[The Game Anthropologist chronicles Michael Walbridge's ventures into gaming communities as he reports on their inhabitants and culture. This column is a summary of Michael's interviews with six prominent and prolific game writers and one professor who all have one thing in common: they spend a lot of time blogging, too.]

A Changing Industry

It’s no secret that game journalism and writing about games is dramatically changing, but what’s not so simple is describing or naming those changes. Even more difficult is determining whether personal, alternative writing spaces can be considered communities, and how they function.

Chris Dahlen’s Save the Robot and Leigh Alexander’s now retired The Aberrant Gamer are two of my favorite GameSetWatch columns. I have since followed these writers to their blogs, Save the Robot and Sexy Videogameland. I noted that in the blog chain they are a part of, sites such as Dubious Quality and Giant Bomb kept reappearing, as if there are common ties. I couldn’t see any explicit mention of these ties, however.

As a newcomer with a puny blog and very few paying game writing assignments to call my own, I thought it fascinating that so many overworked, 50+ hours a week journalists were, for no pay and not necessarily as part of their work, keeping frequently updated blogs. At work they write and when they’re taking a break they’re…still writing. “Why, when they’re taking a break, are they still writing? Why aren’t they, I don’t know, playing video games? They certainly don’t get to do that as much as they’d like….”

The Blogging of Champions

I’ve participated in these sites by reading, commenting, reading comments, and commenting on commenters and their comments. Still, these journalists (and one professor) must know their readers better than I do, so I interviewed some of the ones that have a stronger presence.

In order, I talked to N’Gai Croal of Newsweek’s Level Up; Kieron Gillen from Rock, Paper, Shotgun; Leigh Alexander of Sexy Videogameland (also an editor at Kotaku); Shawn Elliott, an editor at 1Up; Chris Dahlen of Save The Robot; Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer; and Mitch Krpata of Insult Swordfighting.

They had a lot to say: I talked to them for about 45 minutes each (though one was for only 20 and another was for about 75). They said so much that I don’t have enough space here to cover each person in totality.

To my advantage, however, is the fact that they have a variety of backgrounds despite having so much in common, and the fact that I have seven people’s opinions instead of just one or two. I discovered what they did and didn’t share.

We discussed the nature of current games writing in the games press, why they put so much work into their blogs when they already write plenty at their gigs, whether they consider their blogs as communities, and where they hope the industry heads next.

There Are Things You Don’t Talk About In Public

Things they have in common:

-- Dissatisfaction with the traditional way games have been covered and analyzed. From N’gai Croal: “The traditional models of games journalism are broken. People who have a curiosity about games don't want to be shackled by rules that are found in the enthusiast press and sometimes found in the mainstream press. The monologues and dialogues on blogs, forums, and now websites have generally become more interesting.”

-- A desire for their own personal space for writing and discussion - despite writing plenty for their workweek. Leigh Alexander on Sexy Videogameland: “I wasn't sure what it was for at first--it was simply a repository for my thoughts and a place to practice my voice."

“Well, you certainly have a lot of practice now,” I said. “Why do you have it now?” For the same reasons, but now that she’s become more successful, she also writes because: “It's still important for me to be able to say things I want when there is nowhere to publish them."

Kieron Gillen is also successful, having written at many mainstream publications. “I've been a games journalist for a decade at least. 13 years. RPS (Rock, Paper, Shotgun) is an outlet for our PC stuff because we're not seeing people write about the format the way we want to.”

“It's just part time. Games journalism doesn't tend to emphasize the PC. But I do. So commercially and intellectually, making and working on RPS makes the most sense because it's not something anyone else does. It's especially an approach that American readers don't often see, in terms of tone.”

-- The way they wish to write and discuss games. Mitch Krpata noted: "Much of what is being written is 'How fun is it to hop on this multiplayer?', but not 'How are the people really interacting with this game?' or anything else reflecting on the people who play it. That should be the real basis for what we're covering instead of the way they're being reviewed now."

--The roughly common wish for the way they hope games writing will be covered in the future. Shawn Elliott is experimenting with this new style on his member blog on 1UP.com. Of change, he says that “The notion of a non-enthusiast style of writing is new, but it was inevitable that it would come.”

Mitch Krpata, who writes for the alternative weekly the Boston Phoenix, said “The more games are accepted by the mainstream, the more games writing can change. The New York Times, the Phoenix, and other mainstream publications aren't relying on video game advertising dollars--that's why they read differently.”

-- They really want you to really read and get to know them, and actually talk with them.

Regarding his blog, Chris Dahlen says that “The community side evolved on its own. There aren't many visitors, but those that do comment I know pretty well. It's more satisfying to hear from the narrow group of my own blog, not the few or zero I hear from regarding pieces I write at publications.”

Things most of them have in common:

-- A craving for approval amidst some general anxiety despite being highly confident about their ability to think and write. Many are used to criticism and flaming. Despite being highly polite and civil, they sometimes receive feedback that isn’t.

Michael Abbott told me about someone who disagreed. "I once got an email that just said 'Or you could just go read Hamlet.' I'm guessing he meant games don't have enough meaning and that they're inferior. There is resistance out there, but I think we have to plow through that."

-- They all know each other and interact on a regular basis, even if it’s not readily apparent. Phone calls, AIM, working together at different outlets, and recommending each other aren’t uncommon.

-- They are helpful and want more people to join the conversation by comments and writing. As mentioned earlier, all of the writers were generous with their time and honesty.

“Would you say there is a hunger for this [type of discussion amongst people who play games?]” I asked Michael Abbott. “I have a feeling that might be right,” he admitted. “My only evidence is from the emails I've gotten that basically say 'Oh thank God someone's talking intelligently about games', which is encouraging. And I’ve found older gamers are the hungriest….I'd say, 30s and older.”

-- With the exception of Michael, who is not a journalist, they wish there were more ways to be paid to write about games in the way they like.

Things about which they feel differently:

-- Having a name or label for the type of writing these blogs entail. N’Gai was hesitant: “I’ll let you pick a name; it’s your article.” Kieron Gillen certainly wasn’t going to; he wrote the treatise The New Games Journalism, which blew up in his face. “The way the whole thing turned was not something I foresaw," he said. “It was more of a letter, really. I was speaking to my peers, not the readers, and so it ended up seeming condescending to some people. Most people thought it said 'no reviews.’ People thought I was trying to change games journalism—I was simply trying to add to it.”

Leigh Alexander was confident with “Games Criticism”. I took that title to everyone I interviewed after her and they cautiously accepted it, though they weren’t sure what exactly constituted games criticism. “I think game criticism is a good term for us to use, but I don't think there's much being done. I'd say Ian Bogost is definitely doing it right, though,” Chris Dahlen mused.

Shawn Elliott said, “Games criticism has the potential to be a term we use. I come from a literary background, so I'd be picky about what qualifies. I'd say that some of the writing we've seen recently holds up to that term.”

-- Whether their blogs are home truly home to a community. Michael Abbott and Leigh Alexander considered their blogs communities, something I had to agree with. Not only are there plenty of loyal readers, but often the commenters hold discussions, something rarely seen outside of high-traffic sites like Slashdot or Kotaku.

Michael and Leigh’s commenters even influence content: Michael asked what RPGs he should include in a course he was going to teach and used the number of votes to influence his picks; Leigh once wrote a post giving full attention to a well-written, humorous comment on a post she wrote about EA’s attempt to buy Take Two. Others have fewer readers and commenters. N’Gai, for example, doesn’t consider his blog home a community, but simply a place for content—it has few comments and in his eyes is simply a golden opportunity (and though it’s his creation and idea, it is still the property of Newsweek).

-- What it will take to change the way games are covered and why they aren’t being covered the way they wish it were. Some believe it will change inevitably. Some are more cautious. Others think they can contribute to change, and others feel more powerless.

The two responses I received are best summarized as “I hope it changes, but I don’t see how it will or what we can do it about” and “I think it will change, but it’s an uphill climb and I don’t know what it would take to influence those changes.” They share a common goal, but the future of the games writing field is up in the air, even for these hotshots.

Ultimately, these writers and bloggers see a demand and an interest in the kind of writing they love most (which is not the writing that supplies most of their income), even if they disagree how large that demand is. Whether the field of games journalism changes the way these game critics want it to, the discussion will inevitably continue in this form.

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: all these writers said very interesting things that are beyond the scope of this article but which I think should still be printed. Also, the way my own opinions and perceptions came about were highly influenced by the order in which I interviewed them, as well as the flow of the discussion. More details and more of their opinions will be posted on my own humble blog in the coming weeks.]

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['Quiz Me Quik' is a weekly GameSetWatch column by journalist Alistair Wallis, in which he picks offbeat subjects in the game business and interviews them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. This time, an innocent bystander and a nearby train wreck.]

Regarding the whole Limbo of the Lost fiasco, has anyone coined the term “LoLgate” for it? I don’t seem to be able to find any kinds of references to it as that around the place, so let’s see if we can’t get it to catch on. After all, it’s a pretty fair bet that people will be talking about this for some time to come – how often do you hear about something as blatantly weird as this?

On one hand, it does seem cut and dry. The independent Majestic Studios used locales from existing games for their own game, Limbo of the Lost - 3D areas translated into 2D click and point adventure backdrops, presumably by simply taking screenshots. Screenshots from games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Diablo II, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 2003, Crysis, Silent Hill 4: The Room, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, World of Warcraft, Painkiller, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and hell, probably more too.

It’s a pretty straightforward case of plagiarism, and copyright infringement. It’s absolutely no shock that US publisher Tri Synergy pulled the game from release within days of the accusations hitting news sites and forums. Majestic recently responded themselves, calling the “notification that some alleged unauthorized copyrighted materials submitted by sources external to the development team have been found” within the game “shocking”. It’s a pretty meaningless and weak rebuttal.

But, there’s something oddly endearing about the company’s naïveté.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to defend it. It just feels more dense than insidious. Even their response is amusing: “Uh…wasn’t me.” Who would honestly believe that this kind of thing would go unnoticed in 2008? It’s like Ernest Goes To Digipen or something, except that they’re British, so maybe it’s more like Carry On Game Developers.

Still, even with that dimwit appeal, you’ve got to really feel for the people wrapped up in this. Majestic will never produce another game – that’s a given. But what happens to the credibility of Tri Synergy? What happens to the credibility of composer Marko Hautamäki, who worked to produce music for the game as a freelancer, and had no knowledge of the way that the game was being developed?

Already, he’s been under fire: guilt by association. “I have seen my name mentioned in several internet discussion forums,” he noted in a recent press release, “and there has been speculation about if the game contains stolen music but so far that has not been proven one way or another.” While Hautamäki didn’t produce every piece of music used in the game, he adds that he “can 100% guarantee everything” he worked on is original, offering the files on his website for scrutiny.

In order to work through his side of the story in more detail, I contacted Hautamäki, and asked about his experiences working with Majestic, and what this could mean for the future of his career as a composer.

GSW: When were you first contacted by Majestic Studios?

Marko Hautamäki: The initial contact was in May 2006 via an internet forum. They posted an ad looking for composer and I replied and got the job.

GSW: So you were on the lookout for a project like that?

MH: I was - and still am - constantly looking for interesting projects, and at the time Limbo of the Lost did seem interesting.

GSW: What was it about the project that appealed to you?

MH: I wanted to get a game in my CV, so it was easier to get to do one with a smaller company. It was a starting company working on a game that would be quite different from the bulk of games released nowadays. I figured it was a good way to get some recognition in the composer market, plus it offered me a chance to write a very varied soundtrack that isn't tied to just one strict music style. I saw there an opportunity to show my skills in a fairly large scale.

GSW: How long did you work on the music?

MH: I finished with the game level backgrounds in December 2006. After that I still did some scoring for the bonus DVD. If I remember correctly, I was finished with those in February 2007 or so.

GSW: How did you record the music?

MH: I have a PC based studio running Cubase and lots of virtual instruments. There are some - mostly percussive - elements that I recorded in traditional way with a microphone. There was no budget for session musicians, so everything you hear in my scores was played by myself.

GSW: How long, all up, is the score?

MH: All in all I composed about one and a half hours of music for the game. In the last minute some pieces got replaced by others that I suppose were done by [Majestic employee] Lawrence Francis.

So, a bit over an hour of my music was actually used in the game. The DVD main feature was one of the pieces that I originally composed music to, but got later replaced. The original score for that one can be found on my demo page.

GSW: Did you have a copy of the game to work from?

MH: At the time of composing I didn't have a playable game to work with. Instead I got written descriptions about each level - what's happening, what kind of place it is and what kind of mood it should have. The guys of Majestic Studios also encouraged me to feel free to interpret their descriptions musically, so I was having pretty free hands with the score.

I'd say the biggest source of inspiration were the written descriptions themselves. At some point I also got to see some concept art but as they were mainly about characters without their own themes, I can't say they would have influenced me much.

GSW: Any impressions of the game from that time?

MH: None about the game itself. I only got to see the finished game when I received my own boxed copy a couple of days before I first read the news about accusations of plagiarism and that someone had found some stolen graphical assets in the game. It seemed to me that Majestic Studios were very enthusiastic about the game and working hard on it, so I felt good about being involved in the game.

GSW: What are you concerns regarding your reputation, from this point?

MH: After my initial announcement and press release got out, it seems people understand my situation and are being very supportive. I'm still undecided about whether it's better to keep Limbo of the Lost in my CV or just forget about it.

Anyone Googling my name will find plenty of mentions about Limbo so I couldn't just pretend it never happened, even if I wanted to. On the other hand, I don't think I have any reason to feel bad about the music I composed for the game. How all this will affect my career in the future is very hard to predict, so as a precautionary measure I'm taking steps to clear my name.

What will actually happen and what kind of effect this will have in the long run remains to be seen.

GSW: Was it difficult to come out with the press release?

MH: Not as such. The difficult part is keeping in mind the contracts and NDA and what they allow me to say in public and what not. When posting my initial announcement about the matter, I was only concerned about clearing my own name. Understandably, after that I got a lot of inquiries related to the stolen assets and actions of Majestic Studios. Unfortunately I can't answer those - not because of an NDA but simply because I don't have any more answers than anyone else outside the Majestic core team.

GSW: How do you feel about what the developers have done in regards to reusing art?

MH: Simply put, it's a fucking catastrophe! I have no insider information about the game development process outside my own part and I sincerely hope there will be some sensible explanation to how this happened and how it's even possible as so many aspects in this whole circus just seem to defy common sense. Personally it's a major source of frustration and uncertainty for me.

GSW: Did you have any troubles working with Majestic, either personally or professionally?

MH: Not at all. I thought they were a pleasure to work with. They were enthusiastic about the game and seemingly worked hard on it so I felt good about contributing to the game. Working with the written descriptions about the game levels can be quite liberating and I had pretty free hands with the background music so I felt good about working with them. I didn't notice anything odd or alarming at all.

All in all, I have to say that if the plagiarism hadn't happened I would still feel very good about the game and the work I did for Majestic - even if it means that relatively few people had ever heard about the game. Now that's not a concern anymore.

GSW: Any trouble with payment for the work?

MH: Money issues are something I can't talk about in public. So far, no problems.

GSW: What proof are you able to offer that your work is 100% original?

MH: I have all the original Cubase project files. When I work I save my project often under different name. This way, the files not only show the contents of the music files but also the whole composing process from beginning to end. That's something that would be extremely hard to replicate afterwards.
Also, I posted some of the pieces I made for the game on my demo page, so you can make comparisons yourself. Furthermore, I think there's a very big difference in the style and sound of the music pieces I did versus the ones I didn't do. Again, I'm assuming that the rest of the pieces were written by Lawrence Francis. Majestic Studios project leader Steve Bovis has also assured me that there isn't any stolen music in the game.

GSW: How do you feel about accusations that elements of the soundtrack are not your own work?

MH: Of course I'm not happy about it, and that's also the reason I went public trying to clear my name. Such accusations can be disastrous to the career of anyone doing creative work.

Though, as said, there are pieces in the game that are not my work, most notably the game intro and the DVD main feature. The intro was something that was supposed to be done by Lawrence Francis from the start. The music I composed for the DVD main feature got replaced with that same intro piece. Some trailers in YouTube do feature my music, some do not. I have been assured all the music in the game is original but personally I can only guarantee my own work.

GSW: What level of communication have you had with the developers, post-release?

MH: We have been in contact, although not on a daily basis. They have apologized me for the mess but I'm afraid I can't really say much more about that. To my understanding, their announcement should be on its way and I hope it will give more answers than I'm able to.

GSW: Do you feel lucky, in a way, to be only credited in the .pdf that accompanies the game?

MH: Yes and no. Of course a proper credit would have been nice if things had gone the way they were supposed to go with the game. Now, I think having my name in the .pdf only probably hasn't done any harm, but probably mostly because of the fact that I have gone public.

GSW: What hopes do you have for your career from here?

MH: Well, I'm going to continue working on film and game music in the future anyway. I honestly don't know what kind of effect this whole Limbo circus will have so I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I'm currently working on a Finnish feature film that will be released in October. After that my plans are pretty much open at the moment.

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

As the weekend grinds to an inexorable halt, a plethora of GameSetLinks are upon us, with one of the more fun being the (pictured) concept of a nutritional-style label for video games.

Of course, the ESRB descriptors do this in a more advisory, statutory type way in terms of 'forbidden' content, but it is indeed an interesting, oddly alluring concept to have gameplay mechanics described that way. And this weirdness is twinned with 'Sabotage' videos in Halo 3, Scrum and pre-production, and a lot of other stuff, yay.

Go go gadget:

T=Machine » Scrum … and Production, Pre-Production in games
'I see this as one of the interesting unanswered questions with Scrum for games dev.'

Wakeup Throwing Since 1994: Video Game "Nutrition" Facts
'So what if video games had a similar "nutrition" label based on the core elements of that video game?'

Hardcore Gaming 101 - special Treasure game focus
Doesn't seem to be a master index for it, but you can see all the games listed in the 6/24 update!

Lost Garden: Shade: A game prototyping challenge
My wife, also a redhead, finds this hiiiilarious/brilliant.

What They Play - Blog - Entertainment Weekly Ranks Video Games In New Classics Issue
Nice to see EW mentioning games, actually.

Jared Rea: 'Don’t You Get Souped Yet at The Way Things Are'
'Chris Sauer has recreated one of the greatest music videos of all time, Beastie Boy’s “Sabotage,” in Halo 3 and I think it’s adorable.'

Write the Game » Help! I’ve built my game - now what?
'You have to be a bit more imaginative - and exploit the fickle and viral nature of the internet.'

8bitrocket:Home Computer Wars Alpha Mission: Post Mortem for a Failed Viral Flash Game
'In the game you would play a trusty Atari 800 computer. You would battle the likes of TI99, Apple II, Commodore 64 and the IBM PC.'

GameDaily Biz: 'Media Coverage: The Critical Divide'
'Games are reaching the tipping point where more customers are casual consumers – the kind who have a harder time sniffing out quality.'

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Space Invaders from 1UP.com
Benj Edwards looks at the classic Taito franchise.

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

If you are at all sensible, you will likely have purchased the 'Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs' DVD, which came out this week. It's the second of a set of four DVD specials which will be cut up into sets of four episodes when shown on TV.

The Wikipedia page for the special has plenty of initial information, but one of the DVD extras will be of particular interest to GameSetWatch readers. It's a recut version of the 'lost Futurama episode' which appeared as cut-scenes within the Futurama video game.

As noted on the Wikipedia entry: "Many of the crew from the Futurama series worked on the game. Matt Groening served as Executive game developer and David X. Cohen directed the voice actors. These voice actors were the original actors from the series: Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, and David Herman... music composition [was] provided by Christopher Tyng who also composed the music in the series and Futurama scriptwriter and producer J. Stewart Burns who scripted an original storyline for the plot."

There's a gigantic multi-person commentary on the 30-ish minutes of cut-scenes (using 3D assets created for the game) that the Futurama folks cut together for the bonus feature, and I thought I'd highlight some of the interesting bits:

- In order to make the linear DVD story flow properly and to improve it, the Futurama producers and editors actually cut new sound effects and inserted excerpts of gameplay footage to make it flow correctly - even adding a sound effect joke or two to bridge things over.

- When the Futurama folks went to try to find the original, non-compressed version of this footage (which was presumably rendered FMV and not in-engine), they found out that the Swedish developer, UDS had gone out of business, had its assets taken over, and were taken over again by an online poker company - so even though former employees of UDS tried to help them, they couldn't track it down.

- Therefore, the footage on the DVD is actually taken directly from the Xbox version of the game. Apparently, series executive producer David X Cohen had a memory card with the completed game on it, so that served as the basis of the DVD grabs. However, they couldn't get some FMV sequences that were triggered by bonuses, so had to go find a cheat code on the Internet. Oh, and also: "We had to go buy the component cables to get decent video."

- There's some interesting discussion of video game voiceover work from the assorted actors on the commentary, including Billy West, John DiMaggio (who voices Marcus Fenix in Gears Of War as well as Bender!), and Maurice LaMarche. They noted that the variant voice sound effects were really rough to perform in games, especially when they had to do a lot of 'shouting'-style reactions to being shot or bumped.

In fact, LaMarche revealed that he lost his voice on a Yosemite Sam game, and had to go on enforced voice rest for an entire month, after having to do too many short, medium and long bellowing-style sound effects, and "took a long hiatus from video games" after that, only returning to do the Futurama game. He didn't mention the game in question, but I'm going to guess it's Loons: The Fight For Fame. Anyone?

There's also a tribute to the sad passing of Gary Gygax on the main DVD commentary. In fact, it's mentioned that Gygax is a "heavy inspiration" to the third DVD, 'Bender's Game', for which there's a trailer on the 'Billion Backs' DVD, and which features nerds, D20 rolling, and... oh wait, here's the trailer on YouTube.

[BONUS: In a montage during the main 'Billion Backs' feature, Fry is playing 'Normal Combat' (in a Mortal Kombat font) in a video game arcade when the two main characters in the 2D fighting game kiss, reminding him of his lost love (aw!) As is traditional in Futurama/The Simpsons, there are a bunch of neat fake arcade game references, in the background.

This time they include 'Honkey Kong' (Donkey Kong font), 'Exlaxian' (Galaxian font), 'Coin Vacuum', 'Extreme Flosser' (with the 'm' as a tooth), 'Shovel Command(o?)', and most awesomely, 'Ms. Marple Madness' (Marble Madness font, but with two+ joysticks instead of a trackball, get with it, guys!) Ah, and there's a good gag involving a Pac-Man board game elsewhere in the movie. That's enough Futurama for now!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Finishing up the GameSetLinks - that is to say, the best original writing from big sister site Gamasutra and our other website-based endeavors this week, we start off with a pretty neat interview with Grasshopper's Masafumi Takada.

Also flecked into this particular mix - some initial info on Diablo III from Paris, Web 2.0 vs games with Tom Armitage, Ubisoft on putting the 'z' in Dogz, fluid dynamics in games, games that have real-world reactions, and more...

A hoy hoy:

Masafumi Takada: Grasshopper's Musical Craftsman
"Masafumi Takada is possibly the breakout Japanese game composer of recent years - soundtracking cult titles Killer7 and No More Heroes and contributing to the Smash Bros and Resident Evil series - Gamasutra goes in-depth with him on his art."

In-Person: Diablo 3's Unveiling In Paris
"Gamasutra was at Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational in Paris to see the unveiling of Diablo 3 - following the official announcement, we have an in-person look at the return of the seminal franchise. [UPDATE: Lead designer Jay Wilson talks narrative, replayability through randomness.]"

Innovations In Character: Personalizing RPGs
"In this detailed design piece, researcher Tychsen looks to tabletop RPGs for inspiration on the best ways to create compelling characters - and lasting experiences - for video games."

Q&A: Inside The House Of Disgaea
"Increasingly well-known in recent years for its strategy RPG series, Nippon Ichi Software is preparing for the North American release of Disgaea 3 on PlayStation 3 - and Gamasutra probes the developer and franchise with producer Souhei Niikawa and lead programmer Masahiro Yamamoto."

Practical Fluid Dynamics: Part 1
"In this technical article originally printed in Game Developer magazine, Neversoft co-founder Mick West looks at how to efficiently implement fluid effects - from smoke to water and beyond - in video games, with example code."

Headshift's Armitage: Games Must Relinquish Control To Players
"Is the game industry becoming too insular and ignoring the trends of the social web? Gamasutra spoke to web developer Tom Armitage, whose firm has worked on social website projects with the BBC, Channel 4, and The Saatchi Gallery, and who stressed that developers and console certification needs to adapt to allow rapid iteration."

Persuasive Games: Performative Play
"Most games let you change things on screen. But how about the real world? Writer/designer Ian Bogost looks at Pain Station, World Without Oil and an RPG piggy bank to explore games that affect our everyday lives directly."

Q&A: Ubisoft's Galarneau On The Rise Of The Petz
"For French-headquartered publisher Ubisoft, its Petz casual game series has now sold more than 13 million units - and it's so vital that Ubisoft Montreal has taken the Wii version of Dogz 2008 in-house. Gamasutra talks to producer Benoit Galarneau on the series..."

Life In Vegas: Surreal's Alan Patmore On Open World Innovation
"Surreal's open-world title This Is Vegas is a vital game for publisher Midway - and studio head Alan Patmore talks in-depth to Gamasutra on code sharing and the art of designing sandbox games."

Heavy Rain's Cage: Games Stuck In Primitive Emotional Range
"At a recent Gamasutra-attended symposium in France, Quantic Dream's David Cage (Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain) and Lexis Numerique's Eric Viennot discussed immersion in gaming, with Cage suggesting that more "sophisticated" emotions are still lacking from the medium."

[Want to get RSSed-up with all Think Services' game sites? Quick list goes like this: GameSetWatch's RSS (editor.blog), IndieGames' RSS (indie.games), WorldsInMotion's RSS (online.worlds), GamerBytes' RSS (console.downloads), GamesOnDeck's RSS (mobile.games), Gamasutra's RSS (main.site), and GameCareerGuide's RSS (edu.news).]

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

['The Z-Axis' is a bi-weekly column from game writer Michael Zenke, stretching games and gaming trends out planarly to poke, caress, and pinpoint the innards of what makes them great. This week, he offers an alternative viewpoint on excess and quality in the modern gaming industry.]

On the surface, this is the best time going to be a gamer. The industry is booming, with the ‘next gen’ consoles now really hitting their stride. PC gaming is so dead it’s getting cool to develop for again, and the online game industry is threatening to grow its own consciousness and take over, Skynet-style.

PSPs and DSes seem to be everywhere, and grannies are happily showing their grandchildren how to play Wii Bowling at the senior center. The problem: what’s good for the industry is not the same thing as what’s good for the gamer.

I’d argue that, in fact, it’s becoming increasingly hard to be a gamer.

The sheer torrential pressure of game releases over the last three years has made it extremely difficult to ‘keep up with the flow.‘ As gaming continues along the path to mainstream acceptance, the constant lust for the new (and the resulting dismissal of the ‘old’) will be one of its biggest obstacles.

How can we really take seriously an artform which deprecates and dismisses work so quickly? How can we even track the artform when this week’s hot new release is next week’s bottom-of-the-pile forgotten pearl? Let’s tackle the thorny problem of why too many games could be - in truth - a bad thing(TM).

Always Looking To The Future, To The Horizon

The essential nature of gaming has become one of excess. Once primarily the pick-up-and-play of dim arcades, the console and PC renaissance since the early '90s has lead to a wholly different concept of what a game is ‘supposed to be.’ The expectation that every game should give the player hours of entertainment is now implicit, and the result - even combined with the rising costs associated with gaming - is a hobby rife with bargain basement-priced experiences.

For the cost of two tickets and a box of popcorn, you can buy a videogame that will last 3-20 times the length of the average movie. For the cost of a hardcover book, you can pay the monthly subscription fee for an MMO that might happily swallow every waking moment of your life.

That’s great on paper, and has lead to the aforementioned boom in gaming popularity and sales. That success has a very real downside, though: gamers are simply swamped with games. The GameRankings site offers some clues to just how much gaming we’re doing.

Since the Xbox 360 launched at the end of 2005, there have been 683 games released to the platform. There have been 844 NintendoDS games released since late 2004, and some 331 PlayStation 3 games dropped since late 2006. That’s an average of four games a week, every week, for both the 360 and DS. The PS3 averages more like three games a week.

This isn’t just a surfeit of choice, it’s a tidal wave of gaming. There can indeed be too much of a good thing. The result: gamers who stand in front of their television sets or sit at their computer desks and stare in mute horror at the sheer number of options they have.

Despite the seemingly self-evident reality that more choice is always better, modern life has proven otherwise. There’s even a book about this phenomenon called 'The Paradox of Choice'. Barry Schwartz, author of the book, gave a compelling talk about the issue at the TED conference a few years back.

The gist of the idea is this: even though having more choices might make you think you’re doing better, or are more well off, you’re probably going to feel worse about the situation. For some people - maybe a lot of people - having too many choices causes serious problems.

Let’s take last year’s smorgasbord game release season as our example. The list of AAA titles that came out last year made it quite possibly the strongest year in gaming ever. But how can you choose, realistically, between Halo 3 and Mass Effect? How can you choose between BioShock and Puzzle Quest? There were so *many* good games released last year that you couldn’t.

You couldn’t go into a store and buy Call of Duty 4 without *having* to pick up Super Mario Galaxy. Can’t snag Rock Band without that Burning Crusade box. And - seriously - can you even still be called a gamer if you didn’t play at least one of the offerings from The Orange Box?

The happy shopping sprees and smiling faces at GameStop, more than likely, eventually turned into sour grimaces and furrowed brows at home. Like it or not, the gaming public is an aging public. We’ve got kids, jobs, and responsibilities. Ironically, at a time when more gamers are able to afford these games than ever before, the Western lifestyle precludes the time to play more than a handful.

So I’m willing to bet that, across the country, gamers brought home games they didn’t play. They downloaded titles they never loaded up, purchased handheld games that stayed in the packaging.

Time To Get High-Falutin'

Not only is this bad for the pocketbook as gamers purchase games they never play, but it’s bad for games as an art form. Compare games with the modern literary scene. Novel-writing is a mature art, and one that the enthusiast can dive into with as much gusto as a gamer. There are dozens of books released into stores every week, and within a given genre one can always find new titles to enjoy.

Add to that the enormous history of every novel ever written and you have a beautiful unbroken chain of artistry. New aficionados can arrive at the literary doorstep with no preconceptions, and enjoy modern works as easily as classics.

Games are simply not that accessible. The bang for your buck in buying a game means working through a series of video game titles is just not as easy as reading through a few hundred-page book. It might take fifteen hours to read through a thick trilogy of books, perhaps spread across a few weeks. It might take even less time for a dedicated reader. Even the most dedicated game player might take just as long to complete one of last year’s AAA titles.

RPGs, arguably one of the epic examples of the art, could easily take three to four times as long to complete. Again, for one title. To play through all of the games I mentioned above (not including The Burning Crusade) I conservatively estimate could take 60 to 70 hours - for just nine of the dozens of quality titles that came out last year.

Lots of gamers are buying games. This much is clear from the NPD numbers. But how many are playing them when they get home? Of those, how many are making it past the first hour of gameplay? Of those, how many actually finish the games they play? Grand Theft Auto IV is sure to be this year’s GOTY darling but - as Warren Spector recently asked - how many people do you think really finished it? The need, the drive, to see the new and the interesting always pushes gamers onward to new games, to new experiences.

That push into the future guarantees that even a great game of a few years ago will probably be relegated to the bin of history. The news of a new Beyond Good and Evil will no doubt spur numerous players to actually try it out, tying the old with the new.

But what of true classics like the LucasArts adventure games, or even the most primitive graphical games of yesterday? Anyone that’s played through the original Alone the Dark will tell you that in that time, and in that place, it was as terrifying as any over-the-top gorefest could hope to be. More so, I’d argue. But no one is going to play that game in anticipation of the new version from Eden Games. Why would you? “It’s so old!”

Great novels live forever. Great games live only until the next great game.

What we’re left with is a medium where the vast majority of the audience has only a flimsy grasp on the subject. They don’t know about the games of the past because they don’t have time to play them. They don’t know about the games of the future because there are too many to play.

They know about the games of the future because game journalists choke them with previews and spoilers, forcing them to swallow the delicious promises of marketing devils. After all: the lies of tomorrow are better than the bitter reality of today.

Taking Off The Whineypants

So what, right? I mean, it’s great to talk about this and reflect on what we’re missing out on as a subculture. It’s intellectually interesting to consider what might be if we had the time to really explore the art form we’re so fond of. But that’s not the way of things, that’s not reality. No-one has time to commit to a game the way they might want to, gotta pick up and move on to the next thing while the going’s good.

My purpose for bringing this up is to point out the role of the gamer in this mad dash. Ultimately, it’s the individual’s choice to participate in the hobby the way they want to. You can surf the cutting edge of gaming trends, if that’s your goal, but that wave will carry you swiftly past some experiences that take a bit more time to digest.

Despite what the marketing tells you, despite what your friends might be telling you, I want to tell you that it’s okay to slow down. It’s okay to stop and experience what games have to offer. Go back and play Deus Ex if you’ve always wanted to. Fire up that copy of Baldur’s Gate or Planescape:Torment.

Don’t let your relationship with something you love be dictated by hype, fads, or peer pressure. You may not know art, but you know what you like.

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

['Welcome to the GameSetWatch Comic' is, once again, a weekly comic by Jonathan "Persona" Kim about the continuing adventures of our society, cultural postdialectic theory, and video games. This second in a series of two pokes fun at Atlus' cult PS2 RPG Persona 3.]

(SPOILER: Persona explains of this one to me, for those terminally confused - OK, with slight paraphrasing by the GSW editors: "In case you're wondering what this week's comic is about, in Persona 3, one of the main characters, Junpei, is always wearing his hat - even in the hot springs and the beach. This has lead me to assume he has a shiny noggin.")

[Jonathan "Persona" Kim is a character animation student at the California Institute of the Arts. When not working on doujinshi material, he continues the Mecha Fetus revolution on the Mecha Fetus Visublog.]

Posted by persona at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Time for weekend GameSetLinks, innit, and some of the highlights this time include another look at (the pictured!) Game Center CX, as well as Ikea infiltrating The Sims 2 with a new furniture pack.

Also in there somewhere - snaps from Street Fighter: The Movie game, the retailer-exclusive debut of Soul Bubbles, and the Gregorian chant trend that Halo begat - or at least helped to accelerate.

Cha cha chaaaaa:

Japan's Cult Hit Retro Game Show Debuts in English | Game | Life from Wired.com
More Game Center CX write-up goodness.

Simprograms » The Sims 2 Ikea Home Stuff trailer
Amazing how popular virtual furniture can be - and The Sims is an offline franchise that proves that as much as Habbo does online, of course..

'Knights of the Sandbox City' - Develop
Owain Bennallack iscussing his views on '...the inevitable coming of Sir Sam Houser, or Dan Houser OBE.' Gotta love the British honors system!

Heiligenkreuz Journal - Sacred Songs Sell, Drawing Attention to Their Source - NYTimes.com
'More recently, the use of chant on the popular video game Halo has piqued interest [in Gregorian chant]'. Marty O'Donnell quoted!

The Independent Gaming Source: Procedural Generation Competition results
Really impressive titles entered here - check 'em all out, if you have a chance.

Crispy Gamer - Column: I Call Bullshit: User-Created Conflict
On removing the Sporn: 'This bugs me all the more when it comes to Spore. The whole point of Spore is freedom.'

THE MAKING OF… Carmageddon : Edge
A tragically under-rated title, glad to see Edge giving it a retrospective look.

Earth Times: 'Soul Bubbles: Available Exclusively at Your Local Toys 'R' Us Store'
Wow, a Toys R Us exclusive DS game? Wacky, I wonder if this says something about an overheated DS market.

Water Cooler Games - Simulating Torture
'The gruesomeness of The Torture Game pales in comparison to the history and present of real torture.'

A L A N - N O O N: Follow up: Street Fighter The Movie
Awesome pictures of mocap sessions for the slightly terrible game-movie-game thing - via GameLife.

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

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This column looks at gameplay mechanics in PC casual exploration titles.]

Tradewinds Legends is part of the casual tycoon/empire-building genre of games: you have a trading fleet, which also dabbles in a bit of piracy (but always when attacked first, naturally), and you travel from city to city buying low and selling high. You can borrow money, or save some in the bank.

You can upgrade your fleet with bigger, stronger ships (and, eventually, flying ones). You can discover new locations on the map, and new commodities to trade. And you can perform a series of missions for the various governors and sultans in power.

