Game Eaters

In Defense of Stat-Porn.

2007-06-06T00:37:00.000-05:00

I dislike heavily stat-oriented RPG’s. I feel I have better ways to spend my time than doing the same actions over and over and over again, just so I can unlock a new cinematic with the same cloying melodrama. But once in a while a game comes along, does all these things, doesn’t innovate at all, and I love it. Odin Sphere is one of those games.

I usually play mainstream RPG’s like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Genso Suikoden. These are RPG’s where exploration, story, combat, and character advancement exist in roughly equal proportions. But there is another strain of Japanese RPG, like Disgaea or Final Fantasy Tactics, where character advancement and combat are much bigger parts of the game than story or exploration. These games seem designed for those with a fetish for complex systems and a low interest level in narrative. They are stat-porn.

I’m normally driven crazy by the tired conventions stat-porn RPG’s indulge in. In my old age I have become a critic of game conventions that constrain imagination and keep designers from better exploring the worlds they create, thus preventing games from reaching a wider audience. There’s no worse offender of this than Odin Sphere. I was disappointed with Kingdom Hearts when a non-gamer friend lamented that its rich fictional universe was expressed strictly in terms of opening treasure boxes and hitting people. So how can I not hate Odin Sphere, which takes Norse mythology and makes it about whacking monsters and mixing potions?

I’m sure most will assume art is the decisive factor; the sublime 2D art of Odin Sphere. The art is a big part of the aesthetic experience of this game. It does make the world feel evocative, which inevitably encases the play experience—as pedestrian as it is—in a warm and magical glow. I suppose next one might assume it’s the story cinematics. The stately Japanese voice acting removes a lot of the normal barriers to taking an RPG melodrama seriously, and the story itself achieves the human pathos that mythology is supposed to embody. Ever since Square made unconventional plots boring I’ve come to appreciate RPG’s that have the grace to make me care about simple tales of love, lust, power, and betrayal. This is why I now find Dragon Quest far more human than Final Fantasy has become, and I think it’s why I find Odin Sphere romantic. The central metaphor of Odin Sphere is a little girl in a dusty attic reading age old tales of princes, princesses, battles, and gods. The story appropriately feels like a long old book, but one that’s populated by beings of human frailty.

But aesthetics are only part of Odin Sphere’s appeal. Also important is the fact that the mechanics, for all their repetitiveness and simplicity, yield dynamics which are not repetitive or simplistic at all. Lots of reviews complain that characters have very limited moves and that the game is really about doing the same combo over and over. On some level Odin Sphere is about repeating the same combat moves, but what I fail to see is how these reviewers missed the strategic planning one must achieve in order to survive. I’ve done more thinking in Odin Sphere than in games with more so-called variety. Gameplay requires an impressive level of concentration. The dynamics created by one enemy type versus another enemy type, by groups of enemies versus a single enemy, or by one boss versus another boss, are always complex. Odin Sphere is a triumph of minimalist mechanics giving rise to multi-layered dynamics.

I like Odin Sphere for holistic reasons, even though it isn’t the sort of holism I hope for in games. I want games to be better combinations of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics but not in ways that require years of genre literacy to enjoy. Because it’s mired in the fetishism of Japanese stat-grinding RPG’s, Odin Sphere requires a deep level of genre literacy. On the other hand its combination of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics are unusually balanced for a game of its type… which is something I, at my literacy level, can appreciate.

There’s nothing wrong with game conventions that require literacy in order to engage players. After all, there is no such thing as media that is devoid of convention and therefore no media that doesn’t require a form of literacy. The games industry needs to work a lot harder to pioneer new conventions that require new literacies so we can reach new audiences. That said, it’s nice to see existing conventions—arcane as they may be to new players—handled with such superb artfulness. It may be stat-porn, but Odin Sphere is one game that will make you proud to be a pervert.

After GDC: Reflections on Eiji Aonuma

2007-03-15T16:28:00.000-05:00

At GDC, Eiji Aonuma gave a talk entitled Reflections on Zelda that could be briefly summarized as "Nintendo's special brand of development hell." I found it an insightful examination of the various different market and internal forces that shaped the creation of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Aonuma explained each creative decision made for each major change to the series since Wind Waker, including the handheld iterations. In some ways, Aonuma's generally humble tone seemed to me to be an apology to all the Zelda fans who disapprove of various changes to the series.

The Game-Eaters met up at GDC and voiced our opinions about Aonuma's and Nintendo's decision making process, not least being the decision to make Twilight Princess "120% Ocarina of Time" instead of continuing the trend of giant innovative steps in Wind Waker, Four Swords, and Majora's Mask. As always, our GDC discussions get pretty spirited and our dinners get pretty Mexican.

The comments following 4 Color Rebellion article about Wii Sports and Wii Play going platinum reminded me that Aonuma claimed that Wind Waker did extremely poorly in the market, despite breaking a million preorders in North America. A little digging in Wikipedia, that resource of oh-so-reliable information, indicates that Wind Waker was the poorest-selling home-console Zelda thus far. Some of the handheld versions sold fewer copies. It sold slightly less than Majora's Mask, which in turn only sold half as well as Ocarina of Time. Sales-wise, the latter is the champ for the entire series.

Twilight Princess worldwide numbers appear to be about 300k copies away from catching up to Wind Waker, which is coincidentally the difference between the Japanese sales numbers for Twilight Princess and Wind Waker. So, despite the change to Aonuma's "US-focused" graphics by moving away from cel-shading, it sold about the same in the US. The game has been on the shelves for a while, but Wiis are still in short supply, so it's possible for Twilight Princess to perform well in the long-tail and sell more copies to prove Aonuma right. As of this moment, though, Wind Waker is still doing better than Twilight Princess.

