) writes about the issue for Rock Paper Shotgun.

And lastly, Nicholas Shurson -- formerly of the Form8 blog -- has started The Game Journal, hoping to attract a mature audience interested in reading about and talking about videogames. This week he’s written about the The Beatles: Rock Band in ‘Come Together’, the second post named for a Beatles song we've mentioned in as many weeks.

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

The 5th Annual Ankama convention is scheduled for this spring, and it's already inspired quite a buzz. Convention organizers expect as many as 30,000 visitors from around the world to descend on Paris in April.

Initially, I wasn't too sure I'd heard of the Ankama universe, or of DOFUS, the French MMORPG the convention will celebrate (a quick peek at the website, though, and I suddenly remembered I have indeed ventured inside). I do know that DOFUS is huge in France, so Ankama's World of Twelve is fairly analogous to Vana'diel, except that you can get farther into the lands of DOFUS without paying anything.

Press for Ankama promise their visiting fans "book signings, tournaments, shopping, gift packs, developer sessions and Q&As, and hands-on gaming opportunities," especially with Islands of Wakfu, an upcoming Ankama title for XBLA, currently in beta.

Attendees can also look forward to a beta invitation to "an unannounced Ankama game." And 200 lucky fans might also get first crack at "Frigost," the latest DOFUS extension. Still, I heard 'shopping' and 'swag.' Won't someone send me to Paris, please?

The Parc des Espositions de Paris will open its doors to Ankama fans on April 17. The convention lasts through the following day.

[Ankama-Convention.com]

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

This beautiful painting is a sneak peek at Ōkami Picture Book II: Soldier from the North and the Ghost Killer. It's just one illustration from the upcoming sequel to the Ōkami picture book published late last year.

4Gamer notes that, as the Okami sequel is yet a work-in-progress, these beautiful preview images are "subject to change." Gosh, I hope not!

According to manga author/illustrator Awairo, his illustrated storybook will be released -- in Japan only! -- on March 18.

【リリース】「大神絵物語」，第二弾「北の戦士と妖怪退治」が3月発売決定 [Via Eastern Mind]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Sister console digital download site GamerBytes' editor Ryan Langley examines Decembers 2009's Xbox Live Arcade debuts and continuing successes, with charts and leaderboard data, to find out what digital XBLA titles are doing well at this year's end.]

With December over, the new year of 2010 begins, and with it some new XBLA releases. Previously, January on the Xbox Live Arcade has been a strange month, usually littered with puzzle games -- and a few surprises along the way like The Maw.

This January was a little different. We had the same puzzle games and oddities thrown in, but it was also a month that saw the debut of Serious Sam HD and Vandal Hearts – both big names in comparison. We’ll see how they’ve done in this analysis, as well as look at the new Top 20 list released by the Major Nelson blog.

Here are the Leaderboard statistics for the new Xbox Live Arcade releases in January 2010:

The first two releases for January were Vicious Cycle's Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond and Croteam's Serious Sam HD. For the former game, we unfortunately do not have any details regarding Leaderboards, as the game appears to have broken stats.

What we do know is that it was not on the Top 10 list for the week after its release, and it was not on the Top 20 for the final week of the month. So in all likelihood, it didn’t do spectacularly.

Serious Sam, on the other hand, has done rather well. It had over 20,000 players on the Leaderboards in its first weekm with over 35,000 at the end of the month -- and it should continue on well into the next few months as well.

Death Hearts

Konami’s Vandal Hearts: Flames Of Judgment and Square Enix’s Death By Cube were the next two releases on Xbox Live Arcade. Vandal Hearts, which was released at $15, ended up doing fairly well for a January release. Its first week had 15,000 players on the Leaderboards -- with nearly 21,000 at the end of the month. The game was also released on the PlayStation Network on the same week, so there are additional sales on that system not taken into account here.

Death By Cube is the latest game in Square Enix’s Xbox Live Arcade releases, but like the past few, it didn’t have a great debut. In fact, only 2,747 players were on the Leaderboards in the first week -- not a good start. The dual-stick shooter genre has gotten very full on the Xbox Live Arcade – new titles without Geometry Wars in the title have all had a difficult time as of late.

Kriss Crossing

The final new release for January was KrissX, published by Konami and developed by Blitz. For its one week on sale, it added 2,615 players to the Quest Leaderboards. Again, not a lot.

The game had zero chatter before it was released – not even the official Major Nelson blog could tell its readers what the game is. While a crossword puzzle game would probably never be a top seller, it still could have had a bit of a push. Reviews of the game didn’t even show up until a week and a half after it was released.

Each month, we take a handful of titles, usually recent or popular games, and check their Leaderboards for each week.

NinjaBee's A Kingdom For Keflings was put on sale for a cheaper price in the first week of the month, and for that week, 19,000 new players were added to the Leaderboards -- with some good extended sales and/or delayed activations on the weeks afterward.

Twisted Pixel's The Maw was on special in the last week of December, and this list shows the aftermath of that. The game continued to do a little better week after week -- but as referenced above, this could also be players who bought the game and hadn’t played it just yet.

Downloadable Content

We’ve been following the downloadable content for 3 titles – the Peggle Nights DLC, The Maw’s DLC and the Trials HD “Big Pack”.

RedLynx's Trials HD DLC has done immensely well, with over 60,000 new players in January. Currently over 20% of players who own Trials HD have also played the expansion pack – that’s a very good tie-in ratio.

Peggle Nights from PopCap has also continued to do well, with an additional 10,000 players added -- with 15% of all Peggle players buying it. Additionally, The Maw’s DLC sold fairly well alongside the Deal Of The Week back in December.

For the last week of January, Larry 'Major Nelson' Hyrb announced that he’ll be releasing a weekly Top 20 list, instead of a Top 10. This allows us to have a look at games that have sat underneath the Top 10 that we usually don’t see. Here, we’ve added the Leaderboard statistics we gathered for that week to get a better understanding on the sales of Xbox Live Arcade titles.

Here we can see a few titles that we haven’t really spoken about for a while. Madden NFL Arcade hasn’t been in the Top 10 for some time, but it appears that it’s been hiding in the overall Top 20 since its release. Pinball FX and Marble Blast Ultra have also been hanging around further down the charts too. (This will also allow us to see less successful games like KrissX if they appear on the list as well.)

The Big List

As for the rest of the titles we follow, not a whole lot has changed. There are still a lot of games that are selling below 500 copies a month. There are also some that are doing well considering their age – Secret Of Monkey Island added 5,000 players to its Leaderboards, as did Geometry Wars 2. Even games like Red Alert 3: Commander’s Challenge, which didn’t start off on a high note, has been doing far better than other games released in the same timeframe, with 1,500 players in the month.

The Future

February will be an interesting month – the release of Zoe Mode and OneBigGames' Chime, the inexpensive puzzle game with charity in mind, Introversion's Darwinia+, the long awaited tactical strategy title, The Odd Gentlemen's PB Winterbottom, a time-bending platformer, and Sarbakan's Lazy Raiders, a kooky take on the Cameltry-style rotating puzzle game. And March is going to get even crazier, with the Xbox Live Block Party promotion. Can't wait.

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

Katamari Damacy art never gets old, no, and this painting is especially captivating. I'm curious about how the trailing luminescence was accomplished -- it really seems to gleam -- and, less importantly, whether the artist also painted his own box of tissues. (Probably not, OK, but it strangely ties the room together.)

Weekly Geek host (and painter!) Chris Furniss writes that he was commissioned by a friend to complete this canvas. I think it turned out very nicely! And I especially like how all the hearts sort of make it into a Companion Katamari.

In further amazingness, Maya Pixelskaya -- come on, that has to be a pseudonym -- hand-painted three Day of the Tentacle neckties.

Here is one of those ties.

The prince [Via Wasabi Sunshine]
Purple Tentacle Tie [Via Geekadelphia]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Giant Robot SF announces its third annual Game Over gallery show! The video game -themed art exhibit opens at San Francisco's Giant Robot store and gallery March 12. The opening reception begins at 6:30 PM.

Last year's show, which also cleverly coincided with GDC, was curated in part by Attract Mode's Adam Robezzoli. That exhibit featured playable, collaborative game art -- Derek Yu, Anna Anthropy, and Jonatan Söderström were all participants.

We don't know yet what's in store for us this year, except that Chicago artist Jeremy Tinder has a piece in the show (Mushroom Kingdom Totem, pictured).

GR-SF 2.17.2010 [Via the inimitable Brandon Boyer whom, if you are inclined to use social networking services at all, you really ought to follow on Twitter]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Following Part 1 and Part 2, we are continuing our discussion of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, the popular variant of Linley's Dungeon Crawl that has swept the roguelike world by storm.

One special feature of the game is that nearly every one of the game's many races can also play all of the classes in the game, and vice versa, and do so in a reasonably consistent way that exposes interesting gameplay options. Unlike other games, Dungeon Crawl has found a way to keep classes differentiated, requiring different play styles, even into the late game, without actually preventing classes from doing anything. It is possible for a fighter type to learn magic and vice versa, but is it wise to put in the effort in doing this? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.

This column looks at some of the many interesting combinations of race and role in Crawl, and their available paths (or lack thereof) to success. The specific combinations looked at are: Spriggan Enchanter, Deep Dwarf Paladin, Hill Orc Priest, Human Wanderer and Minotaur Chaos Knight of Xom. (I'm sure some of you may have your own favorites, and I'm looking forward to seeing your suggestions in the comments for this one.)

Some words about engines and recommended classes

At the race and class selection screen, you may notice that some of the entries are displayed in light gray and some in dark gray. This is an indication of the Crawl Stone Soup developers’ confidence on the survivability of these play options. Depending on which race you pick different classes will be grayed out; if you pick class first, then different races will be grayed out. Regardless of which race you select, Thief and Wanderer are always gray. Even though they’re “grayed out,” you can still pick any combination of the two; the only actual limits are those where picking a certain class implies following a god that is forbidden to that race. Those classes that are not grayed out are often those that have a good engine available.

What is an engine? It is one term for the mechanism a character uses to survive the dungeon. In most roguelikes this is a matter of walking up and hitting things, with occasional recourse to magic. In Crawl, the greater dangerousness of the dungeon makes this a bad idea for many characters. An engine is a gimmick, a special trick, a clever way around it that you end up relying upon. For example, Wizards beginning with the flame or frost spellbooks soon gain access to the spell Mephitic Cloud, which is applicable to many early-game situations and confuses many types of monsters. It can be used to easily neutralize enemy spellcasters and hordes, sometimes even causing them to kill themselves accidentally. Confused monsters take more damage in melee, due to the stabbing rules. And if a monster is still too tough to beat, you can choose to just run away. An early game wizard’s attack spells aren’t that great, but Mephitic Cloud can keep them going to the point where they can be relied upon, and even some ways after that.

Mephitic Cloud is useful enough that it seems game breaking, and in a lesser game it might actually be. But all of the engines (that I know of at least; Crawl characters have many options available) have limits to their usefulness. Mephitic Cloud doesn’t work against monsters that resist poison, or those that can’t be confused. If you try to win the game with just Mephitic Cloud, you’ll eventually reach a point where the engine stalls. At that point, you’ll have to either improvise with whatever other resources you’ve found or die. Canny players will have used some of the experience income from those easy kills to have given their characters more options to use, but this, too, can be dangerous. A character with level 3 in everything is at a disadvantage compared to one who is level 10 in a couple of skills. Being able to intelligently determine which skills to focus on and which to ignore or turn off, this is the beginning of Dungeon Crawl wisdom.

Here are a few interesting race/class combinations. Due to the way Crawl's characters are diversified, some of these tricks apply to other classes of the same race, or other races of the same class. I leave most of those examples for you to find.

Spriggan Enchanter
“Sweet li’l wee faerie lethal assassin deadly death”

Spriggans are one of the more unusual races in Crawl, possessing a combination of very good and very bad attributes that would break the game if they weren’t balanced against each other. In total I’d say they are balanced a little on the easier side, but they must still be played carefully enough that they require a little more skill than a novice is likely to have.

Spriggans are little fairy-like beings. They are unable to fly, but are still very very fast characters. They are already so fast that some sources of hasting don’t work on them! Unlike centaurs, another race that gets its advantage from speed but pays for it with a greatly increased hunger rate, Spriggans actually have the lowest basic hunger rate in the game. The trade-off comes from what they can eat. They begin with three levels of the “herbivore” mutation, meaning, they cannot eat meat at all.

There are several kinds of food that can be found in the dungeon. Usually the best type of food is meat rations, but Spriggans cannot even try to eat them, nor sausages or beef jerky. They also cannot eat “chunks,” the bite-size fragments left over from butchering corpses. Chunks are emergency rations for most characters, an important fall-back food in the event the level generator is stingy with the meal service. Even if the generator makes what would normally be sufficient food, Spriggans are still out of luck if it turns out to be meat. Once in while this produces a game where no suitable food can be found for five or six whole levels. Spriggans’ super-low metabolism means they might go up to three levels without having to eat, they always begin with a potion of porridge that provides lots of nutrition, and they get extra nutrition out of those food sources they can eat. Despite these things, it can still be a harrowing early game until that first bread ration turns up.

This isn’t even the worst thing about them. They are also completely unable to use most armor! Their bodies are just too dang small to wear armor other than robes (or, strangely, troll leather or dragon armor), and neither can they wear boots, gloves or hats heavier than a cap. This dooms them to having an extremely low AC for most of the game. Low AC means having to play a lot more carefully than otherwise. Some workarounds are dragon armor (which hinders spellcasting), transformations and the right kinds of mutations.

Furthermore, Spriggans get fewer hit points per level than other classes, and can start with the lowest starting strength score in the game. If playing as a magic-using class, it is possible for a Spriggan to begin with a strength score as low as 2! Dungeon Crawl does not protect players from having stats too low for survival, from whatever cause. If a Spriggan’s strength dips below 1 it dies immediately, even if only from carelessly wearing equipment that provides a minus to strength. And in many areas they don’t even have good magic skills to make up for it; Spriggans are awful at Conjurations, Summonings and Necromancy, the most directly-useful types of combat magic, and their elemental magic skills are not that great either.

