[Now that Shank is well past its late summer launch and received a wide-ranging critical reception, our own Leigh Alexander catches up with Klei's Jamie Cheng to reflect on the interesting journey of a small project gone big.]

It's been an interesting journey for Klei Entertainment and Shank. After the studio's publisher, Nexon Vancouver, shut its doors in 2009, the team went right to work on a 2D brawler with a distinctive visual style.

The title appeared in 2010's Independent Games Festival and took off quickly from there -- signed by EA Partners for Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and PC, with renowned God of War writer Marianne Krawczyk on board.

Fortunately, it's a tale that's becoming more and more common these days: Indie developers quickly finding full-scale publisher partners and making a splash before the eyes of the everyday gamer.

But it's also a new arena: what's it like for indies to come up against the Metacritic machine for the first time? What changes and what stays the same for developers when an independent game gets really big?

We decided to catch up with Klei's Jamie Cheng to ask him some of these questions, now that Shank is well past its late summer launch and received a gamut of critical reception.

Often developers focus so tightly on the grueling process of creation and launch, and then the spreadsheet-ticking aftermath of sales data; in this interview, Cheng talks candidly about facets of the tiny-project-gone-big experience that are less-discussed, from connecting with the wider audience to personal experiences:

What were your expectations for Shank's launch, and in what areas did you meet them? Any surprises?

I expected Shank to be a game which people either loved or hated, and we got that in spades. In fact, it was even more than I expected -- the dichotomy actually baffled me at first. For example, I simultaneously heard that Shank's controls are tight, amazing, and spot-on, and also that they were loose and frustrating.

We were determined to really understand the meaning behind that, so I kept watching people play -- especially those who had more trouble with the controls, and we realized that our game favors certain play-styles over others -- in this case, an offensive play-style.

Those who attacked often were rewarded a lot better than those who tried to get away. The critics to our controls were spot-on -- there was a hole in our equation that they caught, and I'm glad they did so we can learn and do better next time.

Name one way in which you are like other indies and one way in which you aren't.

The most important aspect of being indie is freedom -- independence, by definition. In the most important way, we're connected to indies by the fact that we create our own games, our own ideas, and we build it with a passion.

I love this question, because it really highlights the differences between all indies. We're all passionate about the medium of games, and we get along precisely because we embrace each others' differences. The obvious difference for Klei is that we carry different responsibilities than most indies.

We have staff with families who aren't ready to risk everything for the sake of the craft, at least not yet. So it's my role to allow us to continue to operate in the spirit of an independent -- passionate, authentic, and creating our own ideas -- while still providing a stable environment. It's not easy, but it is incredibly rewarding.

Andy Schatz recently said he feels the press holds indies and AAAs to different standards. Do you think this is true? Some say critics are harder on indies because the expectations of those with fewer risk constraints and loftier artistic aims are higher; others say critics are easier on indies because they're more personally invested in 'rooting for the little guy', and it's easier to have empathy for individuals or small teams versus corporations. What do you think?

My philosophy is to try and raise the level of conversation with the press and critics. What indies can do better than most is to talk with the press, and explain and discuss, without the PR spin, why design decisions are made. Andy is definitely right in that being indie creates certain expectations -- both good and bad -- and expectations as we know color the experience.

If we can improve the communication, then at least we can break down the preconceptions and evaluate our games with better information. Personally, I haven't always been successful at that, and in many cases its due to my own inexperience.

Do you feel that when it comes to platforms for indies, mobile and XBLA/PSN are a fairly level playing field, or is one still more viable than the other? If it depends on the title, how?

I think it depends on your situation, too. I've often said that mobile is where I would be if I was starting my studio from scratch, but as an established studio I'm at a big disadvantage. We don't have the marketing budget and contacts of a publisher, and yet we have enough overhead that there's significant risk in developing an iOS game.

In most markets, incumbents like barriers to entry, and in XBLA/PSN the barrier is actually relatively high -- from portfolio management to large costs associated with development. This makes it an uneven field for indies, but those who overcome the barrier often see big rewards, since their costs are far lower, and their marketing is often better than the competition.

As those barriers dissolve, given limited distribution, like in mobile, you don't get "perfect competition." Instead other factors such as marketing become more and more important, and there often ends up being a few really huge hits, and lots and lots of small ones. It's the middle that gets squeezed. So in my opinion even on this platform indies are on a pretty even playing field with everyone except the biggest publishers.

Is there any sense of spiritual change that comes with working with EA Partners? How are partner programs with large publishers fitting into the indie landscape right now?

We were adamant -- almost to a fault -- that we would only work with a publisher that trusted us and respected our vision of the game. To that end, EA Partners became an enabler for us to have the resources to create the game we wanted. Their attitude was more than "how can we help you succeed," they really trusted and believed in our abilities, and didn't feel the need to add value when they didn't need to.

If other publishers come in with a similar mentality, then I think the programs will fit in very well to the whole ecology as they make games that weren't previously possible suddenly possible. If not, I believe they may have moderate success, but ultimately indies are here to flex their creative passions, and despite the dollar signs indies have the option to say no.

Best thing about your experience? Most difficult?

Best: Seeing the eyes widen as friends and strangers picked up the controller for the first time playing Shank. Most difficult: Personally, it was the three months between March and June. During that time, my wife literally only saw me only in passing, and some of my close friends worked side-by-side with me. I'm grateful for the hard work our team went through and I'm thankful for my wife's patience.

What are your primary lessons, successes and general take-aways from the launch of this title, and how might you apply it toward your next one?

It took us 5 years to really understand why the company existed. We reaffirmed that creating and having creative control over our own ideas is core to the studio, and that's something I would never give up.

And then there's all the development take-aways -- the core one being that we need more playtesting of the full product. We did a ton of playtesting on the demos we showed at PAX Prime and PAX East, and the full game could definitely have gone through more user tests to smooth out inconsistencies, such as the controls issue we discussed.

The biggest success is that, against amazing odds, our team created Shank -- an original, hugely content-intensive game that has made a lot of gamers happy. I can't wait to do it all again.

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

[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 challenging racer with over fifty levels to play through, a Western-themed gun duel game, a pair of physics-based puzzlers, and a first-person exploration game that is going to test the limits of your problem-solving skills.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Nimbus' (Noumenon Games, commercial indie)
"Nimbus is a puzzle racer with over fifty levels to play through and many tight spaces to navigate. Your craft has no means of propelling itself, hence it must use the surrounding level to gain boosts and reach the goal."

Game Pick: 'GunBlood' (Andrew Wolf, browser)
"GunBlood is a simple Western draw 'n' shoot style game that doesn't mind splattering a bit of blood around. Over nine rounds against increasingly difficult opponents, the idea is to hold your mouse pointer over the barrel of the gun for three seconds, then let loose on your enemy."

Game Pick: 'BrainSplode!' (Richard Edwards, freeware)
"BrainSplode! is a physics-based puzzle game which puts you in control of a rocket launcher that can be used to fire missiles at pink-coloured brains. The objective here is to destroy all of the brains in the area so that you may progress to the next stage, where more brains await for their eventual annihilation at your hands."

Game Pick: 'No, Human' (Rolf Fleischmann, commercial indie)
"No, Human is a physics-based puzzle game done right, where you play as an omnipotent red being who is slightly annoyed by humankind's desire to colonize everything and claim all that is free in the universe as their own. This petulant behavior calls for a lesson to be taught to the humans, and you do this by hurling fireballs at any construction they decide to launch into space."

Game Pick: 'Q.U.B.E.' (Toxic Games, freeware)
"Q.U.B.E. is a clever first-person puzzle game that tells the story of an unnamed protagonist trapped inside a maze, equipped with a pair of gloves that allows him to extrude or contract multi-coloured cubes by willpower alone."

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

Mastiff, publisher of La Pucelle Tactics, Moon, Gurumin, and other titles you were mildly interested in put didn't actually pick up, will join GameStop and sunglasses company Wiley X in sponsoring Joey Logano's #20 car for the NASCAR Nationwide Series Race in Miami tomorrow.

It seems like an unlikely mix at first, NASCAR with niche video games, but Mastiff has been finding success of recent with Wii titles that fans of the racing franchise might appreciate: Reload, Remington Great American Bird Hunt, and the newly released Remington Super Slam Hunting North America. (GSW friend Danny Cowan recently wrote an ode to Mastiff centered around this fascinating change in focus.)

Also, Mastiff's logo on the hood of the car looks really cute.

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

New videos to support two video game-related film projects that need your funding! Above, we have a preview of Jeriaska's "Independent Videogame Music in Context" DVD, part of a series of productions interviewing Japanese video game composers, indie game music artists, and chiptune performers.

This trailer offers a preview of Jeriaska's interviews with Baiyon (PixelJunk Lifelike), Nigoro's Takumi Naramura (La-Mulana), and Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya (Cave Story) -- the last of whom talks about fans' requests for a sequel to his acclaimed PC/WiiWare game, though he wants to make "a different kind of game".

You can pledge some money to help Jeriaska reach his $5,000 fundraising goal (currently sitting around $1,000) and secure yourself a copy of a "Videogame Music in Context" DVD or the complete series at the project's Kickstarter page.

Filmmaker Brad Crawford posted a new preview for his own project, 100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience, which you can watch below. It features a brief chat with renown competitive Street Fighter player Daigo Umehara. You can fund that project -- it's already surpassed its $9,000 goal -- at IndieGoGo.

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

[In this Gamasutra-reprinted analysis, Tom Armitage looks at Kairosoft's iPhone cult hit Game Dev Story, examining the narrative reasons why game creators and players alike are transfixed by the Japanese-created 'build your own game studio' title.]

As I played Kairosoft's Game Dev Story on my morning commute, the images that formed in my head fell into two categories.

The first were little more than a high-resolution version of what what was playing out on screen - staff coming to work in a tiny development studio, hacking away at a series of passably average puzzle games, sometimes turning up to work in just their underwear.

The second weren't on the screen at all. They were visions of the rest of the world that studio existed in: previews in tatty 16-bit era magazines of their forthcoming titles; interviews with the talented producer who only wore his briefs in the studio; kids swapping Game Kid cartridges in the playground.

By the end of my first twenty-year playthrough, they were vivid enough that I ended up writing a pastiche retrospective of the fictional company I'd headed up for two decades.

I'd written a piece of fanfiction based on a game that, boiled down, is nothing more than a tarted-up spreadsheet. Which made me start to question just why I'd done that.

Game Dev Story is interesting, for me, because, when you take it apart: there's almost no Story within the game. It's just a mechanical engine for simulating a games company (and not even that sophisticated an engine). People work; numbers go up; games either sell or don't, with sales figures rarely correlating to review scores.

But where's the story?

There's a loose theme, sure, with a defined arc: start small, grow into a bigger company by selling more games. There's almost no writing; what there is is weakly translated, rammed into a line or two of the lazy port. There's a lot of Devving of Games, but, in the code that executes, there's relatively little Story to speak of. Just numbers, going up, or down.

Every now and then, the game asks you to type something in: the name of your company, the name of a game. And that's where the magic begins.

In that little flight of creativity, the game opens up: the player starts writing their own story. The player isn't just typing names into boxes. They're saying the words aloud in your head - and that conjures images of box-art, screengrabs, scathing magazine reviews; cardboard standees packed full of buggy, terrible, detective puzzle games, waiting to be flogged.

Sometimes, the companies we invent ring true. Gnarly Games, though named as a pastiche of Visceral, turned out to become a strange mix of From Software and Konami, through their constant return to dour mecha-games and campy vampire nonsense.

Their greatest success was, essentially, a Castlevania MMO. Or rather: that's what I saw in my head. A goofy name, combined with two drop-down fields defining the type of game, led to a moment of wishful, what-if? thinking.

Sometimes, we just give things rude names for the fun of it. But so often that's a joke that keeps on giving. As the eager secretary tells you again of the wild sales figures for Buggy Shit!! 3, it's hard not to raise a smile.

The stories you end up telling yourself are surprisingly complex, too. The rise and fall of little companies, kept down by absurd devkit costs and the inability to shift enough units on consoles with dwindling popularity; the companies that held on to founding staff as totems too long, rather than hiring the staff they need; the companies that failed to diversify out of the genre they first found success in. All that is in your head; all the game presents is numbers and loose encouragement.

Game Dev Story exemplifies a kind of mechanical storytelling: stories told not through text or voice-acting, but through coherent systems that cannot help but generate stories. I'm not waving my hands in my air here and making an excuse - "Oh, it has emergent narrative"; my point is that, in good mechanical storytelling, narrative cannot help but emerge. It's designed into the system.

Such systems are shaped to tell tales of lower-tier football teams, or the survivors of a zombie apocalypse, or mercenaries in Africa, or little companies trying to make videogames. Experiences you play, and feel, and believe, because you're as much a part of the telling as the machine throwing its myriad D20s.

And, for all its lazy porting, weak writing, and repetitive formula, that is something Game Dev Story does remarkably well. It turns out that it's not a story in itself. It's a tool to help players tell thousands of stories. Telling your own stories about running a games company - through the medium of tapping on icons, and waiting - is far more compelling than any description could make out.

It's a tool to help you do something. That notion led to the thought that mechanically-realised stories - the kind that movies can't really ever tell, and the kind that games are invariably best at - are a kind of narrative exoskeleton.

Exoskeletons can do two things. Firstly, they can enhance your own abilities: they make you better at something you can already do - faster at running, stronger at lifting. And secondly, they can give you superpowers: things you could never do yourself - such as flying, or breathing in a vacuum, or surviving intense heat.

The best narrative exoskeletons do a bit of both. Off the top of my head: Left 4 Dead; Far Cry 2; Championship Manager; MUD; Acquire; Illuminati!; Werewolf; almost any tabletop RPG. Stories are baked into systems, but told through the by - and through - the players operating within them.