So far it's very similar to the other installments in the Tradewinds series (though earlier editions take place in the Caribbean and allow only one ship at a time). It's a more distant cousin to the Chocolatier games, or to the classic Apple II title Taipan.

As story-telling, though, it's much stronger than Taipan (which didn't really make an effort) or Chocolatier (which made a perfunctory one, in which the missions are all pretty similar and the characters not very distinct).

Tradewinds Legends doesn't take its setting terribly seriously and has no trouble throwing in anachronistic jokes, jibes, and insults, but it does give some of the recurring characters a bit of distinct personality. It also has story arcs that consist of several missions apiece, and which grow longer and more significant as the game goes on.

In fact, as the game goes on, the repetitive procedural parts (buying goods, sailing around, selling goods, incrementally upgrading the fleet) fades more and more into the background, while the story becomes more significant.

That's a good thing, design-wise, because it ameliorates a balance problem Tradewinds Legends shares with other games of its general ilk: when the player is rich and powerful enough, the buying and selling ceases to be interesting. All the upgrades worth having have been bought. The player has a fleet so large, and an arsenal so efficient, that no enemy poses any significant threat.

The amount to be earned by trade is piffling compared to what the player already has in the bank, or earns in interest just by waiting a few weeks. I started to feel as though I was running around on a pleasure cruise, buying and selling things more out of habit and for amusement than because I cared any longer about profit. I didn't have to do much more than look at my enemies cross-eyed to send them all to the bottom of the sea, either.

Note that I'm not complaining about the fact that the player can become powerful. I always find it a bit frustrating when I play a game with really cool upgrades but it turns out that you can never get the best ones -- that in practice the game always ends before they become affordable. It's just that, given that this happens, it's a good thing the game offers something else to be interested in -- a set of threats and concerns that goes beyond pure buying and selling.

Legends adds a further bit of narrative diversity by offering different player characters with different personal histories. This affects not only your initial abilities (what kind of ship you have, how much money or debt) but also some of the missions you're assigned. A character has his or her own arc elements.

This ought to be great for replay value. It does not quite work. While a character comes with some specific missions, the majority of tasks is the same from game to game, which means that most of the humor is recycled and all of the suspense is lost.

Even so, Tradewinds Legends does a better-than-average job at narrative, given its chosen mode of interaction. (That sounds like a mixed compliment. It is. When ranked against the best narrative games -- against Portal and Miss Management, Anchorhead and Planescape: Torment -- well, compared to that company, Tradewinds Legends doesn't tell much of a story. But it does better than most of its genre, and it uses its narrative in good balance with the other elements of the gameplay, and that's worth noting.)

Some of that success is down to the writing. Some of it has to do with judicious foreshadowing. The same could yet be done even better. Legends relies heavily on its humor, but I'd be intrigued to try a game like it that actually took its setting somewhat seriously. Or one that gave the player more significant freedoms.

I'd be more than happy to skip the nominal replay value in exchange for that greater depth.

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

Posted by Emily Short at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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

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

The delights in this latest version include two neat browser games, a loose remake of an old ZX Spectrum classic with new multiplayer features, and a horizontal shooter with decidedly smart graphics..

Game Pick: 'Cubes' (X-0ut, freeware)
"A multiplayer-only game inspired by Nenad Jalsovec's Counterclockwise, which in turn was a remake of an old ZX Spectrum release. Essentially Tron in 3D, this version supports up to eight players simultaneously and contains four maps to choose from in total."

Game Pick: 'Zero Point' (Alaric, freeware)
"An impressive-looking horizontal shooter developed with the Game Maker engine. The current build consists of only one short level, but nonetheless shmup fans will be eagerly anticipating for more once they're through with the first boss."

Game Pick: 'Powder Game ver4.9' (DAN-BALL, browser)
"ha55ii's physics web toy was recently updated with an option to add playable stickman characters to the screen - expect to see plenty of user-created obstacle courses popping up on the site soon."

Game Pick: 'SEEK ver.0' (Eyezmaze, browser)
"A new action game by ON, who is also the developer of the well-received Grow series. Players must find matching tiles to score points and progress through increasingly difficult levels and challenges."

Game Pick: Life is a Race (cactus, freeware)
"Life is a Race! is a one button art game created by cactus for a new game competition - it's described in the comments as 'like a satirical version of Passage'."

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

[Ahead of covering the Blizzard Invitational in Paris for us, N. Evan Van Zelfden was kind enough to stop off in Holland to check out the NLGD show, and so he caught ex-Spore designer Chaim Gingold talking about the surprisingly complex, loving thought processes behind building things in the game.]

Shortly following the high profile release of EA's Spore Creature Creator, former lead designer Chaim Gingold gave a keynote titled “Magic Crayons: Spore and Beyond” at the Dutch Festival of Games, where the publisher distributed 500 hard copies of the creator to attendees.

The much anticipated and much delayed game features several editors that players can use throughout – but the Creature Creator represents the most difficult design challenge, Gingold told and audience of developers, professionals, and academics during his speech.

It’s the first editor that players will experience, and, said Gingold, it’s the only editor that players are required to play with.

Amusingly enough, an Electronic Arts employee reported to Gamasutra that the company’s chief executive, John Riccitiello, wants all employees of the world’s largest publisher to spend fifteen minutes of work playing with the Spore Creature Creator.

“I spent the last four years working on the creature editor and other editors in Spore,” said Gingold, who has taken a sabbatical since completing his work on the project. The opening of his talk focused on the preliminary question of “why creativity is fun and why making stuff is fun.”

Magic Crayons And Monkey Art

But there’s a second component that Gingold sees: “Computers can breathe life into things.” Through the talk, he explained his concept of magic crayons – creative tools that are for both fun and play.

He makes the comparison between Adobe’s Photoshop, saying it’s a creative tool to be sure, but a professional grade one that requires some skill and experience. “On the other hand, Sim City is a magic crayon you could give to anyone.”

“Research has found that little monkeys, like little humans, like to make things,” Gingold continued, explaining results showing that primates playing with charcoal on paper derived disproportionate pleasure from both the motion and results.

In fact, says Gingold, “this principle of disproportionate feedback is crucial,” from bouncing a ball, to drawing, to playing Go or the drums. “Slot machines work like that. It’s like a seizure with all this feedback you’re getting.”

“There’s this enjoyment when you make things. When you externalize some part of who you are, you can reflect on it,” he said, recalling early tests of the Spore Creature Creator, and how users reacted. “They would make something, and something would go wrong, but they’d still love what they made.”

Further explaining the principle, a clean-shaven Gingold tells the audience that when he first created a Mii avatar, he had a beard.

When he looked at his Mii, he didn’t like the way his virtual beard made his virtual avatar look, and soon afterward shaved off his physical beard. “It was like this weird mirror – I was really engaging the sense of who I was through the Mii.”

Digital Golems

There’s a theory of soft and hard mastery, he continued, that hard things let you feel joy by achieving mastery over the difficult, while soft mastery lets you feel joy through simple pick-up-and-play ease.

“The Sims is definitely more of a squishy thing," said Gingold. "We definitely went more the route of soft mastery with the Spore Creature Creator.”

Gingold then transitioned to talking about tales of things that come to life, from the story of Pinocchio to the legend of the Golem, a creature formed of mud and brought to life by occult incantations. “With computers,” he said, “We can deliver that fantasy, we can make things come to life. Which is totally magical.”

When you think of traditional games, said Gingold, you think of more goals and objectives. But there’s an opposite style, built for “just the pleasure of doing things.”

“In a traditional game you are the Luke Skywalker, you are the hero,” but with the softer games, “you are more like the director.” Gingold tells the story of Will Wright’s first game, how he “had more fun making the levels” for the game, and that eventually the level creation tool was made into SimCity.

Stealing The Cheese

When detailing the design process behind the creature editor, Gingold said, “I think of it as Mission Impossible. You’ve got to get in there and steal the cheese.” In other words, there are difficult parameters, and designers must find ways to get around every obstacle.

And they had goals from the start. “We wanted the output of this editor to look pretty good,” Gingold recalled. Anything you wanted to make, he said, you had to be able to make easily – without frustration. “It had to be exciting and interesting.”

Spore solved a major problem, said Gingold, with its animation system. But it wasn’t easy. “Four years ago, there was a lot of back and forth between the animation and art teams.”

Beside obvious problems with animation and art, there was a question of size. Compression was important because Spore’s creatures had to be small enough to send over networks, and small enough to download as the game is in play. “The data is smaller than the size of the thumbnail,” reported Gingold, saying “The picture is 20k. The creature is 4k -- it’s incredible.”

“The creature editor was the first one people would use in Spore, but also the hardest. So the others were easier,” he said of the development process.

Possibility Spaces And Beans

“There’s this idea I really like,” Gingold continued, "of possibility spaces.” In essence, within a circle of possibilities, there is a smaller circle of probability, and a smaller circle of the optimal. Those two circles don’t intersect unless someone has skill and talent.

The team found that the creatures that had high probability of being created weren’t as good as the creatures that skilled artists could make.

Gingold consulted the art director, Ocean Quigley, on the problem and found out that artists traditionally start creating characters out of bean shapes. Gingold then created a new tool using a 3D bean shape as its basis.

Players wanted more control than he gave them, so he added points that could be pulled – and they looked like vertebrae, which also helped the animation system. “This is like the deep structure of the creatures. It’s very fundamental. You see that spine and you go, ‘oh, it’s a creature.’ You reach out and touch it, and it kind of does what you expect” with the creature’s curved structure.

How Spore Is Like Magnet Poetry

Gingold then talked about “deep structure,” something that might appear to be chaotic, but is, in fact, is quite controlled chaos. His example? Magnetic poetry. “It blows my mind,” he said, that people can take these random words and create deeply meaningful poems.

“It shows that the content is carefully crafted,” pointing out that if they were magnetic letters, it wouldn’t work at all. Forming a complete, meaningful sentence with a bag full of letters would be difficult. But the content system of magnetic poetry has been filtered.

Gingold moved on to discuss subsequent editors in the Spore experience, such as its building creator. “The problem was that there was no apparent structure.” So, the team specified parts: roof, body, window, door, chimney. “If we know it’s a chimney, we can have smoke coming out of it, right?”

“We made sure the new parts were interchangeable,” he continued. “We had a castle set and a sci-fi set. The benchmark we held ourselves to was: you should be able to make something cool in three clicks.”

“Once you have a grammar, you can use it generatively,” Gingold told the audience. “The computer can reason about it.” I can create objects on my own, and it can also create. “You can use that to help them along,” he said of players, citing the example of SimCity’s road editor which automatically suggested what the player might like to do.

One Click Mind

Returning to the topic of the creature creator, Gingold said that the leg manipulation was the last part of the editor to finish—and the hardest. But it also provided some insights into what players want.

“I wrote a bunch of functions that were our fuzzy interpretation of what looks good," he explained. "Most players don’t know what they want. All they know is if it looks good or not, thinking ‘Oh cool, it’s what I wanted,’ – even though they didn’t have anything in mind.”

Gingold also said that the more people switch back and forth, the more lost they can become. “We tried to minimize the modes in Spore,” a principle extended as far as the user interface. “It just looks really simple and obvious.”

The team wanted the interface to grow with the player, to “playfully reveal the features that it has,” and to hold to a one-click structure, as Gingold pointed out that most people are used to the idea with email programs, web browsers, and search engines.

Gingold also explained that one of the things that game director Will Wright insisted on was that the creatures would have symmetry, saying, “It turns out that all living things are symmetrical.”

In the end, Gingold says that he believes computers can ease “this anxiety and alienation that we have from doing one thing.” Even though people become experts at their trade, “we can design houses, human beings, pinball sets,” he said.

“I want to be able to make an animated movie like Toy Story," he concluded, "Or a pop song. I want to write a novel and not be particularly good at writing a novel,” encouraging the audience to “invest in that structure and make those toys!”

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

[In this article, Mister Raroo takes a look at the assumptions that are not only made about gamers, but that gamers themselves make Along the way he manages to discuss a potential murderer that frequents the library, a "bear" meet-up at Disneyland, discussing games with a UPS delivery driver, and more!]

Never Judge a Book…

While using a phrase like “never judge a book by its cover” to begin an article is fairly corny, I thought maybe it was apt since I work in a public library. When people visit the library, they often make assumptions about me that aren’t necessarily true.

I’ll be asked if I’m a volunteer (no, I’m a paid employee), if I sit around reading books all day (sorry, I wish I had the time to do that!), and why I would pick such a boring job (it’s actually pretty interesting and sometimes even exciting).

I often make assumptions about library patrons, too, usually based upon their looks, the materials they check out, and the habits they display. One of my favorite patrons is a man I like to call The Killer. He lacks any type of computer literacy, so he’ll ask me to “do a Google” and “download everything” about particular homicides.

I usually just print out four or five news stories, tell him that’s everything I can find, collect the 15 cents per page for the print-outs, and bid him farewell as he wanders off to find an empty seat and study the information.

The Killer is a tall, intimidating older man with a grizzled beard and a booming voice. He looks like he’d have no trouble overpowering his potential victims. Though he’s always pleasant, there is an air of urgency in his requests. I like to assume that he is checking up on the homicides he’s committed, seeing how close the police are to catching him. Most likely, The Killer isn’t actually a murderer, but it’s fun to believe he is. Just in case, I always make sure to be polite to him so that I don’t become his next victim!

Making assumptions about people is something we all do, at least to some extent. The reason it is so important to make a good first impression, for example, is because people will judge and assume things based upon those first few moments. Even though we might make assumptions that aren’t true, that doesn’t stop us from being influenced by them.

During World War II my wife’s grandparents, despite being American citizens, were sent to the Japanese internment camps because the assumption was made that their Japanese ancestry made them a threat (although my wife’s family tree does potentially trace back to a clan of ninjas, so look out, America!).

Mister Raroo Apparently Likes Sports and Guys!

Making assumptions based on appearance is not only something that we all do, but it is something that we all are subjected to as well. In terms of my physical appearance, I definitely fall into the “guy” category. I’m tall, beefy, have a shaved head, and spout a beard on my chin. I’m the type of person people address as “bro,” “dude,” or “man.”

People always figure I must be a sports junkie and I’m constantly asked questions like, “Hey, who’s gonna win the game tomorrow?” It’s usually easier to just tell people what they want to hear so I normally just fake it, giving a quick response and smile. “I think the Chargers have a good chance of winning.” Really, though, I don’t care much about sports.

Oddly enough, I’ve also been mistaken as being gay from time to time. A couple of my coworkers, both of whom are gay, say that my physical appearance coupled with the fact that I’m a pretty emotionally sensitive person cause me to give off a definite “bear vibe.” Bears, for the uninitiated, are a subculture within the homosexual community of men who are larger, hairier, masculine, and generally look kind of like me! I’ve been hit on and flirted with more than a few times by men who probably assumed I was a bear.

A couple months ago when my niece Autumn and I were at Disneyland, there was some type of official bear meet-up. We saw groups of burly looking guys wearing red t-shirts all throughout the park. At one point when we were in line, there was one particularly big fellow standing behind us. My niece leaned over and whispered, “Don’t look now, but that grizzly is checking you out!” I actually felt pretty attractive at that moment, to be honest!

Games For Bros, Dudes, and Men

Gamers are no stranger to assumptions being made about them. Even though video games have become an increasingly accepted and mainstream form of entertainment in recent years, non-gamers still make assumptions that anyone into video games is most likely a geek with no social skills who sits around all day starting mindlessly at a screen while pushing buttons on a controller.

Though that might describe a small percentage of gamers (and if that’s you, go get some fresh air already!), most of us aren’t like that. We pursue an education, hold down jobs, fall in love, create works of art, raise families, pay taxes, and make positive contributions to the world around us. In short, nobody should assume gamers are any different from other members of society… but they do. And, even within our own subculture, we make assumptions about one another

A few weeks ago when my Xbox 360 was being returned from Microsoft’s Repair Center, I had a conversation with the UPS driver. He knew what was in the box and asked, “So, how many times have you had to send your 360 back?” When I told him it was my second, he laughed and informed me he’d sent his back four times and was afraid his 360 was on the verge of having yet another Red Ring of Death meltdown soon.

Before the driver left, he inquired to what I thought of Grand Theft Auto IV. “Hey bro, it’s pretty sick, huh?” I actually have very little interest in the game, but for the sake of being polite and to get the driver on his way, I just gave a canned response. “Yeah, it’s pretty impressive.” He gave me a “fist pound” then hopped in his truck and sped off to make his next delivery.

I didn’t lie to the UPS driver. I truthfully do think Grand Theft Auto IV is very remarkable on many levels, but it’s just not really the type of game that appeals to me. Still, from the driver’s viewpoint, it makes sense to assume that I’d be into GTA IV: I’m an adult gamer, I own a 360, everyone seems to be excited about GTA IV, and, as explained earlier, I look like a “guy.”

Of course, it’s stereotypical to assume that looking like a “guy” means I’d like games such as Grand Theft Auto IV, but that’s the reality of it. Gamers come in all shapes and sizes, but there are certain types of individuals who, on the surface at least, look like they spend their gaming time playing “guy” titles like Madden, Call of Duty, or Grand Theft Auto.

I happened to drive through a shopping center during a time when there were people lining up for a midnight release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and let me tell you, most of the line consisted of “guys.”

Usually when people find out I like games, they assume I strictly play “guy” games. But, as the old saying goes, looks can be deceiving. When it comes to gaming, my tastes don’t really match my looks. My favorite types of games are often the cute and family-friendly ones with catchy music, bright visuals, and an overall warm, fuzzy presentation. That’s not to say I don’t ever play violent or mature games, but on the whole it’s safe to say I’m in the camp that prefers blue skies in the games they play.

There Are More to Video Games Than Just Video Games

It’s very rare if someone asks me if I like movies, books, or music. Instead, they ask what kind of movies, books, or music I like. Yet, when people find out I like video games, they assume that means I like every all video games. To these types of individuals, a video game is a video game is a video game. Yet, for those of us who are gamers, we know that as with all other forms of media and artistic creation, there exists a multitude of genres available to players.

In fact, having different tastes in games can sometimes lead to an inability to relate to one another amongst gamers. For example, I have a coworker who likes games, but he pretty much sticks to sports games, which I rarely play.

When I tell him about a lot of the games I like, I can see his eyes gloss over as his interest wanes. If I were to discuss the newest NBA Live he’d most likely be all ears, but when I talk about Geometry Wars Galaxies or Game Center CX: Arino's Challenge it’s like I’m speaking a foreign language to him.

And, as anyone who’s ever visited a video game message board on the Web can attest to, the wide variety of video games can cause arguments and, in some cases, all out wars between posters. Most hardcore gamers have favorite genres, companies, and developers, and message board posters will sometimes go out of their way to prove the supremacy of their beloved tastes as opposed to those of the people not in agreement with them.

Things can get plenty ugly, but it just goes to show how passionate gamers are about their hobby. If all video games were the same to gamers, there would be nothing to argue about. In this sense, these types of arguments are a testament to the diversity that exits in video games.

As video games become more accepted and popular as a mainstream form of entertainment, I am confident that the misassumptions about video games and their players will become less common. There will always be people who just don’t understand and will clump videogames into one big group, but that happens with all forms of entertainment and art.

To some individuals I might just be seen as a sports-loving bear who sits on his sofa all day long playing generic video games. However, I have a feeling that before long people won’t just be asking me if I like games, but instead they’ll be asking me what types of games I’m into and be anxious to discuss how their favorite genres and developers are superior to mine.

[Mister Raroo is a happy husband, proud father, full-time public library employee, and active gamer. He currently lives in El Cajon, CA with his family and many pets. You may reach Mister Raroo at mister.raroo@gmail.com.]

Posted by Bill Sannwald at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Some more GameSetLinks up your wazoo, happily, starting out with the marvelous concept that is Dungeon Runners' 'bling gnome' (pictured). I'm pretty sure I want one of these in real life, picking up behind me.

Also in here in various different link-type things - the return of the Crystal Castles controversy, Kindle and lessons from digital distribution, silly animated GIFs, and an educative Wii/cooking crossover.

Go go go:

WarCry Network : News : Dungeon Runners: All About the Bling Gnome
'Similar to its cousin, the Garden Gnome, the Bling Gnome is a tricked-up helper gnome with a bit of attitude that will follow your character around and pick up all the gold dropped on the ground.'

Indie Game Review Panel [June Edition] by Game Tunnel
Aha, the return of THE PANEL, awesome

Why journalists must learn the values of the blogging revolution | Greenslade | guardian.co.uk
'Of course, there should be no distinction between [journalists and citizens]. But journalists still wish to see themselves as a class apart.'

GameTap Indies homepage
Now has an IndieGames.com feed on it, that's pretty cool.

Torontoist: People Who Live In Crystal Castles…
Absolutely awesome Mathew Kumar piece about the chiptune sampling controversy.

Hands-On: User-Gen Xbox Games Are Rough but Promising | Game | Life from Wired.com
Interesting - I wonder why the PC indie scene is making much more vibrant stuff right now tho?

:: Blizzplanet :: WWI Teaser - Day Two
Incredibly elaborate teaser things going on here - either from Blizzard or in fans' heads!

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure: Kindle(ing) for Games Industry?
Kim Pallister comparing a post on the Kindle's lack of 'connected content' with "...digital distribution as it pertains to games."

'Kart We Can Believe In' animated gif @ ErrorMacro
Very cute goofy Nintendo ad vs McCain mashup.

Wii Night! : One-handed, energy-charged bites for a marathon session - CHOW
The cooking/Wii crossover strikes again.

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

[In a fun opinion piece, pseudonymous game designer 'Spitfire' references comments by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling to discuss why game creators should aim to "Fail faster... fail sooner" to more quickly reach their ultimate goal.]

I read a fascinating speech by J.K. Rowling (yes, that J.K. Rowling) that she gave for Harvard’s commencement ceremony this past week and couldn’t help but smile and nod my head while reading about her life lesson she relates to the graduates.

The speech is about failure and imagination, two things which, coincidentally, game design is all about. Granted, the imagination part is fairly self-explanatory, so I’m not going to delve into it much (especially since her noble idea of imagination is more John Lennon than it is Jim Henson). Rather, I was especially interested that she learned from her failure:

"I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless."

How does this relate to game design? I can see how many would think I’m stretching things a bit. Obviously, we risk the same situation if we fail as an entire team or company, but what I really want to get at is how failure is valuable on an individual task-by-task basis.

Failure in design is more often more valuable than success, because if we’re willing to listen to it, and analyze it, we can determine exactly where we went wrong, and find success faster than if we just stabbed at it randomly:

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged."

"I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

I first learned about the value of failure at the Game Design Workshop during GDC last year, and I feel like a broken record repeating the refrain of the lesson: Fail Faster. Many people don’t understand the concept. In fact, if I didn’t actually experience the phenomenon first hand, I’d chalk it up to cheap business success book lingo like “synergy” or “paradigm.”

We even discussed the phenomenon of fearing failure, and how those who fear failure fail last, which is actually the biggest insult and humiliation in game design, because the teams who failed early almost always had a better concept than the teams who debated too long and waited to test their game ideas - and therefore failed last.

So I smiled when I read J.K. Rowling’s take on “failing last” (the all too common phenomenon of fearing failure so much you take the least amount of risks possible and wait to fail) which she terms “failing by default”:

"You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default."

Who knows if the Harvard grads will be able to learn from this? Failure is a sticky wicket. It’s one of those things you have to experience first hand. Sure, some lessons are self explanatory and don’t require witnessing failure for you to “get” the lesson and learn from it, but that’s where the GDC class really excelled.

They forced us to fail, and presented us with what were almost Kobayashi Maru scenarios, ones where I was almost certain we would not be able to pull a game out of. But the value of failure had already been extolled upon us, and we knew how to learn from it.

As funny as it sounds, we could be heard to say, “We’re not failing fast enough.” I’m shocked that we were able to make games out of the rules we were given in that class. Seriously, a card game based off of one of the seven deadly sins? Making games out of random objects and a Tupperware container? Impossible? Only if you don’t try.

So, if any of you folks reading this are designers, try failing. Fail faster. Fail sooner. Don’t sit there in design meetings arguing all day about where your controller buttons should be laid out. Just map them as fast as you can and try it.

It’s going to suck at first, but accept your failure. Hell, welcome it, and iterate on it as fast as you can. You’ll find the winning solution faster than if you attempted to write it out in a game design doc and debate the virtue of your layout without ever playing it.

[Spitfire is a game designer at a self-publishing development company. Before starting his site game-ism.com, he was a published gaming journalist, and during his career has also worked in television, commercials, and film.]

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

A couple weeks back I was laid off from my lavish high-roller job (no, really, I mean it) at PiQ, an entertainment and media magazine I helped found and run for the past four issues.

It wasn't a wholly unexpected closure -- the parent company is more-or-less run by the creditors at the bank, my 401(k) got cut off a couple weeks earlier and health insurance was undoubtedly following soon after, and the office was more empty and barren than most of New Mexico -- and I'm already just as busy with assorted freelance work.

(To get an idea of the state my old company is in, notice how they still haven't taken down our web page, with the final entry from the creative director placing all the blame for the closure on mismanagement up above. Ooooh burn.)

Going through the experience of launching and maintaining a brand-new, nerd-oriented print magazine in this modern era has taught me a great deal about how to survive in that marketplace. To be more exact, you can't.

Forget about the return of GameFan or Next Generation or anything else you may've liked in the past -- the video-game realm will be lucky if it sees any sort of new magazine launch in America at any time in our lives.

Why? The usual suspects:

Advertisers are not interested. Magazines rely primarily on advertising to survive, but advertisers in all fields are rapidly abandoning print media in all fields. Most print-mag ads are targeted towards core users, but even the companies putting out these sorts of core games (like Atlus and NIS) are concentrating more on online these days.

This is the main reason why 100 pages is the normal book size for game mags right now instead of 120. Nearly all the real innovation in print game mags (such as EGM's experimentation with themed issues) is there because editors have to do more with fewer pages, not because things are expanding.

Readers are not interested. It's easy to rattle off the advantages online has over print -- timeliness, user participation, more quantity -- that I won't dwell on them for long. Circulation is largely down for every game mag.

More to the point, reader interaction is practically zero on a lot of publications. At PiQ we got two kinds of mail: readers bitching at us for the failure of Newtype USA, and readers gloating at us after the failure of PiQ.

Even the publishers don't care anymore. Print media requires a serious investment to succeed. It can take a good year before most magazines start to see a profit (PiQ was nearly there in four months, but the bank couldn't wait any longer), and companies aren't interested in investing that much and waiting that long anymore.

Costs are skyrocketing. To produce a magazine, you need to pay postage, shipping, and distribution costs that an online site doesn't. These costs never ever go down, and recent economy problems have made them go up alarmingly fast.

Do the writers/designers care anymore? A lot of them do, but if I see another boring preview-roundup feature where the only advantage over online is that there are slightly different screenshots of space marines and concept art of machine guns than what I can find online, I'm going to get all huffy and go to bed.

It's a common mantra, but print editors have to constantly remember that they are expecting readers to actively pay for their content, not passively (via advertising and the ISP bill) as with online.

Put all this together, and you can see why nearly all publishers in this and other nerd-oriented fields are in "I hope I can keep my job just a few months longer" mode for the foreseeable future.

I've been subscribing to the local newspaper for the past few months, but not long after I got laid off, I realized that I read the newspaper's website far more often than the paper itself, which (I wish I was making this up) I use mainly for ferret litterbox liner. Why don't I read the print version?

Because it's got a noticeably thinner pagecount, there's nothing being done with it that online can't do, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm doing something which "dates" me whenever I pick it up, like the old lady who still writes out checks at the grocery-store checkout line. It's really the same thing with game magazines, isn't it? What's making me pick them up these days, apart from habit and the collecting bug? I'm not sure.

I still believe that a new game magazine that's perfectly targeted, perfectly distributed, and perfectly written can succeed in the marketplace. (I still think that a game-oriented ripoff of Make, where the print mag is only half the story, would work great.) But it's not going to happen, because the enthusiasm and investment money has now well and truly skipped town for greener online pastures. Hey, that's progress.

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Sister web site GameCareerGuide.com has been running a weekly design challenge for a good while now, and I wanted to point it out again and encourage GSW readers to enter it.

The most recent one asked the community of aspiring game-makers to designing a one-button FPS game.

A lively and rather educational discussion ensued on the site’s forum about why one-button games are significant to players with limited mobility. The
best solutions have been posted on GameCareerGuide.com, alongside a new challenge.

The “One Button” challenge came from Brandon Sheffield, senior editor of Game Developer magazine, who, in conjunction with Jill Duffy, editor of GameCareerGuide.com, determined the winners.

The winning entries included Evgueni Dozov's multiplayer game, in which players have one action, shooting, which has two effects: firing the weapon and moving the player backward. Each time a player shoots, she experiences an exaggerated recoil that's so strong, it propels her backward.

In addition, Connor Hogan takes second place in this week's challenge for Death Crane on a Death Train. Imagine a train flying down a roller-coaster like track with a giant crane that is forever circling above an array of objects just waiting to be picked up and hurled at enemies. Hold the object too long, and the momentum will yank the train right off the track.

The latest challenge has proven to give some aspiring or current designers and artists pause about what it really means to have many good ideas with, not just one or two. The new Design Challenge task is to come up with 10 suggestions for new objects that could stand in for a standard crate in a next-gen game.

GameCareerGuide.com’s Game Design Challenge is posted every Wednesday. Professional game developers are welcome to participate or offer advice to the community via the forum.

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

The return of the GameSetLinks is here, with the back catalog of the 'Strafe Left' cartoon over at RockPaperShotgun (see left!) still providing some fine amusement, for starters.

Also hanging out in this particular set of links - the state of game education in the UK, innovation at Tokyo Game Show, the IGDA's memorials wiki, the Yaroze revisited, the U.S. 'bootleg' Game Center, and much more.

Go for broke:

Video games degrees: 95% fail to hit skills target | higher news | EducationGuardian.co.uk
This is presuming that being certified by Skillset is the only arbiter of quality.

Indiantelevision.com's Digital Edge: 'Indiagames launches gaming team Indian Inferno'
Great team name, pro Indian FIFA and Counter-Strike players ftw.

Tokyo Game Show Throws Party for Innovative Games | Game | Life from Wired.com
That's cool, kinda like IGF for TGS!

Indie platformer extravaganza! | MetaFilter
The link to IndieGames.com is broken, nuts, but still a great primer on indie platformers - via Waxy.

FEATURE: The Net Yaroze Class of 2000 : Edge
Interesting because the Yaroze really wasn't that successful - but it still helped some folks get into the biz.

Ludonarrativism - the blog.
An intriguing new game(ish) blog by 'Eileen Smithee'. Whoever that is. Could be anyone.

Memorials - IGDAwiki
'The Memorials project is undertaken by members of the IGDA's Game Preservation SIG to document obituaries and provide a space for memorials of past developers, players and other figures important to the industry.'

Infinite Lives - Jenn Frank's (revitalized) game blog
Hurrah! Good indie/random cool stuff here.

DPad Productions - producers of 'The Game Center'
Wow, a shameless U.S. 'tribute' to Game Center CX, interesting.

Strafe Left: The Formative Years #35 | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Cyan Worlds-related webcomic gags FTW.

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

[In the wake of Gamasutra's recent quality of life feature, Dynamix and GarageGames co-founder Jeff Tunnell - currently blogging at the Make It Big In Games weblog - revisits a no-holds-barred editorial he wrote on the potential dangers of working for large game publishers.]

Publishers such as Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, and Microsoft are the largest sources of money and employment in the games industry. They create billions of dollars of revenue, then reinvest it in development, marketing, distribution, and overhead, and what is left over is their profit.

In some cases this profit is huge (Electronic Arts), and in some cases pathetic (Atari). If you are considering working either directly or peripherally for these publishers, it is important to note these profit numbers. Here’s why.

Companies that are on the very edge of existence such as Atari (or Acclaim not too long ago) may very well go out of business before your check is cashed for either direct wages, expenses owed, or developer/contractor milestones.

In addition, this financial condition makes them desperate, with the treatment and well-being of their employees and developers being the last thing on their minds. Quality of products goes out the window as well, further exacerbating the downward spiral.

The lesson here is to make sure to check the financial condition of the company you intend to work for. A simple check on Yahoo! Finance will give you all of the information you need to know. Look at their profits and losses for the last two years. Are they making money? Look at their balance sheet. Do they have any cash?

Finally, just talk to your friends. Have any of you been impressed with any game they have come out with in the last two years? Do they have any products you are looking forward to? Have they dealt away their best franchises to other publishers in an effort to raise cash?

You can take a calculated risk and go to work for a publisher that is on the ropes, but remember this is a business of, “What have you done for me lately?” Working on a game for a year or so that does not ship, and is then held under NDA so you can’t even show your work to prospective employers produces a big hole in your resume and makes it difficult to get another chance. My advice is, no matter how desperate you are to get into the games business, don’t go to work for a company teetering on the brink of collapse.

So, if you should not work for a weak, money losing publisher, what about the powerful, money-making giants? Publishers that make a lot of money have their own set of problems. Now, a lot of these problems described below are the same in any big company, but you should be aware of what goes on before you take the plunge.

Most large companies pay lip service to being a great place to work, but in reality they make so much money that they tend to not care for their employees. Large companies chide their middle managers into exercising a process they call “churn”, using a simple phrase like, “How is your churn coming?”

Churn is a code word which means firing the bottom-performing 10% of your employees every year and replacing them with a new, promising group of wide-eyed recruits who will not have chips on their shoulders, and who are willing to play into the “work them like dogs until they break” business model.

It is easy to see how employees become unmotivated when they are expected to work incredibly long and intense hours for months on end. In the widely-circulated blog post written by an EA employee’s wife four years ago, the pressures of crunch time on employees became a nationwide issue, causing the company to consider its methods.

The blog post detailed how the company pressured employees to work 80-100 hour weeks starting nine months before the completion of the game. Of course, everybody in the games business can expect to crunch four to six, or maybe even ten, weeks prior to the end of development of any game. That is just the way it is, but nine months was an indicator that it is actually in the company’s business plan to overwork and burn out employees.

So you know you will have to work at least 50 hour weeks with a crunch at the end, but everything else will be hunky dory, right? Not exactly. A natural part of working for a big company is politics. In a word, you will be judged on whom you know and where you choose to put your internal allegiances almost more than what your work product looks like.

If you choose to back an ambitious producer or VP who has a falling out with an EVP or other higher executive, guess what happens to your product and your future chances of advancement at the company? Yep, poof!

Or, even better, you befriend one of these ladder climbers and tell him your best ideas for how you think your project’s development could be made better. Imagine how great it feels when, at the next staff meeting, your ideas magically become his! Welcome to the world of big company politics.

For all of this anguish, you will be compensated fairly well. Average programmers at large publishers make decent to good wages. But, when you consider publishers are almost always located in the most expensive areas to live such as Los Angeles or the Bay Area, these wages will not go as far as you think.

In addition, most people get caught up in the stress of the situation and start to give themselves “presents” such as expensive new cars, exotic vacations, and other such baubles as compensation. Add in stretching for an overpriced home, and soon, the need for this steady stream of large income is an addictive process and cannot be easily escaped. If you ever want to go indie or start your own company, you must resist this temptation. You do not want to become a “sharecropper” for the rest of your life.

In the early days of the high technology industry, stock options were widely circulated as the ultimate payoff for employees expected to work as if they were a principal of the company. As companies such as Electronic Arts became publicly traded and grew from several million dollars in sales to hundreds of millions to billions, their market cap grew quickly, so that four or five years on the front lines could often mean a million or so dollars in stock option appreciation, in addition to traditional wages.

These kind of rewards made it worth the effort, but now stock options are only reserved for the select top few and are increasingly coming under the scrutiny of the SEC, and the upside of any game publisher’s stock is no longer as attractive. As a result, wages made today are the only compensation you will get for working harder than you ever have in your life.

But, if the work is hard and the politics are bad, then working on great games will make up for it, right? As anybody who plays games knows, the industry is getting more and more conservative, and good games are getting harder to find.

Sequels litter the landscape. If an idea was good once, won’t it be even better the sixth or eighth time? Licenses from books or movies seem to calm the executives' risk worries, so Harry Potter, Spider-Man, the NFL, The Simpsons, and other big name IPs are used over and over. Even original, game-driven IPs are stretched to the limit. Does anyone doubt, with the recent success of of GTA IV, that game makers will eventually be toiling on Grand Theft Auto IX?

But work on these monstrous, next-generation versions of big licenses and sequels will be interesting, won’t it? If you consider creating algorithms for realistically making sweat roll off the eyebrow of an ultra-realistic football or basketball player interesting work, then the answer is yes.