But as I said before, Spriggans still seem a little on the easy side, and the reason for that comes down, mostly, to their amazing speed. Faster-than-normal movement speed is an incredible advantage in a roguelike. Most other classes reach a moment of reckoning when they encounter ogres; Spriggans are one of the few classes that can handle them pretty safely, just by keeping their distance, loop dancing and chucking darts behind them along the way. Only a very few monsters can keep up with an unencumbered Spriggan. Being faster than opponents means being able to turn melee range into missile range almost at will, means being able to escape nearly any foe so long as they can get to a staircase in time, means faster exploration, means getting out of enemy sight range and then losing them at an intersection, and means being able to wade lithely through a horde of attackers and getting to a corridor before being surrounded.

Of the magic skills Spriggans are good at, they are amazing. They have extremely good Enchantments, Translocations and Transmutations learn rates, and excellent Divinations as well. In a combat situation, Enchantments is often their greatest ally. It contains the low-level spell Ensorcelled Hibernation, which other games might call Sleep. This spell puts a chosen monster to sleep so long as it doesn’t resist the spell. The way Crawl’s sleep rules work, if the monster is asleep a character with even low Stabbing and weapon skill can do insane damage in one hit. And for some reason, the one melee weapon skill Spriggans are good at, Short Blades, is the one that does the most Stabbing damage. Spriggans are also naturally stealthy, gain Stealth skill quickly for becoming even more stealthy, can’t wear hardly any heavy armor so don’t wake monsters up that way, and are super fast so they can close the gap between the edge of detection range and melee faster than any other race, so they might not even need to put a monster to sleep to stab it to death; they can often do this with monsters who are just taking a nap.

What this means is that Spriggans are what you might call nature’s assassins. Even if you don’t purposely try gaining Stabbing skill, you’ll probably end up getting it accidently anyway unless you go out of your way to wake monsters up before hitting them. And if you don’t start with Stealth, unless you manage to find one of the few Spriggan-wearable types of heavy armor fast, you’ll be getting that skill too. And Spriggans may be the only race that can make it pay off.

Whatever class you pick for a Spriggan, you’ll be wanting to rely on their missile skills and the magic skills they excel at, so you might as well get a head start in those areas by playing a Hunter or an Enchanter. Enchanter, in particular, is a great choice since your starting spell begins with Ensorcelled Hibernation, which makes 95% of monsters you encounter in the early Dungeon, the Orcish Mines, the Lair and the Hive a piece of cake. With care and diligent training you can one-shot hydras this way with minimal danger.

The biggest challenge to playing a Spriggan, besides the food problem, is their fragility. You don’t want to get into melee with strong monsters if you can help it. The nature of the game is that sometimes you end up in melee range of a monster without warning, and a small percentage of those occasions you won’t be able to back away out of trouble. Slowly improving your fighting skill and training Short Blades helps out a bit there, but the best solution is probably to teleport or blink. It is good that Spriggans also have an excellent Translocations aptitude.

All character builds have weaknesses, and Spriggan Enchanters have the most trouble with monsters who are even faster than they (there aren’t many but they exist), with cold-resistant monsters who can’t be put to sleep with Ensorcelled Hibernation, with monsters that don’t sleep to begin with like demons, and with those few monsters who are entirely immune to Enchantments. Fortunately, most of these guys appear late enough that you will probably have found alternate means for handling them by that time, such as attack wands, or a hard-built Conjurations skill.

Good gods for Spriggans include Vehumet (who can help make up for their natural lack in Conjurations and Summoning), Sif Muna (who eventually will provide every spell in the game, good for making up for deficiencies) and, perhaps strangely, Nemelex Xobeh the gambler god, since he appreciates sacrifices of items and Spriggans can’t use so much stuff they never lack for things to offer.

Deep Dwarf Paladin
“As unchanging as the mountains, and with the same capacity for healing”

Deep Dwarves are another special race type in Dungeon Crawl. Their gimmick is that, whenever struck for any amount of damage, they “shrug off” a number of points of it. This ability increases as they rise in level, and against basic opponents they frequently take no damage at all. It is much like the D&D attribute called “damage reduction.”

The trade off, however, is huge. Deep Dwarves do not regenerate hit points naturally. The passing of time does nothing to lessen their wounds! And equipment, items or spells that work by increasing regeneration don’t work either. All of the hit points that Deep Dwarves regain must come from magical or divine healing, and it happens that both are fairly rare in Crawl. The game simply has no analogue for D&D’s Cure Wounds series of spells. (It seems the spells may technically be in the game, but their matching book never generates.) Potions of Healing and Heal Wounds are effective and common, but when they are a major source of healing you’ll always find yourself wanting more.

A Wand of Healing, which can be zapped at yourself, can be recharged and takes up less weight than a equivalent stack of many potions, is one of the best solutions and Deep Dwarves always begin with one. They also can recharge wands as a special ability, although it costs them a maximum magic point to do it. Crawl’s Max MP gaining rules are such that the lower your Max MP, the greater the chance you’ll get more on a level increase or other source of gain, so this isn’t quite as bad as it seems; the lower score may subtly increases the chances of gaining more at higher levels. But it’s still pretty harsh; scrolls of recharging should probably be devoted towards refilling that wand.

Divine sources of healing are another way of getting hit points back. Mahkleb will sometimes heal you a point or two whenever you kill a monster once you get enough piety with him. The Shining One, who you conveniently begin the game with if you choose to play a Paladin, will sometimes heal you for several points of damage when you kill an “evil being.” In the early game this includes zombies and imps, but also applies to orc mages and priests. One can also play as a Healer, which begin worshipping Elyvilon, and using the self-heal ability in a pinch. That carries a piety cost however. Classes not starting with a god can pick one up once they reach the Ecumenical Temple.

Even with damage reduction there are still plenty of monsters who can overpower that kind of advantage easily, and you’ll probably be cannibalizing your Max MP to recharge your Wand of Healing, so it is probably best to abandon spellcasting and put on the hardest armor you can find. Don’t forget though, increasing Spellcasting skill can also provide you with the occasional extra Max MP, so it can be worth it to wait until you have experience pool to spare before reading identify scrolls.

In the long run, probably the hardest thing about Deep Dwarves is their healing limit. You only have so many potions, recharging scrolls and maximum MP for charging that wand. It isn't hard at all to reach a point in the mid game where your character is powerful and ready to kick ass, but is down to 17 hit points with no means for regaining them.

Hill Orc Priest
“The center of the SWARM”

Hill Orc Priest is one of the most entertaining race/role combinations in Dungeon Crawl. It is nothing to do with the Hill Orc race directly, who are generally unremarkable as far as that goes. It has to do with Beogh, God of the Orcs, who is only available to orcs to worship, and who Hill Orc Priests have the opportunity to start out with. It is certainly an experience.

Consider, for a moment, the plight of the orc. Unloved, unappealing, and the go-to-guys for evil wizards looking for muscle to help them take over the world. They do not have the most graceful manners, and they usually either look like pig-men or are green with tusks, depending on which artist is depicting them. That can’t help their self-image any.

In the Book of Orc, the holy text of sacred (as far as that goes with an orc god) Beogh, it is told that one day a Chosen One will emerge to lead the Orcs up from their lowly position in the world. Orc priests tend to labor under the impression that they may be that chosen one. As a player race, they have a decent shot at it.

Playing a Hill Orc Priest basically means taking up the sandals of Orc Jesus. Followers of Beogh, fairly early in their career, pick up a very nice little ability. When they catch sight of a particular orc for the first time the game makes a die roll, influenced, I assume, by your piety level. If it’s successful, the orc there and then greets you in a friendly manner and joins your team. There is no limit to the number of orcs you can have on your side, all flavors of orc may do this including uniques (the stronger ones may have to get beat down a bit first), and as individual orcs accumulate kills they gain power and can even promote into stronger forms, or gain magic or priest abilities. A friendly Orc Knight that has lasted a few dungeon levels is indeed a great friend, and allied Orc High Priests and Sorcerers, if you are lucky enough to score them, spam-summon friendly demons to aid your cause. While casualities are frequent, as many Crawl players discover early, there are a lot or orcs in the dungeon, so losses are easy to replace. It is that simple, and it is that awesome.

Nethack’s pets can be useful to have, but you rarely get the opportunity to have more than two or three at a time due to the difficulty of getting them to the next dungeon level. Dungeon Crawl allows any allies who are visible, can reach your position and within three spaces of you the chance to come along to the next level. That’s up to 48 per trip! You even get an ability later on that lets you summon your henchmen to your side in an instant.

Playing as a Hill Orc Priest feels an awful lot like turning the tables on the dungeon, letting you field your own horde against the monstrous opposition, and does it ever feel good. Using the CTRL-T command you can order your followers to scavenge the best items they find on the dungeon floor, which is a good way to make use of all those artifacts that tend to get generated that your skills are poorly matched for, or that plate mail +3 of magic resistance you can’t make use of because your current plate mail of magic resistance is already +4. A well equipped swarm of high-level orc knights, priests and sorcerers roaming the dungeon is amazing to behold, and recommended to every roguelike player at least once. The funny messages your orcs supply as you traipse throughout the dungeons are icing on the cake. (Those of you who are wary of memes take heed of my warning: these particular orcs are quite loyal. They are known to inform you from time to time how they’re never gonna give you up, and that they’re never gonna let you down.)

The biggest drawback to leading your horde around is just the unwieldiness of commanding an army. It is very easy to leave orcs behind on a level, even with the Recall Followers ability, and if you accidently hit one with an attack there is a chance both of him turning hostile and of Beogh giving you a smack for good measure. (Although the game is very good about warning you about that ahead of time.) If you abandon Beogh, your whole army will immediately turn hostile. So don’t abandon Beogh, okay?

Human Wanderer
“Mr. Average”

Humans, as in many RPGs, are the utterly average race in Dungeon Crawl. All of their aptitudes are straight-average 100 except for Invocatons and Evocations at 75 (which require having a god or magic item respectively and so their average is low to represent that outside aid) and Spellcasting at 130 (which is over 100 for everyone except Elves and Spriggans). Higher aptitude values mean the skill is harder for that class to learn.

Humans are the most flexible of all classes, and have no explicit disadvantages in play. No class is restricted from them except Priest of Beogh (which, as already mentioned, is unique to Hill Orcs). This is actually a great drawback for human characters, since the game is balanced around the idea that characters will have some above-average ability to help them through the dungeon.

That is bad enough. Add to that the Wanderer character class, which starts the character out with basic equipment and random skills. It is quite possible to start out with a weapon the character has no skill with, and it’s very likely that he’ll have skill in some school of magic but no skill in Spellcasting, making them useless until he’s read enough scrolls to get Spellcasting to level 1. (Correction: It seems that it is possible to memorize and use some spells of a class without a level in Spellcasting. Thanks jarpiain!)

On the race and class selection screen, there are combinations which are recommended, which are displayed in light gray, and combinations which are not recommended, showing up in dark gray. The game does not actually prevent picking any combination of race and class so long as isn’t logically inconsistent, such as when trying to create a Demigod in a race that begins worshipping a deity.

Very few are forbidden, but lots are considered bad ideas depending on the intersection of race and role. But there are two classes that are considered “challenge classes,” which are not recommended for any race. Thief is one of them, since thief skills are under-represented in Crawl and Assassins get most of their advantages and then some. The other, in case you haven’t come to suspect it, is Wanderer.

It is possible to luck out with a Wanderer. They never start with high skill in anything, but they can more reliably quickly specialize on the first attack-branded weapon they find and have a relatively easy time of the first levels of the dungeon, if they can survive that long.

Minotaur Chaos Knight of Xom
“Hail Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos!”

So we come to Chaos Knights of Xom, which are almost the mascot of Dungeon Crawl.

Chaos Knight is a class that, like Priest, starts you out already following one of Crawl's deities. The class has a bit of melee emphasis thrown in to help out. When you’re following Xom, every little bit counts.

Xom is unlike the other gods in that he doesn’t just give you new abilities as you gain piety and follow the god’s precepts and generally be a good member of the flock. Xom doesn’t actually care what you do, so long as it’s entertaining. Entertaining for him, not you.

Every so often, Xom will either do something for you, or to you. It could be something good or bad; Xom does have a persistent mood that carries forward through the game, but every time he acts there is a 1-in-5 chance of it getting set to a random value, meaning he can go instantly from absolutely loving you to trying to smash you beneath his shoe, and as quickly back. There is not a lot you can do to affect this, although you can tell generally how he feels by checking the ^ screen; if the message calls you a “plaything” then Xom’s next action will probably be bad, if it calls you a “toy” then his next action will probably be good. There is no guarantee in either case though.

Some good things: get given a (sometimes) good item, summon demon pets, get granted good mutations, polymorph a nearby monster, have a spell cast on your behalf. Some bad things: random miscast effects, summoning hostile demons, get inflicted with bad mutations, polymorph a nearby monster (yes it’s in both lists), get sent to the Abyss. Some of those bad things are very bad, although they are balanced (a bit) away towards being overwhelmingly deadly.

One instance in which this system doesn’t apply is when Xom is bored, that is, you haven’t done anything interesting lately. You get warned when this occurs. While bored Xom only does bad things to you. Just fighting monsters who are reasonably strong compared to you often counts as an interesting thing, but hanging around resting does not.

The key to understanding Xom is in realizing he not just a system for intensifying Crawl’s already-chaotic random number generator. You can use equipment and magic, as well as the better part of valor, to help alleviate the bad things and keep the good items and mutations, so in the long run--provided you can live that long--you should come out ahead. There is a greater variety of bad things he can do to you than good though, and you should still be prepared to hoof it in a tight spot.

There are some other minor influences on Xom’s behavior. He never does something directly lethal to you unless he’s bored or he’s attacking you for abandoning him. At those times, if an action would do so much damage that it would take you to zero or below hit points, then instead he won’t do it. And his chances of doing something good goes up a little when you’re in a fight with dangerous monsters, and down slightly if no foes are in sight.

We’re getting near the end of the series, but there’s still a bit more Crawl to come. Next column focuses on one of the most unexpected, and most awesome, of all of Crawl’s features: its extensive facilities for game automation, which sometimes defy belief! Until next time….