Sometimes, we bring our own stories and personalities to the table, and the system amplifies them - the individual relationships between each player in a Left 4 Dead game add
as much to their realization as the characterization in the script.

Sometimes, those systems allow us to do things we could never do: they kill off characters we were too fond of; they force us to move out of our comfort zones; they have a grace of language or performance that we might be unable to attain.

I'm fed up of talking about stories in games (and I say that as someone who has loved many narrative-heavy, densely-plotted titles). Games are much more effective - and interesting - as tools for delivering stories, and, given that players will find their own stories anyway, why not build interesting systems that will shape their tales in exciting and unexpected ways?

Why not build story-telling engines, and narrative exoskeletons?

And that's why I like Game Dev Story so much: for a game with so little of what most games would call "story" in it, it turns out to live up to the promise of its name in so many ways.

[Tom Armitage is a Creative Technologist at Berg, a design consultancy based in London, where he writes code and words. He has also played a lot of games. He has spoken on games, technology, and social software at conferences in both Europe and the US including ETech, Reboot, Develop, the NLGD Festival of Games, and GameCity. He writes about games, design, programming, and much more, at infovore.org, where a version of this article originally appeared.]

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

[In the latest update in his 'GDC Chronicles' articles ahead of the 25th Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next February, official GDC historian Jason Scott analyzes the take-aways from a report on 1988's second ever Computer Game Developers Conference.]

If you want to impress your colleagues with your old-school GDC knowledge, be sure to work in how the 25th GDC will not be the 25th year of GDC.

It worked like this. When the first GDC was organized, it was held at Chris Crawford's home in 1988. It was such a wild success, that a second GDC was put together and held at a hotel in the same year, with a panel/session format that has held to the present day. I wasn't there, but thanks to contributed items, I can have an idea of what went on.

Eric Goldberg wrote an article for the Journal of Computer Game Design, Crawford's journal related to games and game-making, describing in overview what went on GDC #2 (then called CGDC). Here's scanned images (with permission) from the Journal:

You can view the article as a pdf file (4.3mb) or browse the images on the GDC Flickr stream. You can also click on individual thumbnails to get an idea of the article's writing.

The article is effusive in tone, happy that the whole event came off with few hitches and pleased at the amount of support shown by the 150+ attendees on the need for a conference focused on game design and issues related specifically to designers.

The keynote was the legendary Dani Bunten, creator of M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold, who gave this advice: Start a family, raise children. Grow as a person and learn from your family what people want from games and how games can best serve the needs of adults and children. Bunten, ultimately, wanted to say that being a nerd or a geek was nothing to be ashamed of, and the assembled attendees could feel pride in their accomplishments and talents.

Interestingly, Mr. Goldberg provides some thoughts on gender inequality showing its face, even at this early stage of GDC's life:

"The attendees at the symposium were overwhelmingly male, and often could not figure out how to deal with the few females who make computer game design their business... Bunten rescued us from terminal Neanderthal status by asking the women in the audience to comment on how they thought computers could support true popular multi-player games -- and studiously ignored the men champing at the bit to be heard until a representative sampling of women had spoken on the question."

How are we all doing on that?

In fact, Goldberg has a range of concerns which he discusses, all of which have had to be addressed at later GDCs (and other conferences, for that matter). For example, awards given were to companies and not individuals, because "there was a strong sentiment that these had far too much potential for creating animosity, and also that giving awards to each other was somewhat unseemly."

Another concern was what role publishers would play at future GDCs:

"The chief bone of contention was the role of publishers in future conferences. A vocal group of developers felt that the publishers, with their greater resources and as the source of the developer's livelihood, would disenfranchise the free-lance developer in what's supposed to be a forum of his peers - but not if the publishers were somehow kept out."

And a look to the future:

"After the first conference, at which 27 people were present, Crawford hoped the next one would attract 60. His guess was low, by 120 attendees. Estimates for the next time around range from 250 to 300; the chief worry expressed by long-time designers was that even more will come."

Other sections discuss specific seminars, the growing pains of designers coming into their own, and where the industry might be heading based on what was being discussed at this, the second GDC.

The article is, ultimately, a great on-the-ground report of the goings on at the conference, and one I hope will be augmented with other stories. Feel free to tell them via e-mail or comments.

[Thanks to Eric Goldberg and Chris Crawford for making this reprint available.]

Posted by Jason Scott at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a plentiful week for new job postings, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles across the world and in every major discipline, including opportunities at Infinity Ward, Warner Bros., Gameloft 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:

Infinity Ward: Senior Animator:
"Join our ranks! Infinity Ward, Inc. is an award winning developer of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. We are fiercely dedicated to creating the best games on the market, and strive not only to exceed the standard in game development, but define it. An incredibly talented team, an exciting work environment, and competitive compensation await those who are interested in creating cutting edge games."

THQ Digital Studios Phoenix: Producer:
"THQ Digital Studios Phoenix is looking for a producer who is highly organized, has outstanding communication and project management skills, is self-directed, and regularly follows up with team members. The ideal candidate has prior experience in game development, the submission process for console products, and coordination and management of outsourcing for game development and is willing to work on everything from large box products to small downloadable digital games."

Warner Bros.: Senior Producer:
"WB Games Inc. seeks a senior producer to be responsible for shipping a large AAA quality product on multiple platforms simultaneously through all phases of production. The senior producer is the focal point and key driver of all aspects of the game development. In coordination with the team leads, the senior producer establishes the goals, schedule and game development processes needed to ensure the development team is successful in delivering a AAA quality game on time and on budget."

Gameloft: Game Server Programmer:
"Gameloft, a leading international publisher and developer of video games, is seeking Game Server Programmer to join their existing talent pool. Qualified candidates will link up with imaginative design teams to create hot new game titles in the social networking genre. Previous hit games include Green Farm, Oregon Trail, Hero of Sparta, NFL 2010, Real Soccer 2010, Assassin’s Creed II, Far Cry 2, Terminator Salvation, Asphalt 5, Let’s Golf, Gangstar, Modern Combat: Sandstorm and Brothers In Arms: Earned in Blood 3D. As a key member of the engineering team, you’ll assist in the full cycle of development."

LOLapps: Art Director:
"Lolapps is searching for a super talented art director to lead our team from concept through to production! The art director oversees all art/illustration projects and staff, and is responsible for the overall direction and quality of work produced by the artists. This person will act as a leader in contributing to the game’s visual strategy, and work closely with the head of products to establish and maintain the visual integrity, brand standards, and consistency for existing and all future games."

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 Tom Curtis at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've featured Quasimoto Interactive's Game Gate VU before, the "console arcade machine" allowing users to play Xbox 360 and PS3 games with a coin-op setup at public areas like "family entertainment centers, bowling allies, truck stops, bars, hotels, restaurants and movie theatres".

The company showed off a similar cabinet for the Xbox 360's controller-free Kinect at this week's International Association of Amusement Parks expo. Here, you can see people playing Kinect Sports and Kinect Adventures with the Game Gate VU machines.

According to Arcade Heroes, which captured and posted the above video, one of these cabinets costs around $4300, and requires a license to operate in public settings, which owners would need to renew every six months. You can find more info on the Game Gate VU here.

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

Games journalist Mathew Kumar has published the third Minus/Infinity issue of exp. (not to be confused with Cory Schmitz' EXP), his personal zine featuring distinctive and "experiential articles" on video games he's played -- it's really unlike any other magazine or indie publication I can think of.

Along with the usual print issue you can order, Minus/Infinity is also available as a free downloadable PDF, a first for the zine. "A small but significant minority of potential readers were interested in learning more about the magazine before purchasing," explains Kumar.

He adds, ""While exp.'s content is intended for print and I believe it works best there, I decided to experiment by offering this 'sampler' issue in both PDF and print format so more readers can experience and hopefully enjoy the magazine."

Minus/Infinity contains the following treats:

• The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom (A title card sequence)
• Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent (A puzzle page)
• Alan Wake (A collection of lost lost manuscript pages)
• VVVVVV (A different way of looking at things)
• Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (A party of friends)
• Patchwork Heroes (A lazy demand) *print exclusive*
• exp.ress Mail (A star letter)

You can purchase the $6 exp. issue or download its PDF here.

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

The Station and Levi "Doctor Octoroc" Buffum, creators of that 8-Bit interactive Glee game on YouTube from a few months ago, have teamed up again for a similar production marking the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to theaters this week.

This Choose Your Own Adventure-style game is called Harry Potter and the Summer School Spectre, and it's a neat, retro-ish alternative to all the 3D Harry Potter titles releasing right now. Also (spoiler alert!), you get to see a ghost literally rip Harry Potter's face off.

It's pretty awesome -- just start the video above to begin playing!

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

[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us a fresh new roundup of links from Eric Swain, featuring some of the most interesting articles about Call of Duty: Black Ops, character portrayals in RPGs, and how other media influence game content.]

Starting off with a much-discussed topic, Gunthera1 at The Border House blog applauds Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops commercial for its diversity in regards to race, gender, profession age and body type. However, Sam Machkovech writing for The Atlantic calls it a “Twisted Advertising Campaign," while Gus Mastrapa at Joystick Division takes a step back and decides that tacky is a better term.

And, as usual, the marketers were right. This commercial for Call of Duty: Black Ops fits right it with Dancing With The Stars, infomercials for the Snuggie and C.S.I. Miami. Nobody will even bat an eye.

Moving on, Lucien Soulban on his blog of the same name wrote a six part series on how to write for video games. ANd Joe Myers talks about difference between Eastern and Western approaches to the RPG genre in its approach to heroes, with the west firmly implanted with a philosophy of 'I', while the JRPG focuses on the 'we'.

Eileen Stahl, in contrast, focuses on the “Wussy RPG Girls“: their origin and where they stand now. And naturally, Lake Desire writes a response to Eileen Stahl’s article on The Border House.

In another notable post, Kirk Hamilton at Gamer Melodico speaks with Tasha Harris from Double Fine Productions on its latest release, Costume Quest, and manages to only embarrass himself twice in the interview’s three parts.

There also has been some varied talk on game criticism theory this week. Mark Serrels talks with Adam Ruch on Kotaku about his academic study of games and his desire to make it more accessible to those who want to read it. Evan Griffin at Bitmob explains the theory of “Game Feel” as a form of examining games and demonstrates it on Flower.

Jeffery L. Jackson at Video Game Theory and Language wonders if TV’s cultivation theory can be applied to games and what that would mean. Doctor Professor at Pixel Poppers gives unto us the “One Commandment for Game Sequels,” I wont spoil it. And Jonathan McCalmont at Futurismic wants games to “Tell Your Own Damn Stories!” He’s a big proponent of emergent narrative.

Elsewhere, Brice Morrison had a good week on his blog, first writing about “The 5 Degrees of Fun” not as a ranking, but how we as humans describe experiences. He talks about the rift between ‘Indies’ and ‘Social Games’ and where it comes from. And finally writes how “Minecraft Illustrates the Two Keys to a Sandbox Game.”

Speaking of Minecraft, at Second Person Shooter, Kent Sutherland writes about his experiences with Minecraft and how it is just different from every other game. And Chris Davidson on Bitmob opens up and uses a personal experience of betrayal and how it happened to fall in conjunction to betrayals that come about in games.

Roger Travis, on his Living Epic blog, starts to write about “The Bioware style” in preparation for a chapter he is submitting for a volume on digital RPGs. And J.P. Gant writes on his Infinite Lag blog about fictional primary sources, what they do to expand a fictional experience, and how they are/could be applied in video games. Plus - Bob Chipman has a new video series at the Escapist that started this week and his opening episode wonders how evolved Halo really is.

Mike Dunbar from Chronoludic begins a series of posts looking one by one at the greatest sources of inspiration Red Dead Redemption took from various Westerns. The first one explores the themes taken from Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist Western The Wild Bunch.

Troy Goodfellow on Flash of Steel also begins a series of posts looking at how various civilizations are portrayed in strategy games. He took his list from the choices in Civilization and is going in alphabetical order, starting with America. Jim Sterling writing for FileFront calls the portrayal of homosexuality in Fallout: New Vegas to right way to go about it: to act like it is another characteristic and not the defining characteristic.

And finally, a pair of posts from Nick Dinicola at PopMatters. The first compares the pros and cons between Epic and Episodic Adventure Games. The other expresses his disappointment in the forced alliances in Fable 3, where the game removes the choice the series loves so much.

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

Leading up to Christmas, Nintendo plans to release one WarioWare D.I.Y. microgame each week from a different European indie developer, allowing owners of the title to download and play the bite-size game for free -- it's not clear yet if this is limited to only European copies of WarioWare D.I.Y.

Nintendo did something similar when the DS title first launched, releasing microgames created by developers like Masahiro Sakurai (Smash Bros. series), Gaijin Games (Bit.Trip series), and 2D Boy (World of Goo) but this new batch is just from European DSiWare and WiiWare studios.

Many of the microgames will feature characters or elements from the developer's titles. You can check out the release schedule for the WarioWare D.I.Y. releases after the break:

19 November 2010 - PressPlay (Max and the Magic Marker) "This minigame was crafted by Bo Strandby, whose talents in level design have helped earn the brain-teasing WiiWare title Max and the Magic Marker plenty of praise. Are you up for the challenge or will his D.I.Y. microgame confound you?"

26 November 2010 – RONIMO (Swords & Soldiers)
"Co-founder of Ronimo and one of the minds behind de Blob and award-winning WiiWare title Swords & Soldiers, gaming wizard Fabian Akker has created 'Om Nom Noms!' for your delectation. Redbeard from Swords and Soldiers loves grilled meat, but he's as lazy as he is greedy. Why don’t you help him fill his belly?"