You will not get to work on the creative design work at the front end of a product. That is reserved for the executive design team of producer and director. Instead, you will be forced into the tiniest of niches, much like a modern age factory worker, dutifully cranking out code snippets or art widgets under the strictest of controls and supervision.

Should you find the work tolerable and the products acceptable, and you decide to commit your life energy to helping bring these products to market, making high-level executives rich, surely the companies will reward you with a secure job considering the amount of profits they make? Not true. One of the biggest mistakes people make when working for one of these huge corporations is thinking they are secure.

The executives at the top of the company care about one thing, and one thing only: profits, and not just profits, but increasing profits on a quarterly basis. Remember, the people at the top are paid in stock and options, so their wages are tied to making the price of the stock go up. As a result, they feel no remorse in laying off an entire team once a product has shipped or it is canceled.

Consider this: two years ago, the entire Digital Illusions Canada team was laid off after completion of the latest Battlefield product. Two weeks later, EA announced its largest quarterly profit in company history. The moral is that even the best teams working on highly successful products for the largest and most profitable game company in the world in the best financial quarter in the company’s history can immediately find themselves out of a job.

Putting in some slave labor at an established publisher can teach you a lot about the game’s industry in a couple of years, and give you a good resume to start you own company. Just remember, if you do choose to work for one of these companies, please follow much of the advice in my Foundational Five blog piece, keep your resume up to date, and always be prepared for the worst. Remember: these people are not your family, in fact, they are not even your friends.

[Jeff Tunnell is a serial gaming entrepreneur, having co-founded Dynamix (sold to Sierra/Vivendi) and GarageGames (sold to IAC, Inc.). He has produced, directed, or designed over 70 games including The Incredible Machine, Starsiege: Tribes, and Trophy Bass.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[“Why We Play” is a weekly column by NYC freelance writer Chris Plante that discusses how videogames benefit us when we are away from them, in the real world, and what brings us back. This week, he elaborates on some adjacent thoughts expressed by GSW's Chris Dahlen earlier this year to suggest a new video game genre: world games.]

The Mess

Remember that big Resident Evil 5 controversy, that one where the gamer community felt serious growing pains in the racial tolerance department?

Wait, wait, wait! Please don’t stop reading! This is not another column about race in video games, so calmly move your mouse away from the back button. This week I just want more games, more free games. RE5’s slip up is an opportunity to discuss a missing game genre: “world games.”

And while the RE5 case has shown many commentators don’t like to dwell on tough subjects--look at GamePolitics.com’s continual coverage—this topic of world games should be universally welcomed. After all, this column is not intended to slap gamers on the wrist, or preserve games as art, or even call for a revolution in how we comment and interact online.

This is a column by a gamer who wants more games, varied games, as many games as he can get from the world over. And I think everyone will agree, more games with unique perspective will not only be great for us as players, but will undoubtedly evolve the industry’s creative backbone.

Look, some of us said things we shouldn’t have said, some of us were quick to reprimand rather than to educate, and some of us just sat helpless on the sideline. But, to our chagrin, most of us (read: me) were quick to congratulate our goofy group.

We’re growing, I thought; we’ll get new views, new perspectives from this debacle. We’ll discuss them. And best of all, we’ll give a voice to those gamers and creators that rarely have one.

Resident Evil 5 takes place in Africa, so who better to comment than Africans? Or who better to make a game about the continent’s economic and agricultural devastation—equally, which better to discuss their own voodoo folklore—than Africans themselves? As Virgil Thompson said of Porgy and Bess, "Folk lore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself.

But these questions never came to fruition in our conversation, which instead devolved into a debate over who’s more racist: those players who shoot black zombies, or those analysts who spread racism like it’s Beetlejuice--simply repeating its name conjures the hateful monster. I can’t say either side has played nicely. And, sadly, this clusterfuck will rage on forums until the game’s release.

As I promised, let’s leave the flames for the forums, and make lemonade from this sour situation. Here are my big questions: What do we get as gamers by encouraging and purchasing foreign games? Where are the video games from Africa—specifically South Africa and Nigeria, which have developed relatively sizable video game markets? And, most importantly for us, where are “World Games?”

Where are games wholly un-American, un-white, and unprivileged? Because it appears one of our greatest prejudices, as gamers, may not be against other peoples, but their games.

Play American

The RE5 controversy is a chance to discuss what games need: a new, worldly perspective. Netflix delivers a variety of subtitled films, and iTunes will gladly fill your hard drive with World Music, but where do gamers go for culture—well, besides Japan?

While I hope potential world games would be welcome, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. co-creator Oleg Yavorsky argues a different opinion. In a recent interview he had this to say about the icy American welcome to his game’s more European narrative:

“It's always our intention to make games for as broad an audience as possible, but we've never had problems with getting Europeans to understand our games, and we have had problems with North America and Asia. It's just a different cultural mindset that makes our local topics less interesting. I hear it discussed a lot that European games struggle to find an appeal in North America, for example, just because they're based on different settings and characters, with different stories being told.”

Though Yavorsky clearly has more first hand experience than this writer (and I hope he doesn’t mind me calling him out) he has simplified the issue. Sure, games with foreign stories have struggled to connect with American audiences thus far, but two barriers have interfered: financial security and a cultural foundation.

Many American publishers are afraid to give a game that abandons a traditional (American) narrative the promotion it requires. To win a market unfamiliar with a product more promotion is often required, but titles like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. usually receive less than their American counterparts. Even with the necessary promotion, these new stories may intimidate American gamers.

Portals, the World Foundation:

Regarding a cultural foundation, Yavorsky goes on:

“Most of our successful games were based on big historical elements, such as with Cossacks. Cossacks were pretty well known in Europe, so ultimately that game was more appealing to a European audience than to other audiences. I hear it discussed a lot that European games struggle to find an appeal in North America, for example, just because they're based on different settings and characters, with different stories being told.”

Americans have a unique historical and pop culture knowledge, which has been spread to foreign nations via Hollywood, the Internet, and, most importantly, previous games. If Americans have developed an understanding of Japanese culture through a Squaresoft lens, then many gamers across the world experience Americana through the eyes of Activision Blizzard, Atari, and EA. We lack this pre-history, this cultural understanding to immediately understand, let alone enjoy “world games.”

Expensive production costs, complicated programming, and global promotion are the unfortunate side effects of next-gen gaming that prevent competition from small companies in smaller countries. Therefore, indie games might be the ideal medium, then, to lay the foundation with little financial ramification. YouTube has made it possible for children in Iowa to get their news from BBC1, their sports from torrents, and their entertainment from fan-dubbed Japanese game shows.

Just as independent theaters welcome foreign films with arms wide open, internet portals like Kongregate could offer a space for foreign games that can feed us funny, emotional, or shocking snippets, each so brief that the good may be aggregated to the top and the bad, quickly experiences, and painlessly ignored.

Also, portals like like The Sims Carnival offer free, simple to use tools. These programs are ideal for cultures that lack money or places to train aspiring game auteur. A combination of these two resources, a site where players are not simply divided aggregated by category, but on both a national and global level, allowing players to search the best games by country. On top of these wants, this portal needs to be cheap, accessible by cheaper computers, and easy to learn, but extremely malleable.

What’s this dream cost? A whole lot of money.

All About the Euros

That’s a big demand to make. Many aspiring game auteurs simply lack the money, hardware, or training to create games. Some readers may find it illogical to argue for charities used to promote game craftsmanship in poverty stricken areas, and, well, they’re right. Many more people across Africa need clean water and medical relief than they need games or the privilege to create them.

Yet, art has been used throughout history as a vessel for controversial, political revolutionary, and, just possibly, world changing messages. Painters, poets, and documentarians have brought change with their works, and with videogames as many Americans, Japanese, and Europeans main mode of entertainment, games with a message may be the best way to raise awareness for major causes.

Would you be more inspired to provide help to child soldiers if we felt their plight through a virtual first hand replication? Or would these games devolve into trashy FPS exploitation. Though I fear the later, I can’t help, but believe even the most crudely created game by those who experience these atrocities will speak volumes more than the Darfur projects for an MTV contest. And that’s not to knock MTV for pursuing the right thing.

In fact, please allow me to backpedal and return briefly to Virgil Thompson. There are definitely places and situations where people lack the ability to communicate their plight in certain ways. It’s ludicrous and ignorant for me to assume children in Darfur are equipped or should even be expected to design a video game. This is a case where MTV's work deserves the praise it gets.

Rather, I’m discussing a middle ground, not just for poverty stricken countries, but for nations that simply have trouble getting their mainstream entertainment to viewers across the globe. I’ve gotten worked up over the social change these games might bring, but on a smaller scale, world games will allow for our culture to experience other cultures vis-à-vis how they entertain themselves. For example, when was the last time you played a game from Yugoslavia or even Greece?

Gamers often do amazing things together. We solve petty crimes, we help one another in times of need, and we (read: Cheapy D) foster truly awesome causes, like Cheapy D.’s and Kevin Stewart’s campaign to donate games to soldiers in Iraq. Why not make this world game portal work?

Help Wanted

So, please take this column as a help wanted ad. I want to raise money, find the appropriate tools, and, eventually, promote the content created by users across the world. Sponsorships from major sites like Kotaku, 1UP, and even MTV (come on Totilo, who doesn’t loves tax write offs?!) offer the promotion and funding necessary for a project like this. Partnerships with EA/Maxis and Kongregate could make the portal reasonably affordable as a graft upon their already extensive networks.

With "staycations" at an all time high, many American gamers won’t have an opportunity to check out the world first hand. Instead, they’ll resort to escapism and spend summer break locked in an air-conditioned den, eyes glued to their HDTVs. They’ll surely visit many strange cultures. Maybe they’ll tour NYC with their friend Niko, or study modern American warfare with Snake. Perhaps they’ll line up early for this year’s Madden football (the American kind) or dig through their catalogue of tough talking, earth saving, democracy spreading space marines.

Hopefully though, some of us can take the time to nurture voices the world over. And maybe then we’ll know more about the Cossacks, about Africa (not just the continent as a whole, but each nation), and we’ll know more about ourselves. Maybe we'll set a foundation for the next videogame blockbuster from India, or Thailand, or Brazil.

Anybody game?

[Chris Plante is a freelance writer living the post-collegiate pauper life in New York City. By night, you can find him at HardCasual.net. By day, he produces theatre and television.]

Posted by Chris Plante at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

So, this year's European iteration of Game Developers Conference - co-created by my colleagues here at Think Services alongside the nice French folks at Connection Events - just finished up in Paris.

The Paris GDC show encompassed a bunch of interesting talks from leading European (and non-European!) developers, and luckily, Gamasutra and Game Developer's Brandon Sheffield was there to write a lot of it down and pass it along to us, yay.

Here are the highlights from the show, from Blizzard to Baer and... beyond:

Blizzard's Pardo: World Of Warcraft Originally Planned As Free-To-Play
"Talking as part of a keynote Q&A at the Paris Game Developers Conference, Blizzard SVP Rob Pardo has been discussing the history of world-leading MMO World Of Warcraft, revealing the game was originally planned as a free-to-play title."

Paris GDC: 2K's Kline On Why BioShock Should Have Failed
""BioShock should’ve failed," said lead programmer Chris Kline at his Paris GDC session, from its beginnings as a direct System Shock followup to its initial Little Sister designs featuring a dog in a wheelchair -- a full look at how the 2K team iterated to success within."

Paris GDC: The Rob Pardo Experience
"As one of the final lectures of this year's Paris GDC, Blizzard SVP of game design Rob Pardo sat down for a detailed Q&A on World Of Warcraft, StarCraft II, the Activision/Vivendi merger, and the future of online games - quotes galore inside."

Paris GDC: McCarthy On Bringing EA Sports To The Wii
"Speaking at Paris GDC, Electronic Arts vice president and executive producer David McCarthy discussed how EA Sports intends to evolve EA Sports based on what its learned from Wii Sports and current video game trends."

Paris GDC: McCarthy Teases EA Sports Peripherals
"As part of his Paris GDC lecture, Electronic Arts' David McCarthy has been discussing EA Sports' move to new platforms such as the Wii, revealing that consumers will see EA Sports titles using bundled peripherals within the next 12 months."

Paris GDC: DICE's Cousins Talks Battlefield Variety
"In his Paris GDC keynote, EA DICE executive producer Ben Cousins revealed that the studio is currently developing five titles for the Battlefield series, also discussing development methodology and web games' eventual dominance."

Paris GDC: PlayFirst On The Casual Gaming Revolution
"In a Paris GDC lecture on the casual games revolution, publisher PlayFirst’s (Diner Dash) CEO and president, John Welch, noted that, even with bigger publishers now entering the casual gaming field, smaller studios will continue to dominate the market."

Paris GDC: Quantic Dream Considering Second Next-Gen Title
"Speaking at the Paris Game Developers Conference, Quantic Dream’s Guillaume de Fondaumière revealed that the developer is considering developing two titles with two studios, including its PlayStation 3 exclusive Heavy Rain."

Paris GDC: Acclaim Bringing For-Pay Item Trade To Facebook
"At his session in the ongoing Paris GDC, Howard Marks, head of the revived Acclaim brand, explained the reasons why he has taken the brand down the path of free-to-play games, also revealing plans for a new Facebook game with for-pay in-game item downloads -- full coverage within."

Paris GDC: Media Molecule On Making LittleBigPlanet
"Talking at their opening Paris GDC keynote, Media Molecule's Mark Healy and Alex Evans have been discussing the creation of upcoming LittleBigPlanet and the advantages of player tool constraint - tongue in cheek welcoming 'questionable' user-generated content for the upcoming PS3 title."

Paris GDC: Baer On The Industry’s Birth, Preserving History
"Game pioneer and Odyssey console creator Ralph Baer delivered a lecture at the Paris Game Developers Conference covering everything from building the video game industry with limited technology to the importance of preserving history."

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

[This is reprinted from big sister site Gamasutra, and I thought it was worth highlighting here because you very rarely get Japanese developers talking openly about technical underpinnings of their games, for whatever odd reason - especially interesting since it's WiiWare.]

The latest issue of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a creator-written postmortem on the making of Square Enix's Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As a King, the company's first WiiWare effort.

These extracts reveal how the team faced development obstacles on a project of smaller scale than its typical RPG epics, due to the tight size and budget limits, but how those restrictions and some early development choices ended up streamlining the process and encouraging creativity.

Team lead programmer Fumiaki Shiraishi crafted the postmortem, which was introduced in Game Developer as follows:

"Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As a King was a WiiWare launch title in Japan, and sits somewhere between a strategy game and a god game. In this technically-oriented postmortem, lead programmer Fumiaki Shiraishi shares the ups and downs of implementing scripting for designers, the benefits of small file sizes, and the trouble with overblown AI."

Using A Lightweight Language...Heavily

Starting out the in-depth postmortem, Shiraishi describes how the team settled on the Squirrel language to code its game, an unusual decision for a Square Enix project, but one which paid off in its flexibility:

"At Square Enix, we usually allow planners (which are similar to game designers in North America) to use lightweight languages or scripts to implement cutscenes, which we usually refer to as events. Programmers at Square Enix only use assembly, or C, or maybe C++.

"We knew that My Life as a King was going to be a different kind of game compared to our usual titles. So for our development process, we wanted to have flexibility above all else, and we hoped to gain that by relying on a script language. After a little bit of testing, we decided to use Squirrel.

"In My Life as a King, all the engine aspects are implemented in C++. This includes graphics, sound, collision detection, camera, and data IO. Everything else, such as AI, user interface, game play, and cutscenes are implemented in Squirrel. The actual main loop and all the transition control is also written in Squirrel.

This actually makes a big difference. I know from experience that Squirrel code feels a lot easier to throw away than C++ code. The result is that I am a lot more open to game design changes when they are needed, and for this game, the small design changes made all the difference."

Not Seeing The Forest For The Trees

Moving on, Shiraishi comments on how, at points throughout the development process, the team focused on certain design components at the exclusion of the project as a whole, before realizing larger-scale iteration was necessary:

"One of the buzz words in the industry is 'iteration,' and we definitely tried to iterate parts of our game. However, we spent too much time iterating small parts of the game before we knew exactly what the whole should look like.

"We were fortunate enough to have ample time to iterate some more once we did see the big picture, so iteration did prove to be important. The lesson learned was to not iterate a small piece of the game too early and just for the sake of iterating."

A New Development Model

In the end, Shiraishi was pleased with the experience of working on a small WiiWare title, whose constraints opened up new types of development and design that would not have been obvious choices with a larger, triple-AAA budget. He summed it up as follows:

"WiiWare, like many other download platforms, offers a market for medium-sized games—not as large as boxed games, but not as small as cell phone games or some of the simpler casual games. As the industry moves forward, the lines separating all these types of games will blur.

"As game developers, our challenge is to create the right game for the right platform for the right market, but in order to do that we need the skills, the infrastructure, and a development process flexible enough to adapt quickly. I am hoping that our project was a small step in the right direction."

Additional Info

The full postmortem, including a great deal more insight into Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As a King's development with "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" reasoning, is now available in the June/July 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine.

The issue also includes an analytical study of 3D brawlers, an examination of the free-to-play MMO market, and an interview with acclaimed Grasshopper Manufacture composer Masafumi Takada (Killer7, No More Heroes) - plus tool reviews, special career sections, and columns from Bungie's Steve Theodore, Lucasarts' Jesse Harlin, and Maxis's Soren Johnson.

Yearly print and digital subscriptions to Game Developer are now available, and all digital subscriptions now include web-browsable and downloadable PDF versions of the magazine back to May 2004, as well as the digital version of the Game Career Guide special issue.

In addition, the June/July 2008 issue of Game Developer is available in digital form (viewable in a web browser, and with an associated downloadable PDF).

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

['Roboto-chan!' is a fortnightly column, by a mysterious individual who goes by the moniker of Kurokishi. The column covers videogames that feature robots and the pop-cultural folklore surrounding them. This edition covers the brilliantly anomalous by-product of Team Andromeda and Polyphony Digital.]

In 1999 a developer renowned for its pedigree in creating driving simulators ventured into pastures where high speed mecha roam. The developer was Polyphony Digital, the game: Omega Boost for the original PlayStation.

It was possibly the most accomplished implementation of mecha themed space combat yet achieved.

The player had control over the titular mecha, the Omega Boost, and were able to acquire targets in spherical 3D at incredible speed. Considering the aesthetic influences from anime such as Macross, it was unsurprising that Shoji Kawamori helmed the mecha design with his regular finesse.

Many assumed that the game was an offshoot from Team Andromeda's seminal Panzer Dragoon series, as the beautifully insane homing lasers were in similar effect. It became an almost apocryphal tale, that was supposedly wholly without credence.

Well, Yuji Yasuhara would probably disagree...

From dragons to mecha...

The first Panzer Dragoon was an iconic on-rails shoot-em-up, which had the player mount a dragon that could fire homing beams from its mouth. The aim of the game was to sweep your cursor over as much of the screen as possible, snagging as many enemies as possible. It sounds simple enough but in actuality, it was quite a challenge. Games like Rez owe a lot to the original Panzer Dragoon, as they distill this focused approach even further.

The second game in the series is more interesting though. Sure, the first Panzer Dragoon got the ball rolling but Zwei, its sequel, is actually more influential and also a far more accomplished game.

It's difficult to encapsulate the sheer focused pacing seen in Zwei, to this day it probably remains the most important of all the Panzer Dragoon games (even more so than Azel, or Saga as it's known in the West, and definitely leagues ahead of Orta). Zwei also had a rather notable programmer on its team; Yuji Yasuhara.

Admittedly, he wasn't an official member of the posse known as Team Andromeda but he did help code the game. It wasn't long after Zwei was released that Yasuhara jumped ship to more fiscally stable waters in the shape of Polyphony Digital.

It wasn't long after that when Omega Boost would have started. Obviously, Yasuhara made enough of an impression to get the green light on a Panzer Dragoon-esque shoot-em-up with him at the design and coding helm.

That would have been quite a feat to land something like that back in 1999, doubly so considering that it was at a Japanese developer which eschews the nexus of ego that you normally see in the West.

In any case, the effects of Panzer Dragoon Zwei had a tangible creative outcome. Chanelled through one man to make something that, to this day, isn't truly appreciated for its unfettered brilliance.

The Mechanical Circus

Why all the fuss then? What makes Omega Boost so different from the slew of mecha mediocrity out there?

Well, let me explain how mecha combat has been portrayed for the last 25 years. Specifically, since 1982 Macross beamed across Japanese televisions showing beautifully balletic aerial dogfights with planes that could transform into mecha. The series then evolved very quickly into space based battles were acquiring targets without the paltry limitations of gravity came into full effect. Couple all this with swarms of missiles chasing their targets with an iconic demented glee and you have a very potent aesthetic mix.

So potent in fact, that no-one had been able to accurately reproduce that in game form. When I say no-one, I really mean it as well. Bandai tried to many Macross games over the years and they all tanked horribly, not only fiscally but also functionally. The first real attempt at 3D space combat was with Macross Digital Mission VF-X, though the less we talk about that the better.

Even Virtual On turned a blind eye to the likes of Macross and had its combat occur in a suitably planar fashion. No-one wanted to the poison chalice that was the holy grail of mecha gaming; a full blown spaced based mecha battle. No-one, except Yuji Yasuhara it seems.

Omega Boost approached the premise in a simple but uncompromising way; have the player acquire targets spherically at their own discretion and give them a simple lock-on that can be re-acquired instantly. With the latter, the game offered almost no HUD based elements to indicate what had been targeted but instead focused the camera on that point, or the nearest target that was within that area when the lock-on button was pressed. Releasing the button would then allow the player to fly freely and manually track targets if they so wanted.

One of the few HUD elements was a very conservative yellow targeting cursor that showed which way Omega Boost was effectively pointing, meaning that to fire its vulcan cannon you had to place the reticule on the target. If the player held down the firing button though, then the functionality changed and as you sweeped the reticule over an enemy it produced multiple lock-ons. Releasing the button would result in the familiar swarm of homing lasers.

Whilst these lasers were the crux of the Panzer Dragoon lineage, their true origin was squarely a result of Ichiro Itano's work on Macross (something that has already been covered at great length in this column). So having Kawamori on the mecha design helm only cemented Omega Boost's functional roots even further.

However, Omega Boost had one more anime reference up its sleeve. It wouldn't be a high speed mecha game without at least one nod to Layzner. Something this game had quite blatantly in fact, as after the first few levels the player unlocked an attack called the Viper Boost. This had the Omega Boost glow blue and enter into a spherical energy shield as it homed in on targets and blithely rammed them. The sixth level, where the player faces a fleet of battleships in orbit around a planet, is an ideal example of this attack. For those familiar with Layzner, and it's similarly potent V-MAX attack, then the Viper Boost's resemblance is uncanny. Even more so when you realise that the Beta Boost, your mechanical nemesis, has a similar attack but instead glowed yellow. Again, mirroring the V-MAX attack of the Zakarl from Layzner.

To make matters even more implicit, the mecha would always been boosting in whatever direction it was facing. This could be turned off admittedly but it gave a momentum to the gameplay and help with the player's evasion of enemy weapons fire.

What threw some people, and by some people I mean provincial American journalists, was that the enemies came in waves of attack. This simple and obvious design choice had the game lumped in as an "old school shoot-em-up" like R-Type and Gradius. Despite the mind boggling idiocy in regards to such a major simplification and almost forced ignorance to the remainder of the game, the game did utilise waves of attack but the implementation up to that point was wholly different from the shooters of old. Omega Boost removed the functional allegory of Gradius and re-created, almost perfectly, a fully formed spaced based battle that allowed the player to go almost wherever they wanted.

However, this is where Panzer Dragoon Zwei's heritage comes into play. Whilst the game did allow tracking of targets all around the player you were funneled through environments. Not in an overt on-rails manner but enough to notice a sense of progression that felt similar. Though the stages where you zoomed through a tunnel were obviously more straightforward in that regard.

Expensive Production Values

Despite the functional finesse of Omega Boost, the real eye opener back in 1999 was it's FMV and aural production values. As the FMV's throughout the game feature live actors blended with CG, all directed by Kawamori. Even the pilot of the Omega Boost, played with a fervent apathy by the brilliantly named Greg Funk, had his space suit designed by Kawamori.

Even the music to accompany the opening eye candy was specifically catered for each region of release. With Japan having Feeder's "Shade" from it's Swim EP (no doubt due to Taka Hirose's gaming passion), the UK having Cast's "Dreamer" from their last album and the US receiving Loudmouth's "Fly". Naturally, the Japanese release used Shade more in time with visuals but that's hardly a surprise considering the game was released there first.

The original game soundtrack is another matter entirely though, as it's incredibly rare these days. Though this is more to do with Omega Boost's rather lackluster sales in Japan and the soundtrack consequently had a very limited run.

The cover art as well, which many mistook to be a Kawamori work, was done none other by Yoshiyuki Takani. A veteran painter who worked throughout the anime industry and making a name for himself by doing the cover art for mecha model kit boxes, which is a wonderful parallel considering the game's subject matter.

A forgotten renaissance...

Despite Omega Boost hitting all the right beats from start to finish, it was ultimately several steps too far for the gaming populace to keep up with. It sold initially quite well in Japan but reports of motion sickness were quite common and the game was tarnished as a consequence. Whereas abroad it was more of a sleeper hit and had a few toys released along with it (don't bother trying to buy them though, as they were pretty awful).

It also confused people that a renowned car game developer managed to put out a very polished space based shoot-em-up, as many of the press didn't really approve of the creative tangent. Polyphony Digital responded almost silently and now the game is no longer listed on their official site.

It's an incalculable shame that Yasuhara's vision wasn't appreciated for its sheer all encompassing brilliance. It pushed the genre of mecha gaming into areas that it should have always resided within and made that leap to almost giving the player the chance to sit inside the cockpit of a mecha blasting through a frenetic battle in outer space. Looking back on the decade since is almost heartbreaking, as mecha games have taken several steps back functionally.

Of all the mecha games that deserved numerous sequels and its team to be universally praised, it would be Omega Boost. Unfortunately, Yasuhara and his talented ilk now have the unenviable task of buffing the pedestrian irrelevance that is a Toyota Yaris to a cold, dead and uninspired shine.

[Kurokishi is a humble servant of the Drake forces and his interests include crushing inferior opponents, combing his mane of long silvery hair and dicking around with cheap voice synthesisers. When he's not raining down tyrannical firepower upon unsuspecting peasants in his Galava aura fighter he likes to take long moonlight walks and read books about cheese.]

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

A little more GameSetLink-age as the week continues, then, and I'm heading things out with the announcement of Topspin, a company in the music space which looks to help independent artists do digital (and bonus physical) distribution bundles and loyalty-related 'clubs' easily - they already helped out Nine Inch Nails and are working with The Dandy Warhols and a bunch of other independent artists now.

As I note in the link description below, this is worth looking at closely because I don't really see anyone in the game biz doing similar loyalty-based deals - possibly because games take a lot longer to make, mind you, but I think there's some kind of angle in users signing up for a year, or two years of your output as a game design (especially if you're doing shortform games), and getting other perks too. Think about it, hmm?

Time for change:

Topspin » Unveiling Topspin
Absolutely a big deal that should be CAREFULLY looked at by the indie/mainstream game biz - Ian Rogers' new company is not just albums, it's artist-centric subscriptions with physical extras too. (Via Waxy)

The Independent Gaming Source on 'The Sims Carnival'
Mentioned this before briefly, but Rod Humble is trying to do a DIY indie game tool (open to all) within EA, which is v.interesting - a lot of plagiarized content so far, but you never know.

Pitchfork: Crystal Castles Respond to Chip Music Controversy
'Time to call off the witch-hunt?'

IGN: 8 Bit Weapon/ Reset Generation Soundtrack Album Download
The returned N-Gage (inside smartphones, this time, not the taco) has a chiptune soundtrack to its highest profile game - for free download, too.

Trends in Japan » 5 Second Stadium teaches you to count to five
Bizarre stopwatch game: 'After a while, deep down you’ll know instantly whether it’s been five seconds or not. Probably.'

Consolized AtomisWave System - JAMMA Neo Geo MVS Sammy - eBay
Interesting concept - console-ized versions of arcade boards with TV outputs wired into them, don't see that too often separately from SuperGuns.

Consolized PGM System by IGS • JAMMA Arcade Neo Geo MVS - eBay
Wow, OK, far more obscuro-cool! (The IGS PGM has been a minor obsession of mine thanks to its obscureness.)

Rooster Teeth · 'Supreme Surrender Episode 1'
New from Red Vs. Blue, helping to promote Supreme Commander on Xbox 360 - interesting. Via Wired News.

the-inbetween.com [ Inside ‘Puzzle Farter’ ]
An important franchise deconstructed.

Ben Boos: SWORDS: An Artist's Devotion
Just got sent a copy of this - a lavish hardback children's book about swords from an-ex Blizzard staffer (a fact they're using in the publicity, interestingly) who worked on Diablo II.

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

[Andrew Doull is an IT manager from New Zealand who spent the last 5 and a half years working in the United Kingdom. He's just emigrated to Sydney, Australia, and spends his free time developing Unangband, a rogue-like game, and blogging at Ascii Dreams. He writes an irregular column for GameSetWatch.]

The release of the Spore Creature Creator has resulted in a Cambrian explosion of content creation where amateur creature designers have populated the Sporepedia with hundreds of thousand of different creature designs - at least 754,495 to date (at the time of writing) at a rate of more than 100,000 every 24 hours.

This is a tidal wave of new virtual life, sweeping up the gamer community in creationist controversy as would-be-gods evolve from the puerile (or should I say penile) to mimicry (of game controllers, Star Wars space ships, gaming icons and pop art) to highly original creations. What challenges beyond the obvious problems of a procedural Hot Coffee mod every minute does this tsunami of content create?

The Spore designers cleverly used PNG chunk types to embed the total content of a single creature into the picture data for that creature - allowing quick and ready transfer of the Spore creatures by dragging and dropping images from the Sporepedia into the creator. They've also incorporated ready sharing of existing content as well as 3rd party media integration with YouTube, and user tagging of creature types. But the huge amount of content has clearly exceeded the ability of the Sporepedia website to deliver it effectively.

At the moment, the Sporepedia interface allows 24 creatures to be displayed per page, and an editorial component of the site has offered up a selection of 'featured' creatures - 40 to date. Rated creatures, that is creatures where second user has provided some rating information on the quality of the creature design, number some 154,000 or so. Searching by tag doesn't appear to be supported - and there is very little other criteria to slice up such a huge database of information, except by individual author.

In order to download Spore creatures, the interface restricts me at best to 24 per page, a microscopic drop in the bucket of the total content out there. Where are the tools to let me download the most popular 10,000 creatures - or to have an RSS feed of the top 100 creature creators so that I can see their new work - or to dedicate 10 GB of my hard disk to automatically fill up with new creature types? How do I define an 'ecology' of creatures, with predators and prey, or a phylum so that I can have a consistent series of creatures evolved from a single antecedent?

How else can users organise, sort and select data from a database of this magnitude in an effective manner? Clearly editorial control is failing to address these issues, as can be seen by the ratio of editorial selection to user content. I suspect EA and Maxis have their hands full just removing inappropriate content in this regard.

These issues of information management are at least manageable. Consider another statistic - to date, the Spore Creature Creator tools has populated one virtual game with approximately twice as many different creatures as all beetle species discovered to date. From wikipedia: 'The Coleoptera (beetle) contains more described species than in any other order in the animal kingdom, constituting about 25% of all known life-forms'. In other words, Man (actually avid gamers) has virtually created life at approximately a quarter of the rate that the Bible describes God achieving.

Divine hubris aside, if the current creation rate actually continues at the same pace, within a year Spore will have approximately 30 million creature types. Forget the problems of trying to organize this information within Sporepedia - it is unlikely that the human brain is equipped to distinguish this many different creatures. In one sweep, Will Wright and co have created a tool capable of matching or exceeding the Earth's ability to generate new species since it's inception.

It is likely Spore only supports so many types of different creature morphology, and the specific creature characteristics are well defined within the editor. This may mean that the brain is able to filter on less specific criteria than the individual creature, and give the player a chance to recognize the important features of any in-game encounter, without having to refer to Sporepedia every minute of the game.

The game design seems to have planned to an extent for these kinds of numbers: the Spore galaxy supports at least 4 billion planets, which suggests after a year of playing, you will only encounter a unique species every hundred planets or so.

The total number of creatures may not be an issue, as much as the player's ability to consume new content. For argument's sake, let's pretend that a new creature is encountered every game minute (likely very high, since not all the gameplay involves other creatures). Over a typical ten hour a week playing pattern, this means the player could potentially encounter 6,000 new creatures - in reality, far less than this.

Every year, this is 300,000 creatures, and an adult human lifespan of 50 years of continuously playing Spore, a total of 15 million creatures could be encountered. Therefore, within six months, Spore will have enough creature content to exceed anyone's ability to encounter it all in game in their lifetime.

Spore has created an unexpected set of design problems: the reverse of virtually any other game. There is literally too much content for any gamer to experience; and the tools to manage and select wholesale from this content don't yet appear to be in place. This is an ideal position to be in, and a reason that more and more games are moving to procedural content generation as a part of expanding the overall gaming experience.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Known best for ambitious Xbox mech title Steel Battalion and its similarly expansive PlatinumGames DS RPG Infinite Line, developer Nude Maker's flipside is as an adult game creator. Designer Hifumi Kouno explained to our Brandon Sheffield why he thinks the industry is still afraid to tackle sexuality.]

Nude Maker designer Hifumi Kouno has earnestly described his company's name as an entreaty for developers to shed their pretensions to fame and lay their feelings bare.

Of course, his company has also spent a few years making adult PC games for the Japanese market, so he has a different take than most.

Kouno himself has worked on a broad variety of games, in and out of the gaming mainstream. He directed the first two installments of the Clock Tower survival horror series, which began on Super Nintendo and moved to PlayStation. With Nude Maker and Capcom he developed 2002's mech action title Steel Battalion, which famously shipped with an intricate $200 controller that included foot pedals.

Most recently, Nude Maker has been announced as working with the ex-Capcom all star team at PlatinumGames, developing an ambitious sci-fi RPG for Nintendo DS. Entitled Infinite Line, the game is said to draw heavily from classic works of science fiction, notably 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C. Clark's 1953 novel Childhood End.

During a recent PlatinumGames event, Kouno sat down with Gamasutra to discuss his recent activities, his attitudes towards developing adult titles, and why people are afraid of the adult game market.

What has Nude Maker been up to, between Steel Battalion and Infinite Line?

Hifumi Kouno: You may know this, but we've been making adult titles in Japan on the PC.

I didn't see them on your site when I looked, some time ago.

HK: There's a title called AV King.

And you were previously a part of [defunct Japanese publisher] Human Entertainment, is that correct?

HK: Yes.

Are you still using [Grasshopper Manufacture composer and frequent Human-splinter company collaborator] Masafumi Takada for music on your game?

HK: He's my best friend! Him and Suda51. But anyway, yes. He is also doing the sound on Infinite Line. We asked him to.

How many people are working at Nude Maker now?

HK: 9 people.

Yeah, I thought it was a smaller team. Is that the entire team making Infinite Line, or are there more people from Capcom helping?

HK: This is the same as what we did with Steel Battalion. The main programming is all done by people inside Nude Maker - all core members are Nude Maker. However, we are working with some external developers that are helping.

How does that outsourcing work? Do you create the initial assets and then ask them to create similar ones, or do you give them specific tasks to do?

HK: Yes, it's exactly as you said. At Nude Maker, we make early assets for everything: character designs, space ship designs, and then we show that to the external companies that are working with us and ask them to work along those lines.

Can you name some of the mech designers that you're working with?

HK: The first one's Junji Okabo, who worked on Steel Battalion and who's also working on Infinite Line. He's making one design every ten days.

Impressive! What made you decide to return to standard consumer-facing games, as opposed to the hentai titles and whatnot?

HK: I will answer this very seriously. I won't take this lightly. I do not feel that there's a big difference in my thinking between standard adult titles and consumer titles. We don't have the idea that we're really shifting gears as such.

Generally, people looked down on adult titles just because they're adult titles. But this is just one genre that I want to experiment in as a game designer -- just one avenue for my creativity. There may be other avenues for my creativity. I don't want to limit what I can explore as a designer, based on expectations.

What kind of things do you think you can achieve in the adult game market? What do you want the player to feel?

HK: First, I want to say that I'm not just the game director, but I'm also the scenario writer for my titles. As part of writing scenarios, it's very important to understand human behavior. You have to address the basics of human feeling and motivation. The sexual urge and sexual motives are absolutely a core part of human behavior and a really primal urge. I think we can't forget that. I don't want us to forget that part of ourselves.

Why do you think so many people are afraid of it?