Posted by John Harris at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Medicom are the Japanese toy company behind collectible, Lego-style Kubrick and Bearbrick figures (or are they technically Be@rbricks? I work full-time in toys, and I honestly have no clue).

Slated to drop tomorrow, Medicom's latest are these adorable Kubrick and Bearbrick sets. There's a Mega Man Kubrick (pictured) paired with a corresponding blue Bearbrick, and then there's Proto Man (unpictured), bundled with a red Bearbrick.

Looks like each pair will retail for about US$40 so, taking the scale of Kubricks into account -- figures are about 2.5" tall -- these are some pretty pricey collectibles. Still, these in-demand figures darn near didn't make it stateside at all, so strike while the iron is hot!

Medicom x Mega Man Bearbrick Sets [Via Asylum]

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

As part of my continuing efforts to connect with other poindexters located in the Midwestern United States, I have bravely ventured out alone to at least one of the Chicago Nerd Social Club-sanctioned events and/or mixers.

Next on the Calendar of Events: D&D 101, a tutorial for nerds who (like me!) have never so much as balked at a tabletop role-playing game. (My girlhood unfortunately coincided with a phenomenon now known as the Satanic panic, so for this Southern Baptist, Dungeons and Dragons and video games with RPG elements were anathema.)

The A.V. Club recently interviewed D&D 101 host Phil Kalata, and every one of the man's quotes is a winner.

On what those of us who have never played D&D are thinking:
"You likely knew gamers in high school and college and thought, Is it possible that the bespectacled, over-and-underweight guys who spend their weekends in a basement quoting Monty Python and rolling dice are actually having a better time than I am?"

On RPGs' potential appeal to the feminist ladies:
"This is someone who wants strong characters in fiction and wants to be a strong person. This is perfect fodder for a role-player."

On assembling a crew to play with:
"Play with people you like. Play with people whose company you actively seek out [...], not someone you merely tolerate."

D&D 101 is scheduled for next Sunday, February 21.

Last month, the Nerd Social Club's Video Game Committee hosted a Left 4 Dead 2 LAN party.

[D&D 101: Why now is the time to start role-playing]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The latest issue of GameSetWatch sister publication Game Developer magazine, available for subscribers and for digital purchase now, includes a postmortem of Gearbox's Borderlands, written by the studio's product development VP Aaron Thibault.

Borderlands, a first-person shooter heavily based around Diablo-like loot and level mechanics, is the latest new property from the Plano, Texas-based developer. It was published by 2K Games for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 last October.

These excerpts from the February 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine reveal various "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" highlights from throughout the creation of the game, revealing how the company employed a new art style and overcome scheduling issues and "analysis paralysis."

Analysis Paralysis and the Truth

Early design management decisions left the Gearbox team with less than a firm handle on the state of design at any given moment, and the impact of particular design implementations on the final game. It wasn't until a more objective system was implemented that the whole thing came together:

"The initial core team started the project with very high-level goals and understandably blue sky thinking. The team decided at that point the most efficient tool for documentation and communication would be a wiki. That didn’t work out as the team began to scale. Designs evolved faster than the wiki pages that described them, and discipline was inconsistent throughout the team in terms of keeping things updated.

"Gearbox’s technical director got involved and the Truth Team was born. He intended this group to speak for the customer and to speak through data, not opinions or conjecture. Truth turned out to be one of our very best decisions, and we are now utilizing the strength of that team across all our projects."

The New Art Style

Along with numerous other aspects of development, at a certain point Gearbox completely reevaluated the game's art direction. This is how the team did it, using the initial town "Fyrestone" as a proof of concept:

"Not long after the Fyrestone test was completed, Randy Pitchford took this example to 2K to pitch The Change. This was a risky prospect, and we had no idea how 2K would respond. Internally, we knew what kind of risk this posed to production.

"In our new style, most assets don’t need a normal map because we ink in the details—similar to graphic novel illustration. Fortunately, we had expertise on the team to help us understand the best way to execute and scale into full production. A constant process of improvement began, and it included all of our artists, our very small number of trusted outsourcing partners, and our art directors. This was a great art team motivator."

The Quest for Missions

Unlike with most first-person shooters, which tend to be more guided in their linearity and repetitive in mechanics, the mission system in Borderlands required more consideration, as this extract from the length, useful postmortem explains:

"After The Change, the level design department was given the task of designing and implementing all the missions for the game. This was no small feat. From The Change through to the ship date, the level designers understood what would be required; with leadership from the level design lead they stood together, prepared to put forth amazing effort and in the end delivered a completely rebuilt game.

"On one hand, the constraints made designers focus on doing the best with what they had, and that was helpful for getting the team focused on implementing the kinds of missions that the system would allow. On the other hand, we had only one person who really understood the system inside and out so his workload scaled up metrically, and the system’s implementation made missions hard to debug."

Additional Info

The full postmortem of Borderlands explores more of "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" during the course of the game's development, and is now available in the February 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes a roundup of governmental game development incentives, Front Line Award finalists, a piece on the art of creating believably flawed characters, and our regular monthly columns on design, art, music, programming, and humor.

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 this edition as a single issue.

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

Point-and-click adventure games have their own set of frustrating quirks: the puzzles tend to require dream logic, for instance, or there is a lot of arbitrary clicking around the screen in search of the game designer's intended hotspot. But the most salient hallmark of the genre, probably, is that of the main character's frequent, inevitable death.

Player death is an obvious, even lazy way to reinforce the player's investment in his own in-game decisions -- whether he remembers to chug a cup of coffee could mean life or death! -- but in the case of Phantasmagoria, every death, every minor failure, is, in a giddily gruesome way, its own macabre little reward.

Phantasmagoria was released in 1995 at the apogee of the FMV "interactive movie" fad. Actors typically mimed even their most minor in-game actions -- including their deaths -- in front of a blue screen, lending that genre a surreal, operatic cheesiness. David Craddock notes that Phantasmagoria's narrative action "often culminated in controversial and grotesque scenes made all the more real by the fact that real actors, not animated characters, were involved."

In a Phantasmagoria retrospective that concentrates on the game's failings as much as anything else, Craddock continues,

Dozens of bad choices on the part of the player brought about gory consequences for Adrienne. In one death sequence, an imprisoned demon bursts through a door, grabs Adrienne's face with both of its powerful claws, and pulls in either direction, effortlessly ripping her head into bloody bits of flesh, bone, and brain matter. In another, Adrienne's possessed paramour ties her to a chair and throws a lever, prompting a scythe to swing down and split her head not-so-neatly down the middle. In the same scene, players can cause Adrienne to commit suicide by pulling the lever themselves.

Phantasmagoria was rereleased just last week as a US$10 download.

[Editorial: Smoke, Mirrors and the Phantasmagoria]
And see also:
[The Wonderful Murders In: Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria!]
[Games that scarred me for life: Phantasmagoria]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Disney princesses get everything. They inexplicably tame birds and bunny rabbits without even trying. They get their own fashion dolls and fairy godmothers and a twinkly flash website. Effortlessly, they end up paired with some Charming or On-the-Spot, happily ever after.

What, then, for Disney's villainesses? Are these audacious women condemned to live out all the rest of their days in isolation, with only magic mirrors for company?

I would totally play this 2D fighter. (I would also play a 2D fighter with Disney princesses, mind you, as that might be great fun in its own way.)

Disney Villainesses by violatekate [Via Simon Parkin]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In the latest Road to the IGF interview with 2010 Independent Games Festival finalists, our own Leigh Alexander speaks with Hello Games' Sean Murray, Dave Ream, Grant Duncan and Ryan Doyle about capturing the joy of motorcycle toys in Joe Danger, their Seumas McNally Grand Prize-nominated contender.]

Hello Games, a UK-based independent developer founded by veterans of AAA racing titles, is bringing its first game to digital platforms -- Joe Danger, an Evel Knievel-inspired racer that aims to catch the spirit of childhood toys.

Here, Hello's Sean Murray, Dave Ream, Grant Duncan and Ryan Doyle get together to discuss the Seumas McNally Grand Prize-nominated Joe Danger, how real play with a toybox helped firm up the concept, and where they hope the project is headed next.

What is your background in making games?

Sean: I guess we’ve all worked for bigger companies like Electronic Arts, Criterion and Sumo for a couple of years. I worked on Burnout and Black, amongst others.

David: We’ve all been making games since we were kids, though. The first game I ever made was called Little Yellow Car goes Beep.

Grant: I was an artist on a bunch of Sega games, and I worked on Warhammer. First game I made was a Doom mod called Space Cows From Beyond The Milky Way. I was very young.

Ryan: My first game was called “Tech Demo v0.8”.

What development tools did you use?

Sean: Us three coders mainly spend our days in Visual Studio.

Ryan: We’ve got lots of tools and editors we’ve made ourselves, we use them quite a lot.

Grant: I’m mainly Photoshop and Maya. Sometimes they make me open xml files in Notepad, but I sob until it stops.

How long did you work on the game?

Sean: It’s been about eighteen months since it all started, probably longer than that now.

David: We’ve lost all track of time. We’ve been working on Joe Danger for so long our keyboards are covered in dust and cobwebs.

Ryan: Dave’s keyboard is covered in dust and cobwebs.

Where did the idea come from, and what influenced the style?

Sean: We kind of had too many ideas to begin with, too many directions we wanted to go in. Then Grant brought this box of toys in from his parents attic, and we started playing about these toys -- one in particular, actually.

Ryan: That dildo?

Grant: It was an old Evil Knievel stunt cycle.

David: Next question...

From what I can see, you've really recreated the joy of playing with toy motorcycles and race tracks. What considerations did you build into the design to bring this sense right up to the forefront?

Sean: We wanted something that was fun to play with. Like when we were firing that stunt cycle out of windows and down halls, it was just fun. So many games are based on avoiding failure rather than seeking reward. We wanted to make something different. Something charming, rewarding and just fun.

Grant: As a child playing with toys, they’re never frustrating.

Ryan: Apart from Optimus Prime. He never did what I told him. Always talking back.

With the level editor that allows people to put their own tracks together, can you see the potential for releasing more building blocks via digital download updates once it launches? Would you like to have users able to share tracks among themselves?

Sean: We’d love users to be able to share their levels, absolutely. It’s rock-hard to implement, but we’re working on that.

Ryan: Sean doesn’t understand how it’s done.

David: I’ve been telling everyone how to do it for ages.

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

Sean: Have enough money to finish the game?

Grant: Have enough money to not have to finish the game?

David: Have enough money to never have to finish anything.

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

David: Jelly!

Ryan: Jelly was too awesome for its own good.

Grant: Can we put Jelly back in?

Sean: No.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists or recent indie titles? Any games you particularly enjoyed?

Grant: We’re played them all really, anything that’s been released.

Ryan: They are all disappointingly good. I want to play Vessel. Rocketbirds was ace, loved the Flash version of Closure.

Sean: I loved every minute of Super Meat Boy. They say it’s coming for WiiWare, but it’s not, it’s right there on NewGrounds.

David: Miegakure looks awesome, it twists my brain. Trauma seems really interesting, and Limbo looks lovely. Have we left anyone out? VVVVVV is brilliant.

What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?

David: The focus on guitar is too strong. Folk has been sidelined in recent years.

Sean: We’re probably a bit removed from the main scene here in the UK, but for me indie games have never been more broad or interesting. I’m excited to meet some of the other devs at GDC.

Ryan: I’m afraid of the indie scene. I hear they come for you in the night.

Grant: I had a friend once. That happened to him.

[Previous 'Road To The IGF' interview subjects have included Enviro-Bear 2000 developer Justin Smith, Rocketbirds: Revolution's co-creators Sian Yue Tan and Teck Lee Tan, Vessel co-creator John Krajewski, Trauma creator Krystian Majewski, Super Meat Boy co-creators Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, Sidhe's Mario Wynands, who worked on Shatter, Daniel Benmergui, creator of Today I Die, Klei Entertainment's Jamie Cheng, executive producer on Shank, Star Guard creator Loren Schmidt, and Miegakure developer Marc Ten Bosch.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Keys to the Kingdom is a new GameSetWatch column from freelance writer and blogger Rob Zacny. This month he examines how 'grand PC strategy game' Europa Universalis III portrays social and political change, and how its mechanics put players at odds with their own self-interest.]

Revolutions have never made much sense to me, probably because my understanding of the world owes a frightening amount to Civilization. I have always believed, on a level I kept secret from my history professors, that the Bourbons and the Romanovs perished because they were terrible slackers. Why else would they stubbornly refuse to summon their advisors, select from a tray of exciting sociopolitical values, and say, "Let's get this revolution started!"

Games like Civilization do not attempt to explain why some countries get lost in developmental cul-de-sacs, or why others consciously reject innovation. They focus on progress and power. The tech tree is a litany of scientific, economic, and social advances. The games themselves are races to technological finish lines. Some competitors may fall behind, and others might be eliminated by more powerful rivals, but everyone progresses. The rules do not comprehend another outcome. Grand strategy games are about winning history rather than experiencing it.

Paradox Interactive's Europa Universalis III places historical experience at the center of the design while superficially adhering to genre conventions. The commonplaces are all there: players spend money on research, unlock new weapons and infrastructure, and change society as more options become available. Yet EU3, unlike most of its cousins, never treats development as synonymous with progress.

An EU3 campaign begins sometime after 1399 and finishes in 1821, and players must guide their country through that segment of history. Although the game issues national missions, players are free to choose their own goals. They receive a rank at the end based on their standing, but it's really up to the player to determine the level of his own success or failure. EU3 is very much about the journey, not the destination.

Which all sounds very Zen, but that open-ended journey takes place in a world of unresolvable tensions and the occasional Hobson's choice. The wisest and most far-sighted decisions are rarely the best decisions, and a faction's evolution owes as much to circumstances as strategy.