Seeing the marked downward trend since Ocarina, I'm not at all surprised that Nintendo wanted to keep their their game development low by throwing out hi-def from their Wii strategy. It also reinforced the doom-and-gloom pronouncements of the Japanese "Gamer Drift" that drew every major Japanese game publisher's eyes to the US market in the past two years, until Nintendo stemmed the tide with the DS. Japanese speakers at GDC gave a lot insight into the various alternative strategies from Konami, Capcom, Nintendo, and Square-Enix, the results of which are only just beginning to hit the shelves.

Christmas at Ground Zero

2006-12-21T07:43:00.000-05:00

A holiday mod for Introversion's Defcon. Merry Christmas!

The Dangers of Playing Guitar Hero

2006-12-14T22:43:00.000-05:00

So the pitcher of the Detroit Tigers has hurt his hand... not by training, but by playing Guitar Hero. It's a problem that is unavoidable when you play the game; you're so into it, it's difficult to put it down, even when your hand is hurting. One of the first things I noticed when I started playing was that my left hand hurt the same way it did when I (unsuccessfully) tried to teach myself to play the real guitar. But pain is no obstacle to go on playing... nor tiredness--right after after getting Guitar Hero II, I played until I was practically falling asleep and therefore failing to hit a single note.
Soon we will hear about "wiimote's elbow" or "DDR knee". Doctors should start preparing a speciality on videogame injuries.

(We Game Eaters bloody love Guitar Hero, don't we?)

There are cool games for Mac (only) too

2006-12-01T19:58:00.000-05:00

I just came across Sketchfighter 4000 Alpha, a Mac-only game by Ambrosia Software (these guys also did the Mac port of Darwinia). It's a shooter game, but not a shoot'em up--it has the controls of Asteroids, which force you to navigate the space carefully, while you shoot the enemies that come at you. This, in a way, it forces you to move carefully and not too fast. The concept is interesting, though its hybrid nature makes it more appealing to players that like slow-paced games rather than action-packed.

What made me download the game was how it looked. Following on with the confession series started in the previous entry, I have to admit I admire retro-looking games which turn technical limitations into a style choice. What is now "realistic" (mind the quotation marks) will look old-fashioned with the advent of the next generation of consoles; you can see this yourself by checking early PS2 games, for instance. Making a statement with your visual style that goes beyond "you can count the hairs in this guy's head" is what I'm interested in. There are beautiful "realistic" 3D games out there, as FFXII (which looks fenomenal), but if game developers give a chance to riskier and new visual styles, we can get more stuff like Okami.

Sketchfighter is neat, it makes its visuals part of the concept of the game, the game that you imagined with your notepad doodles, this time moving for real. The music is not sci-fi themed, but more of a retro-calm-leisure soundtrack which makes you feel, not that you're in outer space, but that you're a kid playing with pen and paper.

The only bad thing is that it's for Mac only. Give it a try if you can.

I like to watch...

2006-11-30T01:12:00.000-05:00

... people playing games. And before you start thinking that I'm a videogame pervert, remember that in South Korea there are three cable channels that broadcast videogame matches. I like playing too, of course, but I still keep a certain fascination about watching people play. Perhaps it's part of my academic side, always observing how people relate to media. Perhaps it's my crazy scientist side, the same side that showed clips from Braindead (a.k.a. Dead Alive in the US) and Evil Dead 2 in a symposium to my fellow students and teachers of English Literature, and watched their faces instead of the screen.

There is an inherent pleasure in seeing other people play. C'mon, you've done it too. Watching sportsment while they play cannot be so different from watching someone playing a videogame. As in sports, it is more enjoyable to see a game played when we know what it is about; we should have played it ourselves to appreciate good (or bad) gameplay. Only when you've played Guitar Hero can you be astounded at a video of someone hitting all the notes of 'Bark at the Moon' in Expert mode.

This videogame voyeurism probably started with my own limited gaming skills. I've improved a ton, but there are still certain genres that I completely suck at, so I need someone to play them for me. Six years ago, when I started studying games, if I got stuck in a certain level of a game, I would call my brother to help me pass that level or that stupid boss whose strategy I could not figure out. We scholars need to know as much of the game as possible, so at times we must resort to surrogate players to get us through the game. (Stop that disdainful smirk, you've used GameFAQs too, I'm sure!)

I must confess I'm not so interested in watching a video of what the screen shows while someone plays. I like to watch what people do, their gestures, what they say. More importantly, I love to see how people learn to play the game, and improve with every try. Again, Guitar Hero is an excellent example of this--you can see a newbie from failing the first song to happily rocking on in less than an hour. Every game of the Wii, so far, also brings out that sense of wonder, since we're still getting used to the new controller.

However, the biggest kick I get from watching people is when they play a game I had a hand in. When I was demoing my interactive fiction piece (which I'll post here one of these days), I was thrilled to see what people would try that I had not thought of, and later I would try to incorporate it into the game if it wasn't supported. I would not get discouraged if they did not do what they were supposed to, I made a note and tried to make changes for people to understand what they could do. On the one hand, making games gives you a sense of power, since you get players to do what you want (more or less, if you're a good desinger). On the other, it's also gratifying to give players a sense of power too, by which games allow them to do things that they can't do in real life.

The empowerment of players, letting them do things that they can't do in real life (flying an acrobatic plane, swimming in deep waters, fighting aliens, being a thief, a pirate, a rock star, a surgeon) is what I like to watch, whoever made the game. Sharing that power, that thrill to people around is what I like when I watch people play games.

(... Okaaaaaay, watching people suffer while playing games can also be fun. See "Why Doom 3 is rated mature".)

Triforce on MIT Dome

2006-11-20T12:28:00.000-05:00

Clara noted this on the web before I did (kudos to Bryan O. '07), despite the fact that I'm currently in Boston and she's in Atlanta. I'm verifying that there actually is a Triforce on the Great Dome on the MIT campus, commemorating the launch of the Wii this past weekend.