HK: If you take any given game designer, I think most of them are concerned - perhaps too concerned - with appearances and how they're perceived in the outside market, and by other game creators, even. They don't want to be seen as too unique.

I think that's also the background of the main company Nude Maker. I think that we need to be more honest with ourselves, and people should not worry about how they're perceived and do whatever their creative drive is. It really comes back to appearances, with many people.

I don't need to hide anything about adult games, and I really appreciate an interviewer who'll ask these kinds of straightforward questions and understand where I'm coming from.

What do you think of the state of the adult market right now? There have been a lot of closures this year.

HK: The budget on adult games is very small. On one hand, it's possible to really experiment and implement new and creative ideas, but on the other hand, I think people have gotten too conservative and just go in one direction and do the same patterns over and over again.

People seem to be targeting specific fetishes. Like the moe [cute anime girl fetishism] market, or the lolicon [more sexualized underage animated fetishism] stuff, all targeting very specific things.

HK: I agree with you there. I think there's a lot of those titles with moe or lolicon. My titles are definitely games first. I'm not just trying to sell them due to moe factor.

These are real games, and they happen to also contain things about sex or hentai. In a way, I think that unfortunately the effort we put into those types of things sometimes isn't rewarded, and if you just make it an easy-to-sell moe-type game, it'll sell much easier.

Do you think that you could create feelings of love within a player in a traditional game as well?

HK: I definitely think that's possible, but I think people get love and sex mixed up a lot of the time, of course. Just straightforward sex in games, I don't think that represents love.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Recently, there's been a significantly greater profile for the video game chart compilation site, VGChartz.

As well as beginning to contact major news sites on a regular basis to disseminate its news, the site was also the subject of a positive article on O'Reilly Radar from Robert Passarella, comparing its open data dissemination method favorably with The NPD Group, the generally agreed 'canonical' source for North American game charts.

Indeeed, as the Wikipedia page for VGChartz notes, Forbes, Fortune, The New York Post, and The New York Times have all referenced the site. And since it's been more aggressively marketed by the site's creators - especially regarding the 'holy grail' of global sales figure comparisons, its references in the news are rapidly increasing in frequency.

But how is the site actually compiled, and is it a good source for reasonably reputable news websites such as Gamasutra to be citing? Thus far, we have referenced VGChartz data twice - once with regard to Xbox Live Arcade game sales, and more recently because Michael Pachter has started to cite the data in his NPD game sales previews.

The second citation provoked a number of reader queries about the veracity of the data, so we embarked on some detailed analysis of VGChartz, and followed it up with a long series of emails with the site's creator, Brett Walton.

How Charts Are Compiled

So, let's start with the basics. Most worldwide game charts (of which NPD in North America, Media Create and Enterbrain in Japan, and Chart-Track in England are the most prominent) are compiled by extrapolation from sales figures provided by retailers. Thus, there's no third-party that uses regular access to publisher data on sales to make the charts - all of them take in data from major retailers, and then calculate sales from there.

This service is sold to major publishers and financial firms for a monthly or yearly subscription, allowing publishers to see how well their competitors are doing. Limited amounts of the data is made available to the public, generally in terms of a top 10, 20, or 50 either weekly or monthly, depending on the territory. Obviously, if the pay service was sufficiently 'off' from the internal numbers the publisher was getting, they would not want to pay for it.

But what VGChartz claims to do is a weekly estimate of every game published in every territory - including Japan, North America, and the particularly difficult to estimate Europe (there's no subscription-based pan-European chart right now, due to the fragmented nature of the market) - and offer all of that data for free. Which is extremely impressive, let's face it, because it enables them to provide real-time updated information for the entire market.

But how accurate is it? If I was, say, writing a story for the New York Times, what proof do I have that the 'correct' numbers are displayed on the site? Obviously, as mentioned above, all sales figures are by necessity estimates, and that's the crux of the issue - we'll get back to that later. But I asked Brett Walton his methodology, and he gave me the following, quite impressive answer:

"The methodology we use for all of our charts in all regions is the same and our data is arrived at by a combination of the following:

Exactly how we get from these various sources of data to final figures differs from game to game and console to console and our exact methodologies are confidential for obvious reasons."

Essentially, Walton is saying that he uses a number of high quality factors to produce his estimates, but can't mention any of the retail sources, or companies that VGChartz works with. Well, fair enough. But did you realize that VGChartz estimates can retroactively change by 100% or more based on 'official' chart results?

Iron Man & Retrofitting

One of the most unexpected results in the recent NPD charts for May was the appearance of the poorly reviewed Iron Man game for PlayStation 2 in the Top 10 of the charts, with 130,000 copies sold.

Thinking about it carefully, with the movie rocketing to unexpected success during the month, it would make sense that the game would sell well. But it's not the kind of game that you're likely to estimate in the Top 10 - and indeed VGChartz did not, estimating 53,000 units in sales, according to VGChartz staffers.

But what's surprising is that Iron Man for PlayStation 2 has been adjusted in its official VGChartz page so that its first four weeks of sales (encompassing May) add up to 111,000 units.

Clearly, these numbers have been changed after NPD debuted, showing a couple of things. Firstly, if you were a journalist, you could have cited VGChartz as saying Iron Man was a flop on PS2, selling half as many units - when NPD vibrantly disagrees. In addition, and more interestingly, it shows that VGChartz trusts NPD over their own prediction data by retroactively changing things to better match.

Apparently, this has happened before, because in a FAQ about North American VGChartz numbers, Brett Walton addresses this precise subject:

"Do we adjust our data? Not as such. Do we adjust our methods then? Yes - which will of course alter some data. On what basis? If we believe that a particular data set differs significantly from other sources of data (data released into the public domain by tracking firms, manufacturers, analysts) then we do re-check our data and make adjustments to the methods / scaling factors used.

This happens on a fairly infrequent basis - less often than we adjust due to internal data changes - and is something that every tracking firm and analyst does. I personally have no issues with "benchmarking" our data from time to time against other sources of data - as long as it has been made public."

In other words, if they are sufficiently out, then VGChartz will retrofit their results - either weekly or monthly - to conform to the more 'official' data. But they won't credit those firms as the source of the retrofitting - they'll just bump their numbers around without saying why on the site.

As a result, we get to what VGChartz actually is - a strange mixture of a prediction market (as consensus prediction site TheSimExchange is) and a retroactive, but non-credited reflection of charts that have historically been known for having more concrete data.

Where's The Beef?

OK, so you might say - and a lot of VGChartz' forumgoers do - what's the problem with that? If VGChartz gets close enough, and can adjust if it's too far off when top-end data comes out, then why would there be a problem?

Well, because you then have a moving target for checking/reporting purposes, and particularly because there's a high probability that VGChartz figures will be significantly wrong for those titles on the lower end of sales - those that lurk outside the top of the charts.

In other words, for those high-selling titles, VGChartz is checking against public data, and they will change their estimates if they are majorly off. Most of the time, they are quite close compared to the worldwide charts. That's because VGChartz is - like services such as The SimExchange - using common sense, Internet buzz, real-time data such as Amazon.com and analyst commentary to synthesize a sensible estimate.

But in covering all games, they are doing readers a disservice, because it's clear from the Iron Man example that they simply do not have the direct sale retail contacts to extrapolate unexpected but nonetheless true results. And if a title spikes but is outside public data, VGChartz will never catch it.

And the amount of concrete data available to VGChartz is low - as is freely admitted in a recent interview, VGChartz had 2-3% of the North American market as a sample at the time, whereas by estimate, NPD might have 60-65%. If this 2-3% was clean and canonical, this might not matter - but how do you explain the big Iron Man discrepancy, if so? Wouldn't VGChartz' retail sources have picked it up too?

So, let's take a step back and concentrate on some games that have sold in significant numbers, but have never made it into the Top 20 in North America for a significant time.

One good example is the Ben 10 series of games from D3 Publisher. VGChartz has the series listed at 590,000 sold worldwide to date. But when Gamasutra interviewed D3's Yoji Takenaka last week, he specifically said: "Ben 10 is selling well over a million units right now, since last Christmas."

So sure, Takenaka could be conflating shipped with sold - making the number closer to the estimate. But that's an awfully large discrepancy - one that most people won't care about because it's not a prominent or critically acclaimed game, and there's no way to refute VGChartz on it, but a discrepancy nonetheless.

Unfortunately, we don't have lifetime NPD data for this set of titles - but in researching this story, we spoke to a third party who had access to NPD lifetime to date sales that are not normally disclosed to the public.

We picked two titles released for one of the next-gen consoles over the previous year, neither of which had been in the public NPD charts for more than a month, leaving VGChartz to make estimates based on their own sources on their selling curve over time.

Well, somewhat spectacularly, in both cases, NPD and VGChartz disagreed by about 100%. In one case, VGChartz was citing 300,000 sales, whereas NPD had the game at 150,000 units. And in the other case, it was inversed - NPD had the game at around 200,000, but VGChartz had it at 100,000.

If VGChartz knew of this discrepancy, would they have retroactively changed their data? Probably so, given the Iron Man example. And this is essentially the problem - that with very limited access to retail numbers, especially over time, the downward curve of a game's sales becomes essentially a guessing game for VGChartz, whereas services like Media Create and NPD merge in greater real sales data to calculate their curve at much higher levels.

[Here's one more public datapoint, this time referencing NPD, but uncorrected by VGChartz, since I presume they didn't notice it or consider it important enough. Variety recently revealed that Brash's Alvin & The Chipmunks game had sold 286,000 copies since launch, according to NPD. VGChartz has the combined SKUs listed at just 110,000 units.]

Conclusion

Let's be clear. I think the concept behind VGChartz is a wonderful one - freely available data to let everyone see how well games are selling. And it's absolutely true that all data is an estimate - not even major services such as Media Create and NPD get it exactly right.

But VGChartz is staffed by amateurs working in their spare time to estimate sales, and while they are perfectly smart, they are much closer to the SimExchange model of estimation than the Media Create method.

What I'd like to see is some clear labeling of what is estimated data, and what is extrapolated or changed from companies that have greater access to retail sales. And not only does VGChartz have no intention of doing this, it is starting to claim major scoops based on data which, in some cases, estimates entire territories without any real data.

In particular, the site widely and loudly disseminated to the media its worldwide Day 1 Metal Gear Solid 4 sales, explaining:

"VGChartz can exclusively reveal that first day sales of Metal Gear Solid 4, released on June 12th 2008 in most major markets worldwide, were an impressive 1.3 million units."

The headline actually originally read 1.5 million, but was changed by a not insignificant 200,000 units after publication. Even more surprisingly, the figure debuted just 48 hours after the launch of the game - not a lot of time to compile data from retail sources.

I asked Brett Walton about the change, and why this figure was not advertised a little more prominently as an estimate, given the short amount of time to get real data, and he explained:

"It was based on first day Japan sales, first day America sales, and from that projecting for Europe / others which we didn't get direct day 1 for. We projected Europe would be ~20% higher than America given the larger install base and based on previous game releases, but it turned out at 430k for the week vs 510k for America - whereas we estimated it at more like 600k given America and Japan figures."

Firstly, Walton freely admits the numbers were based on zero actual data for the entire European market, just pure extrapolation. It's also very unclear how far the estimates for launch were based on real retail data for Japan and North America.

It's a reasonable figure, of course, because the VGChartz folks are smart people. But it's not a real figure. It's a educated guesstimate, and it's much more of an estimate than the subsequent Chart Track data for the UK, for example. Walton clarified due to my complaints:

"So yes, maybe we should be clearer with the word estimate, especially in early PR and this has been reflected in comments back to the guy who wrote the story. From now on we will label day 1 sales as preliminary for that very reason."

But that doesn't really change the main problem with the site. There's a place for a resource like VGChartz, but it'd be a site that clearly labels the source of its estimates (whether it be Chart-Track, NPD, Media Create - even if some of those sources have poor data dissemination and a fractious relationship with the media) and then labels which are its own estimates based on its own industry knowledge and whatever channel checks it has.

But if I was a writer or analyst trying to extrapolate significant information from the resource, especially regarding those titles which don't chart regularly, given the major discrepancies with other figures shown here, I would not recommend it.

[UPDATE: Someone has just pointed out to me that Brett Walton has accused me of reprinting a 'confidential email conversation' for this article. In the course of my discussion with Brett, I specifically asked him if our emails were on the record. He replied: "I have no issues reproducing the discussion - needs a tidy up of course." As far as I'm concerned, issues like this are symptomatic of why VGChartz cannot be trusted.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (48)

Having, once again, scoured 600+ RSS feeds to bring you interesting GameSetLinks to you don't have to do the legwork, here's the latest set - headed by Troy Goodfellow looking at the new AK Peters book from sometime Gamasutra contributor and serious video game historian Matt Barton.

Also wandering around in here - another look at the controversy regarding Guy Debord's 'Game Of War', David Edery on game difficulty, the very silly 'Escape From Konami' Flash game, reviewing, uhh, backpacking, and lots more.

La la la:

Crispy Gamer - Column: Print Screen: "Dungeons & Desktops" and Writing Gaming History
Troy Goodfellow longform book reviews Matt Barton's latest, to interesting effect.

China's National Art Museum Plays Host to Some Strange Games With Synthetic Times Exhibit | GameCulture
Art game attack!

1UP says Konami "made it clear we wouldn't be leaving until we signed" NDA (Now with "Escape from Konami" Flash game!) - Boing Boing Gadgets
This is... typically BoingBoing-esque. Make of that what you will. But I hadn't seen the 'Escape From Konami' Flash game, hee. Via Fidgit.

Game Tycoon» Blog Archive » Debating Difficulty
'A game can incorporate interesting (even gut-wrenching) consequences without being difficult, or it can be extremely difficult without consequence.'

Mystery on Fifth Avenue - NYTimes.com
Just in case you haven't seen this. You've seen this?

Why GTA IV Was the Beginning of the End - GigaOM
'I think it’s safe to say that the era of next-gen gaming as a driving force is over.' The Au we know is back, yay!

Insult Swordfighting: Backpacking: The Official Game
'My computer couldn't meet the minimum specs to run Crysis, but somehow, without any computer at all, I was treated to visuals that blew even Crytek's best away.' Been done before, but still fun.

Rhizome: 'Game(s) of War'
About the online version of Guy Debord's 'Game Of War' and subsequent rights weirdness - abstract artkwak that's nonetheless interesting.

New 'Sugar Rush' forums - Sleepywood.net MapleStory Forum
Aha, Klei Entertainment (Eets) and Nexon's new free to play PC game, looks very interesting indeed.

Richard Cobbett's Online Journal: 'Limbo of the Lost'
'There’s also the irony that despite the amateurish stuff and ripped graphics, the game’s really not that lazy'.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['Cinema Pixeldiso' is a semi-regular column by Matt 'Fort90' Hawkins that takes a look at movies that are either directly based upon or are related to video games, with a focus on the obscure and the misunderstood. This week’s entry takes a special look at the just started New York Asian Film Festival]

The New York Asian Film Festival, 2008 edition, kicked off this past Friday, and not surprisingly it's already running on all cylinders. Why the first weekend alone has seen a sci-fi tinged, Howard Hawks-esque noir mystery involving dismembered girls and religious nuts, an old fashioned buddy flick featuring a college kid with no luck or money and a hard boiled gangster who owns the kid's ass, and that's not all.

Also on show - a trio at a all girl Catholic school with super powers, and a look at the life of some schlep whose personal life is in utter shambles, nor is he exactly beloved by his country men, due to the fact that he's so lackluster at his job, which happens to be fighting off whatever big bad monsters threaten Japan.

Another thing the fest is chock full of this year is video game-related goodness. In fact, it was their screening of the Resurrection Of The Little Match Girl some years ago that inspired me to start this column in the first place.

Well this year there are two game-related movies to check out: one based upon D3's budget sensation The Onechanbara, and other, the Takashi Miike helmed adaptation of Sega's Ryū ga Gotoku, aka Yakuza. Plus, the NYAFF plays host to the US debut of Retro Game Master, aka Game Center CX! Let's take a look at the first flick, as well as one of the two debut episodes of RCM...

Beauty Chanbara

Based on The Onechanbara, one of D3 Publisher's surprise break away hits from the Simple 2000 line of budget games (the other being Earth Defense Force, which itself is heavily influences by Starship Troopers, so I'm not holding my breathe for a big screen adaptation of that one, especially since its star is not as "marketable" as the one on-hand).

The movie tells a tale eternally told: some big company, for whatever reason (in this case, the D3 Corporation, which is cute to say the least) has begun raising the dead, and next thing you know, the whole word is upside down. Emerging from the darkness (and I do mean darkness) comes a mysterious woman to the rescue, with the skills to slice and dice the undead! Even if her attire is somewhat questionable... decked out in nothing more than a cowboy hat, a bikini, and a feather boa, though unfortunately she's wearing a poncho largely throughout, which covers the goods for the most part. Why mention the T&A so early on in this review? It's not as if it's one of the few things that the movie has going for it... well it is... but that's also the point of the whole thing, I guess.

When I mentioned to various colleagues that I was seeing the Onechanbara flick, those who had seen it was kind enough to inform me "you know, it's not very good." Like A) that comes as any sort of shock, and B) like that's supposed to deter me. Is the movie good? Even by video game movie standards? Well, define "good."

If you think a movie where you have hot chicks with shapely bodies and swords and guns decimating zombies left and right is good, never-mind the small stuff like the plot, good acting, or even being able to see anything (more on this in a bit), then there you go! As a buddy of mine noted right as the credits rolled: "I give that movie four boners!"

Back to story: the countryside is overrun by zombies, with only a few pockets of survivors just scraping by here and there. One such person is Aya, the next to the last member of a clan gifted in the ways of the sword (of course), who thusly handles the undead with relative ease, though she has her sights on her younger sister, Saki, for the murder of their father.

By Aya's side is some fat dude (didn't get his name, sorry... tried to take notes, but it was too dark, even for a movie... again, more on this in just a sec) who has had similar hardships; his kid sister has been kidnapped by the evil D3 corporation and the zombie it's created, and he too is out for revenge.

In the middle of the movie's almost impossible to make out at times first fight scene, against a bunch of zombie punks (no undead dudes in suits here!), another ass-kicking lady shows up, Reiko, who wages war with a sawed off shot-gun, one that never needs reloading (naturally). After the zombies are done away with, they immediately set their sights on each other. But Aya's cowardly and bumbling, yet lovable assistant manages to convince each other that they're all fighting for the same thing, and a truce is formed.

It is discovered that Reiko's daughter was killed by the once again evil D3 corp, so... cut to, the offices of a one mad Dr. Sugita, the brains behind the evil. We of course we never find out what his deal is, other than he's crazy and wants to become God, with the power to create life from death and all.

Plus he aims to mold the perfect solider by splicing genes, and his next test subject is, naturally, fat guy's kid sister! What a coincidence! Though he ultimately wants to get his hands on the lovely and dangerous Aya, due to her linage (despite the fact that he also has Saki in his employment, who shares the same blood, but let's not worry about the plot-holes).

Back to the gang: after setting up camp for the night, they run into a young couple that warns them to watch their backs. And of course, they fail to heed their own advice as they take a break to have sex, which brings forth some exposed breasts, another nice throwback to the zombie movies of old.

Soon, the heroic trio, after dealing with another undead crisis in the middle of the night.... It really needs to be mentioned how, up till this point, most of the action takes place in the dead of night, and while one does understand that in this future, society has ground to a halt, meaning no electricity, also meaning no streets lights or the such to help illuminate the action, it's still rather ridiculous, watching vague shapes swish around the absolute black, a lot.

One also understands that the dark not only adds to the creepy atmosphere (well, I'm guessing there's supposed to be one), as well as hides the less than big budget special effects, but still, there was several points where one doesn't know what the heck is happening on the big screen, leading to a headache of sorts. Anyway, daylight comes thankfully, and Reiko encounters a young orphan girl, her parents no doubt dead from you know what. She immediately bonds with her who seems oblivious to her surroundings (either the girl's been traumatized or is just, you know, "slow").

Meanwhile, fat dude is confronted with a zombie schoolgirl using the metal ball on a chain gimmick, very similar to Go Go Yubari from Kill Bill (this would not be the only one from the entire fest, even thus far, btw). Horrified, fat dude has to do what he has to do. Meanwhile, Saki shows up and holds Reiko's surrogate daughter hostage, them immediately stabs her in the back, which got easily one of the best laughs of the entire screening.

Along the way, we see plenty of flashbacks of when Aya and her sis were kids, with their father training them how to fight, with Aya being the clearly favored daughter, leading to an encounter with Sugita, who offers to take care of things, and then calls the shots for her, like taking down papa. The funny thing here is, one totally begins to sympathize with Saki for her actions, since daddy clearly didn't like her!

The three take the hurt child to a hospital, where the inevitable scene in which Aya suggests killing the girl before she turns, infuriating Reiko, takes place. And with zombies beating down the doors, Aya and her partner run off, leaving Reiko to be by the dying girl's side and become the masses' latest late night snack. With blood lust on their pallets, the remaining two decide to finally do the deed and storm Sugita's castle, where Aya mows down row after row after row of zombie storm troopers...

But there's too many of them! And it seems like Aya's number is up when, surprise! Guess who shows up because she's not dead? Sorry for the spoilers, but really, anyone who was five blocks away from the movie theater, enjoying dinner at that new Italian place down 6th Ave that I've heard rave reviews about, saw it coming a mile away. Anyhow, fast forwarding towards the end, the sister have their long-awaited showdown. It's all, not shockingly, all very video game-y...

Even for a video game flick, none of it is hardly groundbreaking or incredible, but the Beauty Chanbara does have its merit, and a certain degree of charm. The players do their jobs well enough; not to be sexist, but the female leads are designed to appeal to a mostly male audience, which is more than accomplished (even if Aya doesn't show as much as skin as one would hope, there is Reiko, whose outfits presents her breasts, front and center).

The zombie make up is more than serviceable, and the CGI effects aren't offensive, on a low-budget scale that is. The most annoying had to be Aya's tattoo on her arm, which is clearly a piece of plastic, just looking to get peeled off. Otherwise, once again: zombies, swordplay, cute Japanese girls. The choice is yours.

Retro Game Master Episode 1: The Mystery of Atlantis

As some might already know, Retro Game Master is the translated Game Center CX, a super popular show in Japan in which viewers simply watch an ordinary fellow try and beat old video games in one sitting, no matter how long it takes.

The opening video explains how this person, referred to as "the Kacho" (real name Shinya Arino, a Japanese comic), has managed to thrill viewing audiences and become somewhat of an icon, leading to tons of DVDs, toys, even a dedicated video game being sold, as well as public appearances in which the Kacho tried to best classic games in front of a packed live audience.

Stylejam, the series' representatives abroad hopes to bring the show to America, and since they also distribute films, many of which are playing at the festival, I'm guessing it simply made sense to present two test episodes to gauge audience reactions.

Again, on a purely personal note, when I went to Japan last year, I saw one of the DVD box sets for sale at Super Potato, perhaps the most well known classic gaming store in the heart of electric town, Akihabara, accompanied by a TV set with the show running. I watched a bit as some man who clearly looked fatigued did his best to get through the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros (and despite constantly falling in the same tricky pit, he was quite good.... better than myself at least). I had no idea what I was watching, and lo and behold, here we are!

Anyway, the first of the two episodes presented was the first episode from the second season, or so I was told, centering on an old Sunsoft game for the Famicom called the Mystery of Atlantis, which is apparently legendary for its insane degree of difficulty.

And right off the back, it's less than steady treading for the Kacho, has he immediately has to come to grips with the tricky jumping physics, punishing enemies, and the bizarro warp system. The game has 100 levels in all, and the Kacho bites it pretty early on. But, he immediately gets back on that horse, hits the start button, and tries yet again!

The reason why the show is so beloved becomes almost immediately apparent; the Kacho is just a loveable, everyday kind of guy, who is just as good, and most importantly bad at video games like you. It's not just his choice of games, that being classics from yesterday, but his attitude towards them that makes it all so enjoyable; its not some young kind dealing with the more than peculiar logic of old games without question as we all did, the Kacho is an older dude who wonders why the hell things are the way they are, like we all do when we play something as an adult, with now all this confusion and reasoning.

I know that many have tried to put the act of video gaming on TV here in the states, such as the channel G4, but they've always gotten it wrong, since they assume that people want to witness diehard, expert gamers at play. Sorry, but I'd rather take the humble and goofy, as well as completely relatable Kacho over some snot-nosed cocky teenager calling himself Hadoken316, the same kid I want to slap every time I go inside a game store, or why I don't bother with the arcades anymore.

Back to the Kacho: the aforementioned wonky warp system comes into play early on as he stumbles across stage 9 by accident (and his reaction of total confusion and laughter is quite priceless), which then leads him to stage 8, and then onto stage 10!

Which is where he finds himself stuck for quite some time due to the how the entire stage requires the player to jump from treetop to treetop, with very little footing available, and once again, the less than stellar controls. The Kacho dies and goes back to stage 1, and manages to make it back to stage 10, and again, game over. Over and over.

As the clock ticks, the Kacho gives it another shot, but along the way falls down a hole in one the level, which reveals yet another warp! Eventually he's back at stage 10, but along the way he managed to acquire special boots that allows him to hop on the clouds dotted along the level, making progression much easier!

Yet he still manages to slip and fall, and that's when the assistant is brought in. Known as "Assistant T", he's apparently the dude that the Kacho refers to when he's simply stuck somewhere, and T does a decent enough job of getting Kacho's character back to where he left off... but also dying at the same spot. So after a bit of rest, the controls go back.

But this next time around, the Kacho does much better, and makes a curious discovery; a star item, acquired on stage 10, and a tricky one to get, thus all the dying, grants invisibility! So then it's smooth sailing... till the Kacho stumbles across the stage that is completely black. His character keeps falling down pits that cannot be seen, and yet again, the game is over.

With 100 stages to conquer, and a handful of hours already passed, it would seem completion is all but impossible. At various points between games, the Kacho refers to the instruction manual for some help, and comes across the notes section in the back, in which the previous owner of the game noted that he or she was not able to make it past the 16th stage. Not a good omen indeed.

Yet hope is introduced back into the picture when the assistant comes back from an excursion with a guidebook. And true to fashion for many games of that era, after a quick cursory glance and one immediately begins to wonder, along with the Kacho, how a person is supposed to beat the game without such a thing?

Now is it smooth sailing, at last? Of course not. The guide points towards the shortest route possible utilizing warps, most of which are "suicide warps" in which the player kills himself at a specific spot in a level to jump forward. Again, how one is supposed to know all this is beyond anyone's comprehension.

But at the moment of glory, the Kacho finds himself stuck due to the fact that no invisibility star has been acquired, and the last stage's firepower is just too much to handle. One more time: back to level one! And we sit and watch as the Kacho tried to come up with a different strategy and attempt to further deal with both the wacky ways things are and the innocent mistakes made all along the trip.

Watching the Kacho struggle is like watching a friend of yours right next to you trying to play some game; you can't help but anticipate what moves should be done next, and when things go awry, your frustration is mixture "oh man, that sucks!" and "come on, how could you do that?"

One also shares in the joy of discovery or when a practiced technique finally comes together (such as when the Kacho has to master the art of falling down and also dropping a bomb right before hand to reveal a door, but not blow himself up). Not to reveal yet another spoiler, but after many hours later... around eight I believe... Kacho manages to defeat the game and discover the mystery of Atlantis! And also true to form of so many games of that era, the ending is a total "gee, that was it?" moment!

The show was quite simply a joy to watch. And thankfully, even though I am not exactly familiar with the source material, it seems to have completely retained its voice even after translation. When comparing it to screenshots of the original (like those used in the original... I obviously do not have access to the translated version), it all feels the same, the same use of type all over the place, like they tend to do in Japan.

Everything is subtitled, with zero dubbing; only the host's voice is American, and there's none of that Most Extreme Elimination Challenge needlessly over the top, made up nonsense here. Though there is apparently quite a bit missing; from what I understand, the original episode has the Kacho also going to an arcade and conducting an interview.

It's hard to tell what the future has in store for Retro Game Master, at least here in the US. Style Jam is currently in talks with various domestic distributors about possibly releasing the DVDs, or putting them on our airwaves. And as charming as heck as the show is, and its host, I have to admit that it's going to be a tough sell for mainstream American audiences.

Again, selection is key, that being games we all know and love and remember not so clearly, all of which harkens back to a simpler time... a stark contrast to the overcomplicated fare that's offered on today's systems. Though as we all know, nostalgia is not for everyone... which is why everyone, if they can, should make it out to the Retro Game Master screening, which are free after-all! And then stick around for anything else the NYAFF has to offer, video game-wise or not.

For more information, such as showtimes, as well as to purchase tickets, please check out the NYAFF website. And next week I'll have a recap of the second Retro Game Master episode, as well as my overview of Like A Dragon!

[Matt Hawkins is a New York-based freelance journalist and Gamasutra contributor. He also designs games, makes comics, and does assorted “other things.” To find out more, check out Fort90.com.]

Posted by Matthew Hawkins at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Woop, time to finish off the GameSetNetwork links for the week, highlighting some of the best original posts from big sister site Gamasutra, plus educational site GameCareerGuide and various other neatnesses.

Highlights from the second half of the week - a genuinely funny/entertaining chat with the casual folks at PopCap (Peggle Peggle Peggle!), the state of Nintendo DS piracy in Korea, plus some further write-ups from sundry neat Dutch and Dallas-based conferences. So there.

Inky, Blinky, Clyde:

PopCap: The Complexity Of Being Casual
"PopCap's titles like Bejeweled and Peggle make them the top casual brand - here, Gamasutra talks co-founder John Vechey and CEO David Roberts about XBLA, iPhone, and an upcoming "cool collaboration" with a top console developer."

Lecture: What The PC Gaming Alliance Can Do For You
"At the recent Game Education Summit, Dell's gaming CTO Rick Carini, chairperson of the new PC Gaming Alliance, told his audience why players are fed up with buying PC games - and just how the PCGA is planning to help players and developers alike."

Piracy in Korea: R4 Triumphant
"Game piracy may be somewhat stymied in the West, but not so worldwide - in this case study, Seoul-based Nick Rumas examines the cultural and practical issues behind Nintendo DS piracy in Korea."

Robertson: Does The Industry Need More Self-Awareness?
"Odyssey creator Ralph Baer opened the ongoing Dutch Festival of Games, but it was former Edge editor and consultant Margaret Robertson who took a critical look at forty years of games, asking just why the game biz is "an industry that’s amazingly ignorant about itself"."

Panel: Why User-Generated Content Matters For Games
"A panel at the recent Social Gaming Summit, including Daniel James (Puzzle Pirates) and Cary Rosenzweig (IMVU) looked at the idea that that the games industry should understand user generated content before it's too late, with the intriguing proposition that game developers should think virtual "spaces" - not virtual "worlds.""

Focus On: The State Of Gaming In Europe
"GameVision Europe research head Sean Dromgoole delivered a keynote at the NLGD Festival on the European game market, revealing up to a 390% increase in adults playing games between 2005 and 2008, "mainly based on what Nintendo's been doing" - stats galore within."

Student Postmortem: ETC's The Winds of Orbis
"The Winds of Orbis: An Active-Adventure is an physically challenging game for children ages 7 to 12, developed by students at the Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center - here's a detailed postmortem of the Wiimote and dance mat-utilizing title."

NLGD: TriplePoint's Kauppinen Predicts Downloadable Game Glut
"At the ongoing Dutch Festival of Games in Utrecht, Holland, TriplePoint PR firm VP Sean Kauppinen warned developers of an upcoming glut of console downloadable games, as independent developers are increasingly unable find publishing deals for big-budget titles -- particularly where they can own their own IP."

[Want to get RSSed-up with all Think Services' game sites? Quick list goes like this: GameSetWatch's RSS (editor.blog), IndieGames' RSS (indie.games), WorldsInMotion's RSS (online.worlds), GamerBytes' RSS (console.downloads), GamesOnDeck's RSS (mobile.games), Gamasutra's RSS (main.site), and GameCareerGuide's RSS (edu.news).]

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

['Quiz Me Quik' is a weekly GameSetWatch column by journalist Alistair Wallis, in which he picks offbeat subjects in the game business and interviews them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. This time, an eclectic Japanese game translator gets quizzed.]

If there's one thing you can take away from the previous week's column, it's that I have absolutely no idea about programming. Forgetting the fact that I also have zero knowledge of other languages aside from what I've learnt from Serge Gainsbourg, the technical implications of translating even a NES game scares the living hell out of me. Translating a PlayStation 2 game? Fergeddaboutit.

But hey, at least there are people out there who have an idea of how to work with computers beyond, you know, writing words on them and making them say “Hello World”. People like TransGen founder and webmaster Saito. He's only been translating games since February of last year, but he's already worked his way through NES dodge-ball title Honoo no Doukyuuji: Dodge Danpei and its sequel on his own, and Kakuge Yaro Fighting Game Creator along with the rest of the team.

And now TransGen is working on Namco X Capcom. And Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories remake Re:Chain of Memories. They're both PS2 games. Oh, and Saito is Spanish, so English isn't even his first language.

Some people really are overachievers, you know?

But how could I not talk to him, and ask about what TransGen does? Oh yeah, and there's also the matter of enquiring exactly how much confusion comes from the fact that the group shares a name with a (seemingly abandoned) transgendered support website. That's gotta be worth a query of two.

GSW: When did you first start translating?

Saito: I started to translate games around February 2007 or so.

GSW: What got you interested in translating?

S: Well, I always liked the SNES fan translations that were released by translation groups like Dejap or AGTP, so after playing some of them I started to wonder how they could release such great translations.

Also, I was a little "irated" because a great number of excellent games were left in Japan without any hope to get them to the occidental world.

GSW: Have you always been interested in import games?

S: Yes, many people tried to persuade me to translate some already localised English games into my own language, but I didn't like the idea. I really wanted to translate Japanese games.

GSW: When was TransGen first formed?

S: It was officially formed on May 1, 2007. But before that, elnegro492003 and I were planning some projects.

GSW: How many people are generally involved with the projects?

S: If we talk about Honoo no Doukyuuji: Dodge Danpei, I did it alone. But a great number of people are involved in Namco X Capcom: around ten romhackers, programmers and translators, and more than thirty beta testers.

GSW: Was the idea always to work with more recent consoles?

S: Yes, that was the general idea at first, but at some point I decided to hack some old system games, that experience helped me to understand some technical aspects that I didn't understand well before.

GSW: Are you aware that you've used the same name as an online transgendered support group? Ever any confusion there?

S: Nope, actually it is TransGen, a composed word - Translation Generation. But yes, I recall that some time ago a genius romhacker called Gemini joked about the name a bit.

GSW: How hard was it to decide what to work on with TransGen?

S: It could look from the outside that picking a game to start a translation isn't very difficult, but a great amount of work is done before a translation project is even started. First, we have to realize what we can do, how difficult it is to hack the game, and lastly if the game is worth the effort.

GSW: How do you select projects?

S: Sometimes we select them using our personal tastes and criteria, and some other we pick requests that people posted in our board.

GSW: How many do you normally have going at one time?

S: No more than two at a time. If we had more manpower maybe that number would be increased up to three or four.

GSW: When you select projects, do you typically choose games that you've played before?

S: No, actually I only play them a bit before starting a project.

GSW: Why translate Zill O'll Infinite? It's a fairly obscure game, isn't it?

S: Yes, but it's great. It reminds me of Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song [which is also a PS2 remake of a PlayStation game]. The gameplay differs each time you play, there's a great number of playable characters, the music is charming and the graphics are beautiful.

It's a great - yet relatively unknown - game.

GSW: Are you planning on finishing the project at any point?

S: I don't really know the answer. I just decided to drop that project at the moment, because we lack manpower and skill. Maybe we will resume that project in the future if someone else has not started a translation project by then.

GSW: On a similar note: why translate Honoo no Doukyuuji: Dodge Danpei and its sequel?

S: Well, I wanted to get as much experience as I could from hacking a NES game. I came across some images of that game, played a bit and I liked it. About the sequel: almost the same. I liked it and realized that I could port some code from the first game to the sequel, so I did it.

GSW: What challenges are thrown out by working with more recent games?

S: Mostly that there are almost no tools or information around for the new systems. So, you have to learn through trial and error by your own.

GSW: How much of a stroke of luck is finding a text extraction tool for Kingdom Hearts: Re:Chain of Memories?

S: Well, actually it's not a stroke of luck to find one. A gentleman by the nickname of Rhys started to code a tool to deal with all the compression. He sent me the extractor some months ago and I started to collect some technical data and feeback for him.

He is, right now, coding an inserter, but I don't know how much time it will take to code a stable tool.

GSW: Is it a good game?