Level 5 Chaotic Neutral Rogue Nation

EU3 describes each state through the National Policy window, which is a sort of character sheet for your country. The essential attributes are sketched out across eight policy sliders that place opposing values at the extremes. One slider places Centralization at the far left and Decentralization at the far right, while another puts Serfdom against Free Subjects. A country is defined by where the sliders fall along these spectra, and each position confers penalties and bonuses. At extreme positions, these consequences are likewise extreme.

Presiding over these attributes are the National Ideas that guide a country. To continue with the "character sheet" metaphor, these are a bit like feats or special abilities that confer bonuses in particular areas. "Glorious Arms" causes a country to receive prestige (political currency that has effects across every aspect of the game) for military victories. "Bureaucracy" produces improved tax revenues. National Ideas are important strength multipliers, and it's crucial to have the right ideas to meet current challenges, otherwise they do little good. Glorious Arms is useless during long periods of peace, for instance.

The player cannot, however, simply min-max society. The sliders may only be adjusted once every several years, with the country's form of government determining the exact period. Furthermore, only one slider may be adjusted at a time, so prioritizing is key. Instant social transformation is impossible.

Even these minor adjustments pit the player against a status quo that bitterly resists change. The chief obstacle is instability: every government has a stability rating of -3 to +3, and lower stability can trigger a downward spiral into anarchy. Because lower stability exacerbates every domestic problem, it increases the probability that more destabilizing events will occur. Even a well-governed country is merely at rest on a slippery slope.

The Butterfly Effect, Government, and You

Since each policy slider affects large segments of society, any policy shift can unleash powerful backlashes. For instance, in one game I played as France, I decided I needed to reduce the privileges conferred on the aristocracy in favor of the bourgeoisie. I tapped the Aristocracy - Plutocracy slider from its extreme aristocratic position to one that was marginally more equitable to wealthy commoners.

However, there was a 1 in 3 chance that the nobility would revolt if I made that decision and, to my genuine surprise, they did. You would swear that I was Robespierre from the way they mobilized against me. They produced a pretender to the French throne and marshaled an army of 16,000 men behind him. Since this was a noble revolt, I found myself at war with the men who had formed the backbone of my superb army. The rebels were far better led, and far more motivated, than my peacetime loyalist army. Before I could gather my forces, the rebels started picking them off piecemeal, leaving me temporarily outnumbered.

When the rebellion broke out, France had naturally suffered a stability drop from +3 to +2. While I didn't think that would matter very much, it turned out that it did. My king had a terrible administrative rating, which reduced tax revenues throughout the country. The dip in stability further depressed those revenues and forced me to start minting more money to pay for the army I suddenly needed to build, which sent inflation into the stratosphere. That triggered an event that forced me to either move to a new coinage, which would cost me 2 stability points but reduce inflation, or permit inflation to run rampant. I authorized the new coinage and stability fell to 0.

Now stability was so low that Norman nationalists decided the time had come to secede from France. Another 12,000 rebels cropped up in Normandie and started laying siege to my fortress there. Meanwhile, the nobles were taking over western France. Feeling increasingly hapless, I finally scraped together a large enough army to go take on the nobles. I defeated them, barely, and ended the revolt, but at the cost of most of my forces. In the meantime, the Norman rebels took over Normandie, Caux, and Picardie. The game notified me that due to this nationalist victory, these provinces would be hotbeds of separatist sentiment for the next few decades. Tax revenues would be low, revolt risk high.

I finally managed to put down all the revolts and was beginning to restore some semblance of order when I received notice that the bourgeoisie were furious about the nobility's privileges keeping them out of powerful positions and had brought forth a petition. If I accepted it, I would move the slider farther towards plutocracy but lose yet more stability. If I rejected them, the slider would move back toward the aristocracy. Since I absolutely could not afford more instability, I backed the aristocracy.

Which placed the slider in exactly the same position it had been before a civil war, an economic collapse, and two revolts. It had all been for nothing.

It's worth pointing out that this chain of events could have played out very differently. EU3's event system forked the road at key points, and I could have chosen different routes. Furthermore, my own responses to the crisis produced additional problems. Other courses of action might have produced better outcomes. On the other hand, I might have done worse.

That single minor policy adjustment took on a life of its own and brought France to the brink of destruction. It also drove a wedge between what I knew was the best long-term course for the country, and what pragmatism demanded. While I wanted to support the commoners against the nobility, and knew that would be better for my strategy over the course of the game, events forced me to choose between a potentially disastrous reform or a reactionary backlash.

EU3 is a game about consequences and the limits of power. While I had choices throughout the incident, and even triggered it by using my available policy change to make a moderate reform, my choices were bound by circumstances that I did not create. I could choose from among available options, but I was not free to decide what my options were. I knew what progress demanded, and that France could not be dominated by nobles forever. But progress was not something I could afford.

The cleverest consequence of how EU3 models political and social change is that it makes the player complicit in his own undoing. Where most grand strategy games portray technological or social backwardness as a consequence of poor management, EU3's interlocking policy, event, and stability mechanics can force you to eschew the good decisions for the smart decisions. Later, when you confront the mess left by years of expedience over efficiency, you will ask, "What kind of idiot lets things get this screwed up?" Then you'll remember.

It was you all along.

[Rob Zacny is a freelance writer living in Cambridge, Mass. He is a frequent contributor to The Escapist and a panelist on the Three Moves Ahead strategy podcast. More of his work appears on his blog.]

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

Whoa! Alice Taylor is totally right: in certain screenshots, maybe at certain angles, Allods Online sure looks convincingly like World of Warcraft.

Allods Online launched its open beta today. And as there are no brabbling subscription fees to contend with, the Russian MMO is free to play.

[Allods Online: a WoW clone to make you double-take]

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

Artist GameBoyOne's pixel graffiti juxtapose urban landscapes with 8-bit sprites. Below, his Dragon Quest slimes:

Do check out his latest work -- his Streets of Rage thug, for instance, or this gryphon from Final Fantasy III -- on his Flickr stream.

[Daily Graffiti: Dragon Quest Slimes]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Continuing his series of interviews for GameSetWatch, Jeriaska examines intriguing-looking Xbox Live Indie Games title Kaleidoscope, talking to the creators of the just-debuted Xbox 360 downloadable game about its alluring visuals and music.]

There may never have been a better time to be a developer of independent games than today, but how to go about getting the word out on a great indie remains anybody's guess.

Kaleidoscope, released on the Xbox Live Indie Games platform for the Xbox 360, is the product of a three-person team currently exploring both popular and novel methods of promoting their first game together.

The central theme of the sidescrolling hop-and-bop is that as you progress through each of Kaleidoscope's levels, layers of color emerge on the screen and layers of instruments fade up on the music score. Gameplay, art and music each have interactive properties affected by the player.

Programmer Matthew Stenback and art director Sang Han have run Kaleidoscope through the gauntlet of independent game showcases. The title was a finalist for the Microsoft-sponsored Dream-Build-Play competition.

Composer Mattias Häggström Gerdt's approach to generating word of mouth has included posting the soundtrack album to popular game arrangement site OverClocked ReMix. Site founder David Lloyd, aka "dj pretzel," hosted the music album and wrote the closing credits track. This interview with the trio of game creators at Morsel provides a look at Kaleidoscope's premise, execution and the often elusive goal of calling attention to the finished product.

Kaleidoscope was first on display at PAX as part of the Dream-Build-Play showcase of Xbox Indie titles. What has changed since then, and how would you describe the overall premise?

Matthew Stenback: There’s more of a focus on exploration now, rather than just left-to-right platforming. I started out thinking that I didn’t want to make a game about shooting or killing, and considered what children do for fun. Coloring books were something that popped into my head immediately. On top of that, I wanted for the music to reflect that theme, so that as every layer of color was colored in an extra layer of music would fade in as well.

How would you characterize your background in programming?

This is my first game. I really like the culture around indie games and that most of all was what made me want to be a developer.

I used to do a little freelance graphic design, but I don’t have a computer science background, so I decided to pick up C# and do XNA programming.

Would you consider Kaleidoscope proof that someone with a limited programming background can make a game this way?

Absolutely, the learning curve is not as steep as you might think. XNA is a free tool you can download and they make it really easy to get your games on the Xbox. The community is also really helpful. It didn’t take me too long to get the basics down. After being selected as one of the finalists for Dream-Build-Play I began paying attention to the showcase more, and I really appreciate what they’re doing.

Taking a look at the game itself, it's divided into four central worlds. Without giving away too much, how did you go about differentiating these sections of the game?

The first level is a tutorial with some simple platforming and a bright color scheme to get you in the mood to play. The second world is all about wind and there are fans blowing you to out-of-reach locations. The third world is kind of scary, and you’ll have to turn on a series of lamps as you go through. After you’ve gotten through the third scary world, it seems like the game is over, but the theme of this next world is 8-bit and the music really reflects this.

During production you've said all your communication with the design team was done online. Was this challenging?

It was difficult to convey certain things through IRC and text, like an idea for a certain game mechanic, so we moved over to skype out of necessity. However, I’m surprised by how well it turned out.

Being based in San Francisco, how was it working with team members on opposite ends of the earth?

Me and Mattias never had the chance to see the game as a whole, so for me to guess at every art asset was difficult. Stenback lives in Newfoundland, Canada and Mattias lives in Sweden. We had skype and IRC on constantly, just working and talking to each other. Mattias would be first to go to sleep, then Matthew would go to sleep, and by the time I’d fall asleep, Mattias was up. That whole process was on rinse and repeat.

Your background is in storyboarding, which might be reflected in some of the concept art for the game, but how did you branch out into other areas in providing the art design for Kaleidoscope?

Sang Han: Kaleidoscope visually is very simple, and what we needed to push was colors. The funny thing is that I’m actually colorblind, so there was a lot of trial and error in getting the colors right. Gaming has always been a passion of mine, and working with color was a new experience. It was frustrating because I couldn’t pick the right colors at all times, but it was a lot of fun and we got through it.

The original game idea is the brainchild of Matthew, and he took me on about two months before the deadline of Dream-Build-Play. When he wanted four uniquely stylized worlds, I gave the second world which has a theme of wind a lot of scribbles and messy, windblown kinds of lines. When world three was a night world, everything had to be pitch black and scary, while the trees were alive and had eyes.

Previously you have written the music for Artoon and The Perfect Match, two downloadable independent games for the Xbox 360. Having had this experience making indie games, were you impressed by any of the other Dream-Build-Play entries?

Mattias Häggström Gerdt: It was a good line-up, actually. I remember seeing Dust: An Elysian Tale in the pre-beta on YouTube. It definitely looks like a triple-A game.

The soundtrack to The Perfect Match was made available online through your personal website. This time OC ReMix is hosting Kaleidoscope Original Soundtrack. Would you say that your participating as a judge at OCR has contributed significantly to your career as a game composer?

First and foremost, without OCR I would not be a game composer. That all started because of Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. If you put “Employer: Capcom” on your resume, people tend to raise their eyebrows.

How would you describe the interactive soundtrack, mentioned earlier?

The point with the gameplay was that when you have just the first layer of the soundtrack, it's dry, shorter sounds, more percussive melodic motifs. More warmth and more depth is added as you progress. Often the bass comes in with the second layer, when you see the first colors come in. It was a challenge to get song levels to match the layers, so that each additional layer made sense in context. I spent a lot of time trying different sounds and tweaking synth patches so that you felt something was being added, without it being too noticeable.

How are the individual tracks tailored to Sang's visual design for each world?

The first world is really mellow, like most first worlds. It’s a very laid-back track to ease the player into the game. Then there’s a darker level, where I used more minor chords and deep reverb to make it seem a bit more tense. We also have one world that kind of has 8-bit as its inspiration, with block graphics. For that I used a lot of 8-bit and 4-bit sounds. There’s a mix of chiptune samples I've acquired, from the Game Boy and Commodore 64 to a Sinclare Spectrum, to capture the retro vibe. It's quite heavily processed.

What software do you prefer to use for your game soundtracks?

The entire Kaleidoscope soundtrack is done in Propellerhead's Reason. Reason is really amazing as a modular synth and these sampled waveforms give you nearly endless sonic possibilities in the field of electronica and experimental music. This was the first music software I used on the computer and also is made by a Swedish company.

Reason does not support recording audio, so the actual sampling is done in the open-source program Audacity. I use a variety of samples, the most prominently used packs are the Flatpack-series from LapJockey and WaveFront by BitWord. I always try to retain the right to release my soundtrack albums. OverClocked ReMix is setting up a site to distribute free videogame music soundtracks, this being one of the first.

[Images courtesy of Morsel. The soundtrack album for Kaleidoscope can be downloaded from OverClocked ReMix]

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

I've found an article I'd like you to read. It's really clever. It is titled "Metagames and Containers." The article itself is about emergent gameplay. It's also about making little games out of daily life.

The article is awfully cunning, if a little bit opinionated, a little too self-referential (I didn't really like House of Leaves, for instance, so). Reading it sort of feels like reading Understanding Comics, except that this is an article you can play.

Each self-contained argument is framed out in a little rectangle. Here is how reading it works: as you read each section, you can tick it off, and that section sort of recedes from the page. That's it, that's all. That's all there is.

In this way, as with contemporary video and board -game play, you can feel yourself concretely move through a narrative of sorts. But while the article itself is pretty linear, you may carve your own path, traveling to each "container" in your own order, in your own time. And as you mark each section as having been read, you might also experience little surges of accomplishment.

On the subject of "achievements," the author, David Cole, writes,

Now, the sat­is­fac­tion of “com­ple­tion” isn’t quite the same as “whole­ness” but it’s related.

I think it’s a sig­nif­i­cant rea­son why peo­ple get less out of read­ing for the web: there’s always more.

Then the author makes a number of valuable -- if fleeting, even cursory -- assertions about the metagame of Searching the Internet, which is a metagame I played all last week and up through this Tuesday. (Cole says he uses Instapaper to 'play' the Internet -- I use Read It Later.) He talks a lot about lists, too, and I hope he's read Everything Bad Is Good for You, which contains a nifty passage about playing Zelda games and making little lists in your head.

I'm reminded, very suddenly, of my own anecdote, and as I doubt I've conveyed it to anybody in any venue, I think now is an opportune moment to share it. (Also, I'll put it just beneath the cut -- I'll make a little game out of it! -- so that you might miss it if you're only scrolling past.)