For those who haven't figured it out yet, all the contributors to Game Eaters are MIT alums, so hacks such as random sculptures on the Great Dome are part and parcel of our collegiate experience. It's always heartwarming when the prank takes a form related to one's favorite hobby, though!

Rollercoaster Tycoon Evilness

2006-11-02T16:52:00.000-05:00

From The Last Boss, a piece of sadistic brilliance, courtesy of Rollercoaster Tycoon.

More on the ESRB ratings

2006-10-27T13:23:00.000-05:00

(Rescuing this article from draft limbo)

As a follow-up to Matt's complaint about the double standards of the ESRB, I must post this practical example of what type of values the ESRB is watching over.

This started the day that Matt discovered that Indigo Prophecy, apart from having a different title in Europe (Farenheit), also had different content--there were sex scenes that had been censored in the US. If you go to the ESRB site and look for the game, you find that both versions have been rated by the ESRB. The European version is AO (adults only), while the American version is rated M (Mature).

The difference between both versions is that the AO version has "nudity" and "strong sexual content" and the M version as "partial nudity" and "sexual themes". By the way, the definitions of these ratings go as follows:

Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.
Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.

(If someone can explain to me how you can get more intense violence than with the depiction of blood or gore, I'd be eternally grateful.)

Let's jump across the pond. Farenheit, that is, the uncensored game, is rated 16+ by the PEGI (European equivalent of the ESRB), for sex ("game depicts nudity and/or sexual behaviour or sexual references") and violence ("game contains depictions of violence"). The PEGI ratings are not as detailed as the ESRB, and the range is also different: the PEGI age bands are 3+, 7+, 12+, 16+, 18+. So basically what in the US is "adults only" (and it's actually not widely available), corresponds to a rating for younger people in Europe. What is more, in the UK, where publishers seem to alternate between the PEGI and their own rating system, the game is "suitable only for persons of 15 years and older". This rating system is the British Board of Film classification, that is, the standards for film have been extended to videogames.

You can see a scan of the European boxes here.

Case no. 2: Hitman Blood Money, which presents the same version on both Europe and the US. The ESRB classification is M, the PEGI classification is 18+, in the UK is 18 years and older. That is, the game is considered "adults only" in Europe.

The point I'm trying to make is that different game classifications reflect different values--sex is more "censorable" than violence in the US than in Europe, which is no news. The problem, as Matt pointed out, is that these classifications not only affect the marketing of the games, but also their design and content. Videogame makers must keep these constraints in mind while the game is in production, though the odds are that the rating boards would find something that is not appropriate for a certain age range that the designers had not thought of.

On the other hand, I don't want to give the impression that the ESRB is worse than PEGI, or the other way around--both organizations have difficult jobs, and mostly have to respond to people that don't play videogames or only talk about them in overgeneralized, stereotypical and uninformed terms. The ESRB is also trying to resist anti-videogame bouts -- for instance , Bully has been released in the US with a Teen rating, which has been protested by our old friend Jack Thompson (as a last stomping on the ground after failing to ban it altogether in the US). Apparently, "gay content" (meaning the possibility of kissing a boy in the game) should change its rating to Mature, or so Thompson thinks. Fortunately, the ESRB has not given signs of intending to change the rating. Sex may be taboo, but homosexuality is not for the ESRB.

Note to self: write more entries, but shorter. And publish them.

Bush-Era Rhetoric Ruins Another Great Game Idea.

2006-09-10T11:05:00.000-05:00

Usually, I don't rely on ads for my awareness of games. But I confess that before I saw the ad in last month's issue of Game Informer, I'd never heard of Just Cause. The premise is intriguing: a politically-charged GTA. Just Cause is a giant, open-ended world sim where your goal is not to just explore and create havoc but plot and execute the downfall of a government. Set in a fictional South American country, it seems like a great opportunity to combine the mechanics of GTA with some topical, socially complex content. So you can imagine my disappointment when I read the following description on IGN:

In Just Cause, you take on the role of the flamboyant Rico Rodriguez - an undercover CIA operative specialising in regime change - as he tries to overthrow the corrupt government of San Esperito. This rogue South American island is suspected of stockpiling WMDs and it's your job to negate the threat to world peace.

And here I was naive enough to think, even for a moment, that the title "Just Cause" might refer to the injustices of a corrupt government perpetrated on its people. What was I thinking?

It's not as if every game has to bend to my personal politics, but Jesus, how about a little variety? God forbid we'd have a videogame where the excuse for regime change wasn't WMD's and you didn't play some swaggering yank who kicks ass in the name of world stability. What's wrong with playing as a citizen of San Esperito who is tired of being oppressed and decides to fight back? Oh wait, that would suggest violent revolution against your own corrupt government is justifiable... and we wouldn't want that in George Bush's America would we.

How the ESRB can hurt gaming.

2006-08-10T10:40:00.000-05:00

I picked up the new GameInformer of the floor at the office today (which is typically where we keep our magazines) and I noticed an interview with Patricia Vance, President of the ESRB. In it she said:

[O]ur ratings are more conservative than movies and television. Yet, we're not at a point where we can be comfortable to make them more lenient. One of the things we do every year is we go out and test our ratings assignments with parents. We find that the way we assign our ratings is very in line with mainstream American tastes. I don't think we're in a position to adjust that at all based on that research.

It's at moments like these I wonder if I'm just a simple creature. Maybe this proves I'm a naive hippy with no sense of political give-and-take, but I found myself imagining the following conversation...

ME: Hey ESRB! Why do you perpetuate the double-standards held by the game-illiterate mainstream? Aren't you supposed to be on our side?