03 December 2010 – TwoTribes (Toki Tori)
"Collin van Ginkel is the co-founder and creative director of Two Tribes B.V., and spiritual father of Toki Tori, an irresistibly cute baby chick featured in the game of the same name. In his D.I.Y. microgame, Collin challenges you to make sure little Toki Tori lands safely on the target. He'll cover his ears if you comment on his artistic skills though..."

10 December 2010 - Shin'en (Jett Rocket)
"Manfred Linzner is founder of Shin'en Multimedia and creator of the games Nanostray and Iridion. His D.I.Y. microgame features the protagonist from Shin'en Multimedia’s graphically glorious WiiWare title Jett Rocket. Ready? Start those engines; it’s time to take off!"

17 December 2010 – BROKNRULS (And Yet It Moves)
"Felix Bohatsch is one of the three creative minds behind And Yet It Moves and is the co-founder of Vienna-based independent studio, Broken Rules. He believes that a simple, well-executed game mechanic is one of the main ingredients of a good game. Felix had oodles of fun making microgames with D.I.Y., exclaiming, 'It’s fast and simple!' see what he’s got in store for you!"

24 December 2010 – Christmas surprise
"Have you been naughty or nice this year? Find out with this Christmas surprise."

31 December 2010 - Christmas surprise
"Another treat is in store for you today, as the creator of last week’s game has turned his hand to another fast-paced microgame."

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

In Over The Edge, the first chapter of recently released point-and-click adventure game The Journey Down, players meet Bwana and Kito, two friends and gas station owners trying to pay off their debts in what appears to be some sort of alternate, Jamaican-themed world.

They'll also face off against a power company that's cut off the gas station's electrical supply and has forbidden anyone from exploring a region of the world called The Edge -- a premise that seems loosely based on a certain trademark dispute.

Anyway, that all seems secondary, as what you'll immediately notice about The Journey Down are its beautifully painted backgrounds and fantastic soundtrack composed by Simon D'souza. Indie developer Skygoblin apparently spent five years working on the project in Adventure Game Studio.

You can download The Journey Down: Over The Edge for free here. Skygoblin intends to release the adventure game's second chapter, Into The Mist, in summer 2011.

[Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

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

[Our own Brandon Sheffield spoke with Yusuke Tomizawa, producer of intriguing PSP title God Eater: Burst to discuss the lessons learned from Monster Hunter and similar franchises, and why the cooperative action RPG style is in many ways "like a fighting game."]

Namco Bandai and Shift's God Eater: Burst hopes to capture the spirit of popular cooperative monster slaying action RPGs, while adding a prominent single player component to the traditionally multiplayer experience.

God Eater features gameplay akin to Capcom's popular Monster Hunter franchise, and includes mission-based objectives and a single player storyline to keep players busy even when playing alone.

The God Eater franchise made its debut on the PlayStation Portable in Japan in February this year, and immediately sold over half a million copies in the territory. The updated version of the original title, God Eater: Burst [YouTube trailer] will hit U.S. shores in early 2011. The updated title features new missions, monsters, items, and improved visuals over the original game.

Gamasutra spoke with Yusuke Tomizawa, producer of God Eater: Burst to discuss the game's lessons learned from similar franchises, how the game hopes to appeal to Western tastes, and the importance of incorporating user feedback mid-development.

Let's talk about the original God Eater. How was the decision made to move into this space? It was obviously dominated by Monster Hunter, and one could easily say, “Well, maybe there‘s no room for anyone else.” So how did the decision to make God Eater come about, and were you involved?

Yusuke Tomizawa: Well, in the early stage of developing God Eater, Monster Hunter was already really big in the genre - the boom was there.

So we thought that we could step in and there was enough space in the marketplace, and by adding the story aspect and this post-apocalyptic scenario, we thought that we could get enough people to actually buy it.

And it was only sold in Japan, but it already sold 600,000 units. And we feel that’s about the estimate that we were going to get. So we’re pretty on track in that sense.

When a game is very multiplayer oriented, how do you manage the addition of story, in terms of all players being able to have the same experience at the same time,bBut also not slowing them down too much with story?

YT: Yes, the multiplayer feature is really big. Most of the people after playing multiplayer together, especially in Japan, four people gather around and play together, but when they go home they want to get better at the game, so they play alone. And one of the motivations for them to keep on playing is the story, trying to figure out what’s going on in the world of God Eater.

And to differentiate from Monster Hunter, when you’re alone in Monster Hunter, all you can do is just gather things to make weapons. And some of the players didn’t think that was really motivational. So in that sense, the story driven part was really good for them.

And you can play single player, but when you get stuck, somebody can help you. You can join up with your friends and play multiplayer, then you can go back and actually clear it because your level will be pulled up by your friends, and that aspect is completely balanced.

There have been a lot of theories from different people I’ve talked to about why this genre doesn’t really succeed in the West. Do you have any opinion about that?

YT: The PSP itself in the U.S. isn’t that big in the first place right now. And in Japan, like I said before, four people getting together and playing is normal, but overseas it’s not. So in that sense, also it’s kind of difficult to do multiplayer on a PSP.

And especially Monster Hunter, this title, and Phantasy Star have been on PSP in Japan, so that way it’s probably hard for overseas players to really, get it and be sold that way. But personally for God Eater, since it has a good story mode to it; you don’t have to necessarily play multiplayer. So Western players may be able to get into it a little bit more than a game with Monster Hunter's system.

The multiplayer discussion is interesting because, you know, there are instances of multiplayer co-op being successful in America; like Left 4 Dead. So that’s why I’m trying to figure out what is the real difference is. It may be a hardware issue, perhaps if a game like this were on the 360 and people could play online that way, maybe that would change everything. I wonder if there’s more to it if the design sense appeals to a certain type of person.

YT: I'll use Monster Hunter as an example because that’s the one that’s really big in all countries. It’s hard to say, but maybe it’s the quests that make players do something that maybe doesn't appeal to the overseas players. You know, you might have to repeat stuff a lot of times to get a certain item or something like that. So maybe those kinds of repetitive tasks aren't really appealing to them.

I think there is that element there. You know, often now when players are presented with something that looks like an open world, you don’t want to have invisible walls and they don’t want to feel trapped, they want to feel like they can go wherever they want. So when you have that, plus a lot of grinding, it makes people feel like it’s an older kind of experience. But there may be some game design things in there that are really appealing to players. What do you think about that?

YT: It’s sort of like the core experience is like a fighting game. You go out on the field, and you fight the same enemy over 100 times. For instance, if you were playing Tekken you might use Kazuya against Heihachi over and over to get better.

So if you don’t like walls in the first place, it’s kind of weird to have a fighting game that has no invisible walls because you wouldn’t be able to fight the same way. So it’s probably just the game type.

I think God Eater has an interesting position because you have the ability to kind of iterate on what previous other companies have done. You can see what other games in this genre have done wrong, and improve upon it or see what users request and you can answer those requests in ways that perhaps the original companies can’t. So I wonder if that was part of your design process -- looking at those weaker aspects and what users thought about those games and incorporating that into your own.

YT: The director of the dev team actually wanted to make a user friendly game, a game that answered most of the feedback from users. So he took in, as you explained, the weak areas from Monster Hunter, and tried to learn from them.

And in order to do so, he went over a lot of playtests before releasing the demo. The demo went well, but still some of the players didn’t like some parts. And before releasing the game, after releasing the demo they took the time to fix those parts.

And that’s because we wanted to answer people’s feedback. So in that way, too, God Eater: Burst is tweaked a little bit after the original God Eater was released people gave us feedback. Those concerns are addressed in God Eater: Burst.

Is the story component that the main motivation to get players to buy a sequel? Because now you can actually continue the story or, you know, whereas with other games you may just have more weapons or new classes or something, you can actually continue a storyline as well, and build upon the game's universe. What is your main drive with God Eater: Burst?

YT: Yeah, that’s a big part of God Eater. As you said before, the action part we keep on tweaking and fixing by listening to player feedback. In continuing the sequel, since we have a good storyline, it will make people motivated to buy the next one. And in God Eater: Burst, we have a little bit of story added from the original God Eater, so that will motivate people to play the game.

The 3DS seems like it might be a really good place for this kind of game. Do you think it would be a good fit? I know the whole ad-hoc thing is very PSP based right now, but Nintendo is making a lot of changes with the 3DS. Do you think that would be a good home for God Eater someday?

YT: Personally, as a platform, the 3DS is probably very appealing for these kinds of action games. These kinds of games have very high speed, difficult controls. So being able to touch the screen and being able to control that way would probably be good, as well.

But the problem is, at least for God Eater, since one of the core aspects of this game is that it has high speed compared to Monster Hunter, so we have to keep on turning the camera, So that’s probably going to be a little bit difficult when they’re doing for 3DS. There are pros and cons, and so on.

That was actually one of the things I noticed when playing it is that it’s much, much faster than Monster Hunter, which is one of the reasons that I didn’t like playing that series, because I don’t like to wait a long time for my attacks to come out while I’m getting attacked by giant monsters. How did you tune how fast you want the gameplay to be versus how fast you can get characters act in these kinds of games?

YT: Yeah, as you said, the speed is really hard to get right because when the original God Eater was released, some of the players said, the enemies were a bit too fast. And we are still fixing everyday, the speed of your character and the speed of the enemies.

If the enemy is too slow it’s just going to be a boring game, so we’re trying to figure out the perfect balance. If your character is too fast, you can’t control it as you wanted to. So the balance is really difficult. And our ultimate goal is that the player can control their character to the extent they want to, not too fast and not too slow. So everyday we’re shifting it.

For God Eater, when you’re fighting you can devour the enemy and take their power, and that speeds you up a little bit. That gives you a little bit of advantage over the monster. So that balance too is difficult, but that’s like the core and fun part of that aspect of the game.

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

Vlambeer, the Dutch indie studio behind Super Crate Box and Radical Fishing, showed off an early game clip for a new and small project it whipped together during "an empty week": Space Murder (temporary title). The team is actually looking for new name suggestions, preferably not using the word "space."

It is a space opera game, though, and it looks like players travel from planet to planet, making stops to buy weapon upgrades for their starship and fighting robot overlords/malicious space beasts in shoot'em battles along the way. It looks very fun!

The studio points out that the graphics you see here are very unfinished, as it likely has a lot more work to put into the project. Game designer Jan Willem Nijman comments, "We managed to get some very famous and skilled people on board to help with art and music!"

[Via @adamatomic]

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

Swiss design firm Bread and Butter is selling a classy "Gamepads Complete Collection 1979-2009" poster featuring illustrations of 42 official controllers for home video game consoles. It collects pads as obscure as the Apple Pippin Atmark's controller and as recent as the PlayStation's Move wand.

There aren't any details on pricing or the poster's size posted online, but you can contact Bread and Butter's Laurent Bolli about ordering one of the pieces. You can also see a slideshow with close-up shots of the pads at the consultancy group's site.

And while we're looking at gray-and-white vector art for controllers created by design firms, last month CX Partners posted a rather neat "Joypad Evolution" infographic showing the "design patterns and innovations in gaming interface design" over the past 38 years. Download a high res version of it here!

[Via A bunch of stuff about game controllers]

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

Almost two years since its release in Japan, Spelunker HD will finally hit the North American PlayStation Store next week. Japanese studio Tozai Games (R-Type Dimensions) has re-created Irem's NES edition of Spelunker with new music and six-player online multiplayer.

In Spelunker HD, you control a fragile explorer navigating underground passages, pits, and traps across more than 100 levels. As its title implies, the game is all presented with high definition graphics, but you can play a retro 8-bit style version in "Classic Mode", too!

You'll be able to download Spelunker HD on November 23rd for $9.99, which is much cheaper than the $25 that Japanese gamers had to pay.

[Via PlayStation Blog]

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

[Continuing his interview series for GameSetWatch, Jason Johnson catches up with Enviro-Bear 2000 creatorJustin Smith to discuss a variety of oddly intriguing independent-game related -- and more esoteric -- topics.]

Justin Smith is the kind of guy who you never quite know when to take seriously. Did he really consider making a game about defending the Alamo with a cyborg built from Davy Crockett’s corpse?

Is his favorite T.V. show actually The Love Boat? No matter how outlandish his quips may seem, there’s always the off chance of their legitimacy.

I suppose that’s to be expected from the man who made So Long, Oregon and the IGF Nuovo-nominated Enviro-Bear 2000 -- games in which the biggest adversaries are dysentery and an angry badger rampaging the passenger’s seat.

Smith’s sense of humor borders on the absurd, and only an equally absurd interview could do him justice - so that's what we tried:

Not Another Interview!

GameSetWatch: Hello, Justin.

Justin Smith: Hi.

GSW: I read in another interview that you have a love for being unemployed. How’s that working out?

JS: I said that? I’ve done way too many interviews for the number of games I’ve made. [Laughs.]

GSW: I’m glad you agreed to do this one. I’d like to start by asking you a few personal questions. Are you a pet owner? Do you smoke?

JS: Are you with an insurance company? [Laughs.]

GSW: This interview is actually part of an elaborate rouse to raise your premiums.

JS: No, I don’t smoke. [Laughs.] As an indie, you have to cut down on all costs. I use my neighbors’ pets and I try to get secondhand smoke where I can.

GSW: What kind of music do you enjoy?

JS: All sorts of stuff. When I was making Enviro-Bear, I pretty much listened to nothing but The Fall.

GSW: Oh really? I have a few of their albums. I love Grotesque.

JS: That’s a great album.

GSW: You recently went to Texas for Fantastic Arcade. What was that like?