S: Yes, it's a great game. Better than the Game Boy Advance release, in my opinion.

GSW: Are you anticipating a high amount of downloads for that?

S: Yes, the beta patch was very famous when it was released. Three translation teams contacted me because they wanted to translate the beta patch to other languages: Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

GSW: How many downloads do your projects normally reach?

S: I don't have an answer for this question, because the file is hosted in several websites, I just can say that we did run out of bandwidth once, and we were force to move on to another server.

GSW: What's Namco X Capcom like? I heard it's got its share of flaws.

S: Well, the game's just like a Super Robot Wars title, with the exception that the battle phase is in a pseudo action mode using the pad and buttons.

It can be sometimes boring, due to the amount of text and the lack of a challenge. In other hand, the game has an amazing soundtrack, charismatic characters and an entertaining story.

GSW: Do you think you'll be hosting more projects done by others in the future, like you have with aishsha's translation of Columbus: Golden Dawn?

S: Sure, it's not a bother for us to host the work of other authors.

GSW: Any other future plans you can let slip?

S: Well, what we want at the moment is to finish a stable patch for Namco X Capcom. After that, we can rest a little and resurrect some secret projects, like our Rent-A-Hero translation for the Genesis, or the Monster Hunter 2 translation for the PS2.

Posted by alistairw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Aha, GameSetLinks makes it to the weekend, and this set of ten multitudinous links is headed by some more info on Q's upcoming PixelJunk Eden, which I'm definitely looking forward to, in an abstract type way.

Also wandering around in here - a look at Introversion's Multiwinia, the Dundee game gathering that's full of Jam, a chat with Takayoshi Sato, the new Amusement magazine, and lots more carefully extracted information from 'the Internet'.

Going. For. Gold:

Siliconera » PixelJunk Eden as a testing ground for future PS3 tech
'Q Games is equipping the game with rumble, remote play, YouTube video sharing, and for the first time ever mysterious “trophies”.' Wow.

Tale of Tales » Interview with Takayoshi Sato
Sato, who we've interviewed before for Gamasutra, is really a lost genius - someone needs to set him up to direct an indie game.

GameSpy: Social Gaming Summit: Fun with People
Good to see GameSpy doing something a little off the beaten track for them.

Dobbs Challenge - Critic's Choice Part 1
Wow, these are non-winners - there were really a lot of decent hardworkin' entries to our competition in the end.

Valleywag: 'Exits: Stewart Butterfield's bizarre resignation letter to Yahoo'
The Game Neverending => Flickr => Yahoo! supremo departs in fine style. Anyone got good game biz resignation letters they wanna send me?

Dundee Game Jam #2 - "Build"
Some really interesting one-day games downloadable here by Scottish game devs and assorted strange people.

Gamasutra - Game Career Seminar Returns To 2008 E For All Show
GCG's Jill Duffy and other colleagues are putting on the educational mini-conf at E For All again this year, should be neat.

RPS Exclusive: Multiwinia Hands-on | Rock, Paper, Shotgun
The art style continues to hold up really well - stylized is the future.

The Political Scene: One Angry Man: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Fascinating on Keith Olbermann, absolutely relevant to game journalism because polarized opinions are also segmenting readership here, too.

mbf tod@y: Amusement Issue 1, when EDGE meets Monocle
Ah, the very avant French game mag has launched: 'Amusement. Videogames. Interaction. Style. Inspiration.'

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

[Cross-posting this from Gamasutra, because it's a readably wideranging interview from Christian Nutt on one of the most fascinating and unlikely team-ups of recent years - BioWare and Sonic The Hedgehog. Some good questions and answers on smaller team development on a high-profile product, methinks.]

As roleplaying giant BioWare entered the final stretch of development on its latest RPG epic Mass Effect, a title typical of its pedigree of sprawling fantasy/sci-fi universes, nobody could have expected its next announcement to reveal the development of a Sonic the Hedgehog title.

Straying even further from the typical BioWare formula, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is a Nintendo DS game - as far as one can get in the world of core gaming platforms from the company's traditional high-powered PC and console titles.

BioWare is no stranger to licensed material, with its biggest successes coming coming from the Dungeons & Dragons pantheon (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights) and Star Wars universe (Knights of the Old Republic), but unlike those properties, Sonic originated elsewhere in the video game space.

Production is now far along, and the game is set for a third quarter 2008 release. During a recent Sega event, Gamasutra sat down with Sonic Chronicles project lead Mark Darrah, discussing the significant broadening of scope the game represents for BioWare, how SCRUM and the DS' smaller required team size hearkened back to the earlier days of game development, and the requirements of dealing with a transpacific license holder.

A Shift In Style

So this is the first really console-oriented game BioWare's done in some time.

Mark Darrah: First handheld game we've done. BioWare actually did MDK 2 - I don't know if you're familiar with that - so, from an actual gameplay standpoint, that's a more console-y game than Sonic Chronicles actually is.

Because really, at its heart, Sonic Chronicles is an RPG. It's using a character with its roots in the platform style of gaming, but it's not really a platform game; it's just a game that exists within a platforming IP.

It doesn't seem all that different for BioWare, even though it's a handheld game, and a bit different in tone, and not necessarily as mature.

MD: Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, we're trying to target an E rating, so that's the first time that we've even been close to that since [T for Teen-rated] Baldur's Gate. Well I guess Neverwinter Nights was Teen.

So yeah, it's a younger target audience, it's the first time we've been on the handheld. That changes a lot of things; I mean, you have to understand that a younger demographic approaches gaming in a different way than someone that's played BioWare games for the last ten years.

The motto of BioWare is "The best story-based games." Sonic has been ridiculed recently for both the way its story has been going, and overall as a series. How do you loop that back?

MD: The interesting thing is that Sonic, when you start digging into the IP, is an immensely well-developed IP. There are comics, there are cartoons, and there is all this back-history that's been laid out. So there was an amazing amount for us to draw upon, and refer to, and pay homage to as we made the story.

I mean, I think the big thing is, we're making a storytelling game, while for most of the Sonic titles - Sonic Rush, for example - the story has to be injected between the levels, so it limits how they can tell story.

And when it comes to taking a Japanese action game series and transferring it to a Western-developed RPG, these are fairly disparate game styles.

MD: Yeah. I think we have to remember what Sonic's about, but also remember the kind of game we do, so you are trying to balance these two, and make sure they're not just constantly fighting each other on the screen. But it's actually turned out amazingly well.

Did you adapt the BioWare dialogue tool? I saw it demonstrated at Austin GDC.

MD: We're actually not using the one that was used for Mass Effect, because the Mass Effect one is really designed to do cinematic conversations.

This is moving away, because it's not really practical for us to do cinematic conversations, so we're using a version of the dialogue tool that was developed for Dragon Age, where it's able to deal with more traditional style of storytelling.

Now, Dragon Age has since layered on something like what Mass Effect has, in order to tell a much more cinematic story, but we don't need that here, so we've got a traditional BioWare-style conversation system without the additional trappings of a complicated cinematic system.

When you're putting together a team to work on this game, did you look for people internally who had familiarity with the franchise, or who had wanted to work on younger-targeted games?

MD: I've been at BioWare for a long time, eleven years. So I was looking to move on to something that was smaller teams, smaller dev cycles, and things like that. I'm really interested in the handheld, it's actually my primary gaming platform.

We actually additionally brought in some people from outside, just to break up the BioWare cycle, so we didn't just do what BioWare always does. So the team actually is a mixture of people with DS experience, people with lots of BioWare experience, people with just other console experience, just to keep it [diverse], because you're right, it is a new development experience for BioWare.

Scaling Development Down For DS

I imagine compared to ramping up to development on other platforms, DS isn't as difficult.

MD: Yeah. I mean, the hardware is challenging for someone who's done for console or PC development, just because it's got 4 megs of memory, and it's very much hardware from - if you compare it to a PC, it's like hardware from 14 years ago.

So that's a problem, because the problems are problems that we haven't had to face, as an industry, for a while in most other areas - memory fragmentation, and things like that.

But yeah, the number of things you can do is more limited, so it's a little bit easier to ramp it up, and you don't have to learn how to program a shader, for example, because you don't have shaders. It's not without its challenges, but we can ramp up a lot more quickly.

About how many people are working on the team for this game?

MD: Right now we're down a bit, because we're ramping down; the art is mostly done. So I think, right now, we're around 17. But at our peak we were actually over 30 people.

That's a lot for a portable game.

MD: That is a lot for a portable game. I've heard teams as small as six, though someone on our team who's done DS development before did have a team of 50 on a different, previous title. But that was an eight month development cycle, whereas we're going to end up being closer to fourteen.

Did you have to ramp up a relationship with Nintendo, too, to get the tools and everything?

MD: There's a lot - their development system is exposed, so if you're a licensed Nintendo developer, you have access to everything by the developed hardware right off the website - in fact, I don't even know if you need to be a licensed developer to do that.

But yeah, we do have a relationship with Nintendo. You can say, "Oh, this acts differently than I expected it to," and they can tell you, "Oh, well that's how it's supposed to act. It's explained in this document here."

You said you are primarily a handheld gamer, so you were interested in working on a handheld project. What attracted you to working on handheld projects?

MD: For me, I think one of the things was scope, because I've been in the industry a long time, and I remember when teams were 35 people, and this has let us come back to that. A lot of the angst in the industry is about how we run project management: should we be doing agile, should we be doing waterfall. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

A lot of that goes away on a smaller team, because you're getting down to the scope where one person can understand almost everything in the game, which makes for a lot more control. That's the thing that attracted me in the first place.

The other thing that I realized once we got into it is that it's actually a lot more - you're able to be a lot more experimental. Because of the bounds, because the box is much more well-defined, you're not just spending all your time trying to get the game even running.

On an Xbox 360, a lot of it is just like, "Here's our big giant list of features," and just getting that list done is going to take most of the time. On the DS, you have a little bit more time, because you've already done that, because your list is smaller.

And then that lets you just poke around and figure things out, and be more experimental, be more iterative. And that's actually not what attracted me in the first place, but it's been a really rewarding experience on the handheld since then.

It's got a 3D battle engine, and I the characters on the map are 3D but the map is 2D. Have you had trouble getting good performance out of the DS for the 3D on this game?

MD: It is a challenge, because the DS is not really primarily a 3D platform, but we limit ourselves to 3D only on single-screen, which helps a lot because there's only a single 3D engine on the DS. So performance has been a constant battle; not just for the 3D stuff, but for everything. But no, we've done OK.

What's Old Is New Again With SCRUM

When you talk about project management, did you have and did you follow a specific project management style?

MD: We're sort of using [agile development method] SCRUM now. We didn't start out with that, and I don't think we adopted it completely cleanly, because it was not something that we wanted to smoosh into the project mid-way through. Especially to people who aren't really familiar with it.

But I still think for my style of development, I think it's still the best thing that's out there. So I think we're going to try to go a little bit deeper on the next project, and see how that works.

Why did you choose to move into SCRUM, and what have you adopted as you've moved into it?

MD: In terms of what we've adopted, we do have SCRUM teams, but we haven't really adopted "planning poker" and things like that. I think that's where we've actually stumbled a little bit, the planning side. On the management side, we do daily stand-ups, and - I mean, we've got a lot of the trappings of SCRUM, but we're missing the core project management part.

The thing that really attracted me to it, that really pushed it forward for me, was just that SCRUM, in a lot of ways, was the way that development was done fifteen years ago, but it just didn't have a name. It was just, you did what you needed to do, and you got it done quickly. There was always something running. So it was that style, when the team got smaller, it just made sense to go back to something that felt like that again.

So did you do a lengthy pre-production cycle before you started the game?

MD: We sort of did. I've been on the project since July of 2006, and then until about November, it was just, I'm a lead programmer -- I was lead programmer of the project. I mean, I am lead director now, but I was lead programmer in the beginning.

So for about five months, it was just me and the original project director. There was a lot of pre-production happening then, where we were experimenting, poking around, figuring out the technology, but we've also been building tools as we went. We didn't have a completely clean tools pipeline when we went into full production -- which is pretty typical for BioWare, we're often building tools throughout production.

Again, we're talking about ramping up with DS, and building a tools pipeline for DS probably wasn't as challenging.

MD: Yeah, the interesting thing is that a lot of the RPG elements that we have are just as complicated as you'd have on a next-gen platform game. So our designer pipeline is just as complicated, or maybe 80% as complicated, where, yeah, the art pipeline is a lot simpler.

Again, yeah, you've got textures and models and animations, but you don't have shaders and vertex programs, and like 47 other different things. Bump maps. You don't have those things. So the art pipeline is a lot cleaner, a lot easier, but the design pipeline, because it's a BioWare game, is just about as complicated.

You said you're trying to be iterative, so is that more in terms of refining the dialogue, or is that the game design as well?

MD: It's everything. Yeah, it's the dialogue, the combat systems, the interfaces. Just try to get it in, get it running, and then make it better.

Dealing With An External License

Did someone at Sega approach BioWare, or was it the other way around?

MD: It's really unclear as to how that happened. Simon Jeffery, president of Sega of America, and [BioWare studio heads] Ray [Muzyka] and Greg [Zeschuk], from BioWare, know each other from Knights of the Old Republic [when Jeffery served as president of LucasArts]. No one seems to remember how it happened.

Ray's a huge Sonic fan; he has his Genesis hooked up to his giant 1080p projection screen at home. So I think it just sort of happened almost organically, from when they were just having a conversation.

Do you have to go through approvals with Sega, and does anything have to go through Japan, or is it pretty much that you're left to your own devices and milestones?

MD: No, it's Sega's IP, so they do have control over it, and we do have to get approvals from Sonic Team, which is the team that develops Sonic. So there are approvals on art, there are approvals on dialogue.

Is that a constant process over the course of the development?

MD: Yeah. We submit, and then they provide feedback; we make changes, and then they approve it, or don't approve it, as the case may be.

Did your artists at BioWare do all the 2D art, or is, to keep it consistent with other games, did you supply some of that from Sega?

MD: We were provided with a 'style guide' from Sonic Team, but all the art in the game was made by the BioWare team.

A lot of it's really convincingly Sonic-esque. You can usually tell when games have been developed in Japan or in North America. It convincingly has a Sonic feel to it, which I think is an achievement for you guys.

MD: Yeah, we've gone for a much more painterly look, so I think that helps with that. It looks like something different, but it looks "Sonicy," so I think it lets you not just look at how it's different, because it's different enough that you can look at how it's the same.

I know you can't speculate too much, but do you foresee that BioWare's going to round out the platforms you're working with, and the kind of styles you're working with, as things move forward?

MD: Yeah, we're looking into Wii and PSP as a company, as well, but nothing's been decided, and nothing's been announced. And we are, from styles of games, we are trying to broaden our portfolio. But we still have Dragon Age, which is a more traditional style of BioWare game.

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

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

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

These include a competition entry, one freeware FPS with single and multiplayer gameplay modes, a stylish platformer made in under three hours, plus a new release from the developer of Passage and Gravitation.

Game Pick: 'Visit' (Ted Lauterbach, freeware)
"An exploration platformer in the style of Nifflas' Knytt Stories, made for YoYo Games' Ancient Civilization competition. Solve increasingly difficult block puzzles as you attempt to retrieve a set of eight keys to reveal the secret of the temple."

Game Pick: 'Sauerbraten' (Wouter, freeware)
"A free first person shooter with support for both single and multiplayer game types. The new CTF edition which was recently released includes engine enhancements, performance improvements and the popular 'Capture the Flag' gameplay mode."

Game Pick: 'BlockOn' (cactus, freeware)
"A platformer from the IGF finalist (Clean Asia!) created in under three hours with a limited CGA palette. The game involves drawing your own path to the exit of each level, but enemies and traps are randomly placed once the design phase ends in an attempt to prevent players from reaching their goal."

Game Pick: 'Immortality' (Jason Rohrer, freeware)
"A game by Jason Rohrer in which he ponders on the concept of immortality, created for his monthly The Escapist column - the Game Design Sketchbook. As always, the resulting discussion is anything but ordinary."

In addition, a new link round-up on the site, which is updated regularly with information about the independent scene, includes updates on in-development titles including Machinarium, Crimsonland 2, Clockwork and more.

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

Have been meaning to write this mini-post for a little while, because it pertains to games and marketing in today's climate - and something that impressed me when it comes to getting your game noticed by the press.

Basically, emailed press releases are fine, sure, and sending random promotional items like Xbox faceplates and suchlike also gets some attention, but I was rather impressed when the following package arrived for me a few weeks back:

Basically, it was a vintage stamped envelope containing a cover letter from the 'mysterious' Pini Society, whose webpage reveals that it's an obscure brotherhood comprising "archaeologists, explorers, and adventurers [who] have traveled the world seeking... relics for centuries".

Furthermore, there was a notebook filled with press cuttings and apparently handwritten text into ancient discoveries in there - plus a wood-covered USB key stamped with the Pini Society's crest. At the time, the Pini Society's homepage didn't even have information about the game it's promoting on there, so it made it additionally mysterious.

In any case, inserting the USB key revealed a casual game themed around the alleged Society, and in due course I got a press release explaining further: "I'm contacting you today because we recently sent you a package containing a new downloadable PC game called "The Pini Society: The Remarkable Truth." The game, which was developed by Arkadium and is scheduled to launch on May 27, is designed to engage, entertain and educate new audiences about The Pini Society and some of the planet's richest archaeological discoveries over the past 200 years. I hope you'll have time to check it out and spread the word."

And the game itself is now available, and handily reviewed by Gamezebo. It actually reminds me a little of elements of Pandora's Box, absolutely Alexey Pazhitnov's most under-rated game. But as can be seen from the user reviews, it hasn't completely gelled with casual gamers.

In addition, some other demographics were a bit confused by it too. For example, the UnFiction ARG forums briefly considered it as a trailhead, before realizing it was closer to straight marketing than an actual ARG.

In addition, the editor of Archaeology.about.com reviewed the game, and has an adorable semi-scholarly fret about it:

"So, in contrast to what the site currently implies, the Pini Society has no plans to seek and excavate sites, purchase sites for preservation, or publish scholarly reports. However, the manufacturer does plan on donating 1% of their total game proceeds from 2008 to already existing historical/cultural preservation efforts. I think that's admirable, and makes the $20 a bit more worth spending. I just wish they'd say so on the webpage and not confuse the Pini Society with, say, the Archaeological Conservancy."

Along similar lines, The New Yorker recently profiled archaeologists critiquing the new Indiana Jones movie, and The Pini Society - certainly redolent of Indiana vs. the Dan Brown-ian Da Vinci Code mysteriousness - is indeed, hardly true to life - it's a fun, stylized conceit.

But the whole promotion concept had style and forethought behind it, and heck, it's made me write a whole post about it. So I guess what I'm saying is - more mysterious journals, and less Xbox 360 faceplates in game marketing might make the world a more interesting place. It also might get journalists and influencers re-engaged with marketeers - something which is increasingly a problem, given the way the Web works.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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

Rogue was certainly not the first CRPG. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord probably made it out months ahead. Before then, there were interesting, relatively unknown Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games for the PLATO computer network, and which might get looked at themselves here, eventually. But Rogue's take on the basic concept adapted some aspects of Dungeons & Dragons that usually got ignored by the others. As D&D evolved, in fact, that game itself abandoned the very ideals that Rogue took to heart: discovery, player improvisation, and the amassing of tremendous piles of loot

Rogue was not a niche game at this time. It was one of the most-played games in campus timeshare computer labs, a genuine phenomenon among its audience. Rogue keeps a score list because it was designed to be played in this kind of environment, with lots of people shooting for a spot on the board; later roguelikes lost that sense of competition and community, but kept the score lists anyway. These days, unless the game is played on a public internet server like alt.org, roguelike score lists tend to fill up with the same player. Back in Rogue's heyday however, competition for the top spots could be fierce.

Soon after Rogue's original release, a number of similar games began to make the rounds of these computer labs. They were the original roguelikes, games that took inspiration from Rogue itself more than even Dungeons & Dragons. Some of these games incorporated Rogue's name in its own: XRogue, Ultra Rogue, Advanced Rogue, Super-Rogue.

History of the Early Games

This was still a couple of years before the first modern roguelikes appeared on the scene. The first of those was Moria, a game that takes the same format as Rogue but has a more varied design. (Note: Moria actually seems like it was created contemporary with the early roguelikes, but didn't get released outside its home school for a while.) Hack and Larn, with their own changes to Rogue's core play, came years afterward. We call the newer games roguelikes, but the early games really put emphasis into that word.

That is, they tended to be very difficult, with monsters that got stronger faster than the player could improve. They had a limited number of character classes, if any at all. They had relatively simple dungeons, often plundering Rogue's three-by-three grid generation algorithm. They were generally one-way trips through the dungeon until the player found a goal item. They had dungeons of practically-infinite length, with the choice of winning or going on for higher scores figuring prominently at Amulet-depth.

And they used an item identification system identical to Rogue's, where scrolls of identify were in short supply and most items had to be discovered through trial and error. They most often used Rogue's basic items, with some extras thrown in. The new monsters and items were really what made the game; they were Rogue-with-extra-toppings.

These games are sometimes called the lost roguelikes, and the reasons for that are sad ones. This was back in the day before there was such a thing as an open-source movement. Computer programmers had already begun to look at their source code with a proprietary eye. Rogue's own developers, after some public releases (a version of Rogue is still included with some distributions of bsdgames), began guarding against further source exposures, and in fact even produced commercial versions of the game for play on home computer systems; these are the Epyx Rogue releases. What is probably a pirated version of one of these (although it identifies itself as "Public Domain") is what is now known as "PC Rogue," which these days may be the most-played (and hardest) version of the game.

How Games Become Lost

It's important here to note that Rogue may exist in a playable form now only because of those bsdgames releases and commercial games. The early roguelikes were lost because they had closed source and never got a release for home computer systems. Since they were developed solely for play on then-current, now-ancient, flavors of Unix, they couldn't really be played only by folk who owned that increasingly-esoteric flavor of hardware. Even if the source were available, it turns out they were often coded carelessly, relying on bizarre programming tricks like raw memory dumps for save functionality, making it difficult to run it on anything but the system it was made for.

As the years rolled by, it became harder and harder to get together the combination of hardware needed to play them. And if you could get the hardware, you were probably going to use it for some serious purpose, removed from the influence of playful college students.

So for a long time these games were simply forgotten. The middle-era games Moria, Larn and Hack arose, each either with public sources or with versions for systems with more longevity. The later-era roguelikes Angband and Nethack sprung from those. Then internet reared up, surprising the hell out of everyone, and roguelike games began to find audiences of players who were long done with college, or had never attended. This is where ADOM and Dungeon Crawl enter the picture. All this while, the lost roguelikes receded further back in memory, remembered by few, mentioned but rarely.

For a while there, if one searched for "rogue" on the internet, after throwing out the X-Men links, and after reading through Boudewijn Waijers' excellent roguelike homepages (for a time the only real source of information on these games on the internet), one would find a few tantalizing glimpses of the lost games, usually in the form of hint guides or FAQs socked away in the dustiest corners of FTP servers, still informing a vanished audience of enthusiasts about the best ways to conquer the lost dungeons. For a while it looked as if this sad affair would continue forever. Until....

Please Contribute Today To The Save The Umber Hulk Foundation

The Roguelike Restoration Project (currently down, it seems) remembers these old games, and has for a couple of years now attempted to revive them. For all the reasons given above, this quest they have assumed is extremely difficult. Yet they have done, for the most part, an excellent job in hunting down the sources for these games, cleaning them up, and returning them and compiled binaries available to the gaming world. One of the games they've restored is Super-Rogue, a revision of the original game that, at first, doesn't seem to change the original that much at all.

Super-Rogue has the same one-way-dive, then-return quest format that Rogue has. Like Rogue, it uses nine-sector dungeons that aren't terribly challenging to explore. And the monsters get steadily more deadly as the player gets deeper, forcing him to turn to the wide array of random magic items he finds to survive.

In many ways, Super-Rogue is easier than the original game. Its food system is a lot more lenient. Characters get hungry in proportion to the weight of the stuff they're carrying compared to maximum capacity, and as a result, it's easy to build a big food surplus in the early levels when there's not that much stuff to carry. The least useful items to carry extras of, as in most roguelikes, are weapons and armor, which are also the heaviest things. Players will usually hit maximum pack volume before the weight limit, which is also worth a nice cumulative nutrition bonus.

Just before writing this column, I had finished a game of Super-Rogue that got to level 34. When I died, I had nearly a dozen food rations in inventory, and I had gotten up to 17 at one point. Even though I wore rings, which consume extra food, through most of the game, the only time I was in serious danger of starving was when I zapped a staff that turned out to be "of food absorption."

Rogue may have its roots solidly in Dungeons & Dragons, but it notably only took one statistic from that game, Strength Super-Rogue also brings in Dexterity, Wisdom and Constitution, which each seem to function in the traditional, if obscure, ways. The monsters have been adjusted to account for this; many more foes have stat draining attacks than before. Rogue, in fact, only had Giant Ants (or Rattlesnakes depending on the version), poison potions and poison dart traps to drain Strength, but it seems like half the monsters in Super-Rogue can inflict stat damage. The potion of restore strength from Rogue makes its return as a magic item. Although its name is unchanged, it also seems to restore the other stats. And finally, although it takes a great while to do it, it seems that stats regenerate naturally over time.

The Vrock's In The Details

But mostly this is Rogue with a longer dungeon (the Amulet was on level 26 in Rogue), and with new monsters and items. Some highlights:

• It is the word that makes all Nethack players cringe in fear. I fought exactly one cockatrice during the long game. Whether they have an instant-stone attack as in Hack, or are just another monster, I was unable to determine. Thank god.
• Other monsters don't have some abilities one might presume given the game's origins in D&D. Xorns cannot travel through walls, and Vampires don't seem to drain anything. Vampires, however, are instantly killed by lit spaces, which they won't enter willingly. This makes wands and scrolls of light extremely helpful deep in the dungeon. You even get experience for vampires that die because of light, whether they're visible to you or not.
• The first difficult enemy in the dungeon is the imp, who can sometimes slow the player temporarily on a successful hit.
• Wands of curing heal you, and also cure bad conditions. They are almost essential equipment when Umber Hulks start showing up with their dreaded confusion gaze.
• Rings of speed carry a plus, and that plus is the number of extra turns you get per round. Were this unchecked, it would certainly make it among the most powerful items in any roguelike. However they increase hunger a bit, and after many turns their plusses drain down to zero. If a +0 ring of speed is put on (not if it drains down to +0 from use), it seems that it becomes cursed.
• One type of scroll teleports the player back to level 1 of the dungeon; this seems like a good thing. Another scroll "banishes you to the deeper regions," which sent me down to level 15 when the deepest I had seen was 7. I died soon after. The moral: scrolls can be a lot more treacherous here than in Rogue.
• Rings of illumination permanently light up rooms as you enter them. A lot of the terror of the later levels of Rogue came from not being able to see more than one space in any direction. This makes the game seem a lot more fair, all by itself. (And yes, Vampires hate this item.)

Finally, if you should decide to play this game (I do recommend it), here are a few other things that might help:

• The Z command initiates a general, omni-directional zap of a wand. To direct it in a specific direction, use the P key. I also feel I should warn you that, unlike some other games they've ported, the Roguelike Restoration Project's edition of this game does not support keypad controls. You're stuck with the vi arrangement (hjkl & yubn) for this one.
  
• You begin the game with a random weapon and armor here. My level 34 run got so far, in part, because I began it with +2 plate mail. Nothing quite like starting out with the game's best armor!
  
• Some later levels take the form of full-screen mazes. Expert 'hackers might quake at the mention of this, as it is widely regarded that Nethack's play gets annoying in the second half of the dungeon, where most levels are mazes, but they only show up once in a while in Super-Rogue.
  
• A attraction new to the dungeon, and largely ignored by later roguelikes, is the magic pools that occasionally crop up, about one per eight-or-so dungeon levels. Items can be dipped into them with Shift-D, which seems to increase the plusses on weapons. A given pool can only be dipped into once.
  
• This may be the first roguelike game in which monsters actually may decide to run away if wounded in battle. Unlike in some games, here this is actually an effective tactic for them, and they usually resume the attack only if cornered or after they've had time to heal.
  
• There is now the occasional shop in the dungeon, represented by a caret. While it may seem at first like a prototype of Nethack's shops (it's a room with stuff on the floor), there seems to be no way to steal. You aren't told what items are before buying them, but upon purchase they are fully identified. Shops only remain open long enough to make a few purchases, and upon leaving the level is regenerated.
  
• Healing potions grant extra maximum HP as in Rogue, but you don't have to have maximum HP to take advantage of them. They are awarded whenever the potions are drunk.
  
• Sometimes multiple items, especially potions, are found in one "bundle," another presaging of a later feature.
  
• As in Hack and some other modern roguelikes, player possessions are identified at the end of the game.
  
• Finally.... This probably a bug, although it might be one in the RRP's implementation of the game more than the original. The player gets a healing turn every time any key is pressed. Even illegal keys that don't allow the monsters to get a turn. This means, by pressing some unused key over and over, players can get all their hit points back without danger. I did not take advantage of this in my 34-level game; if I had, I suspect I could have won without trouble.

  Playing Super-Rogue Today

  I would ordinarily include a link to the download page of the Roguelike Restoration Project, but they seem to be down at the moment. So I am including my own link to the Super-Rogue binaries, here.
  Download file(~158k)

  Unlike some other of the RRP's products, Super-Rogue on Windows still requires the Unix emulation layer Cygwin to play; make sure to get the Curses libraries in your installation. After installing Cygwin, go under (install drive):\cygwin\home\(your account name) and unzip the files there. You should then be able to more easily find them from Cygwin's bash prompt.

  As you can probably tell from the screenshots, this is a seriously old-style roguelike. It's all ASCII, it uses no extended characters in its graphics, and it doesn't use color or character attributes. It only supports vi-style keys for movement. Still, from playing it over the past couple of weeks, it seems clear to me that there is more game here than its age might imply. Super-Rogue deserves recognition in the lineage of roguelike gaming. The Roguelike Restoration Project has done us all a great service in making it, and the other lost roguelikes, playable in the 21st century.

  ---

  Extra fun for those who have read this far: a USENET post from 1996 in which the creator of Moria talks about writing it and the early history of his game.

  Next time out, in preparation for the release of its sequel, we'll be covering Success/Ninja Studio/Atlus' DS roguelike Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja. You can bet that I'll be spending most of the intervening time scrounging for screenshots.
  

  Posted by John Harris at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Bonjour, my friends, and welcome to another fun-filled set of GameSetWatch links - headed by the news that the awesome Game Center CX series has an English-language licensor showing it at the New York Asian Film Festival. Please, obscure cable channel, pick this up?

Also wandering around in here - a cute Zangief doll (pictured), the world of the game intern, the Rock Band leaderboards analyzed, what Japanese developers tend to say, an unlove letter to Data Design, and lots more.

Scissors, paper, shark:

insert credit :: View topic - Videogames On The Big Screen At The New York Asian Film Fest
An English-subtitled version of Game Center CX, plus the Oneechambara movie, both being covered for GSW soon by our own Matt Hawkins, yay.

chewing pixels » Dodge, Block, Counter: Interviewing the Japanese
'Many Japanese staff display a politician-esque ability for question-dodging.' Indeed!

Spacetime Studios: 'How to Intern at a Game Development Studio'
'Being an intern in the gaming industry isn’t what many people think.'

Terra Nova: A New Virtual World Winter?
'Are we already seeing the early sign of a Virtual Worlds downturn that may lead to a "winter" as severe as the one in the period 2000-2003?' Probably not, depends on your definition of virtual worlds, mind you.

Terrible Video Games And Other Stuff » Blog Archive » Gaming’s Worst - Data Design Games
Including a letter to Data Design about their 'awesome' Wii titles.

The Triforce » Blog Archives » Me playing Guitar Hero in front of 30,000* people at the Isle of Wight Festival
Magic, or tragic, trend-wise? I think it's cool, but it'd be cooler if it was Rock Band, I'm such a snob.

VGChartz.com | X-Box Live Arcade Charts for 6/14/08 - Top 135 (C3 ~11.6k, F2 ~1.0k)
'I don't have solid numbers for debuts of other, early XBLA titles, but Frogger 2 has to rank somewhere near the worst ever debut.'

videogaming247 » Blog Archive » The 10 most influential games journalists in Britain today
Decent list of competents, U.S. list coming soon, too!

'The Red Cyclone' at The Way Things Are
Very adorable homemade Zangief Munny-style doll, yay.

We Can Fix That with Data / Rock Band DLC Stats
'In addition to your friends’ scores, Rock Band song leaderboards provide some interesting business data.' Good extrapolation here.

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

[Our excellent IndieGames.com: The Weblog editor Tim W. was kind enough to conduct this interview with Gish alumnus Edmund McMillen, so we're reprinting it here, since Edmund is one of the PC indie game scene's most interesting alternative thinkers, we delightedly claim.]

Hi Edmund, how about we begin with a little introduction of yourself?

I'm Edmund McMillen, co-creator of Gish, Triachnid, Coil and a few other indie titles.

Are you working on anything else at the moment besides Gish 2?

I'm currently working on Gish 2, Triachnid 2, a game called Grey Matter with Tommy Refenes (Goo!) and a few other Flash games that are in slight limbo.

Can you explain to us what Grey Matter is about?

Sure thing, Grey Matter is basically a Robotron shooter, but the player doesn't shoot. The game is mouse-controlled and takes place inside someone's brain. It was something small me and Tommy jumped into a little while back just so we could have something we worked on together.

How much of Grey Matter is already done?

Grey Matter is pretty far along, I'd say the only thing holding it back is two (or possibly three) bugs. Could be done soon, could be done later.

Which project will you be releasing next? Is there a date attached to it?

I think Triachnid 2 will come out in a month or so. Possibly before the end of June. We hope to make it more user-friendly this time. :)

Gish and Chronic Logic

Would you consider released a discounted Bonus Maxi Combo Pak combining the joys of both Gish 2 and its predecessor?

Sure. I'd love to remake Gish 1 with the new engine (for Gish 2) and put it out just to see how it plays with Gish's new body. I might make that a personal project of mine after Gish 2 is done.

Why did you elect to make a sequel, rather than applying the same imagination to a new concept? Is it because you've run out of ideas, or because you like money?

I think there was a lot Alex and I wanted to do with Gish 1 that we couldn't do back then. And we have grown a lot. There's just so much more I want to do with Gish 2, and I've had a lot of the ideas mapped out from when Gish 1 was still in development.

Honestly we had originally started to design a game called The Book of Knots, it had a biped as the main creature you control. At that time we didn't have all the rights to Gish due to the break up of Chronic Logic, and it took a few years to get those rights back. Once we got them back I think we were both inspired to work on Gish again, so The Book of Knots kinda turned into Gish 2.

But also I'm sure knowing that Gish 1 was still a staple indie game title, it helps attract some more attention when we do finally release it. But Gish 2 will be a much different game then Gish 1.

What's up with your relationship with Chronic Logic?

I personally was never a part of Chronic Logic. I came on as a freelance artist and pitched the basic idea of Gish to Alex after working with them for a few months. Alex took the idea of a sprite-based blob and turned it into a physical one, hence Gish was born.

Alex left Chronic Logic after Gish. I left too, but I wasn't really ever a part of the team to begin with. Josiah now runs the Chronic Logic website, while Alex and I started Cryptic Sea. It took a while to get one-third of the rights to Gish back, but we finally did. We are on speaking terms with Josiah, and we still have a business relationship with him.

Questions

Has Reggie called you back yet? (in reference to the video where Edmund records himself attempting to contact the Reggienator)

Heh, a few weeks after that video went up we got a call from Nintendo. It wasn't Reggie but it was someone high up in the ranks there who wanted to talk about WiiWare, and we are still talking to him. That's about all I can say.

Our goal is to get on all consoles, and we would love to launch on Steam... I can say we are currently talking to them all, but won't have any info till we have Gish 2 further in development.

Are there any other games out there that you look at and think 'I wish I'd made that. I totally could have made that'?

Hmm.. probably Pokemon. But I wish I made Katamari. I love that idea.

Any recent indie game favorites?

Lemme think. So many games coming out now it's hard to remember them all.

I asked Raigan and Mare the same question, and they answered N.

Haah, I'd say N as well. Me and Alex played the hell out of it.

How did the portrait you did for Raigan and Mare happened?

I talked to them a lot at GDC. I drew a lot of non-game stuff then, and I thought I'd do one of them. I did one for the cover of a Matmos album, and I've also drawn the Behemoth team. They sometimes use those pics when they do interviews. But I mostly draw myself and my wife. I'm just that cool.

If Derek Yu is the George Lucas of indie game creators, what is Edmund?