ESRB: We aren't a public service, duh. If our ratings help stifle the artistic growth of the industry by forcing the market to conform to a conservative world-view that's your problem, not ours.

ME: Golly! Thanks ESRB! I'll never complain again when you slap an AO rating on a game with PG-13 sex!

ESRB: No problem, kiddo. Check back with us in 20 years. By then the mainstream might be on your side.

ME: Will do! Let's just hope the misconceptions about games endorsed and officialized by your current rating system don't shape anyone's perception over the next two decades.

ESRB: *sigh* Silly boy. We just reflect culture. We don't influence it.

ME: I guess you're right. How could I ever doubt you, ESRB!

bit Generations

2006-08-06T04:01:00.000-05:00

I didn't have any luck finding the first series of bit Generations (Boundish, Dialhex and Dotstream) but I managed to pick up most of the others. So far, I'm a little ways into Soundvoyager and Digidrive. I'll get to Orbital and Coloris eventually.

Soundvoyager has many different modes, but the basic concept seems to be variations on a single theme: use the shoulder buttons (or left and right on the D-pad) to intercept or avoid glowy dots. The dots emanate a sound, often synchronized to a background music track, and get louder as they get closer. They also have a cute doppler effect as they pass by. Generally, the games move at a relaxed pace, and you may be wondering where the fun is in that.

Trick is, the dots get dimmer and dimmer as you successfully collect or avoid them, then they completely disappear. That's when you realize that the game isn't about seeing the dots at all... they're only visible in the tutorial levels. For the rest of the game, you're doing the same thing, only faster and occasionally with multiple sources of sound, and the only way you'll be able to figure out what to do is to trust your ears. You'll also start to really appreciate the fact that the game is in stereo, although I found the games easier to play by reversing the left and right speakers, which is only practical if you're using earphones or headphones. I believe all the actual GBA's (Gameboy Advance, GBA SP, Gameboy Micro) only have mono speakers built-in, so you'll definitely need some sort of headphones handy. At any rate, this is possibly the first game I've played where the experience is dramatically improved by keeping your eyes closed.

Digidrive is, for lack of a better term, a hardcore realtime puzzler. You have colored shapes "driving" in from all four roads of a T-junction. It's reminiscent of Crash from gameLab, where you can steer the incoming shapes to the left or right of their trajectory or just let them keep going. Unlike Crash, however, the "cars" don't drive off the screen, they stop at the end of the road. If you match two or more cars of the same shape and color, they start to stack. Accumulate five in a stack and they disappear, but a gauge appears next to that road in the color of the cars and begins to fill.

That's the basic idea of the entire game: stack like-colored, like-shaped incoming objects and separate different objects into different roads. By doing so, you fill up the gauges. The gauges start out as triangles; fill it up completely, and it becomes a square, then a pentagon, then a hexagon, and so on. It gets faster and faster over time and you start seeing more shapes (even having three different shapes can get hellish, but at least the colors and shapes are always associated... good for colorblind players). What happens if you make a mistake? You lose your accumulated gauge for that road. If you're lucky, your gauge will fill up the other gauges a little in the process of disappearing.

On the right, you have something that looks vaguely like a cosmic shuffleboard game, complete with a shuffleboard cue and distance markings. Bet you didn't expect that from the previous paragraph. The cue is evil; if it touches your cosmic shuffleboard disc, the game ends. You need to keep propelling your disc further and further away from the cue to keep the game going, and your high score at the end of the game is the total distance that you propelled your disc.

Yes, this game is a simultaneous combination of Shuffleboard and traffic conducting. Every once in a while, an "ambulance" with flashing lights and sirens comes down the crossroads, and if it runs into a road with a nicely filled gauge, the gauge gets converted into a good shove for your shuffleboard disc. This game is a real tangled pile of metaphors. You can actually create new ambulances, which you can call up by pressing the A button, but I'm not even close to figuring out how to do this on a regular basis.

The amazing thing is that the whole game works. It recalls another gameLab experiment, Arcadia, where you had to play four games at once. In Digidrive, you play one game, whose results influence another game, which is the one you actually care about. Switch to two-player mode and the meta-level goes up another step, turning the game into something akin to one-dimensional Shufflepuck Cafe with powerups. If you enjoy studying complex realtime systems or discovering rules through exploratory play, Digidrive is surprisingly elegant despite its confusing premise(s).

All bit Generations games seem to share a minimalist 2D art aesthetic and an ambient/electronica hybrid soundtrack, bringing to mind Electroplankton or a more mellow Lumines. If the style interests you, bit Generations games can be a real treat. I'll post up more impressions as I work through the collections, but it's already clear from the above two that the gameplay between each title will be drastically different. As such, there are probably some real problematic games in the collection, and some real gems. Hopefully these posts will help you find the ones you'll like.

Building games as a motivation for academic excellence

2006-07-25T07:47:00.000-05:00

Got this one from Gamepolitics:

The Dayton Technology Design High School will enroll about 100 students, with about 80 in the “virtual game” track, requiring a three-year commitment and culminating in the completion, marketing and possibly sale of a student-created educational video game...

...The technology design school is for 16- to 22-year-olds willing to make a three-year commitment. During 70-minute periods, course work will cover math, science, social studies and English. In virtual game classes, students will work in groups of no more than 12 on a schoolwide project, creating an educational video game. The goal is to teach the kids work force, academic, life and “new economy” skills. Student work will focus on developing the technical framework of the game, managing the process and marketing the end product.

In my opinion, that's great. Assuming that they're selecting for students that are already engaged with games as an entertainment medium, the team structure and intensity of game development should be quite a challenging, yet exciting course. I hope that they will also be aiming to develop art and music (audio production?) skills for those students that are so inclined... I expect that they already have programming courses planned.