JS: It’s primarily a film festival, but they had a bar full of computers and arcade cabinets in the back. Enviro-Bear had a cabinet. It had a party atmosphere, and I got to hang out with a bunch of cool people: Paolo Pedercini, cactus, Derek Yu, Messhof. Though I think the show was a little under the radar because there wasn’t a nomination process.

GSW: I saw on the internet that you won, and thought to myself, “I didn’t know that could be won.”

JS: [Laughs.] Everybody won something. It was very much like kindergarten in that regard.

Who is the real Justin Smith?

GSW: One of the first things I did when prepping for this interview was Google you. You get your fair share of hits, but the search also returned a number of other Justin Smiths. I made a list of them, and I would like to ask how each of these other Justin Smiths’ careers would suit you.

JS: [Laughs.] Okay.

GSW: The first guy is Justin Smith, the professional poker player. Would playing poker for a living work for you?

JS: I like to gamble. On second thought, no, I don’t like to gamble.

GSW: Justin Smith, the pro lacrosse player.

JS: The national sport of Canada. Its very violent. It makes hockey look tame. I couldn’t play lacrosse.

GSW: You Canadians are kind of brutal.

JS: We’re trying to shake that reputation. We’re trying to get more into curling. It’s very non-violent. And you can have 100% performance if you’re drunk. It’s a great sport.

GSW: Justin Smith, a historian on the Mexican-American war?

JS: I learned a lot about it when I was in Texas [for Fantastic Arcade]. I went to the Alamo. I got the tourist version.

I’m considering making a game where the Mexican army rises from the dead. The only way to defend the Alamo is to find Davy Crockett’s body and make him a cyborg. So that’s what I know about history.

GSW: Justin Smith, a candidate for Sheriff in Berthhoud, CO.

JS: That would be fun! Colorado is a hotbed of bears doing crazy shit.

GSW: Justin Smith, the Creative Director of Fish Associates.

JS: Of who???

Laughing at Ecological Disasters

GSW: In Enviro-Bear, the fish jump right into the car. Are you concerned about the Asian Carp invasion?

JS: I think we should get a bunch of bears in the area and see what they can do!

GSW: Shortly after the release of Enviro-Bear, reports of bears breaking into cars began to rise. "Bear Trashes Car," "Bear Breaks into Car, Goes on Joyride," "Auto Theft in Progress Turns Out to be Bear." Were these incidents part of a viral marketing campaign for your game?

JS: I don’t want to incriminate myself here.

GSW: Then, are they copycat crimes?

JS: [Laughs.] The most famous one was when the bear actually got into the car, stuck it in neutral, and rolled backwards. He also ate the food that was in there. He was Enviro-Bearing it up. [Laughs.] And I did actually get a spike in sales after that story.

GSW: You live in Canada. Have you ever had any run-ins with bears?

JS: We see bears up here pretty regularly. They get into the trash. I’ve been out hiking a couple of times, seen them across the valley, and remember thinking “Well, shit. There they are. Don’t come this way!”

GSW: Just throw some trail-mix at them if they do. On second thought, you probably shouldn’t do that.

JS: I don’t think so.

GSW: Have you ever ran over a bear, maybe by mistake?

JS: I don’t think you could run over it. I think it would smash your car pretty badly.

GSW: What was the last animal you ran over?

JS: It would have been unintentional, of course, but a raccoon, or a squirrel.

Comedy Dell’arte

GSW: You’re games are pretty funny. By all accounts, you are a funny guy. What do you find funny?

JS: I grew up on old-school British comedies: Black Adder, Red Dwarf, Monty Python. Total silliness.

GSW: Do any favorite Monty Python skits come to mind?

JS: The argument clinic. [Laughs.] You go in, you pay money, and you get into an argument, and they are arguing over whether it’s an argument are not. Also, the one with all the existential philosophers playing soccer. [Laughs.]

GSW: I always liked Confuse-a-Cat.

JS: Oh that’s great!

GSW: Are you familiar with the term ironic appreciation?

JS: I am now.

GSW: Like when you say something is “so bad, it’s good.”

JS: A lot of people use that in self-defense. They really do like it, but their friends will make fun of them. So they’re like, “Oh no, it’s just ironic.”

GSW: Your games seem to have some relationship to that idea.

JS: Some Enviro-Bear fans went completely crazy with ironic enjoyment. The whole Touch Arcade forum really got into that.

GSW: Do you think indie games are currently going through a phase of ironic appreciation?

JS: There’s definitely a sub-genre of indie games that are like that. They’re not meant to be fun. It’s a bit meta. You enjoy how the game exists, but you don’t actually enjoy playing it. But I wouldn’t generalize that across all indie games.

GSW: Part of the humor in your games comes from cumbersome controls. Do you ever get complaints from people who don’t get the joke?

JS: There’s certainly a weird sect of people that want actual driving controls in Enviro-Bear, which would completely defeat the purpose. They say, “I want to be able to use the arrow keys.” What the hell? What are they playing for?

There’s another smaller group that wanted me to implement dual-touch controls on the iPhone. It might be fun, but it would ruin the joke.

Live at the Witch Trials

GSW: Looking at the iTunes Store user reviews, Enviro-Bear is widely praised, but a few reviewers don’t seem to get the joke. I gathered a few of their comments. Would you care to respond to your critics?

JS: [Laughs.] Let’s give it a shot.

GSW: Wxxxxx wrote, “It looked alright so I decided to read the reviews as I always do before spending my HARD EARNED money... I am very angered and I may report this to Apple.”

JS: [Laughs.] Your money might be hard earned, but now its my hard earned money!

GSW: The thing is, someone can earn .99 cents at minimum wage in less than ten minutes.

JS: I used to think one sale was like a cup of coffee. Then it dawned on me: Holy shit! I need like four sales to get a cup of coffee.

GSW: That’s pretty rough. Fxxxx wrote, “Unlike every reviewer before me, I can assure you that I am not a friend or family member of the developer. That has to be the reason this game has five stars.”

JS: I’ve got a huge family!

GSW: Dxxxxxxxxx wrote, “WARNING! DO NOT PURCHASE! IT'S A SCAM TO GET YOUR DOLLAR!”

JS: [Laughs.] I prey on old ladies to get their dollar.

GSW: As do we all.

JS: All the negative reviewers are probably Halo players. [Laughs.]

GSW: Sxxxxxxx wrote, “You will hate yourself for buying it.”

JS: That’s pretty nasty! [Laughs.]

GSW: Poor guy committed suicide after posting that comment.

JS: I hope he got better.

GSW: xxxxxxxxx wrote, “This game is PERFECT for hipsters and indie elitists who love to say they like things that nobody has heard of or could possibly like because ‘we just don’t get its brilliance.’ Total crap for a dollar.”

JS: [Laughs.] You know, I can’t argue with that very much. He could have easily upped his hipster cred by leaving a 5-star review, but he just ostracized himself.

GSW: He will never be accepted in hipster society.

JS: Indie game hipster society. Pretty much the lowest rung of hipster.

GSW: And he left that review on the day after Christmas.

JS: He got it in his stocking. He got a promo code. “Mom, what the F* is this!” [Laughs.]

GSW: So what’s do you have in store next?

JS: There’s this whole genre of games where you’ve got a car and you have to park it.

GSW: I’ve seen the towing games.

JS: Towing is sort of an offshoot of it. And I kind of appreciate the genre in how they try to one-up each other in mind-numbing boringness. I made a game called No Brakes Valet [video]. You have to park the cars as they come whizzing on the screen, but you don’t get a gas pedal. You can only brake. It ends up being a catastrophe in the end.

GSW: That sounds like it’s guaranteed to enrage all the parking game fans out there.

JS: [Laughs.] I hope so. If you don’t enrage someone along the way, its not worth it.

Posted by Jason Johnson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Following up Heavenly Symphony with another must-attend event, Babycastles has brought in Independent Games Festival Chairman Brandon Boyer to curate its next lineup of indie titles, which will debut with an opening party tomorrow night at Manhattan's Showpaper 42nd St Gallery.

The indie games arcade will feature seven previous IGF winners and finalists: Pocketwatch Games' unreleased but much anticipated Monaco, Justin Smith's Enviro-Bear 2000, Cactus' Tuning, Team Meat's Super Meat Boy, Hello Games' Joe Danger, Loren Schmidt's Star Guard, and Ragtime Games' Continuity.

Minusbaby, Notendo, and 000000swan will provide music and entertainment for the free, all-ages party, which opens at 7PM. It looks like there's will be another party on November 27th, too, which Boyer will appear at with performersStarscream, Neil Voss, and Knife City, so make sure to also mark that date!

[Via Minusbaby]

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

Every other video game character seems to be manipulating time nowadays; why not a rat? In Funky Lab Rat, a PSN-exclusive title from French developer Hydravision (The X Factor, Fairytale Fights), you take on the role of a rodent that can rewind and pause time, modify levels, and more.

The goal is to use your powers to avoid traps, collect pill, and win awards based on your performance across 11 worlds (80+ stages) until you can eventually escape the laboratory holding you captive. The game features support for both the DualShock 3 pad and PlayStation Move motion/navigation controllers.

Funky Lab Rat will launch in Europe on November 24th, then hit North America the week after that. You can see screenshots of the puzzle-platformer at its official site.

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

[GSW correspondent Ian Adams spoke with Eddy Walters of Pixelante about the development and funding of quirky 2D platform game Fowl Space, the pros and cons of life as an indie developer, and the team's plans for the future.]

Pixelante's stylish 2D platformer Fowl Space uses innuendo, humor, and bold visuals to wrap traditional mechanics in unusual aesthetic trappings.

The Flash-based game makes no qualms about its sense of humor or suggestive undertones; it's filled with pop culture references and sexual innuendo that create a lighthearted, if eccentric, atmosphere and tone.

The game was recently featured [video] in the Penny Arcade Expo's PAX 10 indie showcase, and is due for release on PC and Mac in late 2010.

Before creating Fowl Space, the three recent college grads at indie developer Pixelante developed several projects, including Hunted Forever and Pixel Legions, both of which which can be found for free on the team's official Web site.

Gamasutra spoke with Pixelante's Eddy Walters about Fowl Space's development and funding, the pros and cons of life as an indie developer, and the team's plans for the future.

Could you please give your name, and a quick description of your game?

Eddy Walters: I’m Eddy Walters, I’m the environmental artist for Fowl Space, which is put out by Pixelante Studios, which is owned by my dear friend Evan Miller. The game is a side scrolling shooter, very similar to the original Metroid that is completely ridiculous from start to finish. There’s pretty much nothing about the game you can take seriously.

So what have been your favorite things about independent development?

EW: Well, doing independent development is really hard for me, because I’m the only one of my team that has moved out of the house. So I’m working part time on film sets trying to pay rent, while they can focus on it much more.

The hardest point would probably be finding time when we can get everybody together simultaneously to do it. We all have different schedules and it’s all working around each other, and every once in a while there’s the one guy who’s late, and we’re like, “I hate you Drew.” He’s another one of the developers, and I tell him I hate him every day.

Other challenges include teleporting platforms. We don’t really know what bugs are in the game, but sometimes collision just screws everything up and the guys start teleporting around and enemies teleport and we just sit there and go “hmmm.”

What have been some of the best things about independent development?

EW: The best thing is you’re free to do whatever you like. There are no restrictions on anything, the only thing that is a drawback is when we send [games] to auction on sites like FlashGameLicense.com, because ... you never really know if a game’s going to be a hit or not. So, we’re free to do whatever we want, but if the game isn’t taken well, our bids that we get aren’t very great, so the amount of money we make is always up and down.

You mentioned you live on your own, are you the only one on the team with a part time job?

EW: Well, three of the teammates have part time jobs as well, but they still live at home, so they don’t have the rent philosophy. The head of the company, Evan Miller, still lives at home, and he’s been the only full time one out of us, who has invested all the time in it. If you go to his webpage, Pixelante.ca, there’s a list of games that he did.

So you guys are Canadian, are you getting any government funding?

EW: No!

You have to get on that!

EW: We should! I keep stressing that. One of the [reasons] for us not getting any money is you need to have a university degree, and we all just graduated in June, so now we can apply for those government grants.

As recent graduates, do you see you yourselves continuing to pursue independent stuff, or are you interested in going to Ubisoft Toronto and the like?

EW: I like independent stuff. I can’t really say much for my teammates. I know Evan is collaborating on some mystery project with EA right now, which he can’t talk about, he has a gag order on that. I don't know, it’s hard to say.

Fair enough. So what are guys looking at for distribution?

EW: Ah! Here’s the kicker, distribution for us was going to be, when the game started, it was just going to be a Flash game, auctioned off, and sold online to a site like Addicting Games. Once we got into the PAX 10, we started thinking, “Well, maybe we can sell this on Steam.”

So we’ve been trying to get in contact with the Steam guys. We’ve worked it out so it can work on both PC and Mac, which is a plus. And we’ve been in contact with a different group at the PAX 10 and they have programmers that are contemplating taking our game, and porting it to Xbox 360, PS3 and WiiWare. That’s in a perfect world.

Since our game is Flash it could wind up being a total nightmare to port it, so we’re going to see how that pans out. Fingers crossed on that one.

How has being in the PAX 10 impacted you guys so far?

EW: [I'm] speechless. When I found out, when I got the call, I was leaving for Europe the day after. I actually had to change my plans to be back here. I wasn’t supposed to be back yet. When we found out I was like, “Ahhh!” [I] called my travel agent and changed my flight to two weeks earlier so I could finish the demo. So in that regard, it totally screwed my vacation up.

So what's the difference between the vision in your head for the game, and reality of the experience?