In October 2008, I emailed my mom a link to a YouTube video -- I think it was Dame Judi Dench performing Sondheim's "Send In the Clowns" in this raspy, half-spoken way -- and I encouraged Mom to share that video with my dad, who is 89 and suffers from dementia. Later, I learned that this is his favorite song, or so he now claims.

I'd also sent, in my email, hilariously detailed instructions on playing, pausing, and "buffering" videos on the Internet. I also sent along recommendations having to do with controlling the volume.

My parents, who aren't very well acquainted with the Internet, incorrectly believed that I had sent them not only a link to Judi Dench's musical performance, but to every single iteration of "Send In the Clowns" that had appeared in the algorithmically generated Related Videos list in the bottom right of their screen.

Mom phoned later to let me know that they, together, had whiled away the entire afternoon, very slowly working their way through the Related Videos list. My dad announced that each new version of the song was his favorite.

"So you played a little game!" I said to my mom. I tried to explain to her that I had not sent a list of links, that instead she had invented her own missions, that she and Dad had gone their own way, and that they had accomplished something special in seeking each new thing out entirely on their own.

My mom didn't understand what I was getting at -- it's very difficult to explain emergent gaming to an elderly woman! -- so I told her that I was very impressed with her newfound abilities, and we left it at that.

Metagames and Containers [Via It's Nice That]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Man. The opening music from Takahashi Meijin no Bugutte Honey is about as smooth and easy as it gets. Mmm.

I own a copy of Takahashi Meijin no Bugutte Honey for Famicom, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because the cartridge is pink? And because it was cheap? But also pretty obscure?

The game itself is neat, though, because you play as the heroine Honey the Bug, a flying bee-lady who sprinkles hearts on everything. (Insects, I think, were very much a part of the 1980s Zeitgeist.)

Now for the weird part: this Bugutte Honey anime was a spin-off using characters from the Adventure Island game series. But the Bugutte Honey Famicom game, in turn, was based on the cartoon! Causality, what?

I am trying to think of an equally recursive analogue -- I guess it would be akin to Captain N having his own game. (And now that I've typed that out, I almost can't believe that never happened.)

[Rare Japanese Cartoon Based on Adventure Island]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Still a few GDC 2010 announcements to come, and we're going to try to highlight a lot of the neatest lectures you might not have spotted -- this time headed by Blizzard, Chair, and Sony folks talking about some interesting things.]

Highlighting new talks for March 9th-13th's Game Developers Conference 2010, organizers have added Rob Pardo on Blizzard's design philosophy, the Smithsonian Institute on embracing games, Chair's Donald Mustard on creating XBLA hit Shadow Complex, and sessions on OnLive's streaming tech and Sony's PS3 motion controller.

The new announcements come with less than a month to go until the event, which takes place from March 9th to 13th at San Francisco's Moscone Center, and includes two days of Summits and tutorials alongside three days of Main Conference content.

The highlights from this set of announcements include the following notable lectures:

- In a rare talk called 'Making a Standard (and Trying to Stick to it!): Blizzard Design Philosophies', Blizzard VP of game design Rob Pardo (pictured) discusses how the Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchise creators "establish our own core [game design] values in the ongoing challenge to deliver a consistent, epic game experience", specifically referencing some of the successes and failures they've experienced along the way.

- Chair co-founder Donald Mustard is talking on 'Designing Shadow Complex', discussing the acclaimed Xbox Live Arcade title and exploring "ideas on how to embrace the 'limitations' of the platform and use them to streamline your game design, prototype your title, and most importantly, boil your feature set down to its core essence of 'fun.'"

- In a lecture called 'A Day At The Museum: How The Smithsonian Is Embracing Games', PastPixels' Chris Melissinos and Smithsonian representative Georgina Bath Goodlander will discuss "how the Smithsonian American Art Museum is using ARGs and other games to engage patrons and how the forthcoming Art of Video Games exhibition was started, its goals and what it means for establishing the validity of video game culture."

- Sponsored sessions are also providing new details on awaited hardware, with Sony putting on a session called 'Introducing the PlayStation 3 Motion Controller', showing the upcoming PS3 peripheral, and a lecture called 'It's OnLive! Cloud-based Gaming Is Here' featuring a duo from the company presenting "a technology and SDK overview, along with best practices for getting video games onto the OnLive platform."

Other recently confirmed GDC 2010 talks include notable lectures on Deus Ex 3's "cyberpunk renaissance" look, Silent Hill producer Akira Yamaoka's ethos, and Batman: Arkham Asylum's art direction, as well as a talk by Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto, confirmations of Peter Molyneux and Pixar lectures, and a keynote from game design legend Sid Meier.

More information about GDC 2010 is available on the official Game Developers Conference weblog, and the GDC 2010 website has a full list of lectures, passes, and opportunities at this year's event.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:00 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 a fun - if slightly ancient - trawl through some of the best video game-related links we've seen in recent times, we start out with an old standby - a big list of neat free games, courtesy 1UP, and it even includes a number of titles that we haven't had a chance to check out.

Also in here somewhere - classic games of 20 years ago in pictorial form, a paean to the Nintendo DS, a look at whether indie games are dead, Frank Lantz on art and games, Tim Rogers wanders along to his own happy place, and more besides.

It was a swan:

101 Free Games 2010: The Best Free Games on the Web from 1UP.com
Another excellent annual list from 1UP and the Sharkey.

can videogames make us happy? - tim rogers - Kotaku
Dunno, but articles as silly as this can def. make us happy.

Interview: Frank Lantz | Edge Online
Nice chat from Art History Of Games conf.

Is Indie Dead? :: Culture :: Features :: Paste
An amazing cover article from Paste Magazine about indie music which has some serious relevance to indie games too - I think in the next couple of years, they will be here too.

IGF 2010 finalists overview at Big Download Blog
Finished up all the finalist overviews, they have, and some really nice write-ups are to be had.

1UP's Retro Gaming Blog : Advertisement Gallery: The Games of January, 1990
'The following is a gallery I put together of magazine advertisements showcasing games released in the United States in January of 1990 which, for a few more hours anyway, is exactly twenty years ago.'

Retrospective: Listen, We Have to Talk Article | Retro | Eurogamer
Some of the best writing in the world is on Eurogamer recently: 'DS, we have to talk. I'm sorry that I'm doing this in a letter rather than face to face, but I need to express all my thoughts and feelings carefully. I need to make sure you understand.'

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

Oh, my! Apparently, dolls and toys have taken over Keita Takahashi's conference room! They're helping the Katamari Damacy creator plan Noby Noby Boy for iPhone and iPod Touch. And according to their whiteboards, they want to appeal to "kindergartners" and "the worldwide party people" alike.

Here you go! The toy is made:

In the last of the three videos Famitsu posted today, Takahashi demonstrates that photographs -- whether taken using the camera, or stored in the iPhone's library -- can be cropped and dropped directly into the application. "I'm sure the party people will love this!" a yarn amigurumi doll trills happily.

According to Famitsu, in automagic English translation, Takahashi hopes this iteration of Noby Noby Boy will be less "complex" and more "carefree" than its PlayStation 3 predecessor.

【第1回】iPhone版『のびのびBOY』の製品会議中の映像を入手！ [Via Brandon Boyer]

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

Every once in awhile -- not too too often, but occasionally -- I like to unplug the Xbox, close the DS, borrow a friend's Kindle, and kick back with a nice electronic book.

I'm kidding. I don't read anything. If I were a reader, though, I might start with these titles, which have been endorsed by some perfectly respectable people.

First, Walker over at the Preserving Games blog writes that he really enjoyed last year's Racing the Beam: the Atari Video Computer System, published by MIT Press. He notes that, in its exploration of the 2600 as a medium, the book does toe the 'technical' -- adding, though, that the layperson (me) will not likely be overwhelmed. (Although, if I were bothered, I trust I could just refer to 2600 Magic as a sort of concordance, and be mostly OK.)

Next, James Wallis lauds Man, Play and Games. Wallis dispenses such high praise, in fact, that I am actually a little upset I haven't read this yet:

I’m talking about the beginning of games criticism. I’m talking about Roger Caillois (1913–1978), French philosopher and writer. His 1958 work Les Jeux et Les Hommes, known in English as Man, Play and Games, is probably the first serious examination of games qua games. Sure, Johann Huizinga’s Homo Ludens was more than two decades earlier but Huizinga was a sociologist and Homo Ludens is more about the phenomenon of play: why we play, not what or how we play. Caillois was, in a gloriously French way, a freelance intellectual, a free-thinker who hung out with the likes of George Bataille -- another link between games-design and the Surrealists and Dadaists -- and Borges. In short: Huizinga, fuddy-duddy university professor. Caillois, one of us.

[Book Review: Racing the Beam]
[Caillois completeness]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In the latest Road to the IGF interview with 2010 IGF finalists, we speak with Miegakure's Marc Ten Bosch, who explains how a novella inspired his game dealing with the "magic" of the fourth dimension.]

Marc ten Bosch's Excellence in Design finalist Miegakure is a dimension-bending brain teaser dressed in Zen -- just looking at it prompts pondering the creator's unusual thought process.

Here, ten Bosch explains Miegakure's aims, influences and inspirations, from dimensional fiction to Japanese gardening.

What is your background in making games?

I went to DigiPen for undergrad, where one of my game projects (Orblitz) was at nominated at the IGF Student Showcase 2006. Then I went to Brown University for grad school. I also spent a very brief time at Electronic Arts.

What development tools did you use?

The game runs on a custom engine based on SDL/OpenGL. The game is written in C++ and my IDE is Visual Studio. The levels are scripted in Lua.

How long did you work on the game?

There was a one-year gap between my first prototypes and the prototype that turned into the actual game. I had to absorb the concepts before I started making any progress. The prototype that I presented at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC in 2009 took about a month to make. Since then, I have been working on the game for about 6 months.

Where did you get the "4th dimension" concept Miegakure uses?

As a programmer, I knew that position in a game does not have to be limited to three coordinates, and collision detection often isn't much harder to program in higher dimensions. I started prototyping game ideas, but only really made progress once I read Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott.

It's a famous 1884 novella that explains higher dimensions by analogy to the perspective of a two-dimensional character living in a two-dimensional flat plane (a piece of paper, for example). A number of actions we three-dimensional beings take for granted feel like absolute magic to this two-dimensional character.

For example, if there is a circular wall around an object in 2D, it is essentially closed-off, since to reach it one would have to leave the 2D plane. It is also impossible for an outsider to know what is inside.

But us 3D beings can see the object from above, and also simply lift it off the ground to move it outside, essentially teleporting it. Now by analogy a four-dimensional being could perform many similar miracles to us living in only three-dimensions. My goal was then to make a game that would allow you to perform these "miracles".

How'd you develop some of the brain-teasing aspects? I'd imagine you had to play around with some real-world puzzle objects...

The concept of a fourth dimension is naturally brain-teasing; it's just a matter of exposing it in interesting ways. I want to make each level show off some interesting aspect, rather than increasing its difficulty for arbitrary reasons like increasing the number of steps required to solve it.

It goes back to the miracles I talked about in the previous question. There's one level where you walk through a wall, one level where you infiltrate a closed off building, one level where you steal an object out of a closed box, etc... For the player to do all these things, they need to understand the rules of the world a bit more each time, and that's where the challenge comes from.

Who's the little guy in the game?

I can't reveal much about him yet. He's a superhero of sorts, having somehow acquired the ability to move and see into the fourth dimension.

What does "Miegakure" mean, incidentally?

Miegakure literally means "hidden from sight." It is a general Japanese aesthetics term, but it often refers to a traditional landscaping technique that emphasizes the effect of only partial exposure of garden elements.

During a walk along a garden path, a tree or hill might obscure the view, letting the invisible part be imagined. Getting only glimpses of the whole garden creates an illusion of vastness and impression that there are hidden beauties beyond. The title reflects the fact that the player can only see along three out of four dimensions at a time, leaving most of the world perpetually out of view.

In fact, modern scientific theories such as string theory predict that our world may actually exist in four or more spacial dimensions, but its high-dimensional beauties are hidden from us.

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

Nothing major. Things have been going pretty smoothly so far.

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

There were tons. A fundamental aspect seems to be that fast-paced elements don't work well in the game. I speculate that's because you can only see a cross-section of the world at any given time, and therefore it takes a few moments to observe and understand each change.

So, in general, the game should give the player plenty of time to think, which makes the fourth dimension mechanic better-suited to a puzzle game that an action game.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you particularly enjoyed?

No, I can't say that I have.

What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?

I wish mainstream game companies would be more innovative, but realistically that's not going to happen. So I'm glad to see the indie scene filling that gap. But let's not forget that the indie scene is producing as much crap as the mainstream; it's just in the form of 2D platformers instead of 3D first-person shooters.

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

Richard Garriott -- the eccentric game developer behind the Ultima series, and whose home, Britannia Manor, has secret rooms and passageways and peculiar objets d'art -- famously traveled to space in 2008.

Since Garriott's space odyssey, Austin-based filmmakers Beef and Pie Productions have ostensibly been hard at work on their documentary, Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission.

Now, after months without a real update, Beef and Pie have just released Man on a Mission's newest trailer. It's essentially the same trailer as the one we saw last summer, but it has a bit more polish this time. It's also considerably shorter.

Last June, Garriott officiated the first-ever zero-gravity wedding. Then in October, he was a guest on Martha Stewart's "Martha" morning talk show, where he -- seriously -- shared curios from his antique automata collection. Seriously.

Man on a Mission is slated to premiere at SXSW this March.

The Man on a Mission Trailer [Via Harvey Smith]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The most recent Hand Eye Society social gathering, we are informed, was a success. Photographs by Mark Rabo confirm last Thursday's Toronto event was jam-packed.

Superbrothers, together with game studio Capy, gave presentations about their upcoming games, Sword and Sworcery and Heartbeat. "Despite a few glitches," Superbrothers write, "the event seemed to be very well received."

The next Hand Eye Society exhibition -- date TBA -- will be mounted by Benjamin Rivers.