Also, only Dayton superintendents can make remarks like this and get away with it:

“When we first started talking about the video game, people laughed at us,” Superintendent Percy Mack said. “But they laughed at the Wright brothers, too.”

Valve wants to break your head

2006-07-19T05:13:00.000-05:00

Buried in the Team Fortress 2 hype, Valve has announced that an experimental puzzle FPS game called "Portal" will be bundled with Half-Life 2: Episode 2, anticipated for release on Steam in Q4 2006. It appears the "experiment" that Valve is performing here is one explictly designed to bend your noggin as much as possible. I don't think I've seen a more vertigo-inducing videogame clip since Descent.

Edit: Here's a link to the 720p HD version of the trailer.

Mascots and Messages

2006-07-13T21:37:00.000-05:00

Next Generation has an insightful, detailed look at Sonic's life as Sega mascot, as well as theorizing a little about what makes a mascot powerful and relevant, or dated and out-of-touch.

When Sonic started off, he was one of the most well-conceived mascots probably in the history of mascotdom. Sega's console was faster than the competition's, so Sonic was super fast. Sega was the scrappy underdog, effortlessly showing up the "big guys", so Sonic was full of attitude. Sega's logo was blue, so Sonic was blue. The Genesis was targeted toward kids who were growing out of the NES, so Sonic was a sleek teenager (compared to the fuddy uncle Nintendo had going, who by comparison seemed to represent the "past generation").

Bit Generations

2006-07-02T20:52:00.000-05:00

A quick glance at Nintendo of Japan's bit Generations site tells us that Digitylish/Digiluxe, a grab bag of abstract (and possibly musical) GBA minigames, hasn't died a premature death since its subtle appearance at E3 2005. It's just being rebranded and tested in Japan first, I suppose. I'm hoping one of the other Game Eaters will take a crack at translating some of the Nihongo on the page.

There was some speculation that, due to the "Digi" name, the games in Digitylish were actually student projects from the Digipen Institute of Technology. However, some reporters have traced some of the origins of the minigames to Japanese game studios. Of course, that doesn't put an end to the speculation, since Nintendo works pretty closely with Digipen, and not all the minigame sources are necessarily accounted for.

I, for one, would love to see more student work appearing on Nintendo's portable machines. It could give this medium the random bit of mutation that is essential for future evolution... I don't really trust publishers to perform that function, and neither does Ron Gilbert, the "grumpy" designer of Monkey Island fame.

Ouendan LIVE

2006-06-09T08:22:00.000-05:00

A live performance of Ouendan, complete with giant stylus!

Final Fantasy Food Service

2006-06-01T04:31:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Robot Chicken!

Professor Fizzwizzle

2006-05-30T22:18:00.000-05:00

It would seem that as a game-eater I have been fasting in the last couple of months, shame on me. So back to blogging duties!!

I should have written my entry on Professor Fizzwizzle a loooooooooong time ago. It's a really cute puzzle game that is also a fine example of excellent level design. I played it before going to GDC, and then I found out that it was nominated for a couple of categories at the Independent Games Festival this year. I had fallen in love with this game (I'm a puzzle game junkie, remember?), and was really impressed when I read that the developers are just two (extremely nice) guys. (Well, they hired a guy to do sound, but still!). The production value of the game is astounding for an independent game, and considering the size of the "crew", it's just fantastic. When my brother saw the game, he said (in Spanish), "These guys completely rule!".

Professor Fizzwizzle is a puzzle game, in the vein of games like Tiny Skweeks (old but still great), Chu-Chu Rocket (a Game-Eaters favourite) or the newer PQ for PSP (though, come to think of it, it's a lot better designed and more fun to play than PQ). Okay, yeah, all these are rather obscure puzzle games, so probably I should also mention that this is a game for fans of The Incredible Machine.

The aim of the game is to help the Professor of the title to get from the start point to the goal, strategically placing objects to help him in the way. The objects range from boxes to inflatable magnets (sic); the obstacles can be getting stuck, or being caught by one of the Professor's robots run amok. What really impressed me was the level design--there are levels for kids, and levels that are wickedly difficult; when you think you mastered the game, a new type of puzzle comes around to challenge you. The programmer told me that it took him four hours to figure out the design of the last puzzle, so by that you may imagine this it's not your usual "casual" game.

It's certainly worth a try, you can download the demo and see for yourself what a cute game this is. The complete game also has a level editor, and you can download user-developed levels from the same website. What's better, the developers have been mindful enough to release versions for Linux and Mac, apart from Windows. So there's no excuse.

This game evidences that there's still hope for independent videogames.
Enjoy!

Self Murder By Command.

2006-05-19T12:32:00.000-05:00

Hey kids! Want to crack codes for Uncle Sam? Visit Cryptokids, the NSA's new website full of flash games that are JUST FOR KIDS!

In the Arts today...

2006-05-07T10:33:00.000-05:00

Not that the Sims really needs a pat on the back, but I was sent this NYT article by our friend William.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/arts/07schi.html

At least as far as the gaming community is concerned, this article is relevant because it gives a fair treatment of the topic and issues involved, and it reflects positively on the medium.

Now if we could get more games that have the same social impact that the Sims has had, maybe we wouldn't have to fight Yee and Clinton quite so much.

Follow the bouncing ball(s)...

2006-05-04T23:54:00.000-05:00

Mo, a friend of mine from last summer's internship, has put together this neat Flash game called Bounce. It's pretty simple - bounce the balls into the blue box at the left side of the screen, but quite entertaining. Has that classic arcade feel of "How long can you go for?" All it needs now is a coin-op interface. =p

http://www.opticuslabs.com/mospider/bounce.html

お楽しみに(Enjoy!)

Spike Lee vs. San Andreas.