EW: Well, in the original design, it was not supposed to be such a sexually driven game. The innuendo was supposed to be there, but it wasn’t supposed to be so much in your face. Then, that all just got shot to hell at some point, and we just went nuts with it, and it’s everywhere.

2D Platformer...

EW: Yes.

On the PC...

EW: Great.

...Do you feel like, in some way, this game had to be indie?

EW: No! You don’t have to be indie to make a 2D platformer. The new Bionic Commando, it’s still technically a platformer. They kind of gave it a 3D element but it’s barely there. I wouldn’t say you have to be indie to do it, it’s just simplistic. There’s nothing wrong with simplistic.

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

Thanking its community with the free release, Helsinki-based indie developer RedLynx is giving away Trials Legends, a new and free PC game designed to recapture "the classic gameplay of the original web and PC-based Trials experience from 2000 to 2005", to anyone who becomes a fan of its Facebook page.

The free game features 33 tracks from classic Trials games (Trials Basic, Trials Pro, Trials Construction Yard, and Trials Mountain Heights), six bike models, 15 ranks, local scoreboards, a track creator that can "turn any graphic into a Trials Legends track", and a history of Trials releases.

RedLynx also recently released a video showcasing every Winner-created track that will be included in its upcoming Big Thrills DLC pack for Trials HD on Xbox Liv Arcade. You can watch that after the break.

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

Organizers of the 2011 Game Developers Conference have revealed a packed full-day tutorial line-up -- including notables from Epic, Blizzard, and Valve -- for the 25th edition of the industry's leading event for game creators.

With the overall session list for the event starting to fill out, organizers are taking the opportunity to reveal the full-day tutorials available to attendees during the GDC 2011 registration process.

These lower-capacity, first-come first-served tutorials will once again be held alongside the GDC Summits on the first two days of the San Francisco-based event, Monday, February 28th and Tuesday, March 1st.

They will be open to those with a Summits & Tutorials or All-Access Pass, and interested parties can select their preference during the process of registration.

Newly announced GDC 2011 tutorials of particular note include the following:

- A special one-day 'Producer Boot Camp' is being assembled by key GDC Advisory Board members including Laura Fryer, VP and General Manager of WB Games Seattle; Epic Games executive producer Rod Fergusson and Media Molecule's Siobhan Reddy (LittleBigPlanet franchise).

The trio will assemble a full day tutorial -- including themselves and other yet to be announced speakers -- that "focuses on some of the key skills required by producers, both new to the role and seasoned veterans, to be successful in this challenging industry."

- Bringing back last year's highly-rated 'Level Design in a Day: Best Practices from the Best in the Business', some of the most experienced AAA game level designers in the industry will offer an all-new line-up of best practices, lessons learned, interactive audience participation and case studies.

Titles discussed will span Brink to Dead Space, and Gears of War to Fallout 3, with takeaway lessons for all those "responsible for crafting moment-to-moment gameplay", and speakers including Epic's Jim Brown, Zipper's Ed Byrne, Bethesda's Joel Burgess, Visceral's Matthias Worch, Splash Damage's Neil Alphonso and more.

- The intense, technical 'Physics for Programmers' tutorial brings together some of the best practitioners in gaming physics -- from Insomniac and Blizzard, through Sony and Havok -- to continue this storied session's more than ten-year tradition.

Over the course of a day, attendees will "get up to speed in the latest techniques and deepen their knowledge in the topic of physical simulation. These presenters will provide a toolbox of techniques for programmers interested in creating physics engines, with references and links for those looking for more information."

- In another first, 'Technical Artist Boot Camp: Lessons in How to Create and Be an Effective TA' will cover the sometimes-neglected technical art area, offering insight from well-respected TAs from Volition, Valve, Blizzard, BioWare, and other top studios.

The presenters' hope is that by exposing academia, studio management, and displaced industry professionals to technical art, they will "foster discussion and expand educational and professional boundaries."

These speakers and tutorials join a host of other notable tutorials, including veteran industry lawyer Jim Charne on 'Emerging Issues in Game Dev Deals', the ever-popular 'Audio Boot Camp', Evan Skolnick's highly rated 'Learn Better Game Writing in a Day', Marc LeBlanc's acclaimed two day 'Game Design Workshop', and the eminently practical 'Advanced Visual Effects with DirectX 11'.

At the forefront of game development, Game Developers Conference -- part of the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this website -- continues to deliver the most pertinent and informative updates in digital entertainment, with a host of GDC 2011 Summit and Main Conference content announcements to come over the next few weeks.

Game Developers Conference 2011 will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from February 28th to March 4th, and registration is now open. For more information on all aspects of the show, visit the official GDC 2011 website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a present to newly opened online fan community SegaAge (launched by the founder of NintendoAge), prototype collector Mark Nolan has uploaded the ROM for previously unreleased Genesis game Swamp Thing -- as you'll see in the video above, it's nothing like the NES game released by Imagineering/THQ.

The 16-bit title was developed by Nuvision, which worked on Bimini Run and another unreleased Genesis game called Bean Ball Benny. Unfortunately, this prototype locks up at the end of the first stage, but you can still see a lot of Swamp Thing's funny powers, like his ability to transform into logs, leafs, and apples.

It's not shown in the gameplay clip, but Nolan says there's also a transformation that drops Swamp Thing into a Pac-Man-esque maze: "When turning into a leaf, ST is forced down a small hole. As the leaf, you have to work your way through a tight maze that if filled with rats and sewage. It's fantastic."

You can download and learn more about the Swamp Thing Genesis prototype at SegaAge's forums.

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

Who's That Flying!?, Mediatonic's PSP Minis project blending a side-scrolling shoot'em up with tower defense and courtroom drama/intrigue, is now available to purchase on PSN for $5.99. If you've played Mediatonic's last release, Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess, expect the same humorous approach!

In Who's That Flying!?, players control the Guardian of Earth, who uses his "hyper-powered laser arm" to fight hostile aliens. The Guardian, though, is accused of allowing Doom Beasts to invade Earth's cities, so he must defend himself against accusations of "gross incompetence" from the Galactic Council of Justice.

I'm unsure how the tower defense elements come into play, but Mediatonic says it's taken "the immediate jump-in-and-go feel from side-scrolling shooters and mixed that with some tower defence-style strategy (just enough to give it a twist)". You can check out more screenshots of the the shoot'em up bits after the break.

"We feel the result is a really interesting blend of mechanics and something we hope will appeal to the discerning tastes of minis players," says Mediatonic writer and producer Jim Griffiths. “We’ve also packed in as much drama and humour as we can, both in the cut-scenes and throughout the levels – we really like it when we can surprise our players and maybe make them smile."

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

[In this design analysis, originally published in the September 2010 issue of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine, Spore/Civilization IV designer & programmer Soren Johnson looks at the fallibility of AI and how games should tailor themselves to its capabilities.]

On March 11, 2009 during the Three Moves Ahead strategy gaming podcast, freelance journalist Tom Chick introduced a phenomenon which has come to be known as the Chick Parabola:

"My experience with Empire: Total War is this parabola of fondness. At first I don’t like it, so I’m at the bottom of the curve. I don’t like it because they do a terrible job with their documentation – it’s got a terrible manual; they want you to play through this scripted campaign if you want to learn anything; the tool-tips are really screwy. So, I’m hating it.

Commonly, there’s this curve where I enjoy a game, and then I master the system, and then – unless it’s got a good AI – I lose all interest because I realize that mastering the system is where the challenge ends. Once I reach that point, the game is dead for me, and I hate that! That’s when the game should really start to take off."

Many veteran gamers will recognize this feeling from their own experiences – the rising enjoyment that comes from learning an interesting game system followed by an inevitable deflation as the challenge slowly disappears.

Sometimes, a simple technique or exploit becomes obvious that renders the rest of the game balance irrelevant. However, usually the culprit is a weak adversary as the artificial intelligence cannot grasp certain core game mechanics to offer the player a robust challenge. The problem is that the game’s designers have made promises on which the AI programmers cannot deliver; the former have envisioned game systems that are simply beyond the capabilities of modern game AI.

Symmetry Matters

Still, not all games suffer from the Chick Parabola. Many are so fundamentally asymmetrical – Super Mario Bros., Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, Half-Life – that the AI is simply a speed bump that can be easily tuned to provide the right level of challenge. The games which suffer the most are ones where the computer is forced to play the same game as the human.

These symmetrical games – StarCraft, Street Fighter, Puzzle Quest, Halo – have a unique challenge in that each game mechanic must not simply be judged on its own merits but also by asking whether the AI can reasonably understand the option and execute it successfully. Unfortunately, asking this question often disqualifies many interesting ideas.

Artificial intelligence is notoriously poor at handling issues of trust and betrayal, of long-term investments, of multi-front wars, and of avoiding traps obvious to any human. The question of trust, in particular, has torpedoed multiple attempts to make a viable single-player version of the classic board game Diplomacy, which relies so acutely on being able to read one’s enemies, one’s friends, and one’s supposed friends.

Thus, to avoid the Chick Parabola, designers of symmetrical games must weigh carefully the implications of various game mechanics. An interesting play option which over-taxes the AI runs the risk of making the game more interesting in the short-term – as the player learns the system – but less interesting in the long-term – once the player masters the system and can use the mechanic to run rings around the artificial intelligence.

Of course, designers of symmetrical games built primarily for multi-player – such as the Battlefield series or the fighting genre – can choose to sacrifice single-player longevity for multi-player depth. Non-conventional weapons are fine if we assume that veterans of the game are only interested in playing the game with each other.

The human brain is remarkably flexible, with the ability to easily process novel mechanics which are orthogonal to the rest of the game. This approach has many advantages; Valve has been able to radically change the multi-player-only Team Fortress 2 with each character update (giving the Demoman a sword and shield, for example) without having to worry about toppling over an increasingly rickety AI.

Designing for the AI

However, symmetrical single-player games need to be designed as much for the artificial intelligence as for the humans themselves. Even if painful, designers must be willing to leave some of their most orthogonal – and often most creative – ideas off the table for the sake of the AI. Game design is a series of trade-offs, and empowering the AI is important for avoiding the downward slope of the Parabola.

Nonetheless, creative developers can solve this problem at the design stage before it even reaches some doomed AI programmer. One game mechanic that pushed Chick over the edge with Empire: Total War was amphibious invasion. The AI was simply incapable of coordinating its land and naval forces together to launch a coherent and effective invasion of an overseas target. Smart players would quickly learn that if the AI could not attack amphibiously, then the strategic balance can be gamed easily. Maybe England’s troops are not such a threat after all?

This problem is not unusual; strategy games with transportation units almost always suffer from ineffective artificial intelligence. Coordinating land and naval units to be ready in the same place and at the same time – along with the necessary escort ships – is a non-trivial task.

Rise of Nations, Big Huge Games’s historical RTS, presented a blunt but effective solution to this problem; land forces which approach the shore simply turn into boats to carry themselves across the water. Once they reach their destination, the boats transform back into the original land units. No transportation ships ever needed to be built or managed at all.

With one simple stroke, Brian Reynolds, the game’s designer, removed a classic AI problem from the game, enabling water maps to remain interesting for veteran players. The design may have sacrificed the “realism” of requiring the player to build transport ships along with other naval units, but the upside was extending the game’s longevity significantly.

Furthermore, many design changes meant to bolster the AI by simplification often have the side effect of making the game itself more enjoyable for the player. Quite a few players did not miss having to build and herd transports in Rise of Nations.

Civilization 3 and Civilization 4 introduced global unit support and city production overflows, respectively; both changes helped the AI manage its resources but also made the game more enjoyable for the average player by drastically reducing micromanagement.

Tough Choices

The designer’s biggest challenge comes when a mechanic which is demonstrably fun or core to the game’s theme needs to be simplified or dropped. Occasionally, a game can get away with assuming that a certain option will be human-only; in the original Civilization, Sid Meier added nukes to the end-game but didn’t allow the AI to use them.

He reasoned that because the super-weapon came only at the end of a game with such scope, players who used them were not abusing the game; they were simply having a bit of crazy fun at the end.

Further, if the designer wants to maintain a mechanic that the AI can’t use, cheating is not a viable solution for balancing away the AI’s disadvantage. Allowing too many human-only systems effectively turns a symmetrical game into an asymmetrical one, which will eventually affect the strategic balance.

In the Empire: Total War example, once players know that the AI will never launch an effective amphibious invasion, the rest of the game changes immediately. Maybe players don’t need to bother defending their coastal territories?

Maybe land-based allies are more important than water-based ones? Maybe the AI can be tricked into wasting its resources on futile invasions? Most importantly, the player is no longer playing like a queen – she is playing like a gamer who knows that the AI doesn’t work, one who is on the downhill side of the Parabola.

Ultimately, the designer may have to make a tough choice – drop a beloved mechanic or risk shortening the replayability? Many options do exist to extend a game’s longevity outside of pure balance – scripting a variety of scenarios, supporting procedural content generation, providing robust mod support, developing post-release content, and so on.

However, for robust replayability, nothing compares to pure strategic depth with a competent computer opponent. Sacrificing the game’s longevity to provide a few moments of fun for the human is essentially eroding the design at the foundation. As Chick puts it, when the player finally learns a system, “That’s when the game should really starts to take off.” The joy of learning is a big reason why games are fun, but no one wants to study for a test which doesn’t exist.

[For those interested in receiving similar columns from Johnson and other major columnists monthly as part of the world's leading magazine for video game creators, Game Developer is currently available for print subscription, and also in web-readable and PDF form via the Game Developer Digital service.]

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

In the mid 90s to early 2000's, a small Hungarian developer called CID Studio worked on several commercial game projects and prototypes, most of which never made it to market. The company eventually disbanded, but its members continued to build a Commodore 64 RPG called Newcomer that they'd started well before forming CID.