I'd hate to say it but I guess I'd be more the Tim Burton of them. My work tends to be darker themed.. so I guess that fits.

Are you secretly Derek Yu?

I could be, though there are pics of us together. I feel like if I was Asian I'd look just like him. Well, that would be my goal if I was Asian - to look like Derek Yu.

If I was black I'd also try to look like Derek Yu, but that's a whole other deal...

Projects

How do you keep track of all your projects, involvements and websites?

I tried to put everything together on my old website, thisisacryforhelp.com. Everything is in .exe form though.

How do you come up with names for your games?

Names, huh.. I dunno. I never thought my games had weird names. I guess the creatures tend to have strange names. I usually just throw out words that sound like how the creature would look.

I mean that's why Gish is called Gish. Gish sounds like how I'd imagine him sounding and looking.. all gishy.

Out of everything you've released (personally or as a team), which is your favorite work?

I love Gish, but my personal fave is Coil. It means a lot to me personally and I put a lot of heart and thought into every aspect of the game.

Can you tell us the actual story of Coil?

No. The meaning is different for everyone, and I'm not going to ruin someone's personal experience by telling them that they are wrong. The game is about life and death. Everything else is left up to your own interpretation.

What's the best or most memorable feedback you've received for any of your works?

Probably "you suck, I wish you were dead". I got a lot of that back in the day. It was actually a big motivator.

Any positive ones?

Yeah. The most recent comment I got was from someone who said that Coil brought them to tears and helped them deal with the idea of death a bit more.

Can you tell us a little about the upcoming mobile version of Gish?

Ah, I didn't think many knew about that...

Might as well plug it. If I could remember everything you did, I'd ask you to plug all of them even.

Basically a programer e-mailed Alex with a prototype of Gish on the cell phone. He's a big Gish fan, and it looked really good so we basically gave him the ok to make his own version of Gish for phones. Here's the trailer.

I haven't played it yet but the game looks good, I think he did a great job. It's also fun to see my art remade in pixel form. I'm a big fan of other artists redrawing my stuff in their own style.

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Gish 2

What's the progress status of Gish 2? Any updates on a scheduled release date that you're aiming for?

The goal is to get it done by the end of the year. We are still semi part-time on it now and working out the core ideas and things we want to play around with in-game.

We had originally gotten pretty far with the IGF build, but totally tossed it because the both of us felt it wasn't offering anything new. We want to do something totally fresh with Gish when it comes to theme and gameplay so we needed Gish himself to feel fresh and new to us.

We had talked about splitting him in two a while back and Alex came up with the particle body idea. We recently put up a test video of the progress of that design. So far it's looking perfect for what we want to do. Florian and I have been working on it for about a month. But as far as development goes, we are still working in all the core gameplay stuff, we have a ways to go.

Can you briefly explain the new features to be found in Gish 2?

For starters he's made of particles now, so he can be split up and get bigger or smaller. The game features a living world that is very, very large compared to Gish 1, and will contain more than five or more large dungeons with big bosses.

There will be day and night cycles, physics-based water, tons of new cool physics neatos, tons of physical cel-shaded bad guys, lots of items that will affect gameplay, collectible stuff, hidden stuff, different endings and all that. Good stuff, that's a big one. Good stuff will be found in Gish 2!

I kept thinking that you must have had at least half of these features done if you're shooting for an end-2008 release date for Gish 2..

You would be thinking wrong!

Will you be releasing any new trailers soon?

We are currently working on outdoor lighting and day night cycles, so our next trailer will show that. It will be more of a graphics test.

How large is Gish 2 compared to the first one?

The maps are about 64 times larger than Gish 1 maps, but I'm not going to be taking up all that space. It will be a lot bigger than Gish 1.

Which games influenced you most during the development of Gish and Gish 2?

With Gish one we played a ton of old school games - Mario, Pitfall!, Pac-Man. But I'd say mostly Mario. Gish 2 would be Zelda 1, Shadow of the Colossus and Ultima IV.

How have you improved the formula established in Gish 1?

Gish 1 was a play on Mario. The level progression and all that was totally Mario. Even the story was a big homage to Mario.

Gish 2 will play out more like Zelda 1. There is a focus on exploration, a living world to explore. You have a basic goal, but your goals might change depending on how you play and what you find. It will feel a lot more open-ended than Gish, and there will be a lot to discover for yourself. I am trying to capture the magic that a lot of games back in the day seemed to have.

Honestly though.. we are making Gish 2 on our own terms, and we are going to finish most of the game before we take it to consoles so they don't try to change anything big. The story in Gish is pretty dark and we would really like to do it our way before we let others get their hands on it. It's a long road we have ahead of us, but we finished Gish 1 in six months altogether.

How much will the game retail for? And is online multiplayer a possibility?

It will be $20 for the Windows XP and Vista versions. Online multiplayer is a maybe.

Will there be a demo for Gish 2? How about a Linux port?

Yes, there will be a demo and a Linux port.

What's the best way to help fund the development of Gish 2 right now?

Send us cash. hell, I dunno.. get me some freelance work. :)

I'd imagine that buying every item in the Cryptic Sea catalogue would help..

Yeah, give Blast Miner another chance.. it's good now I swear. We have like 50+ new levels and even new objects. The game is only 10 bucks too!

Also, send money to souldescen@aol.com via paypal! If you can add that, I'm sure I'll get mad cash. Asking for paypal donations always works, that's why we are all so pimped out.

high res version

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

['Chewing Pixels' is a regular GameSetWatch column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin. This latest instalment deals with Nintendo's marketing of the 'Touch Generations' series as something beyond games.]

“In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. Find the fun and… snap: the job’s a game! And every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake. A lark! A spree! It’s very clear to see: that a…spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the medicine go dowwwn, medicine go down”

Had Mary Poppins pursued a career in game design, rather than choosing to nanny rich kids in Kensington, she’d probably be working for Nintendo right now. Her assertion that every real life task contains an ingredient of fun that, if identified and emphasized, can turn a chore into a game mightn’t be original, but never before has it been so in vogue with game developers.

Nintendo’s ‘Touch Generations’ family of titles has helped define a new gaming market space: games that mimic those real life activities most people go out of their way to avoid. Mental arithmetic, dog walking, eyesight testing, exercise and aerobics all repackaged and re-branded by Nintendo as gaming’s brave new future.

So effective has the company’s work been in mining entertainment from the mundane that their spoonful of pixel sugar could probably make a game out of pulling pubic hair from a bath plug. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the premise of WarioWare.

Games have always mimicked real life activities; the imitation of extraordinary realities is as much the medium’s forte as the offer of escapism. Games allow players to drive a Ferrari around Nuremberg at breakneck speed, to snowboard down Mount Everest in a fearsome blizzard, to pilot an F-16 fighter jet meters above the pacific wash and to take to the war-torn streets of Basra as a grizzled marine.

They offer an interactive window into life experiences that are out of reach to most; experiences that, in real life, require years of hard work, concentrated training, extreme danger or millions of dollars investment.

There are even connections between seemingly abstract videogames and real life pursuits. Tetris requires players to put everything in its right place, the same compulsion felt by so many an obsessive-compulsive tidy-upper.

Likewise, Every Extend Extra is little more than score attack suicide bombing. From waiting tables in Diner Dash to managing sewerage systems in Sim City, games have always understood that what’s tedious in this reality can become fascinating when framed as a game.

But in all of these examples there has been an implicit understanding that the player is entering into a fantasy. Call of Duty 4 or Gran Turismo might aim for acute realism but they are never painted as anything more than make believe. You won’t become a better soldier or a faster driver through playing them.

By contrast, Nintendo’s recent thrusts towards a new ‘casual’ audience have seen the abstraction between the real and the virtual deliberately blurred. When purchasing Wii Fit, did consumers believe they were buying a video game about fitness or a genuine solution to a real weight problem?

When Nintendo took out Brain Training advertisements in Saga magazine, did the over-65 readership think this was a just slightly more convenient way to complete Sudokus or a legitimate device for staving off Alzheimer’s? The lines between game and tool have been scrubbed out and nobody has bothered to ask if the distinctions even mattered…

The distinctions mattered. Where many of Nintendo’s recent Touch Generations titles are concerned, the selling point is no longer entertainment but rather the vagaries of pseudoscience. Dr Kawashima (Brain Training) and Dr Kageyama (Maths Training) are figures that act as endorsements from the scientific community of each product, shifting Nintendo’s output from entertainment to something closer to medicine. But the science behind the sell is at best misleading, at worse, televangelical in its deceit.

For example, Big Brain Academy and Brain Training compute their players’ brain ‘age’ not through some sort of marvelous, inscrutable new video game-science. Rather, they calculate how fast the player is at finishing a number of simple tasks. The faster the player completes these tests, the younger their brain age is recorded as being. ‘This activity stimulates the prefrontal cortex’ enthuses the disembodied head of Dr Kawashima, the not-so-subtext being that, if you play his game daily, fatigued synapses will snap back to life and your mind will regain lost youth.

But, of course, the player’s ‘brain age’ reading is improved through nothing more than raw repetition. As you learn the tests and come to understand their formula, so you improve at those specific tasks, so your time to completion lessens, so your ‘Brain Age’ reduces.

It's a simple re-skin of video gaming’s first principles. It’s a ten-year-old kid playing and replaying the first level in Super Mario Bros until he reaches the conclusion through raw practice and muscle memory. It’s age-old Nintendo dressed up as something shiny and new, sold not on the premise of something that’s fun but on the basis that it’s something to heal and restore.

Brain Training can be fun, of course, but that’s not why they come. No, they come for the snake oil, the miracle cure, and end up with a shallow video game.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the joint Namco and Nintendo venture, Flash Focus: Vision Training, a game that implies it will help correct poor eyesight but which mainly consists of a series of reaction tests, those self-same mechanics videogames have employed since the dawn of their existence.

Or Face Training, a game built upon science so contentious (that is, the idea that daily facial exercises can help reduce the effects of aging) it’s yet to be announced for release anywhere outside of Japan, where ‘facening’ is a current fad.

So too with Wii Fit, a game which monitors players’ exercises with simple readouts and charts designed to inspire repeat play. Except, the overbearing presentation, the reams of menu screens and tortuous introductions to each workout mean that less than half the time spent on the balance board is time actually spent exercising. Viewed cynically, Wii Fit is a pair of expensive, Apple-esque scales that very effectively slow down your rate of exercise.

The need to frame all that is good and enjoyable about video games in a manner that is appealing and acceptable to a wider, older mainstream audience is understandable, particularly for a company who has stepped out of the hardware pursuit of graphical realism. It’s easy to argue that the Touch Generations brand is little more than a palatable re-skin of video game basics. But the language that Nintendo has chosen to sell these games is pernicious.

It might be effective marketing to play upon the modern Western human’s insecurities, selling games to people who think they’re too fat, too ugly or too stupid, but it’s a new emphasis that runs almost contrary to their previous focus. Besides, if games are now medicine shouldn’t they be subject to different kind of testing and peer group study than that offered by GameSpot and IGN?

In all of this it’s important to remember that video games are still video games. The compulsion an overweight housewife feels to improve their sit-up score in Wii Fit is the same compulsion a shmup fanatic tastes when wanting to improve his Ikaruga high score.

The demands Flash Focus: Vision Training makes of its player are similar to those required by Counter-Strike: all that’s changed is the metaphor. New metaphors are fine. That’s how we discover new fields of creativity and interest. And sometimes the new metaphors bring with them new purposes.

Perhaps, in the future, games will no longer be principally tools for fun but instead a means to a different end: weight loss, better eyesight, attractiveness or drumming. But if that’s the case, critics and consumers need a whole new set of language and approaches to understand what’s being encountered, because the whole game just changed.

Posted by Simon Parkin at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Aha, time for a midweek round-up of some of the original stories we've been posting on big sister site Gamasutra, as well as other related sites such as Game Career Guide, presided over by the delightful profile of Richard Jacques (left!)

Also in here somewhere - some in-depth analysis of release rates on PSN, XBLA, and WiiWare/VC, plus the renaming/re-coverillustrating of Katamari Damacy, chats to folks from Electronic Arts and D3 (oo, Coraline!), and much more.

Here we go:

Staying In Tune: Richard Jacques On Game Music's Past, Present, And Future
"Richard Jacques is a musical icon to Sega die-hards, thanks to his work on titles like Sonic R - and in a wide-ranging chat, the composer (The Club, Mass Effect) discusses the state of game music in 2008."

Three Services, Three Stores: Analyzing XBLA, PSN and Wii Shop Channel
"Has there really been a slowdown in digital distribution for the major game consoles? In this in-depth analysis covering WiiWare, PSN, and Xbox Live Arcade, Gamasutra crunches the numbers to discover some surprising trends - graphs galore within."

In-Depth: Electronic Arts' Quigley On The State Of EA Games
"EA Games is the key 'core gamer' division for Electronic Arts, and marketing chief Mike Quigley sat down with Gamasutra to discuss his division's charter, EA's modular structure, and how the BioWare/Pandemic acquisition will keep EA from "getting our ass kicked in RPG and action"."

Sony's Danks Details PlayStation-edu Initiative
"Sony recently announced the PlayStation-edu initiative, helping students train using PS2 and PSP hardware, and Gamasutra was at the Game Education Summit to hear the company's Mark Danks explain the program fully - details within."

GCG's Game Design Challenge Results: 'Rename Katamari'
"Two weeks ago, Gamasutra's sister site GameCareerGuide.com posed this challenge to readers: rename classic Keita Takahashi-designed roll-em-up Katamari Damacy with an English language title. And the results are in!"

Sponsored Feature: Common Performance Issues in Game Programming
"In this technical article, part of Microsoft's XNA-related Gamasutra microsite, XNA Developer Connection staffer and Interplay co-founder Becky Heineman gives tips on avoiding the 'Load-Hit-Store' performance-killer when making games."

Q&A: D3 Talks New Coraline, Shaun The Sheep Deals, Strategy
"Japanese-headquartered publisher D3 has revealed plans to publish games based on Henry Selick's upcoming animated film of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, plus Aardman's Shaun the Sheep - and Gamasutra speaks with U.S. CEO Yoji Takenaka about the deal and his company's Western strategy."

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

[So what is Warren Spector up to now, hmm? Given his tone in this Game Education Summit lecture, I think Quartermann's recent rumor that he's tackling a Mickey Mouse-starring game might not be off base. We'll see! Also, thanks to Stephen Jacobs for notes and the Kumar-Remo trifecta for knocking this piece into shape.]

How can game educators prepare their students for a place in the ever-changing games industry?

In this keynote from the Game Education Summit, held in Dallas last week, Junction Point’s Warren Spector and Disney Interactive’s Mark Meyers took a look at the issues inherent in the game biz, with Spector admitting he’s "so tired of making games about guys in black leather carrying guns."

"I graduated with electrical and biomedical engineering and I never thought I’d be in the game industry," opened Mark Meyers, now Vice President of Internal Studios at Disney Interactive. "Up until five years ago most people got into the game industry by accident!"

Meyers, who started out as an engineer before moving into design and then production, touched on changes to quality of life and demographics. "Working in game development is still a lot of hours, but it was at least eighty hours a week when I started," he said.

"Back in the day only 20% of the team members had kids and now it's more like 50%, and the whole industry is getting older, having kids, and needing those nights and weekends. We need good programs to back fill our organizations because we’re no longer our own demographic."

"Working in this industry everyone’s had their own disaster, and Sony was mine," he laughed. "EA was getting all the sports licensing, and everything kind of collapsed."

He related an anecdote speaking to team culture: "We were in this hacienda in San Diego, a crappy building where we lost power all the time, but everyone loved it. We moved to a new building with all the power we needed and everyone hated it and wanted to go back to the hacienda!"

"It's amazing what a simple thing like a move to a different building can change a studio, and I ended up moving to Disney. Disney is great because they understand a corporate culture and allow teams to keep their studio cultures even though they've been acquired."

Warren Spector, now creative director at the Disney-owned Junction Point studios, agreed. "We had a similar experience at Ion Storm when we made Deus Ex," he said. "We had a similar old rickety building we loved. We also moved to a new building which must have had the world's worst feng shui, and the culture fell apart."

"The culture is critical. I think it's even culture and team over talent at this point in my career. Find a home in a place that’s simpatico with you and make the games you like."

Disney Interactive

Continued Spector, "Building a game is as complex as making as a Hollywood movie. Do we have the right people and how do we harness creativity without crushing it? We are in a business that is both software engineer and entertainment, and we have to balance it. It used to be that you could trade off gameplay for graphics, but you can’t do that anymore."

As he has often done in the past, Spector commented on his frustration with some of the dominant tropes of video games. "I love working with Disney because I'm so tired of making games about guys in black leather carrying guns. I don’t want to make those any more," he said.

"Game costs are going to be $35-40 million, even $100 million, and the expectations are huge. You have to differentiate yourselves. One-hundred hour games are on the way out… How many of you have finished GTA? Two percent, probably. If we're spending $100 million on a game, we want you to see the last level!"

Even on the other end of the economic scale, Spector did not paint a rosy picture. "I heard people say that casual games are where to go as an indie, but you still need to differentiate yourself because that’s a really crowded field," he pointed out. "If you don’t make it on the front page you don’t get your game seen."

Shit Shots and Specialists

Meyers noted that new forms of distribution are bringing new development attitudes, which in turn bring new demands for educators. "The next console cycle may be mostly home distribution - downloadables and episodic games may be much more of the market and it means that on-line gaming and episodic content may be what you need to be teaching," he said.

"We also hear more and more about increased need for storytelling and it's almost a requirements at this point. It’s a changing dynamic. In the last year demand is going up and up."

Spector chimed in. "That’s a sea change," he said. "A couple years ago - I won’t say the name or the company - they told me, 'Warren, you are not allowed to say the word story.' What we need is students who are innovative creative thinkers who want to be part of teams that push their limit."

He stressed the importance of team members who can bring creativity to any corner of a project. "I go to Pixar a lot and they talk a lot about guys who get 'shit shots' - the scene of Remy walking across the room or something," he recalled.

"The people who say 'I don’t want to do that shit shot' last three weeks. The people who stay are the ones who can take that on and make it special. That’s what we need - people who are going to make the boring parts special. People who push boundaries - and there’s maybe 20 guys in the world who do it now."

Meyers cautioned against narrow education. "We’re getting a lot of specialists -- 'I program shaders, that’s all I do.' We don’t want that," he argued. "There are some publishers who will tell you that those specialists are what they want, but -"

"If you’re going to be a specialist, you'd better be the best in the world," quipped Spector.

How Can Educators Help Students Meet Developers' Needs?

Meyers spoke on ever-increasing development team sizes. "In the 80s, a nine-man team was standard. PS2 development was huge, with forty man teams. PS3 and 360 - in our organization, the team size is 65-90, plus a couple million dollars in outsourcing. At points in time we can have 150 people working on a title," he said.

"Before, organization was flat: one leader who communicated with everyone. In the PS2 days, lead programmers and lead artists who've never managed anyone in their life had to lead others, and they didn’t know how to have those tough conversations. Disney has a class to teach managers to have those conversations."

He called for more leadership training in development education. "Team sizes with leaders and managers have doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and needs are not being met today," Meyers went on.

"Most game developers have not had management and leadership training. For example, a lot of leaders and managers don’t understand the difference and impact between talking to people in front of other people and taking them aside. If I came to Warren and said something like that I wanted a decreased costs, compressed time frame straight away? Warren'd jump ship!"

"Processes, communication, leadership, culture, vision and team fit are all vital," he emphasized. "We have to reassess what we’re doing and what we’re tasking people with weekly."

Meyers also touched on changes to the overall development timeline, which seems pre-production take a more important role than it traditionally has had, and was sure to point out the importance of team communication.

"There’s always one guy who says 'We’re going to do it my way,'" said Meyers, who admitted as a programmer that his programmers in particular can be poor communicators. "We need educators to really hone in on people skills and styles. They still should speak their minds, but not step over the bounds. Leadership and group dynamics are tough. In the industry the chances of getting good leadership mentors are really tough."

Spector agreed. "Give students 'touchy feely' skills," he said. "How to manage creativity without killing it. Compassion, tough conversations, understanding their audience, ability to lead, how to be a part of a larger group and understanding dependencies. Don’t wait to do this at the end of the project. Do evaluations at the end of each milestone, and part of that is teamwork."

Development Education Must Adapt

Spector then laid out an overarching point about the amorphous nature of game development. "Vocational training doesn’t meet our needs," he argued. "Platforms are always changing, technology moves faster than we train, focus on concepts instead of tools. At Pixar they say you can be a world expert on one film and useless on a second."

He noted the multidisciplinary nature of game design: "Your people need to love chaos, love change. I’ve had to know how WWII planes fly, how medieval castles work. If you haven’t studied economics, you haven’t studied game design. Psychology, game design are all about reward cycles. We need people who can tell us why they love the games they do. If you can just say, 'It was fun,' you’re not getting the job. You need critical and analytical skills."

"We need people who can see what comes next," concluded Spector. "For every position I have, I get to pick and choose the best. If all you have to show me is class projects and grades, I won’t even see you. If I tell you you probably won’t get a job in the industry and that scares you, get out now. That should make you push harder!"

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[GameSetWatch's sister programming mag/website Dr Dobb's Journal has been running the Dr. Dobb's Challenge game competition in association with Microsoft Visual Studio, with $10,000 in prizes for modding a Windows and Windows Mobile sample game. Here, contest organizer Mathew Kumar is kind enough to outline the winners - go check em out!]

It's been an intense few days of judging and we'd like to congratulate all of the entrants for their remarkable work in modding Dr. Dobbs Challenge into a variety of striking and very different games!

We'll be making our critic's choice of all the entrants available for download on the Dobbs Challenge website starting tomorrow, but we'd like to first announce the winners of the inaugural Dobbs Challenge, selected by our panel of judges.

Best One Button Game
Wobble Bob
(Lukasz Lesicki)

The one button category was a challenging category that entrants had to "give their all" to in the hope of winning, and although there were many amazing entries, Lukasz Lesicki's Wobble Bob came out of nowhere to win it by virtue of its unique game design. Though our judges are au fait with many different kinds of one-button game, they had never played one with a character who "wobbled" backwards and forwards allowing movement in two directions with a subtle, timing-based gameplay.

In addition, both graphics and level design offered a unified pleasant feel, and as a result Lukasz Lesicki walks away with the $1,000 prize. [Download Now!]

Best Total Conversion
Ninja Run
(Giuseppe Navarria, Rosario Milone)

Like all of the categories Best Total Conversion was hotly contested, but in the end our judges had to select Giuseppe Navarria's Ninja Run because it simply astounded them with the extent it was different from the original Dr. Dobbs Challenge. Turning a 2D single screen platformer into a cel-shaded 3D platform game (with working physics) even with the help of NVIDIA PhysX was just so unexpected that it was the winner even in the face of more complete entrants. If there was criticism to be made it would be that while the technology is there the "game" isn't complete.

As a result, many of our judges requested that we only give them the $1,000 prize on the condition that they continue to develop the title -- as they want to play it! [Download Now!]

Best Game Starring Dr Dobbs And The Defy All Challenges Crew
Dr. Dobbs Challenge Remix
(Georg Rottensteiner)

In stark contrast to the previous category, what won this category for Georg Rottensteiner was how complete he made his title. A full scrolling 2D platformer with a new setting, story and design, Georg Rottensteiner's version of Dr. Dobbs Challenge sends Dr. Dobbs inside a computer to clear out a bug infestation, in a challenging (and fun!) adventure.

Our judges were impressed with the gameplay and level design (even if they felt one hit kills on Dr. Dobbs was a little harsh) and Georg Rottensteiner receives a $1,000 prize. [Download Now!]

Best Windows Mobile Game
Dr. Dobbs Challenge Mobile
(Daniel Morillo)

Many entrants overlooked the Mobile Game category perhaps because of a perceived difficulty in developing for the hardware, but it was to Daniel Morillo's benefit that he decided to take on the challenge, as he takes home the $2,000 prize!

Our judges were surprised and delighted with Daniel Morillo's entry, as an isometric puzzle game with 3D blocks to manipulate and clever use of existing assets to create a very playable game well worth the download if you've got a Windows Mobile device (or the ability to emulate one.) [Download Now!]

Best Windows Game
Mr. Spiff's Revenge
(POW Studios)

The big prize, with $4,000 on offer, this was one of the most difficult to judge. But in the end our judges had to go for Mr. Spiff's Revenge on the basis that not only is it a clever modification of the Dr. Dobbs Challenge source, it also innovates in ways that we never expected!

Though a 2D platformer similar to the original title, the entire game is played using mouse gestures -- even movement of the titular skeleton Mr. Spiff – and while our judges took a while to get comfortable with the controls, they particularly enjoyed the gestures used to attack enemies and perform the huge, screen clearing "smart bomb" attack!

Mr. Spiff's Revenge also featured excellent new graphics that only added to the immersion. Congratulations to POW studios, which consists of Betson Thomas, Justin Varghese and Chris Lau. [Download Now!]

Congratulations again to all of our entrants and winners for taking part in the contest.

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

['Design Lesson 101' is a regular column by Raven game designer Manveer Heir. The challenge is to play a game from start to completion - and learn something about game design in the process. This week we take a look at Ready at Dawn's PSP prequel, God of War: Chains of Olympus]

The God of War series is known for its massive scale and fast paced, adrenaline fueled combat. When Sony announced a version of the series would be coming out for the PSP, many fans were worried. Luckily, the developer Ready at Dawn has done a great job of keeping all the core elements of the God of War series intact, and the series' antihero Kratos is back once again.

One of the core elements of the series has been the interactive events, where the player engages in scripted sequences by pressing buttons on the controller when prompted. Some of these sequences rely on timing (quick-time events), where one false move will force you to start over or die.

Other sequences allow you to interact at your own pace. For example, one sequence has the player make clockwise circles with the analog stick in order to pull down a statue and progress. You do not have to do this immediately, but you won't progress forward until you do so.

It seems that these events are either loved or loathed by most people. While they allow for scripted, specific events to occur within the game, the interactivity is limited to binary input (you either hit the button or you didn't). There is also the issue of the button to press appearing on the screen, something that can pull the player out of a state of sensual immersion. Even so, these events are capable of still drawing the player deeper into the narrative, thereby becoming effective plot devices.

At this point, I must mention that the remainder of this column contains a major plot spoiler for the game. Please do not continue reading if you would get upset at having major parts of the story revealed.

Design Lesson: Using interactive events at the climax of the game allows God of War: Chains of Olympus to create a closer, more emotional bond between the player and Kratos.

The set-up of the situation is rather simple, yet effective. In the first game it is revealed that Kratos unwillingly kills his own family. His entire life is spent trying to forget that atrocity. In this prequel to the first game, Kratos' family is already dead. As Kratos nears his end goal, he ends up in the underworld. There, he sees his deceased daughter, Calliope. Once reaching her, they embrace in a cutscene. Kratos promises Calliope he will never leave her again.

Kratos is told by Persephone, queen of the underworld, that if he wants to be reunited with his daughter, he must give up all of his power. At this point the player must remove the abilities, upgrades, and items from Kratos, by following a sequence of button presses that are displayed on screen.

This, in effect, makes the player feel as if he is choosing to remove his powers. This easily could have been a cutscene, but instead the designers allow the player to actually remove all of the abilities they have been working towards all game. This isn't done with just one button press. A series of prompts occur, making the entire event feel like a very deliberate choice, even if the choice doesn't actually exist in the game code.

Once the player is weakened another cutscene begins. Here, Persephone reveals to Kratos that it was all a trick and that while he weakened himself, she has set forth to destroy the entire world. At this point Kratos realizes that if he stays with his daughter Calliope, the entire world will be destroyed and his daughter with it. However, if he pursues Persephone to stop her, he will never see his daughter again and go back on his promise of never leaving her.

Just a child, Calliope hugs onto her father's leg, begging him not to leave her. There is but one choice for Kratos, unfortunately. However, again the game does not just have Kratos push away his daughter via cutscene. Instead, in-game it prompts the player to push the circle button over and over. As the player presses it, Kratos pushes his daughter further and further away from his leg.

Once he pushes her far enough away from him, she screams and latches onto his leg again. The player must once again repeat the process of pushing Kratos' crying daughter away. The sequence is repeated a third, and final time.

The emotional impact of such an event can be staggering. Kratos is a sympathetic antihero in gaming. You like him, even though he is deeply flawed and troubled. The reasons for liking him are that, deep down, he is human and has human emotions, such as love for his family.

By forcing the player push Calliope away multiple times, God of War: Chains of Olympus is able to forge a deeper, emotional bond between the player and Kratos and remind them of his humanity. Instead of the aggressive, bitter man, you see a saddened father for a moment. Kratos ceases to feel like a 2D caricature, if only for a moment.

In fact, I felt an amount of sadness pushing the crying little girl away. Soon, this sadness was replaced by anger. Anger at Persephone for making me forsake my daughter (I even thought in the first person, as if I were Kratos).

In fact, I was angry enough to make sure I beat Persephone, the game's final boss, the same night. Even though it was 2:00 in the morning, I had work the next day, I had died dozens of times, and the game forced me to watch the same cutscene every time I retried, I played for an hour to make sure I beat Persephone. I didn't want to wait until the next day. I wanted to know if Kratos would be reunited with Calliope somehow in the end. I wanted vengeance... just like Kratos did.

Both the losing of power and the pushing of Calliope away could have easily been cutscenes. By making them actually interactive, even if only on a simplistic level, God of War: Chains of Olympus creates an empathetic response to its story, during its critical climactic events. This creates a smaller gap between the player and Kratos.

When the player thinks and feels like character on screen, then there is a sense of being fully immersed. It may be impossible to ever get players to fully think like the characters on screen (at least in games with well-defined characters, and not empty avatar such as Gordon Freeman), but the closer we get the more we utilize the narrative power of this medium.

God of War: Chains of Olympus may not be ground-breaking in any way and may even be criticized for other ways it reminds the player that they are playing a game rather than being immersed in the game. However, for a short period of time it shows how to make the player feel empathy and emotion in what is otherwise thought of as a nothing more than a testosterone-fueled male power fantasy.

[Manveer Heir is currently a game designer at Raven Software. He updates his design blog, Design Rampage, regularly. He is interested in thoughtful critique and commentary on the gaming industry.]

Posted by Manveer Heir at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah yes, the GameSetLink-age, it does continue, and today we're starting out with Peter Travers actually devoting a lot of his Rolling Stone film column to why Grand Theft Auto is important, even to, uhh, the film column.

Of course, why games can't have their own big column in Rolling Stone every week is another issue altogether, but let's just content ourselves with checking out the other links, which include a Chicago Tribune look at the arcade industry as it is today, a pretty amusing Gamasutra job posting, and a plethora of other videos, text links, and ephemera.

Stumbling towards OK-ness:

Is Grand Theft Auto IV Actually the Best Popcorn Movie of the Summer? : Rolling Stone
This was printed over 1 and a half pages in the latest Rolling Stone - so somewhat of a big deal.

Kokoromi Collective - Cum on feel the game
Steve Swink's book cover - from meh to yay, thanks to Fez co-creator Phil Fish!

Gamasutra Jobs: Unscripted Ventures' random job ad that made me boggle
Nice job title, at least, for effect: 'Wanted: Part Patton, Part Elvis (If either were alive and fronting as a senior game executive)'

GameDaily: 'Media Coverage: The Seven Deadly Sins of Video Game Reviewing'
Ah, Mastrapa launches into the fray.

Hell's Kitchen PC casual game review: Jay is Games
As some commenters note, a CG Gordon Ramsay is seriously disturbing.

Siliconera » Origins of Agetec’s Women’s Volleyball
I wonder how this will sell in the West.

Zune gets in tune with L.A. - Los Angeles Times
Much as Nokia has a theater in New York, some interesting attempted hipster event branding for Zune.

Video arcades' last gasp -- chicagotribune.com
Well-written from an outsider's point of view - via GBGames.

Independent Creator: 'Designing Your Respawn System'
A mini-post with a really cute lolcats-y illustration (pictured) from an ex-Doublefine indie blogger I was unaware of - ta Brandonnn.

YouTube - "Green Blues" The Incredible Hulk Video Game
Industry music veteran, Captains Of The Chess Team band member (and my old co-worker) Scott Snyder goofs off with a grunge-y music video about the Hulk's new game incarnation. 'Hulk Smash', etc.

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

['Welcome to the GameSetWatch Comic' is, once again, a weekly comic by Jonathan "Persona" Kim about the continuing adventures of our society, cultural postdialectic theory, and video games.]

Aha, this latest GameSetWatch Comic references the Atlus-created cult PS2 title Persona 3, and for those not aware of the general conceit, here's Wikipedia explaining neatly of the RPG:

"The player uses weapons and magical abilities gained by the use of "Personas" to defeat foes in a turn-based combat system. An iconic feature of the game is the method by which the members of SEES release their Personas: by firing an Evoker, a gun-like object, at their head, which does no damage but causes sufficient emotional stress to cause the Persona to appear."

So there. Commenters, explain the other references for the unworthy/insufficiently geeky.

[Jonathan "Persona" Kim is a character animation student at the California Institute of the Arts. When not working on doujinshi material, he continues the Mecha Fetus revolution on the Mecha Fetus Visublog.]

Posted by persona at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

[Considering the GameSetWatch Comic was just last week poking fun at Castlevania, thought it might be neat to reprint Christian Nutt's brand new Gamasutra interview with whip-totin' franchise overseer IGA - the Konami is designer enigmatic, wacky, but still actually likeable! We claim! Also, there's an N+ plug in here, hee. Onward.]

Veteran publisher Konami recently announced Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, the third Nintendo DS title in the twenty-year-running action platformer series.

Following the announcement, Gamasutra sat down with series producer Koji Igarashi, who is well known to fans by his nickname IGA and who has a tendency to appear in public somewhat theatrically wearing a cowboy hat and wielding a whip.

Igarashi, who has shepherded the popular series for the past few years, touched on his outspoken passion for the 2D format, his thoughts on experimenting with the Castlevania formula, his love of Bionic Commando, and why he harbors a fear of fans yelling at him.

Obviously, you're keeping the 2D fight alive on 2D with the Nintendo DS. You said last year you're the last hope for 2D games at Konami. Tell me how that's going.

Koji Igarashi: I did that speech over a year ago, and I'm glad that 2D is still somewhat alive. It's been fun.

More than one developer that I've talked to has said that they found your speech was inspirational.

KI: I'm glad.

Did you play N+ for Xbox Live Arcade?

KI: No, I have not.

You should check that out. It's a 2D ninja action game, and I think the creators like your stuff too.

KI: I will definitely try it.

You've talked about experimenting with the series and figuring out where it's going. Are you still trying to figure out more ways the series can evolve, or are you sticking with the DS for now?

KI: This time, I announced a DS title, but I definitely want to grow the franchise. It's something I'm really focused on. You guys will probably be hearing something from me.

When I spoke to you at GameStop Expo, you talked about how linear gameplay in the PSP version [Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles] was kind of an experiment, to see if users would accept it. Did you get any feedback?

KI: I was fairly satisfied, but the PSP install base in the U.S. isn't very strong, so it wasn't a very strong step. I was satisfied. It's not something that I can jump up and down and enjoy like I do with the DS titles.

I still believe that type of game is great, and I'm still a big fan of the PSP and thought it was a great game.

What kind of feedback did you get from fans on the linear game?

KI: I didn't get too much feedback, but there were some fans who came back and said, "Oh, this is great. This is nostalgic of previous Castlevania games." That was great to hear.

We've got the 25th anniversary of the series coming up soon. Do you have any plans for when that rolls around?

KI: We're really focusing on getting this game the best I can. Before you mentioned 25 year coming up, it really didn't pop into my head. And right now, when you mentioned it, I thought of it, and I realized yeah, I've got to think of something. (laughter)

It looks like you did incorporate some feedback from the fans, like getting rid of the anime-style art and moving to an illustrated style. Castlevania is a very fan-based series. It really has passionate fans. Is that the most important audience for Castlevania?

KI: To be honest, who I listen to the most is myself. Not to sound arrogant or anything like that, but the reason why I listen to myself is because I think really deep and hard, and I feel that if I can't tell it to myself, I can't tell it to the fans.

And yeah, I definitely do listen to the fans. I don't want to release something that's boring and not fun. It's just for the fans. They wanted it. If one of my games flops, I want to basically be able to say, "Sorry. That's my fault." I don't want to say, "I wanted so badly for it to do well."

Speaking of fans, it's becoming more and more important to have community elements, like a website, forums, podcasts. Have you thought about doing any of that stuff for your fanbase?

KI: Yeah, that's definitely something I want to do, but I'm a little scared that if I do something like that, fans will always be yelling at me and things like that.