2006-04-29T23:53:00.000-05:00

Clara and I just got back from seeing Inside Man, Spike Lee's new film about a bizarre bank heist. There's a scene where the bank robber, played by Clive Owen, talks to one of his hostages, a young African-American kid with a PSP. He wants to know what the kid is playing, so the kid hands over the system. Suddenly the movie cuts to a giant, full-screen image of what is obviously a parody of GTA: San Andreas. In it a guy with an Uzi (assumedly the player) chases down another guy, shooting him in the legs. As the victim lay on the sidewalk, the phrase "KILL THAT NIGGA!" flashes on the screen, at which point the player jams a grenade into the victim's mouth and trots away as the guy's head explodes like a water balloon. The conversation Clive Owen has with the kid, which plays out over these images, goes something like this:

Robber: What do you do in this game?

Kid: Rob people. Kill people.

Robber: You think that's cool?

Kid: Yeah. Like my man, 50 Cent. That's what it's all about. Get rich or die tryin'. That's what you're doing, right?

Robber: Never mind what I'm doing. I think I should have a talk with your father about this game.

There's a lot of complicated stuff going on in this scene, and I found myself having a complicated reaction to it. First of all, it's yet another example of videogames shown on film in a visually inaccurate way. The graphics were too clean and detailed for an actual PSP game. Rather, they looked like what they were: some pre-rendered CG trying to pass for in-game footage. This put me on guard, since it's the first sign in any film that the filmmakers aren't gamers. Secondly, there was the obvious way in which Lee was criticizing GTA: San Andreas for its glorification of urban black crime. I think this would be clear to anyone who is familiar with Lee's politics. Bamboozled could be read as (among other things) a rant on the subject. Thirdly, it was a strange contrast to the way the PSP had been shown as blatant product placement in the rest of the film. The kid is never seen once without the PSP in hand, and there are several lines of dialogue, aside from the scene I mentioned, that seem designed only to draw attention to it.

So...

We have a movie where the filmmaker clearly doesn't know that much about games. But the people who hired him want him to sell games to his audience. He shows the hardware, but then he turns the one showcase of software into a suckerpunch at morally corrupt pop culture and bad parenting. You've got to wonder if that was Lee's response to being told he had to feature the PSP.

Whatever Spike Lee intended, I have to admit that I've seen worse. I didn't walk away with the impression that Lee is pro-videogame regulation. The fact that the kid mentioned 50 Cent makes Lee's criticism seem directed more at gangsta culture than videogame culture. And the corrective impulse is constructive: Clive Owen's response is to educate the parent... not do the parent's job for him.

I can't think of many examples where filmmakers showed they understood either the technology or the culture of videogames. Shawn of the Dead is the only one in recent memory, and it was merely showing that games are (gasp!) a normal part of people's lives. I can't think of a movie that used real videogames (which excludes videogame-as-metaphor movies like Tron or The Matrix) to say something positive. Inside Man isn't exactly a step in this direction, but at least it doesn't feel like a step backward.

I guess that's sorta good news.

Splinter Cell: Game Design Theory

2006-04-24T20:44:00.000-05:00

I’m finally playing Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.

Chaos Theory has fabulous production values (even if the visual design—aside from Sam Fisher’s signature goggles—is typically forgettable.) The game's biggest triumph is the sheer number of context sensitive animations. They don’t add much gameplay, but they do succeed in making Sam’s actions feel unusually purposeful. The way he switches to a tip toe creep when skulking near an enemy or the way his head automatically turns towards his prey. Not only have the developers made the animations fluid and expressive, they’ve made the *transitions* between animations smooth. This is key to making a character feel life like.

Any schmoe can mocap an animation and stick it on a character model. But to make sure said animation, at any given moment, can be interrupted by another animation and not seem artificial… that’s the secret sauce. Chaos Theory does this as well as any game I can remember. The real show stopper is how Sam stops in mid-creep when you let up on the move button. At literally any point in his creep animation you can just stop, and instead of reverting to his squatting stance Sam just freezes in mid step, wavering ever-so-slightly. This creates a marvelous sense of tension when closing in on an oblivious enemy. It looks like Sam is holding his breath, internally battling to keep his balance in that exact position, lest any movement give him away. It’s a wonderfully realized aspect of Sam’s character, making him seem both more human and more comical. One could imagine a similar physical gesture in a Chaplin or Keaton film. In an artform where movement is everything, characters are defined by how they move. This is what the makers of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus know better than anyone, and a bit of that knowledge is on display in Chaos Theory.

Otherwise, Chaos Theory is not terribly amazing. What Splinter Cell really delivers on is sheer production value and polish. It’s a great looking game and a great playing game. Everything it attempts it realizes effectively. This is why, I suppose, some people consider it the pinnacle of the stealth genre: it has virtually no flaws. But it has virtually no ambition either. Splinter Cell, as a series, brings almost nothing original to the table. It’s a patchwork of features and mechanics swiped from other stealth games. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it does basically mean that polish is about the only thing that sets Splinter Cell apart from the competition.

I do not prefer innovation alone, just as I do not prefer polish alone. But I tend to favor innovation over polish provided the innovative game contains at least a basic level of polish and its mechanics are not totally broken. I suppose this is why I prefer Hitman to Splinter Cell as far as what the Western world as to offer the stealth genre. The Hitman games are not graphical powerhouses, but they manage to not look shabby while innovating in non-linear gameplay far beyond what Splinter Cell even tries to achieve. The simulatory aspects of Hitman are robust and, for me, encompass all the tension that Splinter Cell has to offer within a larger framework of persistent, realtime world dynamics. In Blood Money there’s a mission where, in order to assassinate an opera singer onstage during a live performance, you have to wait and snipe him at the *exact* moment he is shot by a fake gun as part of the opera. This is not an event that starts and stops as the result of a cinematic or because you cross some invisible line that triggers it. The mission lasts for the duration of the opera, and the rest is sheer clockwork. To me that’s compelling in ways most stealth games don’t approach, and even if the realtime aspect makes it more frustrating than the bite size “one hallway, one problem” design of Splinter Cell, I’m willing to put up with it because of how fresh the experience feels.