After working on the project on and off for the past 20 years, the team is finally preparing to launch Newcomer, and has entered it in the Independent Games Festival this year. The game has elements from both classic adventure titles and tabletop roleplaying games, placing an emphasis on interacting with characters, exploring the world, developing in/game and real life skills, and solving puzzles.

It's a massive title (for the C64), as one would expect after 20 years of development. Newcomer features 180+ characters to interact with (each with their own portraits), 10+ people who can join your party of six, 50+ areas created with 30+ graphic sets, 100+ cutscenes, 180,000+ words of in-game text, thousands of puzzles, and more all packed into 2 MB.

Of course, we'll let you know once Newcomer is released. You can check out more information about the game at Newcomer's official site.

[Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

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

GameSetWatch contributor and Nobuooo founder Jeriaska has filmed a compelling collection of interview/performances from Japanese video game composers, indie game music artists, and chiptune performers for a 'Videogame Music in Context' DVD series he's trying to raise funding for.

The Kickstarter initiative includes a Videogame Music in Context in Japan DVD, an Independent Videogame Music in Context DVD, a Nullsleep Collapsed Desires Tour DVD, and a double-disc Hydorah Original & Arrange Soundtrack Album -- depending on how much you pledge to the project, you can get one or all of them.

Videogame Music in Context in Japan features interviews with Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy), Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill), Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka (Metroid), Hideyuki Fukasawa (Super Street Fighter IV), Hideki Sakamoto (echochrome ii), Noriyuki Asakura (Tenchu 4), Takashi Tokita & Naoshi Mizuta (Final Fantasy Legends), and other game creators.

The Independent Videogame Music in Context DVD offers recent interviews with Baiyon (PixelJunk Lifelike), Dan Paladin (Castle Crashers), Daisuke Amaya (Cave Story), Shinji Hosoe & Ayako Saso of SuperSweep (Prismatic Solid), Nigoro (La-Mulana), Takashi Iura (PixelJunk Monsters) and more developers that will be announced later.

As for the Nullsleep Collapsed Desires Tour DVD, that will include live performances from the 2010 Collapsed Desires Tour, which features chip music artists Nullsleep, Trash80, Starpause, Crashfaster, and Mr. Spastic. It also has omake bonus material from the 2010 Tokyo Blip Festival.

Needless to say, the series is packed with content that anyone interested in video game music should be interested in. You can pledge some cash to the fund and learn more about 'Videogame Music in Context' at its Kickstarter project page.

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

[In a series critically re-examining a game released 12 months ago, our own Simon Parkin picks up Activision and Infinity Ward's Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, to look at a single-player campaign "as memorable for its surrounding bluster as its actual content".]

Twelve months ago, no-one suspected that Modern Warfare 2 might be the final Call of Duty title created under the stewardship of series creators Vince Zampella and Jason West.

These two creative and business minds, now embroiled in a legal battle with former publisher Activision, grew the first person shooter series to its current, record-breaking popularity and, in their final game in the series, reached a critical and commercial highpoint.

Treyarch's Call of Duty: Black Ops may have claimed the spurious record of "biggest entertainment launch in history" last week, but that success is founded squarely upon on Infinity Ward's shoulders, who established and perfected the techniques that now define almost all contemporary military FPS blockbuster video games.

No game better exemplifies the strength and weaknesses of that format than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, whose controversial level, 'No Russian', forced gaming's advocates to defend the medium not only to a watching world but also, perhaps for the first time in years, to themselves.

Mechanically, the game represents the most fully-formed realization of the modern FPS blockbuster, for better and for worse, from its linear level design, obfuscated by set-piece distractions, to the collectible intel files, 'hidden' inside rooms off the main corridors of each mission.

Beneath the bombast, it has everything in common with gaming's proto-shooter Space Invaders. You take cover behind walls before peeking out to shoot aliens. Twenty-two years ago the aliens were line-dancing extra terrestrials. In 2009 they were Afghans. The metaphor changed, but the principle remains the same: avoid missing headshot for high score.

Likewise, the opening shooting gallery training level that takes place on a desert encampment, soldiers idling in the heat and dust while you sprint from pop-up target to target, is a 2009 rendering of Duck Hunt, the final evolution of a medium that has always obsessed over bullets and targets. For that reason, despite the visual firework display and cacophony of barked orders, play can feel curiously one note and familiar.

Guns are the sole mode of player reach into the world, not solely because of the contemporary military setting, but also because this point and click tool continues to be the most efficient way to allow a player to interact instantaneously with a virtual world both near and far.

Down the barrel of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's guns, you can snipe a soldier two miles away, before using its butt to knock out a guard 2 feet away. The weight and feel of these tools is here perfected, while, in the game's most controversial level, the gross limitation of that sole verb they offer the player, 'shoot', is clearly revealed.

It's here, the game's most talked about moment, that you accompany a group of terrorists as they mow down unarmed civilians in a Russian airport. While you have the choice to skip the level entirely, once in it, you ride on a conveyor belt through the hellish fairground ride, your only choice to shoot, or not to shoot.

The removal of meaningful choice for the player is both frustrating and (perhaps unintentionally) brilliant: through it, the limitations of the first-person-shooter's purpose and themes are revealed. For years this brand of video game has limited interactions to destructive ones fired down the barrel of a gun. In this moment, we wish for a bandage.

But perhaps the loudest message 'No Russian' spoke was of cinematic gaming's frequent inability to maintain a consistent tone and voice. While the game may know exactly what it is in terms of its systems, in terms of its scenario it's a confused confluence of approaches.

It opens with a step for step tribute to David Simon's Generation Kill, sharing camera angles and composition with the second episode from the HBO drama. You must protect a bridge before crossing it in a Humvee, leading into a tense creep through a hostile city, scanning rooftops and doorways for potential threats, the order "Do Not Fire Unless Fired Upon" still ringing in your ears.

This grave approximation of gritty drama/ Six o' Clock News is then juxtaposed with the second level, which has you tearing across a snowscape in a snowmobile, firing from the hip and leaping ravines in a James Bond-esque white knuckle-ride. Then there's the airport massacre, a po-faced rendering of snuff CCTV footage entirely out of keeping with what has gone before.

The tone and approach continues to veer left and right, soft and hard as you work through American suburbia like a Rainbow Six CQB soldier one moment, before storming the ruins of the White House as it burns against a black fire sky the next.

As a result the game's abiding message is confused. Try to remember the experience 12 months on, and you'll recall diverse set pieces, tied together only by way of the mechanics they clothe. Perhaps this is the point. Modern Warfare 2, and its legions of impersonators, offer a Disneyland tour of scenarios, an exhilarating parade of scenes and feelings that do little to educate or enrich in the long term.

And that's entirely reasonable. Video games are entertainment and not every title should be forced to display ambition that stretches further than popcorn thrills. But in 'No Russian's attempt to offer more than mere happy distraction, the inability of this linear roller-coaster ride FPS to sustain wider commentary is made clear.

A year on, a moment touted by many as gaming's most compelling stab at maturity, is as much memorable for its surrounding bluster as its actual content. It's arguably a criticism that can reasonably be leveled at the wider game it's part of.

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

By now you know I'm a sucker for mini-arcade machines, so you'll understand that I had to share this custom Donkey Kong cabinet that is purportedly "exactly half-scale" of the original, complete with a marquee that lights up. As you can see here, it's set up to play a lot of arcade classics via MAME, not just Donkey Kong.

I've seen a similar Donkey Kong bartop cabinet before, but this one actually has the original artwork on the control panel and plexiglass. Retrocast spotted this machine at the recent R3play expo, but the maker didn't want credit, as he hoped to avoid any copyright issues or requests from others to make more.

[Via Retrocast at R3play]

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

This Friday, Cory Schmitz will launch The Controller, his follow-up to video game art and culture magazine EXP (no relation to Mathew Kumar's .exp), with a party at Seattle's Space gallery in Pioneer Square. After paying the $5 cover charge, attendees will presumably be able to buy a copy of the magazine while enjoying refreshments, art, and music.

The party kicks off at 8PM and will have performances by Scratchmaster Joe, PWRFL Power, and one of my favorite chiptune artists, Leeni. DJs Phantom and Dorsia will host an after-party, too. Also planned for the event: a collaborative sculptural video installation by John Backstrom, Ryan O'Neill, and Jonathan Rafael.

Original artwork from The Controller will also be on display (you can check out a list of all the artists who contributed to the magazine, as well as some sample pages after the break). For those of you who won't be able to make the event, it should go on sale at online shop Attract Mode sometime soon afterward.

Artists contributing to The Controller include the following:

Adam Garcia
Alden Verdan
Alexander Sin
Ashley Davis
COSMOS
Chris Furniss
Corey Lewis
Cory Schmitz
Fitzwater AM
Gaelyn Woltz
Jacob Ferguson
Junichi Tsuneoka
Karly Williams
Katie Turner
Kyle Fewell
Leigh Faulkner
Lindy Kanand Lola Migas
Maré Odomo
Nina Nguyen
Roman Muradov
Scott Garner
Tiff Chow
Trevor Basset

[Via Motherboard]

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

GDC China organizers have debuted a near-complete schedule for the December 5th-7th Shanghai event, including a packed main conference and comprehensive Summits on social, mobile and indie games.

Now in its third year, Game Developers Conference China offers "valuable and timely insight into the world of game development in China for an audience of both local and international developers", according to its organizers.

Overall, the December 5th-7th event provides a forum for local and international developers to explore business opportunities, expand their reach to a unique market, and discover the on-going trends emerging in this region.

With only a few lectures left to reveal for the event, organizers are summing up the agenda as follows:

- The Global Game Development/Outsourcing track has added a talk by Concept Art House's James Zhang, discussing "case studies and analysis of successful IP integration and cross platform development", joining major talks by notables from Activision, Intel, BioWare, Volition, and Slant Six.

- In addition, the Online Game Development track has just added 'Bringing Disney's Marvel Super Hero Squad to Online Gamers' from The Amazing Society's Jason Robar, augmenting a host of valuable Asian speakers from companies including NetEase, Joyport, Kingsoft and XPEC, plus CCP on EVE Online, Riot Games on League Of Legends and Bigpoint on European online game success.

- The Indie Games Summit at GDC China includes a newly announced lecture from Joe Danger creator Hello Games' Grant Duncan on successful development and marketing tactics -- as well as lectures from Andy Schatz (Monaco), Erin Robinson (Puzzle Bots), an Osmos postmortem, and Chinese indie lectures from Coconut Island Studio and 4399.com.

- The Social Network Game Summit has added a talk by PopCap's Long Vo, 'How to Succeed in Social [Gaming] Without Selling Your Soul', joining major lectures from Playfish China's Andrew Mo, and representatives from Disney-owned Playdom and major Chinese SNS firms 6Waves and Five Minutes.

- Finally, the Mobile Game Summit includes a notable talk from Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka on the firm's rapidly-expanding Angry Birds franchise, as well as lectures from notable companies in the iPhone, Android, and other cellphone space including PikPok, Gamevil and Noise Buffet.

These leading speakers join the host of announcements made in recent weeks, including the earlier confirmation of Blizzard, Flagship and Cryptic alumnus Bill Roper as one of the keynote speakers, plus serious games-centric talks including notables from Realtime Associates and NewGame Solution. In addition, a robust Expo Floor and the 2nd annual Independent Games Festival China - for which finalists have been announced and will be playable on the show floor - are additional reasons to visit the event.

GDC China's online registration ends on November 30th, and for more information about the Shanghai International Convention Center-based event, please visit the official GDC China website.

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

Publisher MonkeyPaw, which should surely be hailed by retro/import gaming fans as heroes by now, has brought two more Japan-only PlayStation titles to the U.S.: Face's puzzler Money Idol Exchanger and Video System's shoot'em up Arcade Hits: Sonic Wings Special, both priced at $5.99 and available on PSN's Import Store in their original Japanese forms.

Money Idol Exchanger follows the familiar Magical Drop/Puzzle Bobble formula of stacking and matching objects (coins in this case) before they fill up your screen, except this one is presented with Japanese "idols" who have names like Mightdealer, Debtmiser, Everyworker, and Cherrybiter.

Arcade Hits: Sonic Wings Special combines features from the first three Sonic Wings/Aero Fighters vertical-scrolling shoot'em ups into one title. Sonic Wings Special features seven teams, 14 pilots, 26 different jets, 17 stages with multiple paths, and two-player, same-screen simultaneous play.

"We’ve been giving the import fans a run with some decidedly avant games from Japan," says MonkeyPaw president John Greiner. "Those in-the-know will appreciate Money Idol Exchanger and Sonic Wings Special for their contributions to the puzzle and shooter genres."

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

[The Gaming Doctrine is a monthly GameSetWatch column by Richard Clark about the intersection of gaming, religion, spirituality, and morality. This month - how games can use their power to actively involve the player in order to challenge their moral assumptions.]

It goes something like this: You are the hero. They are the villains. You, as hero, are tasked with putting a stop to the villains and ridding the world of evil (inasmuch as the created world allows). This simple goal sums up the basic thrust of ethical consideration within the video game world.

Even open world games that contain a variety of morally opaque battles, conversations and side-quests still require an adherence to a larger, morally transparent storyline.

Traditionally, this means that the emotional and intellectual resonance that is experienced at the end of the game is little more than a simple justification and pat on the back for saving the world, the girl, or yourself. Recently, though, this has started to change.

A Changing Ethical Landscape

In Modern Warfare 2, you are a soldier with a simple goal to follow orders. In Bioshock, you are given few choices other than carrying out the objectives of a mysterious voice. Red Dead Redemption places the focus solely on John Marston’s drive to see his family, at the cost of all else. Braid tasks the player with seeking out a lost significant other, equating her with a helpless princess.