The Hand Eye Society writes that it is a not-for-profit coalition dedicated to a) helping to make games; b) connecting game developers with one another; and c) cultivating "diversity in game creation and public perception of games."

Toronto, Canada! To plan around its schedule of video game -themed mixers, simply visit the Hand Eye Society Calendar of Events.

[teletex oo8: live deep?]
[The Hand Eye Society]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As we compile the notable long-form pieces of writing elsewhere on the network, here's 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.

This time around - the features are headed up by interviews with Funcom's Ragnar Tornquist (over The Secret World), and Patrick Gilmore (on LA developer Double Helix), as well as a super-neat postmortem of WayForward's A Boy And His Blob, plus TV and games, achievements analyzed, a Dead Space narrative review, and lots more.

We're a team:

A Little Piece Of Hell: Building The Secret World
"Veteran developer Ragnar Tornquist (The Longest Journey) outlays his plan for The Secret World, an MMO that avoids the epic fantasy cliches of the past in favor of psychological horror and contemporary fantasy -- and no player leveling system."

Postmortem: WayForward's A Boy and His Blob
"In this in-depth postmortem, longtime independent developer WayForward (Contra 4) discusses the creation of Wii remake A Boy And His Blob for Majesco, looking at what went right and wrong in updating the classic NES title for today's gamers."

Persuasive Games: Check-Ins Check Out
"What's the point of achievements, and how do they interact with us in the real world? In this in-depth Gamasutra column, game designer and author Ian Bogost contrasts airline mileage programs with Foursquare and Xbox Live Achievements."

Television, Meet Games
"TV channels commissioning games, and developers who work with them -- what is the current state of this relationship, and where might it be headed? Gamasutra talks to Adult Swim, Channel 4, and Area/Code (Parking Wars) to find out."

Two Halves, Together: Patrick Gilmore On Double Helix
"The newly-installed head of Foundation 9's Double Helix studio holds forth on its evolution, the creative direction of current-generation games, and the current state of Los Angeles-area game development."

GCG: David Perry on Game Design: Game Conventions and Clichés
"Clichés abound in game design, and here, in an extract from David Perry on Game Design, is a handy list of concepts which have become part of the wallpaper of game worlds."

GCG: Game Narrative Review: Dead Space
"We take a look at how the psychological horror story of Dead Space functions, in another installment of the student-contributed Game Narrative Review."

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

Today's my first honest day off in a good couple weeks, so I'm kicking back and sharing in the general frustration across the Internet at NBC's Olympics coverage. (Seriously, why do I have to hunt down random Russian feeds in order to see the events I want live when I'm only two time zones away from them?)

Despite my attempts to relax, it's been a busy past couple weeks in game-mag-dom, for two big reasons:

- Play Magazine doesn't exist any longer...more or less. Fusion Publishing, the Dave Halverson-ran outfit that released the mag, hasn't printed anything since the January 2010 issue; their other publication, Geek Monthly, hasn't seen a print issue since early last fall. Geek Monthly's Facebook Page has reports that Fusion has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy (i.e. liquidation), but I haven't been able to confirm that for myself.

Meanwhile, Halverson has already announced his next project: a relaunch of GameFan, the famous game mag that he and Tim Lindquist first founded in 1992. The new GameFan will be large-format and have something of a dual personality -- video games on one side, movies and such on the other, making it a very literal "merging" of Play and Geek Monthly. (The only primary source on the net for this is a site I've never heard of before, but ex-Play staff have confirmed the news.)

GameFan is reported to be ready for a mid-March launch, although I don't know how it'll be distributed -- or, for that matter, who'll write for it, considering that most of the Play staff (including its editor-in-chief) has already moved on to other jobs. For that matter, I'm not sure what the point of a combo game-movie mag is. We, me and the staff at ADV, tried that with PiQ and it lasted four issues. The marketplace likes specialization, not jack-of-all-trades coverage.

I'd write a eulogy for Play, but it'd be the same as any eulogy written for GameFan or Gamers' Republic. Play was pretty and printed long industry interviews, but it was a magazine by Halverson, for Halverson, and of Halverson -- and your opinion of him sort of dictates your opinion of his publications. I know I won't miss having to purchase Girls of Gaming every years just to satisfy my completist urges.

- And what of Brady Fiechter, Play's EIC? He's joined the staff of the new Electronic Gaming Monthly, which is finally taking subscriptions. Steve Harris and team are launching with the April issue in print-land (which "will be printed in late March," according to my subscription acknowledgment) and it looks like they've got their act well together for for the big debut.

Harris's focus with the print edition appears to be squarely on quality, which is great. It means the newsstand price is $6.99, but I don't see a problem with that -- especially since the subscription prices are still pretty cheap. Harris is still a little coy about what the weekly digital edition will be like, but from a consumer's perspective, I'm definitely excited.

Between EGM, WOW: The Magazine, and what's happening over at GamePro, 2010 is looking like the "do-or-die" year for the print game-mag business -- the year that it proves, or fails to prove, that it's alive and worth keeping so. Which will it be?

[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 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[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.]

With GDC coming up early next month and DICE next week, there's a whole heap of busy out there, but we're going to keep up with the periodic GameSetLinks, since there's a lot of really cool content out there on the Internets that not enough people get to see, sometimes.

This time, some of the highlights include an in-depth look at all-time ZX Spectrum classic Manic Miner, a discussion on history and The Beatles: Rock Band, an interview with the still awesomely monikered Michael Michael at one of my favorite cult developers, PomPom, and rather more things besides.

Go go go:

The Making Of Manic Miner | NowGamer
'Matthew Smith talks us through every level of his classic platformer.' BLISS. Esp. for VVVVVV fans, heh.

Action Button Dot Net: Tim Rogers reviews FFXIII
Yes, there is a 'short version' of this review.

Indie | Artistic Vision | Resolution Magazine
'The EGP has again shown what developers can do when given a theme and just seven days to work on a game.'

RevisioNESt History: Comparing Made-Up Mythology in Retro-Style Games from 1UP.com
'Is making games purposefully simple and arguably ugly a piece of cake? Not if you want to properly represent their forebears.'

Hotmilkydrink: Cod liver oil and effective learning...
'How can parents make sense of games and how they can be used for good with their children when we are faced with the continual construction of them as modern day folk devils?'

Experience Points: I'm Looking Through You
Regarding The Beatles: Rock Band: 'As I play the game, I grow continually more interested in the narrative and its relationship to historical events. More than once, I found myself thinking of one of my favorite films, which also deals with the line between truth and myth: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.'

PomPom Games' Michael Michael Interview | Eurogamer
Super-rare interview with the talented UK shooter creators, personal indie heroes of mine.

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

[In the latest of an occasional series of demoscene-related posts on GameSetWatch, AteBit's Paul 'EvilPaul' Grenfell presents a multi-part retrospective on 2009's best demos - continuing with the best demos made for older video game and computer systems, but released last year. Previously: best demos and best 64kb/4kb intros.]

Next up in my look back at the 2009 demoscene is one of my favourite categories - oldschool. Oldschool sceners are some of the most dedicated in the business, working night and day to squeeze ever more out of computers that are decades old.

This isn't like the PC scene, where effects that we can only imagine doing in realtime today may be possible tomorrow with the release of better and faster hardware. The oldschool scene moves forwards as its devotees delve further into undocumented hardware and coerce it into performing tricks that were unimaginable when their machines were first released.

Unlike demos on modern computers, if an effect is too slow they can't simply run it on more powerful hardware or pre-calcuate the required data - they must use arcane hardware and software tricks to squeeze every once of power out of their chosen hardware.

As a result, every year astonishing new techniques and effects are discovered and presented, and the whole scene continues to evolve. We're presenting YouTube and other videos of the demos here, but obviously, you get the best effect if you run the real-time versions on your classic hardware (C64, MSX, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST...) Here are some of the highlights:

1st: Jesus Christ Motocross by Nature & Traktor

This fast paced Commodore Amiga computer AGA demo with an awesome soundtrack easily stands out from the crowd with its unique style.

2nd: Luminagia by Loonies

Another memorable soundtrack in this 4k Amiga AGA intro.

3rd: Mescaline Synesthesia by deMarche

A good example of how the oldschool scene is still pushing machines like the ZX Spectrum to new heights.

4th: Lightshaft by Elude

Amiga AGA demos continue to impress, and this demo again shows why a computer released back in 1992 still deserves much respect.

5th: Andropolis by Booze Design & Instinct

A Commodore 64 demo packed full of great effects and graphics.

6th: Bold by Dvik & Joyrex

Neat design wraps up the great effects in this MSX computer demo.

7th: Ahh.. The Tape loading Era! by Ate Bit

Yo dawg, I heard you like demos so I put a demo in your demos so you can watch a demo while you load your demos. [Disclaimer: I designed and coded this ZX Spectrum demo.]

8th: From Scratch by Vanity

Great music, vibrant colours and a couple of lovely effects in this demo running on the Amstrad CPC computer.

9th: Roboty by Tulou

Another 4k Amiga AGA demo. Not the most technically advanced 4k maybe, but I love the fresh design.

10th: Suretrip II - Dopecode by Checkpoint

An epic megademo on the Atari ST, showcasing some amazing code tricks on this 25 year old, 8mhz home computer.

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

[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 delights in this edition include a puzzle-based roguelike with an emphasis on managing resources, a single-button Flash action game, a pair of platformers made for the recent Global Game Jam 2010 event, a one-button remake of Civilization, and a space trading strategy game with shoot 'em up elements.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Desktop Dungeon' (Rodain Joubert, freeware)
"Desktop Dungeon is a puzzle-based roguelike with an emphasis on resource management, where the health of your adventurer is restored by walking into unexplored rooms or corridors. You can choose to engage an enemy immediately upon finding them, or save the tougher encounters for later after you've gained some battle experience with weaker inhabitants of the dungeon first."

Game Pick: 'One Button Bob' (Tom Vencel, browser)
"One Button Bob is a single-button action game in which you have to help Bob survive an obstacle course to reach the treasure he desires. The control scheme is switched around in every room, meaning that you could be running away from a boulder, climbing a set of ladders or jumping from one platform to another as you venture further into the cave."

Game Pick: 'Where We Remain' (Twofold Secret, browser)
"Where We Remain appears to be a simple 'save the girl' Zelda-style adventure at first glance. Yet look a little closer, and you'll find that there is so much more to it. Trapped on an island by a mysterious being, our hero must find his sweetheart and rescue her. But is there a way to escape the island?"

Game Pick: 'Super Space Rogues' (Ted Lauterbach, freeware)
"In Super Space Rogues you play as a trader who owes a big sum of money to an alien overlord, and must find means to repay him back or suffer the consequences. This basically involves mining asteroids for precious minerals to be traded at a friendly spaceport, or destroying pirate ships and making off with the loot that they drop."

Game Pick: 'Press Tilda' (Press Tilda Team, browser)
"Press Tilda is a Unity-based puzzle platformer in which you can bring up a console to type in commands and change the layout of a level directly. By typing in certain keywords, players can swap the position of their character with another item in a stage, send an attack order to one of the robot guards, push objects or even set them on fire."

Game Pick: 'War and Peace' (Stéphane Bura, freeware)
"War and Peace is a one-button remake of the classic strategy game Civilization, created by created by Stéphane Bura as a submission for the Gamma 4 game showcase competition. The technology tree which was the highlight of the original series has been distilled down to just two branches of research, and your task is basically to choose whether to dedicate all of your resources into developing war machines or encourage the cultivation of technology advancements."

Game Pick: 'Boxplode' (David Newton, browser)
"Boxplode is a neat little puzzle game created by David Newton, in which the player's objective is to destroy all boxes with numbers on them by causing a series of explosions to blow everything up. The chain of explosions work like a domino effect, and you have a limited number of clicks to clear all blocks in a single level to progress."

Game Pick: 'depict1' (Kyle Pulver, freeware)
"Created by Kyle Pulver (with Alec Holowka providing the ditties), depict1 is a platformer which will hurt your head lots, but probably also make you smile too. An unknown announcer barks orders at you, which you need to follow... maybe. The whole game is pretty much an incredible mind-bork."

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

Remember the first time you dreamed Tetris?

You were asleep in your childhood bed, and there! There they were! A steady torrent of tetraminoes, one after the next, was tumbling toward the dreamscape's horizon. And in your mind's eye, you were tilting and pivoting and reconfiguring each Tetris piece so that it would pack neatly into the jagged landscape. It was an exhilarating nightmare.

My dream manifested in the murk of split-pea monochrome -- your dream might have been in color, though, if you had an NES, and if you are able to dream in color.

I think about Tetris every time I try to put a lot of things into my car's trunk all at once. Don't we all? This hoodie appeals to a gaming universality, a collective "a-ha!": Tetris, always secretly on the brain.

If I calculated exchange rates properly, these hoodies are ~US$60. (But so totally worth it.)

Braintris Hoodie [Via Sprite Stitch]

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

In our latest employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from 2K Marin, Foundation 9 and more.

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

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

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

38 Studios: Game Designer
"Would you like to become part of the team that includes the creative visionaries behind Drizzt Do’Urden and Spawn? 38 Studios is currently seeking a Game Designer to join our Design department. This is a full-time position with competitive salary, full benefits and 401(k), and the chance to be part of online gaming history!."

Foundation 9 Entertainment: Marketing Director
"This Marketing leader will provide Marketing and brand management leadership for Foundation 9 Entertainment Studios and serve as the primary Marketing advisor for Studio leaders. S/he will take an active part in developing strategic corporate and studio marketing plans that will enhance F9E’s its market position and brand value within the traditional video game market. The Director will also help F9E grow into new markets."

TimeGate Studios: QA Manager
"TimeGate Studios, developer of the award-winning F.E.A.R., Extraction Point and Kohan series, is looking for talented and driven individuals to work on its current line of next-generation products for major publishers. Projects in development include an MMO and FPS. Both of these projects are based on TimeGate intellectual properties."

Vigil Games: Senior Game Designer
"Take one legendary comic artist, one technological guru, and add a host of experienced artists, designers, programmers and managers, and you have a recipe for groundbreaking gaming - you have Vigil Games. In 2006, Vigil Games became a part of the THQ family. We released next-gen title Darksiders in January 2010 and are at work on the Warhammer 40K MMO."