There’s nothing wrong with Splinter Cell, but it is not the best the West has to offer. Many like to compare Splinter Cell to Metal Gear because of the military theme, but Metal Gear is such a different creature, operating under a such wildly different design logic, that comparing them doesn’t feel very useful in the end. Hitman is the only other high profile stealth series that seems to have the realism-oriented and simulatory (i.e. Western) design goals as Splinter Cell. Out of those two I think Hitman trumps it in terms of ambition, and the hit it takes in production value is negligible. Since Thief has faded away (thanks to Thief III’s failure to reinvent itself) there hasn’t been much left to carry the torch. Hitman fills this need as well as any as far as I’m concerned. It’s pushing the genre, not just its own IP, forward.

In short, I doubt a Splinter Cell game will come out that I won’t play. But I also doubt there will ever be a Splinter Cell game I’ll truly love. I need something a little more unpredictable to really stoke my passion.

A mix of H20, Na+. and Cl-

2006-04-23T00:25:00.000-05:00

So I know I'm a total sap, but I just finished Kingdom Hearts II and have to admit that I leaked a few tears at the end. What I can't figure out is why...

Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the game. The part that perplexes me whether it was the game that provoked my reaction, or was it just the cutscene? It seems nearly impossible to disentangle one from the other, but here goes.

My first instinct is to say that it's the game, but that's more of a knee jerk "We need more games that have emotional impact," reaction. When I step back a little and consider the exact moment of saline secretion, it was one of those classic moments:

Sora: "We're back."
Kairi: "Welcome home."

which I can guarantee in the Japanese version was:

Sora: "Tadaima."
Kairi: "Okaerinasai."

For anyone that watches any Japanese film, drama, or Anime, this is a fairly typical narrative device that wraps up a lot of pent up emotion into a ritualistic phrase. (Note: Not trying to imply here that this device isn't found in other nation's media, just that this particular instance is a quintessential moment in cheesy Japanese dramas.) Despite their cheesiness, these kinds of moments tend to 'get me' more often than not. So maybe it was just the cutscene...

... or maybe not. I invested a solid 35 hours into getting to that one moment. And it wasn't because of the mechanics. The gameplay was tight, but uninventive. More often than not, it's a lot of mashing the X and Triangle Buttons with an occasional nod to the Square and Circle. So imagine this, I was actually playing the game for the story *gasp* and not the gameplay. Does that make all gamey the stuff in between the narrative chunks irrelevant? Or does the investment that one has to make in order to move from one chunk to the next fundamentally alter the reception of the chunk?

David Cage, the self-proclaimed auteur behind Indigo Prophecy, came to MIT, and said that all American games were like pornography - that their stories are irrelevant and trifling, and people generally skip through them because all they really want is the action. While he is right to some degree, it's experiences like the one that I had this evening that make me question the 'disconnection' between cutscene and play. To draw a parallel to film - if you're watching Zatoichi, are you constantly thinking about the reprecussions to the town that Zatoichi's violence will have, or maybe, just maybe, for a few split seconds you think "how @$!*ing cool was that move!" So, does one have to constantly have in mind the particular narrative context that drives their action in order for it to connote truly 'narrative' gameplay? Or is it sufficient to have the context set up the action, and then we resolve the narrative outcome to reflect the new state of affairs that has arisen as a result of the action?

Or is this all moot, Square RPGs don't make people cry, and maybe I'm just a melodramatic simp? ;)

What's a boy to do?

2006-04-20T15:46:00.000-05:00

This is probably going to end up more as a plea than a post, but here goes:
In the near future, I'll be starting a job where I will be working at a studio that has a more balanced male/female ratio (compared to the rest of the industry) and on a game that will be looking squarely at women as a primary audience. I'm very excited about this; I'm also very frightened. No, I don't think they'll eat me alive. What I'm afraid of that I will unwittingly make some comment or design suggestion that, while seeming like a perfectly natural thing to me, will estrange my co-workers or the audience that I really do want to reach.

The latter is what really gets me. I'm not as worried about my co-workers; I'm hoping and expecting that they'll smack me if I do something unintentionally 'male.' What's of greater concern is the fact that no matter how hard I've tried over the years to get occasional gamers (that are women) to comment on what they want to see in games, the response is almost always "I just don't like games." Granted, the question is ill formed: if they only know video games as has been defined by what's been out there for the past 20-30 years, it's little wonder that they don't like games.

I guess this is where the stroke of brilliance is supposed to come in, pulling that concept out of the ether that makes a mysterious and not well understood concept plainly simple. Before I attempt that though, I want to ask the readers (and contributors ;) of this blog the following:

What aspects of 'guy' games are unappealing to women?
What would you like to see more of in games?
Is there any scholarship (beyond Henry's "From Barbie to Mortal Combat") that you would recommend? (This would also include editorial articles etc.)
How can I, as a guy and a game designer, start a better dialogue about games with women, whether they are gamers or not.

Online Gaming is like High School.

2006-04-18T23:19:00.000-05:00

I recently tried to get a friend of mine into the online mode of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. His answer was eye-opening...

"I have no interest in a game that's going to be like High School gym class all over again," he said.

For him, playing competitively with strangers was bringing to videogames all the things he originally turned to videogames to escape from. People ganging up on you. People bullying you for no reason than to make themselves feel powerful, etc. This is what he imagined playing online is like.

I tried to explain to him that it's different if you play with friends, but he just wasn't interested. Although I am not much of an online gamer myself, I have been dabbling in MGS3S's multiplayer mode. I find it generally fun, but something happened tonight that helped me understand my friend's attitude.