We are encouraged to take up these tasks with aplomb, shooting, investigating, questing, and puzzling to the very end with a certain amount of confidence that we’re on the right track. In a sense we are very much on the right track, making progress through kills and completed quests. The game rewards us, makes us feel good about ourselves, our skills, and our ability to take orders.

That is, until we realize that these games are not exactly like the games of yesterday. The revelation in Braid isn’t that the Princess is in another castle. The shocking thing about Bioshock isn’t the degree to which the villains are willing to go to ensure their own ends. Instead, the moments we remember in these games are those when we discover our own moral uncertainty. Maybe this goal we’ve been chasing - that we so believed in and had been striving for - is not the right thing after all.

The Medium's Unique Power

We could call these moments “twists” and reduce them to mere plot devices that are borrowed from popular cinematic moments, but that is doing the medium a disservice. In fact, the typical plot twist alone, told merely through interspersed cut scenes, will often fall flat and leave the player wholly unmoved. This is almost certainly the case with Alan Wake’s ending. By most standards, it’s a heck of a twist, but because it ignores the mediums’ strengths and attempts instead to recreate the classic cinematic “twist ending,” it falls flat.

These surprise endings are most successful not when they merely surprise the player, but when the player is complicit in some larger discovery or mistaken assumption. In other words, a game is most powerful when it challenges us directly. Who we are and how we react to the game’s various outputs can be taken in by the game, mirrored and questioned, often with stunningly memorable results.

If I am playing a game, I am playing it because I want to be a part of what is going on. So, when I feel as if I am viewing a relatively decent film plot-line and merely doing all the work for the main character in between scenes, I get antsy. When the game unveils its’ inevitable third act and asks me to gasp in surprise and wonder, I do so primarily out of duty and expectation. Do I enjoy the game? Probably. But do I remember it? Ask me five years from now, and unless the game excels greatly in some other noteworthy way, I’ll ask what on earth you’re going on about.

But if I am given a certain amount of ownership not only of demonstrating a skill-based mastery of a game but of making value judgments and ethical decisions within the created world (whether or not there is a choice-based mechanic built in to the game), then that experience is elevated far beyond that of a mere game.

It is that personal involvement and resulting impact that makes a game seem more significant to us. They meant something to us because they allowed us to be a part of them and because they are a part of us. We weren’t merely playing a game; we were living our life through them. It’s those games that become our classics.

A Range of Techniques for Moral Challenge

Games can accomplish this goal in a variety of ways. Some games choose to lull us into a false sense of security toward our own natural assumptions and then question or contradict those assumptions openly toward the end of the game. For instance, in Bioshock we are accosted for blindly following orders after the game uses every technique known to the genre to gain our trust in the first place. We did what we were told because we had seen these tropes before. We trusted the mediums’ storytelling and gameplay standards to guide us toward certain victory. In the end, the game betrayed our trust, but not without leaving a lasting and welcome mark on our psyche.

Games have done this in the past, of course, but only recently have they started questioning our motives and moral assumptions in ways that can be seen as valuable as opposed to harmful.

Mortal Kombat sticks with me because it was the game that shocked me with an act that (at the age of ten years old) I wouldn’t even think to imagine: ripping your enemy’s spine out of their body. Previous fighting games had operated on the assumption that knocking your opponent out was enough. Mortal Kombat challenged that assumption, and because of that it remains a part of me years later, for better or worse.

This technique is commonly referred to as “shock value,” and unfortunately it’s what games are often known for above all else. It’s important to remember that we are shocked not simply by the presence of blood, but by an affront to our nature or view of the world. Games shock us because they confront our assumptions. This is what games in the 90s were known for amongst the general public, and that tradition continues today. Now, the industry’s opponents use these examples as evidence in court in favor of censorship.

Shock value doesn’t need to be harmful or negligent in nature, however. Bioshock’s finale, or Modern Warfare 2’s “No Russian,” while not perfect, at least accomplish the task of asking us to rethink whether we really have as strong of a hold on the truth as we think. By the end of “No Russian,” our assumption that pragmatic “ends justify the means” sort of thinking can be faulty at best, and disastrous at worst. In both of these games, we’re awoken out of our thumb-twitching stupor to reconsider ourselves, without being explicitly preached to or instructed.

Of course, “shock” isn’t the only way games can cause us to question ourselves. The beauty of Red Dead Redemption is the subtle way the game questions our priorities. The passive nature of John Marston, the relentlessly unlikable characters he serves throughout the game, the beauty of the undisturbed environment, and the drawn-out surprising ending all serve to nudge the player from valuing one thing (action, death, destruction) to valuing another (family, beauty, mundanity).

It’s these more subtle opportunities to reevaluate myself that I find most impactful. I find myself mulling the game over long after I am finished, and I identify with the failures and faults of the character himself in ways that I don’t do in more overt games.

Still, whether it’s a subtle shift in tone or a last-minute twist of the storyline, games have a unique opportunity to engage players in ways other mediums can’t. When we allow ourselves to do the work of the hero while also seeking after the villains we open ourselves up to a world of discovery in terms of ethical, moral and philosophical questions.

The gaming community has a reputation for being thoughtless automatons, waiting around for the next Call of Duty so they can “pwn” their friends. Still, I refuse to believe that playing through Red Dead Redemption left the average gamer with anything less than food for thought, and I suspect that most, like myself, reevaluated for themselves the very concept of what makes a hero.

[Richard Clark is the editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture, where he often writes about video games. He and his wife live in Louisville, KY. He can be reached at deadyetliving at gmail dot com or followed on twitter (@deadyetliving).]

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

If you're looking to buy a Christmas gift for that Nintendo gamer in your life, Retrozone is now taking orders for its annual 8 Bit Xmas NES cartridge, which includes a playable homebrew game, custom text options, and blinking lights.

8 Bit X-Mas 2010 features Brian Parker's Jolly Joyriding, a "a four-player drunken bumper car present throwing fest". You can download the homebrew ROM for free, but you'll miss out on the chance to customize the title screen message and the blinking lights (see video after the break).

The $39 clear cart will work on authentic NES consoles ("NTSC, PAL A, PAL B, and Asian systems"), as well as clones like the FC Twin and Retro Duo. It also comes with a clear dust sleeve and a printed Christmas card with a pin-up style cover.

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

Indie publisher Nicalis revealed late last week that NightSky (formerly Night Game), the atmospheric action game from Knytt-developer Nicklas "Nifflas" Nygren (Knytt), will be releasing on other platforms besides WiiWare, such as PC, Mac, and iPhone

For those of you who've forgotten NightSky already, it's a beautiful title that has you guiding a crystal sphere across "sunset plains, dreary mountains, abandoned ruins, and other locales", solving physics-based puzzles and hopping on vehicles with unique properties along the way.

NightSky was a finalist for the 2009 Independent Games Festival's design and grand prize awards. It also has a great soundtrack composed by Chris Schlarb, who is currently raising money through Kickstarter to fund a vinyl pressing for his latest album Psychic Temple.

[Via IndieGames.com]

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

[In this editorial, originally printed in the November 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine, EIC Brandon Sheffield discusses the negative stereotypes that plague the medium, and what we can do to increase awareness of games in the mainstream to eliminate these stigmas.]

Recently I was talking to my mother about the game I’m working on. I had told her about the new types of characterization I was going for, and the messages I was trying to imbue into this universe, and she was intrigued. She said she was proud of what I do, but always makes sure to tell her friends that I “don’t work on those rape games.”

What did she mean by this? “You know, the games where you go around raping Native American women,” she explained.

At some point in time, some sensationalist news story informed my mother about the controversial 1982 Atari 2600 title Custer’s Revenge, which most current game players have never even heard of.

This, unfortunately, is the kind of image that sticks in peoples’ minds, and instills in them a negative stigma, even if they don’t know very much about games in general. The Hot Coffee scandal was similar in that way—completely blown out of proportion, while leaving an indelible scar on the minds of those who don’t play or really understand games.

It’s not really her fault. She understands games better than do her friends, and that’s part of the reason why she feels the need to make this clarification.

But there’s definitely a social issue at work here that makes her feel that way, and I realized that it’s up to people like me, and other game developers, to change this thought pattern—one person at a time, if need be. We should start with ourselves, while we’re at it.

You Seriously Play Video Games?

I’m making a generalization here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that a lot of people you meet for the first time aren’t super impressed when they hear that you work on video games.
How often, when asked what you do by a member of whichever gender you’re attracted to, have you taken a little pause before figuring out how to position “game developer” in the most appealing light?

Maybe you’ve done this with a family friend or relative, as well. This may be part of the problem. So long as we continue to allow the playing of games to be considered fringe or marginalized, the longer the stereotypes will perpetuate.

We, the decent human beings of the game development community, needn’t feel ashamed to get excited about a Sonic the Hedgehog revamp—most people get excited about movies, novels, or bands they like coming through town.

Why should games exist in a second tier of entertainment? If someone else can get excited about Twilight, of all things, I can anticipate The Last Guardian. But I, and many other people I know, still do feel some trepidation or embarrassment when talking about this particular hobby, and like they always say, change begins with you.

Subterranea

As MMO, social, and multiplayer games become more popular, and games become less of a solitary experience, the old joke about gamers living in their parents’ basement becomes less plausible. We’re almost always connected to people when playing games on a console or PC now, even if we’ve simply signed into Xbox Live.

Unfortunately, I feel that we players and creators of games perpetuate these self-deprecating ideas about games being an inferior or childish hobby, even as we argue for its advancement as an art form.

In conversations with those outside the industry, we may say "I know this is how game players are, but I'm not like that." This allows us to go on the defensive, putting ourselves down before the other party can get the chance. We distance ourselves from a negative stereotype, but simultaneously enforce it.

People that fit the basement-dweller stereotype do exist, but they’re not the majority. The trouble is they’re often the most vocal. What I’m suggesting is an (admittedly somewhat silly) call to action for people to make their significant others, family members, and estranged school chums understand why games matter, why what you do is important, so that perhaps they’ll learn for themselves that game players and developers can be normal people. Maybe even mildly awesome people.

The Shrinking World

Maybe all these folks need is a subtle nudge in the right direction. The number of people playing Facebook, casual, and mobile games is increasing rapidly.

Many of them don’t consider themselves game players, inherently, but with the right coaxing can probably be made to realize they’re essentially doing the same thing we do. While they may not want to sink 70 hours into Fallout 3, they might spend some 20 hours playing Peggle during their commute. And how different is that, really?

Games are becoming more and more a part of global culture, but stereotypes still persist. The more we weed them out of the social subconscious, the fewer sensationalist stories we’ll see about mainstream “raping games,” and the less often our moms will say “you do what for a living, again?”

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

Publisher Zoo Games announced that its PSN port of Cipher Prime's iPhone/Flash puzzler Auditorium, which releases on November 23rd for $9.99 (an XBLA version is also planned), will include twice the content, as well as support for 3D and PlayStation Move.

Along with an Auditorium Classic mode with the original game's 72 levels, the PSN edition includes an exclusive Auditorium Modern option that offers 78 new levels and new music. It also includes "subtle stereoscopic 3D support" for gamers with 3D televisions.

As for its Move features, players can use the a single Wand controller to direct onscreen controls and guide the Auditorium's streams of light/sound particles to Audio Containers. You can try out the original game with traditional mouse controls here.

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

Made possible through Youtube's linking feature and the film's public domain status, Canadian design company Analogue has re-cut George Romero's classic 1968 film Night Of The Living Dead as a "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style game that pretty much anyone with a browser and a fancy for zombies can play.

The interactive game, which you can start playing with the video above, lets you control key decisions for characters from the film. In between clips, you can make choices that save the characters from the approaching undead or purposefully send them to their doom -- the latter seems much more fun!

[Via AV Club]

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

Even more exciting than a new Shenmue game, Sega Saturn mascot Segata Sanshiro -- previously thought dead after saving Sega's executives from a missile attack -- reappeared alongside Yu Suzuki at Sunsoft/DeNA/Sega's press conference for mobile/browser-based Shenmue City last night.

Of course, we knew he wasn't really dead, as he did some promotions for Sega's Rambo arcade game a couple years ago, and one of his commercials made an appearance on the Tonight Show last year. Still, it's nice to see Sega hadn't forgotten the actor who played Sanshiro, Hiroshi Fujioka.

So, what did the Judo master have to say at last night's press event for the social game? Well, apparently he "rambled about martial arts for like 10 minutes." Suzuki revealed that the Sanshiro actor will play Ryo's dad in Shenmue City, as " he wanted an actual fighter for the role".

In Shenmue City, which is a sidestory based on the series' first chapter in Yokosuka, players take on the role of a student in the Hazuki dojo, working with the protagonist of the franchise's previous games, Ryo. Gamers can train in Kung Fu, manage a dojo, and fight other players.

The social game will be playable later this year on DeNA's Japanese mobile social games service Mobagetown (as well as Yahoo Japan's PC version of the service), and will feature a free-to-play business model. There's no word on whether this will ever release in North America.

[Via @sprsk, Andriasang]

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

Examining the feature-length stories from the Gamasutra network, here's the top full-length features and blogs of the past two weeks (after once again skipping a week!) on big sister 'art and business of gaming' site Gamasutra, plus the new pieces from educational site GameCareerGuide that debuted of recent.

We're continuing our new format that simply has basic links to the Gamasutra and GameCareerGuide features, but also points out the articles rounding up our Member Blogs and Expert Blogs sections on Gamasutra.

Here's the rundown for the last fourteen days:

- The last two weeks of notable Gamasutra features includes interviews with the producer of THQ's Homefront, with Valve's Erik Johnson on Portal 2, with Battle.net's Greg Canessa, plus a postmortem of the Deadliest Warrior game.