2K Marin: Networking Programmer
"2K Games develops and publishes top-line PC, console, and handheld entertainment software with a strong concentration in three distinct categories: sports, high profile licenses and specialty product. Some of the hit titles in 2K's lineup include the critically-praised BioShock, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, and The Darkness."

Crystal Dynamics: Concept Artist
"Be a part of the most exciting and innovating computer entertainment in North America. Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) markets the PlayStation® family of products and develops, publishes, markets, and distributes software for the PS one console, the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 computer entertainment systems and the PlayStation Portable (PSP)."

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Posted by Simon Carless at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The immemorial Heracles RPGs are popular enough in Japan: until recently, however, they were all but unknown here in the US.

Each title in the epic series is set against a fantastical backdrop borrowing from classical mythology. The first Glory of Heracles game, Tōjin Makyō-den Heracles no Eikō, appeared on the Famicom in 1987.

The fifth game in the Heracles series, simply titled Glory of Heracles for its North American release, hit the DS just this January.

It seems something of a tricky proposition to localize just one title in a heretofore unknown game franchise. And in 1UP.com's Kat Bailey's words, the game is, peculiarly, "one of those instances of a Japanese take on western mythology being retranslated back to English."

Bailey recently spoke to Rich Amtower and Mark MacDonald about the potentially herculean task of localizing Glory of Heracles.

In the interview, MacDonald indicates that this particular title has its own standalone narrative, disconnected from the larger series. Certainly that may have eased the difficulty of translation.

Still -- because it seems such painstaking work to account for cultural differences when preparing a game for its international audience -- how strange it must be to translate an altogether new, practically made-up culture. (Or would that make localization yet easier?)

On the game's otherworldly setting, Amtower says:

Glory of Heracles draws on familiar Greek myths instead of presenting the usual standard swords-and-sorcery fantasy fare, so everything's set in a sort of imaginary Greece. The setting affects everything, from character design and clothing to town design and art style. When you see so many RPGs running across the same, familiar territory, it's nice to come across a game that tries something different.

[Interview: The Glory of Localizing Heracles]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[In his latest 'Sound Current' column for GameSetWatch, Jeriaska discusses the music to intriguing Japan-only PSP hostage negotiation title Diamond and the Sound of a Gunshot, showing the value of sound in heightening tension and the potency of Sony's Playstation C.A.M.P.! design project in Japan.]

Playstation Portable title Diamond and the Sound of a Gunshot was released in 2009 by Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan. A new take on the text-heavy visual novel genre that never seems to make its way across the Pacific, the game requires players to handle hostage negotiations and other dramatic situations in real time.

The music score and sound effects were designed by Noisycroak, a game audio production company based in Tokyo who previously discussed with us their soundtracks for Yakuza Kenzan and Castlevania Judgment. Noisycroak's founder is currently composing music for the Playstation Portable title Patchwork Heroes, due out Spring 2010.

In this interview we hear from Diamond and the Sound of a Gunshot sound director Hideki Sakamoto, composer Keisuke Itou, guitarist Yasushi Asada and effects creator Tsuyoshi Yukawa.

The discussion offers some background on the origins of the Playstation C.A.M.P.! design team and the making of the original soundtrack album published by Aniplex Records. The roundtable sheds some light on how music and effects were designed as a significant counterpart to text-based dialog in Diamond and the Sound of a Gunshot.

Diamond and the Sound of a Gunshot involves police detectives that are in charge of handling hostage negotiations. From the vantage point of sound designers, what was your reaction to learning the premise of the game?

Hideki Sakamoto: Having gameplay based on the concept of a negotiation system was a new challenge because it required the reader/ game player to react to events dynamically in real time. That's what set the title apart conceptually.

We're very familiar with interacting with a game where waist-up character portraits exchange dialog on-screen, but here dialog captions change in size and speed up in response to the player's decisions. The design team pushed for this interactive component to the narrative, and that's what makes it a very contemporary kind of game to experience.

The size of the text gives you an idea of how loudly the character is speaking, a factor that would be difficult to recreate using voice acting. Did you find the choice of written text placed added emphasis on the music and sound effects?

HS: Yes, although we were not required to vary the audio to correspond with text size.

Music director Hideki Sakamoto and composer Keisuke Itou

What strategies employed by the development team would you say were most effective in making this unusual approach to gameplay work?

HS: On many games the design staff and sound teams are separated, so the musicians really only have an idea of how well their audio complements the gameplay once their work is done. With Diamond and the Sound of a Gunshot, both teams were working together closely from early in the process. There was direct feedback informing both sides.

Itou-san, having composed and arranged music for the game, what was your reaction to its premise?

Keisuke Itou: I agree with the points that Sakamoto-san mentioned. This is a game that makes the player read a lot, though much of the story is conveyed through images rather than words. The captions primarily involve dialog being exchanged between the characters on-screen. What you discover upon picking up the game is that it has a nice tempo that gets you involved without wasting any time.

The style of the main theme streaming on the official site is Argentine tango. Why did you feel tango lent an appropriate atmosphere to the game?

KI: Tango was decided as a thematic motif early on, together with the design team. It was up to us to emphasize moods of tension and excitement using the conventions of the genre.

Tsuyoshi Yukawa and guitarist Yasushi Asada

Are there other precedents you can point to of detective tango?

KI: The accordion can be heard on European television dramas from time to time.

HS: Like in the soundtrack for Amelie?

KI: Even on older television programs I've seen it used to good effect. I did some research into European shows and films that had a comparable style. From there I put some effort into doing something different, incorporating rhythms that suit the instruments while sounding stylish and up-to-date.

Yukawa-san, how would you describe this unique style of game?

Tsuyoshi Yukawa: In my observation the game can be divided into two components: there's the story that you follow and the game that you play. For that matter, my wife told me that even the negotiation system lends itself to casual players. I particularly like the way this title functions separately as both a novel and a game.

To answer your question, a lot of care was put into choosing sound effects for the game. For the side that functions like a book, the effects are realistic, just as you would encounter in real life. However when the interactive components kick in, there the effects are based in the conventions of videogames. The player is alerted by these aural cues that they've entered a new mode once the negotiation begins.

Miyu, interpreter and interviewer

How did you go about creating the effects?

TY: I used both sounds I captured myself and referenced sound libraries. I try to go with the real thing whenever possible. On a different game I was asked to recreate the sound of piles of paper bills being scattered and blown around in the wind. There Sakamoto-san and I recorded the sounds of real bills being tossed around in the air.

There was another time where I needed to find the sound of a sushi restaurant without too many customers. I took my tape recorder to a small sushi restaurant in an out-of-the-way neighborhood during lunch hours. They weren't doing much business that day, so all I could hear on the tape was the sound of the television. (laughs)

Can you tell us a little about the design team Playstation C.A.M.P.!?

HS: Playstation C.A.M.P.! (Creator Audition Mash-up Camp) is the name of the group, which emerged out of a design contest called "Game Yaroze." The first titles that produced as a consequence of this event were Devil Dice and Doko Demo Issho.

Playstation C.A.M.P.! continues to seek out creative and talented people, helping to create titles like Echochrome and Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman. Incidentally, Noisycroak created music for both these titles. Sometimes the most strange and interesting ideas crop up outside of the industry, so Playstation C.A.M.P.! attempts to lend a hand to those individuals.

Asada-san, you performed the guitar in over twenty tracks on the soundtrack to Diamond and the Sound of a Gunshot. Did you encounter any challenges confronting the genre of Argentine tango?

Yasushi Asada: It was difficult to find just the right sound for the game, requiring me to choose from among a number of guitars to find the right match. Mainly I went with an Ibanez. To get a Stratocaster sound, there was a Yamaha Pacifica USA 2 that I felt sounded right. There's also some recordings where you can hear an inexpensive Paul Reed Smith. Before starting anything though, I wanted to make sure I had a thorough understanding of its narrative context.

On a project like this, I will typically read the game script over. Between the planning stages and the actual implementation, the script changed quite a bit. Mainly, the story unfolds in a police office, but originally the yakuza and SDF were involved. This led me to believe it was going to be a military drama. What we ended up with required subtler instruments such as the bandoneón and violin. Making music to portray everyday events proved to be just as formidable a challenge. How do you do make it interesting without climax or tension? To get the right mood it required a lot of trial and error.

HS: Which of the songs on the soundtrack would you consider fit the description of everyday settings?

KI: The second track "Pleasant Afternoon" and third track "Everyday Scenery" on the soundtrack album. My first few drafts of those songs were rejected because they didn't sound mundane enough to fit the context. It's just my habit to create climactic music, so I had to tone things down on this occasion.

Is there a particular track you could recommend from the music album?

KI: "Last Message," which is track 27. It's a song in the game which can only be unlocked if you get the right results during a particular negotiation. There aren't many sentimental moments in the game, so it's a bit special when you can hear a ballad featuring the bandoneón.

The character of Keisuke Nakamura, modeled after the game's composer

[This article is available in Japanese, via Game Design Current. Interview by Miyu and Jeriaska. Images courtesy of Sony Computer Entertainment and Aniplex Records. Photos by Jeriaska. Translation by Kaoru Bertrand.]

Posted by jeriaska at 12:00 PM | Permalink

Martin at the Digital Tools blog found this unbelievable ZX Spectrum fansite. The best part, probably, is the screamingly psychedelic gallery of fan-submitted art, "made by the finest Spectrum graphicians." Something about that medium's limited color palette really lends itself to the kind of hallucinatory art you'd find on a flocked blacklight poster.

In the meantime! Hiive Books, those publishers of fine, limited-edition retro gaming books, have generously rereleased their sold-out ZX Spectrum Book - 1982 to 199x as one long -- and free! -- PDF.

The handsome (and at 243 pages, fairly encompassing) reference book assembles ZX Spectrum titles in chronological, alphabetical order. Each title's entry includes an overview, box art, a screenshot, and even review scores from that year. Beautiful.

According to the PDF, Hiive are hard at work on more than a few upcoming titles, including The Game Boy Book and The Arcade Book.

The ZX Spectrum Book - 1982 to 199x [Via Gnome's Lair]
ZX Spectrum 48Kb graphic - pictures/gallery [Via Digital Tools]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Some fun, miscellaneous links for Friday:

- Bejeweled: "A copy is sold, on one of many devices, every 4.3 seconds." [Opposable Thumbs]

- Crime: Thief enters arcade, threatens attendant with his cup of hot coffee, gets away with the cash drawer. *yawn* [Arcade Heroes]

- Free: 12-track compilation for download, Beep City Presents: Love Songs from the Future

- Sega: "Too late to change Yakuza 3's box art." [Examiner]

- Today: Indie Love Bundle, five games for US$20. Including Machinarium! [Byte Jacker]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham looks at posts on digital distribution, No More Heroes 2 and Proust.]

In a newly published piece, Evan Stubbs finishes his three part series of musings on digital distribution for games, noting: "So far we’ve had a look at what the future holds for digital distribution and how data mining’s going to change the way we interact with our vendors of choice. But, that doesn’t answer the question: Where do we currently stand?"

Daniel Bullard-Bates at Press Pause to Reflect discusses the open world genre in ‘If this is an open world why are all the doors closed?’ Its title reminded me of an older post by Alec Meer at Rock Paper Shotgun, his ode to a “Locked Door”.

At a brand new video game blog called Post-Hype, Chris Breault asserts that the oft applied metaphor for comparisons with Uncharted 2 -- that it’s like a film -- is inaccurate. In fact, he says, ‘Don’t call Uncharted 2 a film’ at all, saying somewhat stuffily: "Its achievements are purely technical, but they are never "film quality.""

Elsewhere, David Carlton has been thinking about children’s and adolescent literature and comparing/contrasting the features of that genre with video games aimed at children and teens. Like his previous application of the fiction/non-fiction literary categories to videogames, The Beatles: Rock Band in particular, I found Carlton’s line of reasoning both illuminating and persuasive.

At The Border House this week, Rho writes about some of the issues you may have never had to worry about when using voice chat in online games, and Alex Horn discusses ‘Racism and Left 4 Dead 2’, suggesting that it might ignore important post-Katrina issues.

In ‘Proust was… a game designer?’ Mitu Khandaker explains some of her PhD research work on games in the context of a discussion of John Lehrer’s book “Proust was a neuroscientist”, addressing relationships between the arts (humanities) and sciences.

Michael Abbott talked about No More Heroes 2 this week, and resolved that sometimes better is worse. I have a mixed response to this one, because he references a post from a few months ago (which he links to in this newest discussion) where he talked up the virtue of iterative design in the context of the Nintendo DS game Mario & Luigi: Bowsers’ Inside Story, and states that at the time he was wrong.

I think that’s an easy oversimplification and I can’t help but wonder what the real story is, even if Abbott himself can’t explicate it. It seems to me that whenever there’s (apparent) contradiction there’s almost always something interesting going on. On the same subject, Leigh Alexander wonders "if we've come to associate creativity with visible flaws?" and if so, that would go some ways to explaining Abbott's response.

Kirk Hamilton wrote in to let readers know about the new blog he’s started recently with some fellow collaborators. It’s called ‘Gamer Melodico’, and his post parodying both Mass Effect 2 and hipster memes gained him some serious popularity. I hope some of the newcomers decide to stick around.

In other news, Deirdre Kiai talked this week about a hunch she has that the target audiences for her Kickstarter-funded indie game project Life Flashes By and the new Apple device the iPad overlap somewhat. She says, “In fact, the intended audience for my game is a lot like the intended audience for the iPad in many ways. I’m not really making a game for gamers.”

Over at Game In Mind, Matthew Kaplan relates ‘How video games helped me talk to my father.’

Matthew Burns-né-Wasteland writes about his time in the dungeon of game testing over at Edge Online, in which various favorable and not-so-favorable metaphors abound. As he explains simply: "Generally one spends a lot of time in front of a screen and a single game, eight or more hours a day, day after day."

In another blog published last week, Alex Raymond explains what it takes for a game to feel “epic” for her, saying “in order to invoke that sought-after “epic” feeling, a game has to work to show me its scope.”