But yeah, it's definitely very important to do that kind of thing. I do see the web address, and I'm trying to fill it with fan content. [IGA points at the whip he brought as a prop.] If I whipped that around... I can't whip it around. I would, but I don't want to get arrested.

I don't know if you're familiar with Capcom's Bionic Commando. It was very popular in America for the NES, but not in Japan, so they revived it recently, and they're making a 360/PS3 version. I bring this up because they're developing it in a Western, not Japanese, studio. But the producer is working out of Japan, and I was wondering if you thought this was a potential solution to such development issues.

KI: I believe it's called something different...

Yeah, Hitler no Fukkatsu: Top Secret.

KI: To be honest, I didn't know it wasn't very popular in Japan. I loved that game, and thought it was popular in Japan. I don't think whether it matters whether the game was developed in Japan or the United States.

There's fans that love it and think it's a great game. I think it will be fine. I think that something cool developed in Japan where it's like, "It was popular in America, and I don't know why it's popular," I don't think it will succeed.

Have you considered working with foreign development teams, or do you want to keep everything developed internally at Konami?

KI: It doesn't really matter where the game is developed. I want to be involved in it. I want to know what's going on. If we did decide to develop it in the U.S., I guess I'd have to move here.

Not fly very often?

KI: Yeah. I guess I'd have to stay here.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[In this editorial, game commentator Nayan Ramachandran lays out the dynamics of a hallowed gaming convention -- the boss fight -- categorizing the various design approaches to boss fights: Metal Gear's lateral thinking, Zelda's tool-based fights, and Ninja Gaiden's mercilessly 'archaic' forfeitures.]

Western developers and media have been, for the last several years, foretelling the fall of the era of boss battles. In an industry that, in years past, was dominated by a simple level structure, the very designers of these games are turning their back on this tradition in favor of a more asymmetrical and perhaps more beneficial pattern.

Asian developers still bother to design evil and devious boss creatures for their games, sometimes spreading them through the game at a rate higher than a single one in each level. Japanese roleplaying games are famous for gauntlets of boss fights, while Capcom has become famous over the years for having players replay boss fights later in the adventure.

With all this talk of “bosses” and “level structure” though, perhaps we are alienating a portion of our readership; a portion more attuned and connected to modern Western game design than the games of my childhood. Likely after reading the last two paragraphs, a single question leaves their bewildered lips: “What is a boss?”

Your Final Boss Exam

Games in which bosses appear have levels that are usually designed like a traditional class syllabus. If you were to liken the the length of a game’s level to a semester of studying, learning the game’s boundaries and mechanics and the flaws of the enemies it throws at you, then surely the boss is the final exam for the class.

Testing the skills you’ve learned on your journey to this powerful character, as well as the powers and weapons you’ve collected over time, the boss character is meant to be a milestone of achievement for the player. It offers structure where there might not be any. It is the personification of a climax.

The actual nomenclature for this unique game design mechanic likely comes from the beat-em-up genre. Because these boss characters are much stronger than the minions that populate each level, and often attack by themselves at the end of the level, story usually dictated that they were the highest ranking member in the organization the minions belonged to.

Therefore, they were quite literally the “bosses” of the minions you had already defeated. The rest, I suppose, is history.

With that information at hand, perhaps it is time to venture into deeper water, and look more closely at the design and implementation of the boss in gaming.

Boss Patterns And Mechanics

The Japanese tradition of video game boss design has almost always found pattern based gameplay to be the most rewarding. The Pattern school of thinking is probably the most well received and the most often used, finding a home in countless games, including Castlevania, Contra, Metal Gear, Super Mario Bros., and, most notably, The Legend of Zelda.

The mechanic is simple. Either based on the environment or based on the player’s position and status, the boss character has a variety of attacks that they will perform. The player’s job is to discern the pattern from the seemingly random cacophony of action, and use the abilities and tools available to him to exploit the pattern.

Depending on the game, this structure can be rather rewarding. Some games, sadly, beat the player over the head with the mechanic required to defeat the boss, either offering overly obvious visual cues, or having the voice of the developer in the form of a sidekick telling you what exactly to do.

What becomes so unrewarding about this design is the fact that with the little intelligence the developer assumes the player has, the fight devolves into a slightly more digital incarnation of paint-by-numbers: duck here. Use the grappling hook here. Maybe you should try using this weapon.

We also land up with an entirely different problem: choice. When the game starts to remind you how you should be defeating the boss, the player isn’t rewarded for solving the encounter, nor are they rewarded for playing the way they want.

Suddenly, after mission after mission of letting the player choose what they want to do, the developer decides to stick a funnel at the end of the pipe, and force the player to defeat the boss using an exact list of instructions. Why even have a boss encounter at all?

Bosses - The Action Version

More action-oriented games, like Konami’s Metal Gear and Contra series, boss battles are still designed in terms of patterns, but the methods by which each boss is defeated is not immediately apparent. Suddenly the player is forced to do something they’ve never had to do before: use their brain.

While games like Okami and Zelda hint at a specific set of tools to be used on a boss encounter to test the player’s ability to use said tools, Contra tests a player’s decision-making skills. Not only does the player have to use a specific weapon or skill at a specific phase of the boss’ attack, but they have to choose which weapon to use.

While this offers an unprecedented amount of choice for the player, it can also create unprecedented anger and frustration. While the game may not tell the player which weapons to use, the player has no idea of knowing if a variety of weapons and strategies will be equally viable against the boss, or a single precise chain of movements and attacks is required.

How the game handles the experimentation therein becomes the main point of contention at this point. Some guys welcome experimentation and even lateral thinking to defeat a boss, even offering multiple ways to defeat the boss depending on strategy.

The Metal Gear Solid series is famous for this. Any player familiar with the famous sniper fight with The End in Metal Gear Solid 3 will likely remember the initial frustration of fighting him, the slow but methodical deduction process involves in detecting him, and finally the incredible satisfaction in reigning victorious over the aging sharpshooter.

Players could use the directional microphone, thermal goggles, The End’s parrot and a variety of other tactics and weapons. Because of the sheer variety of solutions to the fight, the game ends up being incredibly rewarding, as each player manages to arrive at their own solution without too much assistance.

The converse would be a boss fight from the recently released Ninja Gaiden II for Xbox 360. Each boss encounter has very few options for success. Bosses often come equipped with abilities that immediately and violently counter the most powerful attacks of certain weapons. Like its predecessor on the original Xbox, bosses mercilessly brutalize players for mistakes, taking off exorbitant amounts of health.

This negative reinforcement prods players to try entirely new strategies, but it also doesn’t promote changing strategies mid-battle. Often because of the excessive health loss, and the boss’ merciless attacking, players are forced to forfeit and start fresh from the beginning of the battle with a new strategy.

This hearkens back to an older style of gameplay, where retrying was the norm. It has its place, but in this day and age, it simply looks archaic when compared to more organic learning processes presented in far more forward-thinking games.

Conclusion

Bosses are not going anywhere. While developers who have yet to figure out how to properly implement them have largely given up on trying to use them, it would truly be a tragedy if the art boss design were truly lost.

Thankfully, there are still quite a few developers that know how to make them, and hopefully that rings true for a long time to come.

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

Well, time for some new GameSetLinks to usher in the new week, headed by the neat idea of having audio commentary to explain your super-speedy game speed runs - thanks for sorting that one out, Speed Demos Archive.

Also in here somewhere or other - a totally adorable (pictured) new Steve Purcell illustration on the Sam & Max tip, plus confessional games, types of testing, and 'games as poetry', indeed.

And it's on:

Speed Demos Archive: 'Audio Commentary' thread
Great idea - speed runs with commentary to you can understand how/why the ninja speed is cool.

SPUDVISION: SAM & MAX
Steve Purcell: 'My obscure bookplate, lovingly painted and aged to perfection for the Sam & Max Surfin' the Highway Limited Edition Hardcover.' Weiner Sam!

Heroine Sheik » Blog Archive » Click Me: “Video Game Sex Beyond Grand Theft Auto”
Slightly NSFW cover, discussing a new book on sex/games I wasn't aware of.

The Escapist : Immortality
"If you had an immortality pill right there in front of you, would you take it?" Jason Rohrer tries a game about it.

Nintendo's Mixed WiiWare Messages : Edge
'Because of the structure of the initiative, WiiWare developers are wholly responsible for having their titles rated, translated and legally checked for each of these regions.'

Confessional Games | The New Gamer
'Why are confessional games so scarce when the genre thrives in other mediums?'

Types of Testing | Gamelab
'I found 16 different kinds of testing that might happen all in the course of a single game's development.'

Q Entertainment's Tetsuya Mizuguchi Interview // None /// Eurogamer
Nice wide-ranging Rob Fahey interview with the Miz.

Ludus Novus :: Phyta: Games As Poetry
'This is a game about growth. Growth at the expense of all else. It’s sad and beautiful.'

Japanmanship: Futurama
JC Barnett goes all predictoid - I think he does a good job. If serious. Which it is. I think.

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

[The Game Anthropologist chronicles Michael Walbridge's ventures into gaming communities as he reports on their inhabitants and culture. This time round, he takes a look at Valve's seminal Team Fortress 2.]

Darn FPS Kids And Their Language

It is no doubt or secret that the first person shooter genre and its communities are highly steeped in the competitive spirit. If playground basketball has its ball hogs, FPS has its kill hogs. The team, for all its necessity, can shove off. This usually isn’t considered a problem, though; it’s what we expect, right? We’re shooting at each other. FPS servers are, after all, playgrounds. A player being the Kobe Bryant of the team is the least of your worries.

In concrete life, when an adult goes to observe children in their element, the children do not act the same. Social science research is often rife with hand-wringing—“how can we study people scientifically when the object of study changes simply because of its being studied?” More than one researcher has lamented. Plunk down a random adult in the back of a high school classroom and the kids act differently. In the digital realm, though, kids don’t care that you are there.

Those who look for scapegoats blame the games. Those of us who play games have a better memory of our childhood; young males, adolescents, children are depicting animalistic humanity and lack of development while online and on Xbox Live because they’re just that: kids. While research and artistry can show us much, we don’t have to look far to see it for ourselves.

All Grown Up

In Team Fortress 2, a game which has been sold to at least 2 million people, showboating, kill-whoring, and brazen, crass insults are a rare sight (on non-modded servers with standard maps, anyway). This is puzzling for many reasons. Not only is it an FPS, it’s a quality, competitive one that is only available from Steam. (Counter Strike kids are different from Halo kids, but not in the way you would hope—many of them are hopelessly vulgar.)

Each character has a taunt for each weapon; that’s 27 animated taunts available, including the verbal ones your character automatically utters upon killing. Not to mention the fact that any time someone kills you 3 times in a row a big “NEMESIS” gets planted next to that person’s name.

When you die, the game zooms in on the person who killed you. Big fists appear over him so you can tell who keeps shoving you back to observing your teammates. Failing to get revenge? Here’s the third shot of your ass being handed to you by some kid from Iowa. But the kid says nothing. Rarely does.

To this day, I can only recall one or two times where immaturity affected gameplay. Unlike some of the communities I will profile, TF 2’s PC community (the console versions don’t have Steam or typing chat to assist in organizing and communicating, and the PC version sold better) is one I’m undoubtedly personally invested in; I’ve spent a good amount of time on all the classes, and I haven’t only played in just one or two servers.

Team Fortress 2 seems like it’s just another innovative, 9X%-review-scoring shooter, but it is an anomaly. It is a gratuitously violent game with your instruments of play being guns, explosives, and sharp and blunt objects and the target nothing but other players controlled by human beings. Yet its atmosphere can be as congenial as a puzzler. And the players are often, wouldn’t you know it, polite and helpful.

Some of the most famous and watched videos of TF 2 gameplay are tutorial videos on how to do well, not self-aggrandizing sets of sniper shots.

Exactly why most teammates are polite, patient, and helpful in a game that is violent and wildly popular is not easily answered, but I have some good ideas. The players seem older, and this may be because of its predecessor, Team Fortress Classic, which predates TF 2 by 10 years. Someone who is 24 may remember TFC, but someone who is 15 will not. I’m not saying it’s devoid of teenagers—but there are a lot more people in their 20s and there are a lot more women on voice chat online as well, signs of a more mature audience and community.

Perhaps it is because of the medic class. Instead of the archetypical female priest or paladin (every World of Warcraft player has met one), the women more often play medic. This is a class that goes around healing characters in a genre of health pickups. Every winning team needs one. If your enemy has a medic and you don’t, bragging is thrown out the window. The medic heals almost anyone fully within 5 seconds, and everyone within 10. Oh, and maybe it’s the critical hits. No one earns those—they just come out of nowhere. And there’s really nothing a scout can do against an engineer’s fully-leveled sentry gun.

Back to that medic who just shouted I healed zee man who vill keel you--you’re dead, and you wonder where your medic is to heal you. So you tab or comma and realize there are NO medics on your team. It’s still difficult to get people to play as a medic, but someone usually switches within half a minute.

Also, when the other team wins, the enemy team gets free critical hits and 15 seconds to butcher your weaponless team. They still get points and if a third kill occurs at this time, there will still be a big fat “NEMESIS” attached to an opponent’s name.

We’re Not Kidding About The “Team” Part

The characters in Team Fortress 2 are personal avatars repeated. To see a demoman who is black, Scottish, and wears an eye patch is to see both a character and a representation. He is a character because he has personality—we know there is a hilarious story to him and not just because he has spoken of it. He is a representation because we can see 4 of him on the battle at the same time, and he is a class without a real name; he’s a demoman, and that’s it.

Nameless as they are, I’m going to suggest, that we love these characters. Each and every one of them represents our varied styles of desires to do violence. When we choose one, we are choosing a superhero suit that we can’t take off and can’t escape, unless, of course, we die and then switch classes.

And we often will switch classes. Even the most steeply curved distribution in a player’s stats will have at least one other class with a lot of space, because Team Fortress 2 gives us no choice but to be a team. Sometimes a sniper isn’t going to work.

The only conditions of winning and losing are as a team, and the potential for each class is best seen from a holistic perspective. You can do poorly and the most you hear is “we have too many spies” or “that’s not a good spot for your sticky bombs” or “you uber’d me too early”--gentle, irritable counsel from your elders in gaming. In a game that takes place in America with an all Euro-American cast and all-American violence comes a group-centered ethic and comraderie. Are we in an Eastern culture? It’s video games, after all.

No, you’re in the army now, pyro (soldier; whatever your class). Follow orders, take responsible leadership, make yourself useful, and learn what it truly means to be part of a team and forget yourself. This is what we’ve been missing, and why those of us dedicated to TF 2 can’t take ourselves away.

Posted by Mike Walbridge at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (96)

[Over at virtual worlds site WorldsInMotion.biz, we're continuning with the Worlds In Motion Online Atlas, penned by Mathew Kumar - looking at the rapidly advancing free-to-play online game biz. This time round, it's the much advertised-on Gaia Online, and worth noting that I think it's awesome how Mr. Kumar is cutting cleanly through the hype and pointing out what works - and what doesn't - in these environments.]

Here's an overview of Gaia Online, from Gaia Interactive. Gaia Online began as a linklist for anime fans, and has since expanded hugely to feature customizable avatars, an online world with user-owned homes, virtual currency and games. Its core is still based around a huge forum (which averages a million posts a day according to some commentators), but we're taking a look at its MMO aspects.

Name: Gaia Online
Company: Gaia Interactive
Established: February 2003
How it Works: Gaia Online is experienced on the web through a combination of html, Flash, Java and Shockwave. It requires no installation. Navigation and gameplay are accomplished via mouse and keyboard input.

Overview: Gaia Online's community originally solidified around its forums, and the majority of Gaia Online users still spend most of their time there. However, the site has a massive range of other community options, with customizable avatars and home pages, an online world with towns full of user-owned homes that are just as customizable as the avatars, and games to play (with or against other members of the community).

Payment Method: Gaia Online is free to play, and earns revenue through microtransactions (users can purchase limited-edition items each month, and Gaia Cash), advertising/corporate sponsorship and licensed clothes and accessories.

Key Features:

- Unique avatar with a huge variety of dress-up options
- Customizable home and car for your avatar
- Full social network with a massive forum community
- Games to play with and against other community members
- Items can be bought, sold and traded within the community

Gaia Online: In-Depth Tour

In our last atlas entry I was astonished by what was on offer when it came to avatar customization with WeeWorld, and I have to say I'm almost as impressed with the options in Gaia Online. Choosing an anime influence rather than South Park, the characters are bright and attractive with a fair range of skin tones, hair, eyes and mouths. The starting outfit selection is far more limited than in WeeWorld, and there's good reason for that, as the majority of "play" in Gaia Online's world is related to earning new clothes for your avatar -- and in that respect there are certainly thousands of different pieces that could be worn in almost any combination.

Once you've created your character and logged in you're given a small amount of gold to start off with (Gaia's internal currency) and left to work out what to do on your own. Now, I'm a seasoned internet user who can even manage to navigate the worst excesses of MySpace, but Gaia is instantly bewildering with its huge range of options and a start page cluttered with information that, for a new player, is confusing at best. I decided to ignore the information overload and start trying to customize my character more to my liking, as I found him rather generic.

You can alter your character's dress from your avatar page (and in fact have a MySpace like profile page which to show them off with) but to purchase new clothes you have to hit the shops. There are a wide range of stores which sell differing styles of clothing, housewares and other objects, including some sponsored stores like MTV's "Sunset Couture". After looking for a while I realized I had nowhere near enough money to purchase anything, so decided to get my house in running order.

Though the majority of the time on Gaia Online is going to be spent on the html website, whenever you do anything such as play a game or explore the world it loads a Javascript client in a separate window. After you choose your home's style and place it somewhere in the player towns, you can visit it or place objects in it. Placing objects or visiting the home happens in separate clients, however, which can get a little confusing. The player towns themselves are vast "suburbs" with few players milling about -- like many "instanced" player towns in MMORPGs homes are more for inviting friends to (or as personal trophies) rather than an active part of play.

After setting up my house (it comes with a set of starter furniture) and purchasing some wallpaper and a new floor (disappointingly, I like neither) I decided to purchase a car, a segment of the world that was developed as a result of sponsorship from car manufacturer Scion. I decided to ignore the option to pick up a Scion xB and go for a Possum Coupe. Cars are free to begin with, but like everything else, cosmetic upgrades cost a lot of gold.

I decided to take my unmodified car and "meet up and rally". This launches a new window where, I guess similar to real street racer culture, you park your car in front of a convenience store along with a bunch of other racers and stand around waiting for something to happen – or at least that's what I did until I realized that you're supposed to challenge other racers. Racing is a simple sort of slot car race (hold down accelerate, but slow down when you see an obstacle).

The other games are all similarly kind of simplistic, but can be quite interesting. There are the usual kind of games (jigsaws, slots) but also a fishing mini-game that kept me playing for quite a while (mostly because it's so difficult with the starting rod and bait) and a pinball game that's pretty passable.

The 'worlds' are arguably more interesting. As seen with rallying, the way Gaia works (or can be thought of) is as a MMO where the player spends most of their time on the web, but launches an instance each time they want to explore a more traditional MMO experience, with an avatar to navigate around, other active players milling about, etc.

As a result the world isn't particularly cohesive, but it allows them a vast ability to create some wildly disparate worlds. I found myself investigating Virtual Hollywood for a short period of time, but was (surprisingly) most enamoured with the Skittles Quest world, perhaps because it had some very obvious tasks to complete -- such as being asked to watch a Skittles advertisement in the cinema to gain an object.

The cinema is kind of cute too. Think of it as YouTube with avatars -- you can enter a room and watch even full movies(!) with up to 30 other users, who seem to spend most of their time chatting and throwing objects at the screen. It's like an unbearable Saturday matinee if you think of watching videos as a personal experience, but it'd be a great way to watch videos with other friends on other computers concurrently. And hey, I managed to win some clothes by watching the "Don't Mess With the Zohan" trailer! (Though I don't know if it was worth it, really.)

I haven't talked too much about my feelings on Gaia Online yet as I want to save that for the conclusion, but in advance of that I will say that Gaia might be the most interesting world I've seen yet in terms of culture -- it's an almost completely bonkers mish-mash of anime and corporate sponsorship spread over a willfully strange mix of MMO and social network that has an absolutely huge community. I almost don't quite know what to make of it.

Gaia Online: Conclusion

Let's get the most important complaints out up front -- if there's one main problem I've found with Gaia Online it's that it is incredibly flaky to get working. I can't place too much blame on my end (I'm running a PC only a few months old, with all my software up to date, and running an internet connection that's proven more than acceptable for all other tasks) but Gaia Online is slow, prone to timeouts, crashes and generally feels completely unstable.

I've tried to spend as much time playing Gaia Online as possible, and I think it may simply be the case that it's just too popular. There's an average of 80,000+ people online at any one time (well, when I've been playing it) and that seems a likely reason for it to slow to a crawl even when I'm just trying to load my profile. The crashes are worse, because they tend to come when loading or closing the javascript MMO sections, which doesn't make me think the technology is up to it.

In addition -- and this is probably because Gaia Online has been built up over such a long period of time -- the interface is unbearably bad. Trying to buy new clothes for my avatar was such an uncomfortable challenge (go to a wide array of poorly arranged shops, look at tiny versions of clothes, have to click and fiddle with to preview, etc.) that I just didn't want to do it. Doing anything in the MMO areas opened new windows that I was never sure how to close without messing things up, and there are just so many options arranged in what feels like a near random manner doing absolutely anything in Gaia was, well, unpleasant.

In fact, it feels like these are all good reasons that the majority of Gaia Online players tend to only use the forums, with their avatar about as far as they go when it comes to the MMO options. Perhaps it's simply that at the ripe old age of 26 I'm no longer young or hip enough to put up with the kind of interfaces the generally younger audience of Gaia Online are, but it was not the kind of experience that made me want to continue.

Neither did the community I found either. I'd like to restate that I spent almost no time on the forums, which seem fine (your usual sort of thing) but the community in the MMO worlds, while not as rabidly monosyllabic as those found in WeeWorld, were not particularly exciting. No obvious chatter, collaboration or even a particular air of fun was to be found anywhere I visited (other than possibly in the fishing game, for some reason) and as a result the whole thing left me flat.

From my conclusion, you'd be fair to say that I thought Gaia Online was absolutely terrible; you'd also be fair to question why it's so popular if it's as bad as I say it is – am I just missing the point? I don't think so. Gaia Online's popularity has grown from its forums, and that's where it mostly stays. The MMO aspects are good in theory at engaging the audience, but they're currently so badly implemented that it's no wonder that few players take them up on it.

However, I don't think that's particularly a problem for them from a business standpoint. Gaia Online is very successful, particularly in attracting sponsors, and their other monetization ideas, such as limited edition items for avatars, are very canny indeed. There are more than enough users willing to put up with the clunky interface and slow loading to watch adverts in the hope of getting swag for their avatar -- after all, I spent time learning about Don't Mess with the Zohan, Skittles and MTV while there – that I think it will remain very successful for them. It's just not worthy of it.

[UPDATE: We've been reliably informed by Gaia Online (and by our own tests) that the Gaia Towns, seen crashing in an image above, now loads far more often than it did before (around 99% of the time). So it's worth noting that they are trying to improve the system behind the scenes.]

Useful Links:
Gaiapedia
Gaia FAQ/Help
Gaia Forums

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[Missus Raroo takes the lead and brings her unique perspective on gaming to this week's Game Time With Mister Raroo column. She discusses how during her initial time as a new mother recovering from a cesarean section, the Nintendo Wii provided an unexpected source of support. The Wii proved to be more than just a way to play games. Rather, it was a way to access the world beyond the loveseat she was confined to most of the day.]

When Mister Raroo went gaga over purchasing a Wii at launch, I was a good supportive wife. I listened to all of the pre-release hype and even helped him hone down his list of games to buy at launch. Upon getting the Wii set up in our home, I participated in Mii-making and even gave some games a run.

In those early months, I attempted some Monkey Ball mini games, shot my way through a few Elebits levels, and joined in some Wii Sports and Wii Play action. Truth be told, though, I never had the urge to independently power on the Wii until after the birth of our son, when I suddenly found myself clocking more hours on the Wii than my gamer husband. I was using the Wii for everything but gaming, but I was in love with the Wii all the same.

Prior to our son Kazuo's birth, my image of motherhood did not involve me strapped down to our little loveseat of a couch with a Wii-mote in hand. I had seen too many black and white photos of that woman with a newborn nestled in her arms, dreamily staring out at the world through a window.

I always imagined that woman must be thinking, "Ah, I have this precious new life in my arms and the world is simply amazing!" Don't get me wrong, as I find myself entering my second year of motherhood, I do find myself watching Kaz in awe all of the time and feel that being a mother is truly amazing. All the same, those first weeks after his birth were far from the idealistic image I had stored in my mind.

To begin with, the whole issue of pain was much more prominent in the experience than I had anticipated. I had always suspected that I have a low threshold for pain, and that was confirmed during labor, which I knew to expect. But the pain I experienced during my recovery was definitely not expected. Due to Kaz's "off the chart" (as his pediatrician describes) head circumference—which has consistently measured in over the 100th percentile—I ended up having a c-section.

Stubbornly, I refused to take the prescribed Vicodin for fear of turning into a Rush Limbaugh of sorts, and so I was in such extreme pain as we drove home from the hospital that every little bump in the road made me cry. Walking up the stairs to our second-floor apartment was nearly impossible, I could hardly get out of bed or sit down on a toilet, and what made me most depressed was that I couldn't even rock our new baby, change his first diapers, or give him his first baths. The only way I can explain it is that it literally felt as if all of my guts were falling out. I

It was so bad that one afternoon I even went online and did all kinds of ridiculous searches, such as "c-section recovery AND feels like my guts are falling out." I ended up finding some Yahoo! discussion board post that claimed it's possible that doctors will just stuff all of your organs back in your body without taking the time to properly sew each layer of tissue back together. I madly tried to convince Mister Raroo that this scenario must be what had happened to me. Needless to say, during those first couple weeks after Kazuo’s arrival I was definitely not that woman in the window.

In order to cope with the limitations of my recovery, my dear Mister Raroo went into action setting up camp for me on our loveseat. He supplied me with pillows, blankets, my Boppy, and a TV tray that had everything I could possibly need: a water bottle, Kleenex, Lansinoh cream, my journal, the baby book, pens, a remote for TV, and…a Wii-mote.

This was my sole command center for at least the first month after Kaz was born. And, while I might have done more walking around if hadn't had a c-section, I think I still would've ended up spending much time sitting on that couch, because Kaz loves to eat! Even though Mister Raroo and I had attended a whole class on breastfeeding during the pregnancy, I had not fully comprehended how I would be spending the majority of my days going from one nursing section into the next without time to do much else in between.

Now, there are some talented and skilled mothers are able to multitask while nursing. I went to a "Baby-wearing" club meeting once and I met women who are able, by using a carrier, to breastfeed while doing chores, going shopping and more. Perhaps I, too, will be able to reach this next level of mastery if we have another baby, but at least the first time around, I was a total couch potato when Kaz was a newborn.

Sitting on a sofa all day long always sounds pretty easy until you find yourself stuck there against your will. I tried to busy myself by watching some television, but having freshly read plenty of parenting books, I did not want to expose our impressionable baby to the likes of Maury Pauvich, whom I had previously enjoyed watching regularly as a guilty pleasure. My saving grace, one that I would have never suspected, ended up coming in the form of the Wii.

Accessing the Web from the Wii became my way to stay in touch with the outside world. I guess I could've tried harder to use our computer, but that would have involved having to stand up, walk to the computer desk, and balance Kaz all the while. I simply didn't have the talent to hold him and type at the same time.

Surfing the Web with Wii eliminated my issues with coordination since it only requires the use of very slight motions by a single hand. Before long, I had set up all kinds of bookmarks and had become very quick at the key-at-a-time typing. I was able to check in with my Babycenter.com bulletin boards, research mastitis at Kellymom.com, order a breast pump with accessories, and more.

My biggest complaint with the Wii’s web browser is that it wasn't very good for typing anything long, like in-depth e-mails. But, the fact that the browser works so well for watching YouTube videos more than made up for that deficiency. If you haven't watched videos of babies spitting up before, you must go and search them out now! Perhaps it's just because we're so used to the gross bodily functions of Kaz, but in any case, Mister Raroo and I thought these videos were genius.

As Kaz grew out of his newborn phase, my love affair with the Wii waned. My body started to heal and so I was able to move around more. Kaz became a more efficient eater and nursing sessions became less frequent and time consuming. I went back to work, Kaz started going to daycare, we moved out of our apartment, and we bought a new, larger couch to replace the little loveseat that I had spent all of that time camped out on.

My days now seem so different from those early weeks with Kaz and the Wii. Kaz is walking around now and getting his little hands on everything in sight. Each day is spent keeping him from torturing our cat that is too lazy to jump out of Kaz’s reach versus resting with a baby swaddled up like a warm lump in my arms. In retrospect, I suppose it's a good thing that I eliminated the likes of Maury from my viewing habits during those early days, because even my time with the Wii has indeed made a lasting impression on Kaz.

Like Pavlov's dogs, Kaz has been conditioned to instantly respond to the sound the Wii makes whenever it turns on. No matter what he is doing, he will turn towards the television screen with wide-open eyes the second that ringing goes off. Even if he's nursing, which is one of his favorite things in the world, he will unlatch with a quickness the moment he hears that sacred sound, exposing me to all parties present.

Although I hardly ever use the Wii to surf the web anymore, Kaz continues to find new ways to love the Wii. Mister Raroo is a fanatic when it comes to keeping up with the Everybody Votes Channel and so now Kaz not only reacts to the sound of the Wii turning on, but also to the specific music which accompanies that channel. He stays glued to the screen and is mesmerized when the "Results are in" and the sea of Miis form a pie chart. It can be a little creepy at times to see how entranced he gets by these images—that he is truly so impressionable. But, I guess I'd rather have him obsessed with seeing that the "Results are in" on the Wii than via those gosh darn addicting paternity results on Maury.

Most recently, Mister Raroo and I have fallen in love with Mario Kart Wii. A game that comes along and is able to catch my interest is a rare game indeed, and so it is no small thing when I say that I have fallen in love with “Karting.” With both Mommy and Daddy role modeling a love for Mario Kart, Kaz has also developed a deep love for the game.

Even though he's at an age where it's nearly impossible for him to sit still, he will stop in his tracks to watch us race through the courses. He is not old enough to wield a controller himself, but he often grips his favorite Giggle and Go toy cars, one in each hand, when he watches us play. I like to think he pretends that he's playing alongside us, with his toy cars catching imaginary mushrooms while we're busy dodging banana peels on screen.

While I didn't instantly feel like a "mother" after Kaz was born, I do feel like I've comfortably grown into my role during this past year. I am happy to report that there have actually been those moments of stillness when I've held Kaz in my arms, and looking down at him, I've felt like I'm that woman in the black and white photo by the window. I realize now, though, that I'm also that woman who at times feels like her guts are falling out, and while I may get pummeled by winged blue shells from time to time, I can also count on coming across bright stars that allow me to get through anything in my path.

[Missus Raroo doesn't consider herself to be a "real" gamer, but between listening to her husband excitedly talk about games on a regular basis and trying her hand at a select few titles herself, she knows a thing or two about videogames. She currently serves as the co-editor-in-chief of Game Time With Mister Raroo and has been called the "heart and soul" of the zine by readers. She lives in El Cajon, CA with her husband, son, and pets. You may reach Missus Raroo at koopaboo@yahoo.com.]

Posted by Bill Sannwald at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wow, it's a hot month, isn't it, GSW readers? It's hot for me, at least. PiQ (the exciting entertainment magazine I founded and ran) has folded, and I'll have more about that next week, but I don't even have any time to enjoy the usual unemployment ritual of sitting around the couch naked and watching The View -- the freelance is piling up around me, and I'm working all weekend to fend it off. Ah well.

Anyway, let's check out all the game magazines released in the past fortnight, of which there are way too freakin' many. Don't you people realize how much all these mags weigh, publishers?! All the gas I have to use transporting them home...ugh...

Edge July 2008

Cover: MadWorld

This is, in many ways, your typical Edge issue. You've got a feature on Alpha Protocol, the usual case of Edge doing a game preview feature a little later than GI and the results beting a little more in-depth and worth reading. You have your way-out-there alternate feature, this one on the new PlatinumGames, which has a lot of concept art, crazy visuals, photos of game developers posing in front of (or inside) silly futuristic-looking photographer studio setups, and text that's less to do about any game in particular and more about thegame industry in general.

You have a gaggle of less flashy but much more nerd-core pieces, like the one on eight old Yaroze developers who now have jobs in game outfits, or the large ad-supported subsection on the Singapore game industry, one which bulks the book size up to 164 pages (which is practically unheard of these days in America). You have the always-interesting retro stuff, this time around a look at the making of Carmageddon -- which seems to have been very much a (if you'll pardon the pun) "garage" operation, comparatively.

Great stuff as usual, and worth saving up for.

Game Informer July 2008

Cover: Infamous

This is, in many ways, your typical GI issue. You've got a really neat front-of-the-book section with lots of industry pieces, little and big, highlighted by a piece on "why do games go bad" that ask a roundtable of devs why crap games happen. You've got a humor piece which isn't very funny. You've got a cover feature that is high on concept art and low on actual content.

For that matter, you got a cover that looks like SCE's marketing department designed it. Why does GI keep coming up with coverlines that read like Don LaFontaine should be reading them out loud to you at the newsstand? (For that matter, how many casual gamers browsing at the newsstand know what "sandbox" means?)

And while I'm whining about GI, why do they send the last issue of your subscription with a glued-on suspension notice that's impossible to remove? At least I can get some sense of schadenfreude from the fact that this month's issue is 108 pages, a low for GI and a sign than even the top of the top is having trouble retaining advertising these days.

PC Gamer July 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Age of Conan

I forgot to cover this issue last update. As consolation, if anyone wants to use my code to get the "Totem of the Origins" item in Age of Conan, knock yourselves out. It's BX6TPYREPKVKAKM9. But beware: "Due to its immense power, it can only be used once every 24 hours."

The cover feature attempts to portray Age of Conan as a groundbreaking event for MMO fans, and it almost convinces me, actually, thanks to the snappy, breathless way it's written throughout -- reminds me of of the MASSIVE of old.

Play June 2008

Cover: MotorStorm: Pacific Rift

Another one I forgot to cover last time. Sorry, Play! But, man, an off-road racing game on the cover? I don't think I've seen that since the glory days of PSE2. No, the real highlight is a visit to Rare's studios and a look at all their current projects -- neat, and uncommon, since they never talk very much up there.

Play is getting rid of review scores as of this issue, which is great as far as I'm concerned -- they only exist for the purposes of marketers, console warriors, and Metacritic, so the sooner they leave the press in general the better. (I will bitterly miss the comedy of Dave Halverson rating every platform game ever 8.0 or higher, though.)

Hardcore Gamer Summer 2008

Cover: Metal Gear Solid 4

Hardcore Gamer's got a new logo! And like the previous issue, the vast majority of the 70-page interior is devoted to the cover subject. There's 18 pages on MGS4 and MGO, and unlike the Brawl feature last ish, this one's meaty and worth reading. The feature on energy drinks and caffeine pills marketed towards gamers is pretty amusing, too, but the import feature on an import mahjong game (complete with incomprehensible tutorial) reminds me of GameGO! a bit much...

Future Goes Crazy

   

Yes, Future has bankrupted me with specials this week. The 2008 PSP Yearbook is marred with glaring production errors (the Monster Kingdom review illustrated with a screen from Metal Saga; Wild Arms 5 getting a review despite not being a PSP game), but is otherwise serviceable. PC Gamer Proudly Presents the 2008 PC Builder's Bible, meanwhile, is your typical homebuilding primer -- didn't Future just put out one of these a few months ago?

   

CHEATS! Volume 15 is the same as always -- lots 'n lots of pages of codes -- and the Ultimate Xbox 360 Cheat Guide is pretty much self-explanatory from the cover. I'm going to have to sell my Sega CD collection to afford all these Future specials pretty soon...

Game Developer June/July 2008

And GD takes its yearly month-long break (so it can produce the annual Career Guide) by offering a very technically-minded My Life As A King retrospective and an interview with Grasshopper resident musician Masafumi Takada. Whew.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also worked in games media and development since 2000.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Totally, totally the weekend, and in between the Spore fun we're attempting to have in the Bay Area haze - and watching some completely eviscerating Doug Stanhope stand-up - there are links to be disseminated, damn you.

Highlights? Kyle Orland poking vigorously at Qore, the return of the (pictured) grizzled game journalism originator Bill Kunkel, the Star Wars Galaxies splintering still causing intense pain, and other things that I've found, and that you might want to see.