Also in there - worldwide social game opportunities, the secret of AI in Uncharted 2, a piece on indie gaming in Japan, a detailed feature on pitching your game to publishers, and more.

- In the two most recent Gamasutra Expert Blogs round-ups, one focuses on indie jam sessions, game clones, and the challenges of operating a startup developer -- and the other covers meaningful choice in MMOs, a look at the state of XNA, and the dangerous rise of the moble App market.

- The latest two Gamasutra Member Blogs focus on firstly morality in games, difficulty settings, and the current incarnations of cheating. - and secondly on the failures of horror games, an alternative to random loot drops, and the possibility of gaming addiction.

- Educational site GameCareerGuide's latest features include a column on designing games referencing Team Fortress 2, plus new game narrative analyses on Persona 3 and on Portal and a further look at the promise of episodic games.

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

[“The Blue Key” is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch exclusive column from Connor Cleary that explores the wide arena of gamer culture – where it's been, where it is now, and where it might be going. In this piece, he takes a look at the mixed-bag MMOFPS MAG and Zipper's attempt to reinvent the title.]

In January of this year, Zipper Interactive released the ambitious PlayStation 3 exclusive multiplayer action title MAG to mixed reviews. Some applauded the teamwork mechanics and the epic scale – up to 256 players in a single battle, while some focused on the fairly numerous negative points.

These included obvious compromises to technological limitations imposed by squeezing so many players into a single game; the top-heavy leveling system that puts new players at a maddening disadvantage; unbalanced level designs that often give one team a huge advantage; and a surprising number of glitches that weren't patched before launch despite a lengthy beta-testing cycle.

Despite the many valid complaints, MAG still managed to get scores ranging from decent to excellent across the board; according to Metacritic it received a Metascore of 76 (out of 100) from their compiled critical reviews, and an 8.3 out of 10 from Metacritic users.

Keeping Your Community Happy and Healthy

Even though MAG feels like a fairly generic game on the surface, it does have a hard-to-pinpoint appeal that keeps me coming back for more. Somewhere between the Stonewall and Steamroll matches that occur so frequently, you occasionally get a Superbowl-esque struggle of epic proportions, and win or lose, you feel like a stadium full of people should be cheering for you and your squad. It's exhilarating.

But one of the complaints I kept hearing from other players, a few months after launch, was the lack of variety. On one of three factions – or “PMCs” – you have roughly 22 starting positions spread over 12 maps and 4 game types.

Many players felt like this wasn't enough, especially considering the fact that MAG has no single-player experience whatsoever. The total number of players online at any given time took a sharp downturn a couple months after launch, and many players wondered what was going to become of their $60 purchase if the community abandoned it.

When word got around that a brand new game-type was in the works, many players shared my feeling that the new DLC should be free. Free DLC would undoubtedly reinvigorate the community while helping to maintain an active core of players, the thinking went.

Granted, at that point Zipper had already released a few small additions that were free to download – new armor types, flashbang grenades, and a few slightly-altered weapons – but this was nothing too groundbreaking or exciting. So in June, when the “Interdiction” game-type debuted on the PlayStation Store for $9.99, the server numbers plummeted and have yet to recover since.

I think the community felt betrayed. The players knew instinctively that the continued success of the game was entirely tied to the happiness and continued loyalty of the online community. If the servers went silent, Zipper would not be selling any more copies of MAG.

The Attempted Resurrection

On September 30th 2010, Zipper released a huge update in the form of MAG 2.0. This update got some things so right and some things so very wrong. The back-end game mechanics were completely reinvented, for the better in some ways, but also in other that merely exacerbated pre-existing problems.

Having the option to specialize in various combat roles has always been one of MAG's strong suits. A player who might not be the best shooter can still be a huge help to their squad by specializing in field support, such as repair and medic roles, while a player who has gotten good at sneaking around can turn themselves into Solid Snake with increased stealth, motion sensors, etc.

This aspect of the game has been made far more complex in the best way. You can now go far deeper into any of these roles than was originally possible, plus take advantage of new specialization options like vehicle and explosives expert. This has added far greater complexity to the game's teamwork element, and a far greater necessity to having variation in your squad.

However, this also means that the best fighters will become vastly overpowered by the time they reach level 70. Start with three levels of increased health, knife damage, movement speed, stamina recovery, weapon-swap speed, add in decreased reload time and explosives arming and throw in stealth equipment and/or a motion sensor and you've got an unstoppable beast – the bane of low-level players. It is somewhat unavoidable that an MMOFPS with persistent character levels and bonuses would be a little top-heavy, but MAG 2.0 took a game that was already noticeably top-heavy and pushed the problem to a new level.

Next, the double-edged sword “Clan Deploy.” This new feature allows clan leaders and officers to fill entire 128-man armies in a single game with only clan members, whereas previously you could only create groups of up to 8 people and fill a single squad in a match.

This is great when you want to be sure that your team is going to work together – it's no surprise that clans are far more cooperative than groups of random strangers – however, it also exacerbates the already too-frequent occurrence of a severe skill disparity between the two armies. If one side is filled with clan members, and the other is a random jumble of players, you're almost certainly looking at a Stonewall or Steamroll.

Shifting to another positive note, MAG 2.0 separated the acquisition of weapons from the acquisition of skills. Equipment is now obtainable based on character level and “Currency Points," which means your hard-earned skill points are spent on persistent buffs rather than weapons you may never use. Players also have vastly increased flexibility in the various equipment set-ups they can create, making them a more dynamic asset to their team.

The last addition, as far as I'm concerned, is the most brilliant thing Zipper has done yet with MAG. In an attempt to stoke dwindling enthusiasm for the game, Zipper often threw “Double XP Weekends,” and every time they did there was a noticeable jump in the server-numbers. So Zipper learned from this experience and added the permanent “Happy Hour” feature to the game. This means you get double-experience for the first hour you spend online every day. This feature definitely has the potential to resurrect a slowly dying fan-base, and ensure regular play-time investment from casual fans.

MAG 2.0 felt like getting a new game, but all of the excitement associated with that was marred by severe technical difficulties. I hopped on regularly for several days after the patch only to find that I was lucky if I got to play through a single full match without my PS3 freezing.

When a freeze happens, you have no choice but to do a hard shutdown of your system with the power button. Even if you were one of the lucky ones who didn't freeze, it wasn't uncommon for half of your team to freeze and drop out, leaving you severely outnumbered. On one occasion my system froze three matches in a row. After this happened, I was fed up and I quit playing, unsure whether I ever wanted to play again.

Too Little Too Late?

On October 13th, Zipper released patch 2.01 which they claimed (note entirely truthfully) has fixed all the freezing issues. Granted, the game is significantly more stable, but even so, I have a feeling the damage is already done. MAG has a history of being quite glitchy, and I wouldn't be surprised if many other players had the same “last straw” experience.

Unlike a game with a strong single-player experience, where the company already has my money and probably wouldn't worry much to lose a few online players, the continued sale of MAG absolutely depends on the happiness of its community.

MAG was an interesting experiment in exploring a new type of game, but despite the many good moves by Zipper, there may have been one too many wrong turns for some gamers. Only time will tell what the impact of the recently debuted and highly anticipated “Escalation” game-type will be, since it's the first game type to include battles between all three factions.

Given the current state of MAG, I cannot recommend that anyone run out and buy it at full price. However, if you already own a copy, then 2.01 -- and a further 2.02 crash fix -- definitely makes it worth giving MAG another shot. And who knows? Maybe Zipper can turn it around and make it worth recommending to friends again some day soon.

[UPDATE: This column had previously stated it was necessary to purchase the game's DLC in order to earn its Platinum trophy.

Zipper community specialist Chris Roper says: "This is false. No DLC for the PlayStation 3 increases the requirements to earn the Platinum trophy associated with said game. You’d need to earn the DLC trophies to show a 100% trophy percentage in your games list, but the Platinum is still awarded when you acquire all of the base game’s trophies."]

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

[We round up the week's top news and new digital releases from console digital download site GamerBytes, featuring new information about Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, WiiWare, DSiWare and PSN Minis.]

So, this was a pretty weird week for console digital game debuts... pretty much all the releases were unknown, or not talked about a whole lot. Perhaps that's not surprising, considering it's also the week that saw the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops.

But there are some good games here on formats like XBLA and PSN -- give them a look! Lots of great Xbox Live Indie Game titles this week too, which we should be seeing a whole lot more of in the future.

Store Updates

XBLA Update - Faery: Legends of Avalon, The Undergarden, Guwange And More
NA PSN Store Update - Crescent Pale Mist, Scott Pilgrim DLC And More
EU PlayStation Store Update - Grandia, Crescent Pale Mist And More
NA Nintendo Update - Go Series: Pinball Attack!, Gods Vs. Humans And More
EU Nintendo Update - Spin Master, Robot Rescue And More

Top Stories

Get Ready for a Fancy Pants Adventure (XBLA / PSN)
Fantastic Flash game gets XBLA and PSN adventure!

Xbox Indies - The TEMPURA of the DEAD (JPN 8bits fanatics) (XBLIG)
Awesome 2D action title based on NES games now available!

Xbox Indies - Garden Gnome Carnage (Ludosity Interactive) (XBLIG)
Bungy your way around with your building on wheels to explode helicopters. Not kidding.

Xbox Indies - CheneyStar: Half Sinistar, Half Vice-President (XBLIG)
I am CheneyStar! Prepare to die!

First Screens Of Boulder Dash-XL (XBLA)
Dirt-digging game gets reboot on XBLA.

Faery: Legends Of Avalon Out This Week On XBLA (XBLA)
Came out this week, but you probably don't know much about it. Find out here!

Full House Poker To Be The Next Xbox Live Primetime Experience (XBLA)
Free poker? Yes please!

Gameloft Developing Multiplayer Modern Combat Title For PSN (PSN)
Want more Modern Warfare? You could try the distinctly derivative Modern Combat.

Trailer: Glory Days - Tactical Defense (Odenis Studio) (DSiWare)
Quality DSiWare games go!

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

[At this week's Montreal International Games Summit, BioWare Austin's Blake Rebouche delivered a passionate talk -- attended by our own Christian Nutt -- on how he believes internal game jams can keep studios agile and staffers creative and happy.]

Prior to BioWare Austin, Rebouche worked at Junction Point as a designer on Epic Mickey, and while neither studio has instituted a policy of internal game jams yet, Rebouche said his participation in external jams have convinced him that this is the way to go.

"I'm really here to make a simple proposition and not much more than that," he said.

In his view, game studios should be doing game jams during "soft periods" -- before holiday breaks, between projects, and the like. He believes these jams can increase creativity, team cohesiveness, and job satisfaction.

To help define the term "game jam" at his presentation, Rebouche showed Kyle Gabler's (World of Goo) keynote from the 2009 Global Game Jam.

"This is a very valuable team-based exercise," said Rebouche, and not just because it will help the team, but because it can also help the business.

Not only have some "titans of indie gaming" such as World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe come out of game-jame-style rapid prototyping, but if you know you have a major project coming up, you should set a theme related to that project and jam on it, he said.

"Ideally a theme should be a leadership directive," said Rebouche. For example, "If you're working on a game that's about aliens coming to earth, you might want to work on a game on the theme of 'oppression,'" he said.

Rebouche also said game jams should also "encourage role-switching." In a major modern studio, "the disciplines get very separated, and they tend to lose sight of how hard people [in other disciplines] work, sometimes."

Switching roles "can teach you a lot about the complexities [others] deal with on a daily basis," he said. "If you can understand what stresses people are under in their daily lives, you can better understand who they are as a human being and how to work with them."

Of course, on major projects, developers are working on very small pieces of the overall game for many years in a row, and thus lose a sense of their place in the context of the project, particularly at lower levels.

"People tend to get bogged down on projects," Rebouche said. "You can lose the sense of what you're doing -- lose the love," he said.

Rebouche pointed out that Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers identifies three things people want from their jobs: "Autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward." These are hard to maintain on big projects for obvious reasons. Autonomy is taken by decisions made from above, complex tasks are simplified into small goals, and the connection between the effort made and the eventual reward of shipping a game down the road can be very abstracted.

On the other hand, periodic game jams give all of those back, by making all participants decision-makers giving the reward within 24 to 48 hours, and asking them to do a lot of work in a short time. What's more complex than developing a whole game -- even a simple one -- in such a short period?

Rebouche noted author Daniel Pink reached a similar conclusion in his book Drive: people seek autonomy, mastery, and purpose in life. "When was the last time anyone in your company talked about purpose, like the reason we make games?" Rebouche asked. "How about we make games more often? That's sort of the simple proposition I am making here. Let's make more games... something silly, stupid, fun that just might push us forward creatively."

Game jams still sounding peculiar? Think about this: large, successful companies have similar policies. Google, famously, has "20 percent time," in which engineers can work on personal projects for 20 percent of their time. One such project was Gmail.

The software company Atlassian (which makes bug tracker JIRA, among others) has something similar if shorter -- workers have one 24 hour period to work on whatever they want. Bug fixes, new features, and new software packages have been generated in this time -- things that never would have happened without this opportunity being presented.

In fact, said Rebouche, this is a "zero-risk proposition."

"Just do a 24-hour jam. Do this before a holiday. Christmas is coming up. How much work gets done on the Friday before Christmas break? Nothing gets done," he said.

"This is so much better than bowling, the normal team exercise everybody does," Rebouche continued. "How about you make a game, the thing you do every day, but you don't have to answer to anybody about it?"

An attendee from DS developer 1st Playable Productions noted that the company does game jams for upcoming projects in advance, and "everybody looks forward to it all year."

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