Jorge and Scott from Experience Points talk about the Halo games in 'Halo Podcast Evolved' and Scott, who has been writing about The Beatles: Rock Band for a while now, talks about the game again in ‘Yesterday’. It’s not too far removed from some of the issues raised in David Carlton’s abovementioned post, discussing the historical aspects of the game.

And lastly, at HardCasual, someone named Greg realises his life has tragically been one long side quest all along. Oh dear.

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

Here's a neat tutorial from Fabu of Superlevel, with step-by-step instructions for configuring VICE -- that's a Commodore 64 emulator! -- to support online two-player games. As impressive as it is to play a two-player co-op game alone, this could make for a nice indoor activity tonight (or, depending on your commitment, a weekend project).

The only problem is, the tutorial is in German. But! Run his words through the ol' googlerator, and you'll see that the step-by-step how-to mostly makes sense.

One of the two players will need to be the 'server,' of course. From there, the trick to getting C64 multiplayer to work will be 'synchronizing' all your friend's actions with your own, so that together you 'load' each game at just the same instant. So you'll probably need to, ehm, be in an instant message window (or on the phone!) with your opponent. Which, hey! That could be fun, too! I can't imagine it's too much more difficult than mid-90s Doom on dialup.

Probably, though, the challenge ultimately rests with finding another friend who is game enough to also make it through the set-up. Good luck!

[C64 Netplay Tutorial & Download]

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Speaking of video game preservation, the National Center for the History of Electronic Games (or NCHEG) reports that noted game designer Don Daglow has taken on the role of Collections Development Consultant:

"In parallel to his work as an independent game designer and producer, Daglow will assist NCHEG in the acquisition of key objects and records to document the early and ongoing history of the development of electronic games. This effort is at the core of the NCHEG’s work to expand its prestigious collection, already the largest and most comprehensive public collection of electronic games and game-related historical materials in the United States."

The missive adds that, apart from his duties as vintage games consultant, Daglow will represent NCHEG at upcoming industry events and conferences.

The NCHEG is located in Rochester, New York's Strong National Museum of Play. Last year, the preservation initiative acquired 114 vintage arcade games that had toured with the Videotopia games exhibit.

In 2008, Daglow and others were honored with a Technology & Engineering Emmy for their work on Neverwinter Nights.

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Continuing a series of interviews with the more esoteric end of development, critic and writer Phill Cameron talks to the fiendish mind of Vic Davis, also known as Cryptic Comet.]

Hell is an odd place to set a game, you'd think. EA are trying it with Dante's Inferno, but instead of gruesome gibs and visceral vistas, Vic Davis has pulled the player back from the action and placed them in the shoes of an Archfiend, providing them with a simple instruction; rule hell.

Except, of course, there are others with the same goal. Solium Infernum, his latest release, is a turn based strategy game that asks you to rule through manipulation of an intricate prestige system that requires you to fling insults across the abyss at one another, and attempt to ruffle enough feathers/scales/postulating protrusions that you can initiate a hostile take over of your fellow archfiends. And really, it's brilliant. So naturally, I had to have a chat with him about it.

Can you explain a little about who you are and what you do?

My name is Victor. Victor the game maker. I design and arrange turn based strategy games on the PC. Even in these dark times you will most likely need to read the manual before you attempt to play my games. They will require that you invest some effort in learning the mechanics and play patterns before you really appreciate them and there is a good chance that you will have cursed my name and my amateur User Interface before it is all over…although you will probably have said “Wow, that’s some nice art” before you do so.

You've worked almost solely in the turn-based-strategy world, at least as far as development goes. Do you think that there's space for expansion within it, or is the niche you're filling already full?

There is plenty of space to explore and the hissing sound of all the medium and big game companies leaving the punctured ship’s hull still hasn’t quite ended yet. I really like turn based games as a design medium because I think they offer a more contemplative experience. Whenever time is a resource I tend to feel harried and distracted. It also makes sense for me because it allows me to forgo the complex animation and visuals that real time and 3D demand. That type of production usually requires large teams and heavy duty programming that is way beyond what I can produce solo.

You used Adobe Director to write the game, which has drawn a few negative comments your way. Were there alternatives, or did you just use it out of familiarity and ease of use?

Yes, familiarity was the key reason. I knew that I couldn’t really afford the time and effort needed to learn a new development environment. I had been using Director for about 5 years doing US Civil War battle animations so I knew I could probably pull off the coding but that the AI was going to be difficult since I’d never done anything like that before. One nice thing that has come of using Director is that generally compatibility has been pretty good. I have read reports of some developers finding that new video drivers or versions of Windows have caused all types of problems with keeping games working that were published years ago. That’s important for me since I hope that my “retro” games have a long shelf life.

Was the choice of hell there to encourage a mood of deceit and connivance? Did the setting come before or after the concept of backstabbing politics?

The setting and theme always come first for me. I basically decide on the theme and then build the mechanics and game play around it. So once I knew that I wanted to make a strategy game set in hell, all the corresponding attributes were fleshed out as game mechanics…the deceit and backstabbing.

You've stated that there was inspiration from Paradise Lost previously. The art style, specifically the cantons and Places of Power, reminded me most of Hieronymus Bosch. Was that another inspiration? Was it that time period in general that provided the most ripe ideas concerning Hell?

Yes, I did a fair amount of research to try and draw from a bunch of different sources when I was building the mythos of the inferno that I wanted to present to the players. You will see influences from things like medieval vision literature to the work of artists like Giotto and especially Hieronymus Bosch. My wife is an art historian and she actually got her Masters in Medieval art so I had seen lot of Bosch before and even had a personal tour of the Prado in Madrid led by my wife when we were much younger….almost 25 years ago. But I still had all her books to refer to. When I worked with the artists to do the illustrations they were always very keen to pay a little homage to Bosch.

Following from that, while Hell is obviously timeless, there was a certain late medieval/early renaissance feel to it that in part stems from the high level of bureaucracy and in-fighting. Do you think it's important that something like Solium Infernum, which is already somewhat abstract, has touchstones in reality and period?

Yes, I was definitely thinking of a feudal system when I went about designing the Diplomacy system. Even more than the historical feudal systems of medieval Europe I was thinking about the fantasy structure of the Landsraad from Frank Herbert’s Dune. Vendetta was my reinterpretation of Dune’s Kanly. Of course I’m sure Herbert drew his inspiration from a huge amount of historical research and knowledge. I also had George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones on my mind as well. The central idea in both universes is the pursuit of power through all means possible…brute force, deception and manipulation with the knowledge that you are playing for keeps…you either win or you die.

When I first started using the play by email system, I thought it crude and ponderous, but as our game progressed it became the perfect medium to build tension and formulate plans that I wouldn't think possible with the immediacy of a 'real time' system. Was this an intentional choice or something forced on you by the platform?

It’s a bit of both. I explored ways of automating the sending of the turns by using the computers default email program but I ran into a bunch of compatibility problems and exceptions. I do like how measured and paced the sending and receiving of turns is when using PBeM. The game that real got me hooked on PBeM was Dominions by Shrapnel and Illwinter. I will never forget the racing heart feeling that I would get when I had made a big gamble move and the email with the results appeared in my in box. I hope that Solium Infernum captures a little of that.

With both Armageddon Empires and Solium Infernum, you tend to offer the player a platform to work off rather than scripting a sequence of events. This obviously leads to an emergent narrative, but at the same time do you think that such a sandbox can be daunting to new players?

Yes, and if you add the complex rules into the mix then you have even more for the players to overcome. I think it is worth the investment though. Replayability is something that I really like my designs to offer and is a key sales pitch. I like to also keep the play time short and focused so that you can sit down and finish a sand box in a few hours.

While your games exist in a niche, they do tend to get a lot of press, at least in the indie-circuits, which encourages people who might not instantly get excited at the prospect of a turn-based-strategy game to go out and play it. Do you think it's important to cater to them, or would that dilute the experience for more 'hardcore' players?

I’m happy if it reaches a broader audience but I think that what happens is that those types of players get attracted to the idea of the theme but the actual mechanics and game play don’t really pull them any further. My goal is to make games that drive away 90% of the player base out there. That’s how I fill my niche. I’m not making super hard games where you die every 10 steps and have to figure out how to defeat the super boss at the end of the level by trial and error 150 times. It’s a different type of difficulty. And really once you invest a little effort in learning the systems and play patterns that I am offering, you usually come to the conclusion that the complexity is really not that overwhelming. It’s the combination of simple elements that yields fun complexity and decision making… basically chaos theory incarnate.

The $30 price point has been contentious for a fair amount of people. Do you think that's because it's reached a wider audience than you expected, and players who wouldn't normally be happy to pay that price for a niche game are paying attention to it?

I’m reminded of that scene from Spinal Tap where Ian the manager tells Bobby Fleckman: “You should have seen the cover that they wanted to do.” I actually thought hard about going with an even higher price point for Solium Infernum….in the $34.95 range. Seriously though, I think that a higher price might even be better but I have yet to test it out. I like the thought of winnowing out the people who are going to buy based on impulse and then not enjoy the game. My games are an acquired taste. It saves us both a lot of time, money and effort in the long run….and I can focus on my niche. I only want customers who feel they got some value for their purchase.

All that said, Solium Infernum is on the lower end of the price spectrum for niche strategy games (but is admittedly on the high end for and “indie buzz” game). But pricing in the games industry is undergoing a tremendous amount of turmoil. You have AAA games debuting at $60 and then a race to the bottom depending on the “success” of the game. You have a downloadable casual market that has just imploded in the Great Portal Wars deflation and you have services like Steam that offer huge volume moving sales while adding continually to already large catalogues. For a small developer or you might even say hobbyist like me that’s scary….how do I fit in? I basically just pick my price, stick my head in the sand and try and make games that justify the price to a small niche audience.

With Solium Infernum completed, what are you headed towards next?

I’m working on two things. First, a free mini expansion pack for Solium Infernum. Second, a new game design based on exploration and push your luck decision making tentatively called “Rogue Expedition.” It’s sort of a rogue-like board game with random maps, lite rpg character development and a cool theme that hasn’t been trodden very much. Right now I’m just designing, laying out the general game architecture and doing some quick prototyping of some of the systems. I have no idea at this point how long it will take to finish but I’m hoping no more than 18 months. Famous last words.

Thanks for your time.

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

[It's only a month out, but there are still some Game Developers Conference 2010-related speaker announcements from my colleagues -- including both overseas neatness and retro-cyberpunk Deus Ex-ification, this time around!]

As the March 9th-13th event approaches, GDC 2010 organizers have revealed new lectures on Deus Ex 3's "cyberpunk renaissance" look, Silent Hill producer Akira Yamaoka's ethos, and Batman: Arkham Asylum's art direction.

The new announcements come with less than a month to go until the event, which takes place from March 9th to 13th at San Francisco's Moscone Center, and includes two days of Summits and tutorials alongside three days of Main Conference content.

A pair of particularly intriguing new lectures lead the new line-up announcements. Firstly, Eidos Montreal art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete presents a lecture on "The Successes and Failures of Creating a Near-Future Cyberpunk Setting with a Renaissance Twist in Deus Ex 3", providing some of the first concrete information about the much-awaited title.

Jacques-Belletete "...will discuss the creative underpinnings behind the unique blend of art style that combines the past, present and future in the next evolution of the Deus Ex franchise", with particular reference to the title's "Cyber Renaissance" look, which "is infused across the fashion, characters, environments and story."

Secondly, veteran Silent Hill composer and recent series producer Akira Yamaoka, who has just joined No More Heroes creator Grasshopper Manufacture, will present a lecture entitled "As Long as the Audio is Fun, the Game Will Be Too".

This retrospective, taken from Yamaoka's "first 20 years in video game production", will present an interesting angle: "People tend not to think about game design and audio design in parallel. I will present my views on audio design in games from a producer's perspective, having had experience in both roles. With few technological limits remaining, we can focus on achieving realism and interaction. What challenges remain in audio design?"

In addition, as part of a series of GDC 2010 Track keynotes just confirmed, including already-revealed lectures from Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto and on StarCraft II's programming approach, a number of major new lectures have been revealed, including the following:

- In "The Art Direction of Batman: Arkham Asylum - Rebooting a Super Hero Video Game IP", Rocksteady's David Hego will discuss making the acclaimed title, "from the challenges of taking a well known IP to new grounds, how to stay true to the spirit of 70 years of Batman comics, and how to rejuvenate its feel and look by injecting a hyper realistic approach to it."

- Ngmoco (Touch Pets, Rolando) head and former Electronic Arts executive Neil Young will present "Things to Unlearn Moving From Traditional Development to the New Digital World", and in his talk, will speak "candidly about the challenges that traditional game developers face in transitioning from long development cycles, packaged goods and the one time sale to the essential new models of games as a service, virtual goods, data driven design & minimum viable products."

As well as the nine major Summits, from iPhone to indie and social games -- and notable tutorials on the first two days of the show, there are six main Tracks - programming, art, production, business, audio, and design - for GDC 2010.

Game Developers Conference 2010 will also play host to the GDC Expo Floor, including a host of notable tool companies, the recruitment-specific GDC Career Pavilion, the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival plus Awards and the 10th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, open to all pass holders.

More information on many of the highlighted areas of GDC 2010 is available on the official Game Developers Conference weblog, and the GDC 2010 website has a full list of lectures, passes, and opportunities at this year's event, as well as specifics on registration pricing and options.

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

Somewhere out there, in a Tokyo arcade, probably at nighttime, a lone gunman hones his skills, invariably readying himself for the zombie apocalypse:

In other news, that Doctor Octoroc -- the musician behind 8-Bit Jesus -- is up to no good. This time, the blipsmith has reimagined "Everything You Ever," a tune from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, as an NES-era ditty.

And that isn't all! Other songs from Dr. Horrible are due for the 8-bit treatment; Doc writes that he is ambitiously recreating the entire web series as a Flash animation, "in 8-bit style."

8bc - Everything You Ever [Via Nobuooo]
You think you have seen high-intensity lightgun game shooting action

Posted by Jennifer Frank at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)