Un deux trois:

Avant Game: Chaotic Community (UPDATED)
In ARGS, 'sandbox mode can create interesting -- and sometimes contentious -- intersections of personal gameplay style.'

GameSpot News: 'PressSpotting: Qore values'
Orland: 'A confusing hybrid of advertising and editorial that often ends up feeling more like the former than the latter.'

Clickable Culture: 'How Do Web Game Monetization Venues Compare?'
'Ryan Creighton of Untold Entertainment is doing a little experiment to compare an array of monetization venues for his Flash-based mini-game Two by Two.'

chewing pixels » ‘A Positive-Thinking Animal Who Just Keeps Going Forward’
Discussing Ecodazoo.com, "one of the best-executed ‘experience’ sites I’ve seen", Web-based 2D/3D game-ish fun.

8bitrocket: J2Games.com And The Return Of Bill Kunkel, The Game Doctor
Awesome, it's not RSS-able, sigh, but great to see the pioneering Kunkel writing online again.

Nerve Blogs - 61FPS: 'Developer Journal part 1: Beat Me Up Too'
Making an indie game, from a Nerve game blog I was unaware of - via Eegra.

In Which I try to speak honestly about history | rubenfield.com
Dan Rubenfield on possibly the most traumatic event in MMO history - the Star Wars Galaxies attempted reboot.

Good Apollo, Dear God The Internet It Burns IV: Srsly, Dude « Broken Toys
Oh, wait, more on the Rubenfield SW:G fallout.

youdiditwrong - Important announcement
'Stop saying that Spore has been in development for eons.' I stand by this - I think Spore is still one of the longest in development titles from public demo (GDC 2005, even if just a prototype) to final release.

GamerBytes - GamerBytes Adds System-Specific RSS Feeds
In case you're an XBLA or PSN (or WiiWare!)-only freak and you wanna read our new console digital download blog. Yay.

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

['Quiz Me Quik' is a weekly GameSetWatch column by journalist Alistair Wallis, in which he picks offbeat subjects in the game business and interviews them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. This time, we get a little weird.]

This column seems to be turning into some kind of weirdly self-absorbed trip down memory lane for me, at least in the introductions, though it has on occasions made its way throughout the column proper like some kind of terrible beard-stroking, sky-gazing virus.

It’s like I’ve just discovered informal first-person journalism or something, except that I’ve been writing like this for other places for a while now. Anyways, given the lack of angry comments calling me out on my egotism, I assume it’s not getting up anyone’s nose, which is lovely.

And, on the odd chance that it is – and, by extension, I am - getting up your nose, hoo boy are you going to hate me this week.

Back in early 1992, while in Mr Harris’ grade four class, I was engaged in some kind of cartooning cold war with my best friend Sam. I had created – amongst other things – a family of anthropomorphic radishes. He had created a family of anthropomorphic echidnas. And though we were best friends, we did have more than a few blow-ups: he copied me, you know?

I like to think I was ahead of my time in regards to intellectual property protection rights.

Anyways, the one thing I had going that he didn’t was a video game design document. It was, admittedly, not a finished design document, but it was better than nothing. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the first thing about programming, and nor did any of my friends, so the Jaton the Radish game never really got underway – discounting a brief, unsatisfactory, jaunt into the world of Macromedia Director later that decade.

The documents, however, survive, and have been scanned for your enjoyment in an extraordinarily painful and time consuming manner: the scrapbook I used at the time is something like A3.75 or some inconvenient measurement. As such, the scanning was done in four sections for each page, before they were all stitched together. Goddamn it.

Back to the point at hand: since this column is called Quiz Me Qwik, and not - I don’t know; Show and Tell Hour or something, I’ve decided to interview myself about the project and its influences. Narcissism ahoy!

GSW: Let’s begin at the start, and talk a little about the genesis of the character – was it intended to be a video game from the beginning?

Alistair Wallis: Firstly, don’t use the word “genesis” in that context ever again. It makes us sound like a complete bastard. Secondly, no, it wasn’t intended to be a game in the beginning. Like we said in our intro, the character – Jaton, and eventually his family – grew from a fairly simple desire to have a regular cartoon character that I could work with. If I recall correctly, I was sitting in the shelter shed one lunchtime and drew a very simple looking radish.

I intended to use the name ‘Jupiter’, but realised soon after beginning to write it out that I, in fact, had absolutely no idea how to spell the word, and decided to settle for ‘Saturn’ instead. Unfortunately, I also had no idea how to spell that properly, and the ‘S’ still looked very much like a ‘J’. So I went with Jaton.

For the most part, I would just draw pictures, or write stories using Jaton and associated characters, which I developed around the same time, or – come to think of it – even earlier. I had a character dating from 1990 called Cool Dog, which I brought back and added to the Jaton-universe, which is a pretty interesting example of the kind of retrospective use of characters that seems popular in comics, I guess. Like an anthropomorphic Watchmen, but not really like that, now that I think about it. At all.

Jaton, eventually, had a son and a wife, and possibly even a daughter, but that isn’t entirely relevant as they make no appearance in the game design, unless you count the fact that they are – presumably – frozen along with the rest of Jaton’s home country/world, Vegetable Land. He did have a number of antagonists, however, who did play an expectedly large part in the game – mostly, they were rabbits, and that sort of thing. You know, vegetables….rabbits. Makes good sense.

I did attempt a book of short comic strips after seeing my friend Sam do that very thing, but I have a feeling that he might have appropriated his ideas from existing strips like Garfield, and so I found the task of actually making up 25-30 three panel strips a little hard. It’s probably for the best that they never made it out to the general public - that is to say, my year four classmates. What I did finish wasn’t very funny.

There was also, oddly, a series of basketball cards that I did – actual NBA cards were pretty huge at that time – and photocopied at the local video store. I recall handing them out to a few friends, but I don’t remember whether or not anyone was impressed or happy or even kept them.

The actual starting date of the game, I’m not so sure about. I believe it may have been around September or August of 1992. There was, I believe, a first draft of the first level, written out waiting while my mum was doing aerobics at the gym. None of it has survived, it seems.

GSW: How much do we remember of the first draft, though?

AW: Not a great deal, really. It was written on paper from the train that runs between Adelaide and Darwin: The Ghan. My uncle was doing the design for the paper, so we had an enormously large amount of it. It only really ran out around 1999, and I believe the last thing I drew was an attempted – and aborted – portrait of a girl I had a crush on at the time.

Anyway, it’s possible that the draft was the first time the project’s trademark pens were used.

GSW: Trademark pens?

AW: I don’t know what the brands were, but the whole thing was done in ballpoint pen – about 15 different colours. There was a 10 colour pen, and a four colour one, and then just a plain red pen. It gave the whole project a pretty distinct look, in a way – I mean, it wasn’t crayon, or coloured pencil, at least.

I don’t think you can buy the pens anymore, unfortunately. Not that I’d add to it or anything, but I’d like to at least find some, because I like to take a creepy sort of comfort from the things I cherished in childhood.

GSW: What about the actual content of the first draft?

AW: Again, it’s pretty vague, but I think it only showed the first level, without any kind of enemy design; the sort of thing that appears in the actual design document.

GSW: Did the first level change at all from our first draft to the actual document?

AW: It does appear so. I remember the first draft’s level being inspired quite heavily by another game. Possibly inspired to the point of being kind of a rip-off.

GSW: What game was that?

AW: Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the built in game for the Master System II. I never had one but Sam did, and I spent a lot of time playing that game in particular, so the first draft’s level was pretty much just the first level from Alex Kidd.

Actually, I could have had a chance to win a Master System, at some point. I applied to be on Australian kids TV game show Guess What, hosted by terrible cartoonist Andrew Fyfe, but I guess I didn’t have that x-factor they were after from contestants. My friend Matt got on there, though, and managed to win a Master System II. Bastard already had a NES and a SNES, and by actually going to the audition I missed out on that episode of Captain Planet where they swapped their rings for gloves but the gloves were evil or something. I’m not sure, since I never saw it.

GSW: Leaving aside scarring childhood memories, let’s look at the actual document for a while. Have we outlined the story at any point on here?

AW: Well, sort of. I mean, that bit down the bottom on the first page, if you click on it to zoom in. That’s pretty much it. I think, honestly, there’s something really appealing about not only the brevity of the dialogue, but also the general sense of ennui that Jaton is managing to project:

“OK. So Vegetable Land is frozen. But what can I do? Well, if I don’t save it who will?”

That’s pretty awesome. It conveys a feeling of utter weariness and helplessness in an unintentionally comical enough fashion to impress me greatly even now. The reply of Jago, the main antagonist, lacks a little in characterisation, but it makes up for it in regards to its threat of “GREAT warriors”, I think. That’s some serious shit.

GSW: It’s also a kind of cover for the game, right?

AW: It would appear that way, I guess. It’s like a back cover and front cover all rolled into one, in a way: showing the character in action poses, and also giving a few gameplay teases. It works kind of well in that respect.

GSW: And then we’ve got pages of the regular enemies: the “GREAT warriors”?

AW: Clearly, yeah. I don’t actually know where the inspiration for most of those characters came from: they never appeared in any of the other drawings.

The nuts, I believe, were from a small ornamental walnut my grandparents had on their mantel piece, and the golf ball is probably the same sort of thing, but beyond that who knows?

There’s a lot of Super Mario Bros. in there though. Things like having the enemy used as both a ground and air opponent, not to mention the fact that I had plans for a castle level at some point.

GSW: And then we’ve got the bosses.

AW: It should be pretty obvious to anyone who had the distinct displeasure of playing Wrath of the Black Manta that I’ve ripped off Tiny from the first level of that. Sorry – I played it a few times around then and thought he was a pretty cool boss. I guess the idea for the giant golf ball is probably stolen from the Technodrome too.

The descriptions make me laugh. Most of them seem to be, “Does anything to kill you”. It’s a little redundant, considering they are bosses, but nevermind.

Water is probably the lamest name for a boss ever, just for the record.

GSW: Shall we talk about the somewhat disturbing race stereotypes that we’ve managed to throw in there?

AW: Oh, let’s. Honestly, that’s one thing that I do feel a little embarrassed by, and while I’m pretty sure that no one is going to find the work of a nine year old particularly offensive, it’s worth noting that I am very much aware of the fact that not all Italians will throw “pizzas at you”.

Also, Sihks, in my admittedly limited experience, don’t tend to throw “knives every five seconds” and jump around.

GSW: The “Good Stuff” seems to suggest a fairly interesting range of influences in terms of power-ups.

AW: Thank you for noticing. Yeah, there seems to be elements taken from Alex Kidd, Sonic and Mario in there, from what I can see. Eight different vehicles might be pushing it a little for a game that only seems to have 18 levels, however.

GSW: I think it’s best if we let the level designs speak for themselves for the most part, but do you have any overarching comments you’d like to make about them?

AW: Only that I seem to have included a number of things that I particularly hate in game design: the moving platform that forces you to jump over blocks, and the “line” in level three that reverses your controls. I can’t think of anything that irritates me more than having my controls reversed.

Level four is quite clearly an indication that I must have played Shinobi sometime around then, and I’ve got no idea why I never finished anything past level five. Or, indeed, ever finished level five.

GSW: How long did all this take to do?

AW: Probably around a year, I think. It was pretty on-again off-again, mostly because of the fact that I had no way to make the game. I’m assuming you’re asking me questions about this in a second though, so I’ll not go into too much detail here.

Suffice it to say that if I had been able to make the game, the designs would have changed quite a bit. They look really annoying to play. Also, I think I would have been more motivated to complete the design.

GSW: Do we know what happened to Sam? He moved away after the end of that year, if memory serves.

AW: That’s correct, yeah. First to Melbourne, which made it relatively easy to keep in touch, then further up the east coast to Newcastle, which is about where we lost track of him, until the wonders of the Internet age allowed me to successfully stalk him. Unfortunately, not his sister, which is a pity, because I always had a bit of a crush on her.

Turns out he’s a writer now, though not a games-related one, which is good, because otherwise the vicious rivalry would have to be rekindled. That’s also why I haven’t used his surname at all; even though that’s something I normally wouldn’t have an issue with.

If I know writers (and I like to think I do, seeing as how Simon’s introduction says I’m a journalist and all) he’d find this article pretty quickly with the constant Googling of his name that all writers indulge in, then be confused, and then probably outraged by my rampant egotism. Or our rampant egotism: I forget how this plural/singular pronoun thing is working.

GSW: Me too. We don’t draw much at all anymore, do we?

AW: Not really. Birthday cards, the odd MS Paint thread on GAF; that kind of thing.

GSW: The actual attempts to make the game: how did they go?

AW: Well, there were a few. The first was to actually make it in Hypercard. This suggests I really had no idea what Hypercard was capable of, and it turned out expectantly badly. I mean, there’s just no way to make a sidescroller in Hypercard. I made some bad adventure games later on, but that’s a whole other column.

From there, I think I considered briefly making it in Klik and Play – or whatever the name of that program was – but after using it for about two minutes I realised that it just wasn’t going to work. The program was…pretty lacking in all regards.

There was a brief idea that I could do it in Macromedia Director. Again, after using the program for a little while it became obvious that this just wasn’t going to work. On one hand, it’s not such a misguided idea when you realise that it’s more or less the precursor to Flash, but on the other hand, well, it was the precursor to Flash and couldn’t do half the things that Flash can.

GSW: There’s definitely a feeling of regret that we never produced it, then?

AW: In a sense. I mean, I wish I’d done it when I was drawing this up. I think the influences I had at that time were fitting. A few years later and it probably would have been a Secret of Mana style action RPG. I mean, that makes about as much sense as…a Sonic RPG or something.

Oh wait.

GSW: Ever think about actually producing the game for real? Even just as a nostalgic thing, maybe?

AW: I’ve thought about it, sure, but it’s not going to happen. My programming skills are not what could be described as wonderful. I spent two months learning C++ for a project that was later shelved, and none of it really sunk in.

Actually, to be fair, ‘learning’ might be the wrong word. The guy teaching me spent 90% of his time sitting on a mattress on the floor of his home office, smoking bongs and eating chocolate cheesecake right from the packet while watching Star Trek Voyager. ‘Teaching myself’ would be infinitely more accurate. To say the least, that didn’t go so well. I did get paid for the time, though.

Anyway, it’s unlikely to ever happen, barring a purchase of Multimedia Fusion 2, or learning how to use Torque Game Builder or something. I really wish that I’d learn to program at an early age, but I just had no idea how to make games, or even where to start. I’ve done interviews with people who were making games for Spectrum and things like that at the age of 12, but I really didn’t even understand the way it all fit together.

It’s like how I used to play guitar at that age by just strumming open chords: I didn’t understand what the frets did. Maybe if I knew that, then I might be able to play guitar to a reasonable degree these days, instead of being singularly one of the worst guitarists of all time. Same thing applies to my programming.

GSW: But we secretly hope that someone else will make it now, don’t we?

AW: Secretly.

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

Aha, time to round up some of the best original features and interviews this week from big sister site Gamasutra and Game Career Guide, among others, headed by a neat, superlong Randy Pitchford interview - mainly run so we can feature the 'Pitchford covered in games' hilarishot.

Also around here somewhere - a design piece on how Dungeons & Dragon's 4th Edition could influence video games, Silent Hill's Lynch-ian influences, plus designing exergames with deeper stories.

Cha cha cha:

Catching Up With Gearbox's Randy Pitchford
"Texas-based Gearbox both owns the Brothers In Arms WWII franchise, and is diversifying swiftly into areas from Samba De Amigo for Wii to an Aliens FPS - Gamasutra talks in-depth to president Randy Pitchford on challenges, successes."

The Adventurer's Guide to Thievery
"The 4th Edition of the seminal pen & paper RPG Dungeons & Dragons has just debuted - but why should game developers care? THQ veteran Tom Smith explains what video games can learn - or even 'borrow' - from D&D's evolution."

Interview: CCP's Richardsson On The State Of EVE Online
"Space-based PC MMO EVE Online is five, and in this wide-ranging interview with Gamasutra, CCP executive producer Nathan Richardsson looks at the game's progress to date, gameplay comparisons with starkly different market leader World Of Warcraft, the lack of female players in-world, and much more."

A More Accurate Volumetric Particle Rendering Method Using the Pixel Shader
"Many games, even on current "next-gen" hardware, render particles using camera facing quads - veteran coder Krazanowski (Tomb Raider: Anniversary) suggests a neat alternative solution using pixel shaders and a little bit of math."

GCG’s Game Design Challenge Results: Hamlet
"Sister site GameCareerGuide.com has posted the strongest solutions to its recent game design challenge, which tasked readers with designing a game based on Hamlet - limiting in-game character dialogue strictly to words directly from Shakespeare’s text."

Combating Child Obesity: Helping Kids Feel Better by Doing What They Love
"Can you create a deep, story-based title that also functions as an exergame? DeAngelis looks at the history of exercise gaming and explains how his CMU university project Winds Of Orbis tries to twin the RPG and exercising for kids."

Q&A: Konami's Yamaoka on Silent Hill: Homecoming's Western Development Trip
"Konami's seminal Silent Hill horror franchise has shifted to a Western developer with the upcoming Double Helix-created Silent Hill: Homecoming - and Gamasutra talks to longtime series composer and now producer Akira Yamaoka about the shift, creative direction, and Lynch-ian inspiration."

The Impact of Activision Blizzard
"With the giant Activision-Vivendi Games merger, announced in late 2007, still wending its way to completion, Gamasutra talks to lawyer Tom Buscaglia, journalist Michael Zenke and analyst Michael Pachter on soon to be felt ramifications."

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

[This Chris Remo-penned piece actually ran earlier in the week on Gamasutra, but thought it was worth a repost here due to the indie-friendly subject matter - and some of the particularly neat Last.fm/email stat features that Fitterer mentions, yay.]

When Audiosurf creator Dylan Fitterer took the chair at Valve's recent Bellevue, Washington press event attended by Gamasutra, the presence of an actual third-party developer (even one using Steam's tools) confirmed the affair as one of Valve's most expansive - aimed at holistically legitimizing the PC as a game system.

More importantly, however, it spoke to Valve's unique position in the industry. Still an independent studio, the company is blurring the lines between developer and publisher within the context of digital distribution.

Even while it sells its own games, the Half-Life creator maintains what has become one of the de facto online methods for buying other companies' games, especially among the hardcore PC set.

With the release of the Independent Games Festival 'Best Audio'-winning Audiosurf, which he calls an "adaptive music game," Fitterer became something of an indie darling of the gaming world - and that's saying something when it comes to games, which have nothing so pervasive as a Pitchfork Media to knight hipsters weekly.

Rather than speaking about specific development issues, Fitterer's postmortem of Audiosurf decided to address why he stuck with the PC platform rather than try to jump over to a console-based download service, and how Steam helped him make the game financially viable.

No Barrier To Entry

Audiosurf is handily described by Wikipedia as "an IGF Award-winning puzzle/rhythm hybrid game created by Invisible Handlebar. Its track-like stages visually mimic the music the player chooses, while the player races across several lanes collecting colored blocks that appear in sync with the music."

The game was released in February of this year, becoming the most successful Steam title of the month both by units and, more impressively given its $10 price tag, by revenue. The title, which was the first to use Valve's Steamworks community/networking suite, continues to be a strong seller.

"I made it basically by myself, I released it on Steam, and it's changed my life," said Fitterer. "It's been a really big success, way beyond my expectations."

So firstly, why did Fitterer create the title on PC? He stressed his relief at not having to deal with approval or certification once the game was ready to deliver.

"I just kept working on it, and eventually I had Audiosurf," he recounted. "I didn't have to ask anyone to release it, except for Elizabeth, my wife. Nobody could turn it down."

Bringing the game to closed platforms, he said, would have required even more development time, not to mention the issues involved with getting a publishing deal in the first place.

Like many indie developers, part of Fitterer's PC allegiance is out of practicality. "I built this game without any financial backing," he explained, "so, dev kits, that's just not a hurdle I want to be facing."

Post-release, he pointed to the open network architecture available on PC as a strength. "On the consoles, there are limitations," he said. "On the PC, I can do whatever I want."

Fitterer uses that openness to not only host leaderboards for all included Audiosurf tracks, but to automatically create leaderboards for every custom track a user plays.

No Barrier To Customers

Echoing the central theme of Robin Walker's Team Fortress 2 presentation the same day, Fitterer praised the connected nature of the PC platform, which allows developers the most direct route to customers.

"On the PC, I have an open dialogue with the customers, a real direct line," he explained. "On the internet, it's emails, it's chats, forums, and social networks. Consoles, to me, are kind of across the wall from all that. There are over 10,000 YouTube videos of Audiosurf. I love that stuff."

The designer then gave a direct example of how both the direct communication as well as the lack of development restrictions resulted in a major new feature for the game's community.

"One of the things I noticed," Fitterer recalled, "is that a lot of Audiosurf players were into this site called Last.fm. It's a social network for music fans; it tracks what you're playing and correlates it with other people, so you can discover new bands. I just integrated it into Audiosurf, so whenever you play a song there, it updates your stats.

"It didn't take long to roll it out. No certification. Boom, it's out, everybody has it, everybody's happy," he said. "Good stuff."

No Barrier Between Customers

Part of Audiosurf's success was due not just to Fitterer himself having easy access to his customers, but also due to potential customers having open communication between themselves.

The game's design, he argues, lends itself very much to viral marketing, something Steam facilitates. For example, he saw users linking one another to the Audiosurf Steam page, which contains a convenient purchase link. Some evangelists went as far as purchasing the game for their friends with Steam's gift function.

On the development side, he implemented a simple feature that encouraged competition between users, as well as providing automatic, but personal, encouragment keep coming back to the game.

"Dethroned" emails are sent to users when they are knocked off a song's leaderboard, informing them of their defeat.

Unlike most online games, where top leaderboard slots are the domain of only the most hardcore addicts, Audiosurf generates a unique leaderboard for any song a user chooses to play.

Thus, users are far more likely to end up vying for the top of one of their favorite tracks - and, thus, likely to be chastised and reminded by an automated email.

"For example, if I were to take the top slot on a Madonna song, Jason is going to be dethroned," Fitterer concluded cheekily, looking pointedly at Valve business director Jason Holtman and rousing up some laughter amongst the small audience.

Grumbled Holtman in response, "Sure, pick on the business guy."

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

Well, the folks at Maxis/EA were kind enough to send me an early copy of the full version of the Spore Creature Creator, the $10 pre-release creature maker for Will Wright's magnum opus.

The Creature Creator is officially debuting on the 17th, but since some other folks such as Kotaku's Mr. Crecente and Digg's Kevin Rose are also linking to movies of their delightful creations - and lots of videos are starting to pop up on YouTube after the hands-on Maxis visit earlier this week, I thought I'd document a few different stages of effort in making monsters.

Here's the first creature I knocked together, 'Fluffyleaf', and I describe him as a 'plantarian' in his description. This took me literally no more than five minutes to put together from start to finish, since it's simply a torso, a maw, a couple of pairs of hoiked-up legs, and some leaves where I guess wings should be.

He doesn't have eyes, as a YouTube commenter astutely notes, but that's because I thought he looked more stylish without them. Might lead to some evolution-related issues when the full game is released!

Click on the image above to see a hi-res version of him, or watch the video below for his slick dance moves:

If you want to know more about how the Creature Creator really behaves, Nate Ralph's hands-on explanation at Wired's Game|Life blog is the best description I've seen.

In the meantime, I'm just going to be doodling and noodling at greater length, and presenting you with the results. First, simple impressions? It's a heck of a lot of fun to make timorous beasties, and the social and YouTube upload features are just killer.

[EDIT: Hmm, looks like the Creature Creator free demo version somehow got leaked early. Still, I'll carry on with this, because it's fun, and I'm guessing the demo version has different capabilities to the version I'm using.]

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

Following Microsoft's announcement that it would be delisting Xbox Live Arcade games with a MetaCritic score lower than 65%, if other conversion rate and age criteria were met, newly launched Gamasutra sister blog Gamerbytes - which deals with all elements of console digital downloads - asked XBLA developers exactly what they thought.

First up was Ilari Kuittinen, CEO of developer Housemarque, recently known for its PlayStation Network Super Stardust HD and currently working on Golf: Tee it Up for Xbox Live Arcade. He advocates an approach that fixes the oversaturation problem with interface improvements rather than delisting:

"It is hard to really fully comment on the issue of removing games from the XBLA service as we don't know how many games are really fulfilling the criteria. Are there really many games that are under the threat of being delisted from the service?

Amazon.com has literally hundreds of thousands of different items available and they are happy to add more items to their lists every day rather than delisting items from their database."

Both Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns, the two members of N+ developer Metanet Software, were more outwardly frustrated by the announcement.

They would like to see a user rating system such as the one used for WiiWare, and like Kuittinen, they cited Amazon.com.

Mare Sheppard:

"Wow, that seems so extreme! It seems very unfair that the offending titles would be pulled entirely, regardless of their sales. Sure, they may be rated/reviewed poorly, but isn't that, realistically, entirely subjective? And, a conversion rate of 6% is still admirable, isn't it?"

Raigan Burns:

"It really doesn't make any sense that they wouldn't just bump them to a lower-profile category... deleting them outright is INSANE. Amazon stocks books with single-digit annual sales, and they have to deal with physical inventory! You'd think digital would be even cheaper to manage.

We both believe that a rating system would be a better solution to this problem. The system implemented on the Wii is working very well, for example, especially since it requires players to have played the game for a certain amount of time before they get to rate it. It's fair, and such an important feature. Cutting down the catalog is not an effective way to manage complexity; user ratings are."

Finally, Merscom (Buku Sudoku) co-founder and CEO Lloyd Melnick weighed in with a dissenting opinion in support of Microsoft's changes, arguing that developers who deliver quality games deserve a marketplace free of clutter:

"I support this policy. I think it is important to maintain a consistent level of quality and if a game is not hitting these targets (which are not that rigorous) they aren't giving the gamer a good experience.

"We put almost three years into Buku and it is frustrating that there is so much noise that player's may not realize our game really is good.

"I always believe in quality over quantity and I think the Microsoft policy is a good move in this direction. I understand how some developers feel they might end up wasting their effort, but I think if they make a REAL effort these hurdles should be a piece of cake."

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

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

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released earlier this week - two sequels, a highly-rated tower defense game, one freeware puzzler and finally, a roguelike with no name.

Game Pick: 'GemCraft' (Game in a Bottle, browser)
"A neat tower defense game which has been getting rave reviews from fans of the genre, featuring plenty of skills and achievements to unlock in campaign mode. Expect to spend at least a couple of days to beat all challenges within."

Game Pick: 'Rose and Camellia 2' (Nigoro, browser)
"A sequel to one of Nigoro's more popular releases about female aristocrats dueling via face-slapping, made especially for visitors to the Shockwave web site. Rose and Camellia 2 is a hidden bonus which can only be unlocked by players who are good enough to beat the first game."

Game Pick: 'DayMare Town 2' (Pastel Games, browser)
"A new point and click adventure game from the developer of Submachine and the Covert Front series. Fans of Samorost 1 and 2 should not miss this, but do keep a walkthrough handy as some of the puzzles encountered during your journey can be rather difficult to figure out."

Game Pick: 'Nameless Roguelike' (Hexedian, browser)
"A roguelike game in which enemies are represented by alphabets, while items are shown as special symbols or quotation marks. Gather and use whatever equipment you can find, as the journey to retrieve a secret artifact will be wrought with danger at every turn of a corner."

Game Pick: 'Ziczac' (0rel, freeware)
"A simple scoring-based puzzler where players acquire points by making small squares with four tiles of the same colour, or attempt to create large loops for a special multiplier bonus. Comes with a functional online high score submission feature."

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

['The Z-Axis' is a bi-weekly column from game writer Michael Zenke, stretching games and gaming trends out planarly to poke, caress, and pinpoint the innards of what makes them great. This first week, he finds out how the folks from Penny Arcade laid their web strip end to end to make a deftly simple episodic game.]

Games are escapism. At their core, games offer the player a way to experience a place or moment in time which would otherwise be unattainable. Whether that moment is impossible (exploring a ruined dome city on the floor of the ocean) or merely highly improbable (living the life of a night vision goggle-wearing super-spy), games take us out of our time and place and put us into a new one.

The written word has done this for centuries, and over the years this has been concretized into the literal virtual worlds we now inhabit every day.

What I find fascinating is how modern gaming, having now turned many thorny design and technology issues into “solved problems”, has returned to the roots of the medium. The popularity of “all you can eat” gaming is ever on the rise, with titles like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Just the same, pure moments are quickly becoming the bread and butter of modern gaming - in the same way they were at the beginning of the pastime’s history.

Pac-Man and Asteroids don’t get much simpler, and games once again seek to once again offer that clarity of experience. Strung-together chunks of directed gameplay offer this up on the moment-to-moment level, while episodic gaming seeks to offer this sort of pure experience over a longer timeframe.

Nowhere is this vision or purity more visible than in last month’s release of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. The new title is the perfect example of an extended moment, a point in time distilled and spread throughout a greater whole.

On A Precipice

OtRSPoD, as it’s being called, is the first venture into gaming from the creators of the Penny Arcade webcomic. To say that Penny Arcade is wildly successful would be a gross understatement. Within the field of web comics, creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins are legends. It helps that they’ve proven themselves to be charitable, great guys and (with the help of the equally-mythical Robert Khoo) pretty savvy business-folk.

The first Penny Arcade title brings you inside the comic-world they’ve been creating for the last 9+ years. This strange and sometimes disturbing reality has been, up until now, only visible through the three-panel windows Krahulik and Holkins post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. These transitory realms are almost always self-contained. There’s no ongoing storyline, no continuity at all except for the appearance of the characters Gabe and Tycho. Even their participation isn’t required to make a Penny Arcade strip.

So the very fact that their first playable offering is as identifiably Penny Arcade is notable. At roughly six hours in length, you’d be right in thinking that the transition from 30-seconds of humor to the equivalent of an epic poem results in some significant changes. The changes, though, are all fundamentally consistent with the comic’s internal reality. What results is an extended strip, three panels stretched and warped out to encompass a full-fledged story.

This extension of a moment in time is accomplished in a number of ways. The ‘padding’ of the gameplay time with combat would seem to be the most obvious method. Interestingly, I found the game’s combat to be very much in keeping with the PA ethos. Bloody, over-the-top violence interspersed with some genuine weirdness - just like your average strip. What could be an immersion-breaking element, drawing you out of the comic world, instead furthers your belief that you’re interacting with their weird little universe. “If things were to go down this way,” you think to yourself, “I’d fully expect to see Tycho attacking people with a book.” And he does.

Like Butter Scraped Across Too Much Bread

The key here is that these elements extend the transitory moment we all experience when reading the weekly strip. Instead of spreading the game’s essence thin across a wad of padding, the game offers regular moments of PA-quality humor. As a result, the game is more like reading a bunch of strips over and over again in a row. There’s the ‘combat’ strip, the searching for hidden objects strip, and then a number of story-focused strips that move the game’s tale along. The game offers one experience over and over again to the player, but the quality of the game is such that it doesn’t get old.

It could be argued that many popular modern games ‘make their bones’ by providing this very service. Repetition without boredom is inordinately rewarding for fans of particular game types. The stalking and creeping of Assassin’s Creed turns the title into an extended hunt, a macrocosm of the individual missions Altair completes. Gears of War seems to be one long, exquisite battle from cover-point to cover-point.

While both of these games (and the PA title as well) have their detractors, the audiences that enjoy these kinds of games have welcomed them with open arms. That would seem to fly in the face of the “everything and the kitchen sink” style of gameplay that’s growing ever more popular. Whether a truly open world as in GTA IV, or just a title with numerous styles of play (as in Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction) ever-more elaborate artifice seems to be the trend.

Simple is Sexy

The obvious question, then, is “what do these seemingly-simple games offer players?” The answer is just as simple: a single perfect moment. Stretched out over the length of an entire game, the endless hunt of Assassin’s Creed becomes a thing of crystalline beauty. The gunfight that permeates every scene in Gears of War isn’t repetitive, just unfettered.

In an era where Xbox Live Arcade games and PopCap candies are becoming just as much a part of the gaming scene as 60+ hour JRPGs or hard-core violence shooters, this should come as no surprise. I personally view it as an epicurean turnaround. Just as many fine dining restaurants seek to emphasize the inherent flavors in their meals, so too do modern games seek to offer a palate-cleansing purity.

Don’t mistake the writing on the wall: there will always be room for Final Fantasy, GTA, and the varied gameplay of a Ratchet and Clank. These “extended moments” are, instead, a chance for gamers to focus their experiences. By paring down to the purest gaming components, the most important storytelling elements, titles like On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness offer an alternative to the all-you-can eat buffet. Variety is, after all, the spice of life.

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

Returning for a near-weekend brush with GameSetLinks, we feature such delights as the (pictured) GameStop trade-in air freshener gimmick, which I am still recovering from opening, nasally, and those awesome Blik Nintendo-themed wall decals.

Also in here - some very game community-applicable Yahoo! community patterns from the Habitat folks, an awesome lecture on game culture, more No More Heroes critiques, and more Nintendo DS oddness, sniffle, *bawl*.

Inside it's shining:

WhatIsBlik.com: Nintendo Wall Decals
Oo, officially licensed surface graphics for walls, totally awesome.

Jeremy's 1UP Blog: MGS4, EGM, NDAs and YOU
Explanations are good!

GameStop Uses Air Fresheners to Promote Trades - Shacknews - PC Games, PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii video game news, previews and downloads
We just got one of these, and it stunk up the entiiire office, haha.

NCSX Import Video Games & Toys: 99 No Namida - New Japanese DS Game
'The Namida software throws a few personality questions at the user and creates a sort of emotional profile from the answers. A short story then plays out on the screen which is designed to make the reader cry.'

Dispatches: No More Heroes, Part Three; Or: Raise High the Beam Katana, Carpenters! at Game Design Advance
I swear, there's been more decent thought-pieces about No More Heroes than almost any other recent game. Is it all the pop culture crammed into it?

GP EXCLUSIVE: Read the Transcript as Jack Thompson Storms Out of Court | GamePolitics
A playwright couldn't have playwrote it better.

Sean Malstrom: 'Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy'
Slightly lunatic, extremely fascinating rant on casual gaming, Nintendo, etc - via Dubious Quality.

Three Wishes: Game Genie Grants Developers Their Hearts' Desires from 1UP.com
'If you could, at the wave of a magic wand, overcome some technological hurdle in game development, what would it be?' Neat people reply!

Functional Autonomy » Blog Archive » Under The Mask: Games Culture
Transcript of a phenomenally good lecture on gaming culture by David Hayward. Read it.

Habitat Chronicles: Reputation Patterns for Everyone
'During almost five years working on these tools and ecosystems, I developed several rules-of-thumb about how and when to use devices such as points, ranking, ratings, reviews and especially when not to use them.'

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Spore creators Maxis held a near-final preview of Will Wright's eons-in-development 'everything' game Spore at its Emeryville studios the other day, and our very own Chris Remo was present to see presentations and ask: Who's this game for, and why should they care?]

For all of the understandable excitement about Spore - after all, it is The Next Game From Will Wright, and the concept of guiding a species from cellular birth to spacefaring brilliance lacks not in ambition nor potential - there have consistently remained some fairly fundamental questions.

Just how exactly does the whole thing work, and is there a clearly (or loosely) defined target audience?

Neither of those questions were definitively answered during a presentation yesterday at the Maxis team's Emeryville, California headquarters, mainly because the event was primarily dedicated to only the Creature Creator part of the game.

Still, a number of features demonstrated by the team, as well as some hands-on time, suggest a lot of promise and a necessarily long-term strategy.

Targeting An Indefinite Market

Last May, when asked what it would take for Spore to be profitable, then-EA CCO Bing Gordon said, "It needs to sell in the millions and last a few years to pay back the investment."

When presented with this reaction last night and asked to speculate on Spore's target audience, Maxis designer Soren Johnson (Civilization IV) explained that the game at large doesn't really have an explicit target audience, per se.

In his own specific role on the team, he himself has something of a charter that springs from his development experience: to try and make the game palatable to core gamers who aren't the traditional audience for The Sims.

Spore may well connect more with core gamers than has The Sims, whose impressively diverse audience is massive enough that it need not disproportionately cater to the traditional triple-A gaming set.

As Will Wright has said in past presentations, the structure of Spore is something of a homage to many of own favorite games, with phases of evolution mimicking titles such as Pac-Man, Civilization, Diablo, and Populous, to name a few (Johnson even refers to one of Spore's phases as "Civ," the accepted shorthand for Sid Meier's long-running series).

That kind of multi-genre self-referencing is uncommon, and may well ins