I was in a game, and one player seemed to be playing for no reason other than to abuse people. As Snake he refused to capture the microfilm, but rather just liked to see how many people he could kill by headshot. One time, when someone else was Snake, I sat down in a nook and drew my sniper rifle. He, playing a fellow soldier now, ran up and kicked me out of the way and took my place. As I was about to walk away, he shot me in the head. This really made me angry so I vowed to knock him out next time, just to express my frustration. I eventually found him, grabbed him, and threw him to the ground, a move that does no actual damage when done by a teammate--it merely is a humiliating animation. Literally two seconds later I was booted. He, it turns out, was the host.

I know much has been written about player behavior in online worlds, so I'm not here to suggest my above description is particularly enlightening. But it did remind me of why people such as my friend have no interest in online competitive play. The feelings I experienced in the aforementioned situation were uncannily like, well, High School gym class. I remember those sneering fuckers, kids who were so filled with hate that they exploited the magic circle of sports as an opportunity to humiliate others. I remember one time playing some kinda water basketball. I missed a basket because I wasn't very good. One of the other kids on my team, who took winning VERY seriously, gave me a very nasty look. It was really frightening. It's like he thought I was sub-human. If he could have made me disappear out of that pool, I'm sure he would have.

I felt a little bit of that unease tonight. After I got booted I put down the controller and tried to imagine what was motivating the host's behavior. It was like he had started a game for no other reason than to satisfy his fetish for shooting people in the head. And by god, if you didn't submit to the rules of his little world you would be taught to fear him... else you'd be silenced, instantly and permanently.

What kind of a mind needs that sort of stimulation? I really don't know. But I understand why some players would want to have nothing to do with it. I also understand how, depending on your life experience, the potential pleasures of online play don't seem worth reliving the worst era of your life.

Tacos and Heroes

2006-03-27T22:27:00.000-05:00

At the end of the Choice awards at GDC '06, the entire Game Eaters crew and friends headed out for tacos and burritos. That's Nick ignoring the camera in favor of nutrition. Going clockwise, there's Matt (Blue Heat), "Gus" Andrews (Columbia U), Gordon Fellows (MIT alum), Clara (Georgia Tech) and Bill Crosbie (Rutgers). I was behind the camera, of course.

It took us about 5 minutes to realize that the only other people in the restaurant was the entire Harmonix crew representing at GDC, having just taken four awards! Many horns were thrown that night. They let us take a photo, but unforunately, my camera's flash didn't go off. So pardon the blurriness. (Click the thumbnails for larger images)

Cambridge rocks!

Reinventing the wheel (while riding in the car)

2006-03-14T00:10:00.000-05:00

It’s little wonder that as the assets needed to make a commercial quality game balloon outwards, amateur developers increasingly turn to modifying, or modding, commercial off the shelf games as an outlet for experimental game design. Over the past few years, I’ve had the luxury of time to mod and develop games both semi-professionally and in an amateur capacity, so I thought I’d share some of the (what should be common sense) knowledge that I’ve learned from experience.
First the obvious: have you, or anyone you know ever tried to program a modern 3D graphics engine? There’s like vector math and thousands of lines of code involved in that, right? If the prospect of independently having to make a 3D graphics engine doesn’t sound daunting, you’re either ignorant or this generation’s John Carmack. It takes a lot of effort to make one of these. So much so, that iD (Doom) and Epic (Unreal) have found a perennial source of income in selling their engine technologies to other professional developers.
And there’s a good reason why there’s a marketplace for these engines: why allocate hundreds or thousands of man hours just to show things on a screen when you could instead allocate to programming game play. Rapid prototyping is a great way to solidify design, understand what works (and what doesn’t), and have something to show off to interested parties. The more chances you get to iterate through your game’s design, the more polished it will be.
The ability to rapidly prototype does come at a price though. The scope of a mod project is defined by two things - the openness of the system that’s being modded, and the ability of the modder(s) to bend the system. In some cases, such as Bioware's Neverwinter Nights, offer modders a robust toolset for altering the game. Even with those tools though, there are some elements of the game, such as user interface, analog control, and core mechanics (e.g. combat) are barred from significant alteration. So if you want to make a computer D&D adventure, then you won’t mind these limitations. For more aggressive modders though, constraints such as the ones above can be roadblocks.
This is where the ingenuity of the modder comes into play. The modder that can appropriate the mechanics of a game by changing the specifics of the representation has earned a lot of free work. At the lowest level, this can serve as a means of parody and critique. However, if you can pass data out of that mechanic, then it’s advisable to find a clever way to tie it into your more experimental mechanics (so maybe you deal Humiliation instead of Damage =).
Another limitation that one should consider is the original audience of the game being modded and the style of game of the mod. Most amateur modders will have to rely on the game’s original audience being their potential audience. If there’s a mismatch between the two, then the likelihood of getting wide distribution is slim. Of course, if the original game is cheap, you might be able to draw in a few more curious souls.
Finally, modding is all about knowing the rules of the game. When you’re writing code to modify the behavior of a game, knowing exactly how the game responds to that code is critical to creating a successful mod. Anyone who’s worked on team coding projects knows how difficult it can be to work on someone else’s code. Now imagine not being able to see all of it! It can take a while to become fully familiar with a toolset or engine’s behavior. The one tip I can offer to beginner modders is to insert as many debug messages as you can mentally process. Wrap them around functions that are causing you uncertainty, and track any and all data that you think is being affected.
For many of the reasons I’ve listed above, most mods that are put out are exercises in level design. Every now and then though, people are able to redefine a game through modding. Either way, game modding is a great way to stretch your creative instincts, learn some basic coding practices, and have a little fun.

The visual effects of SotC

2006-03-12T20:53:00.000-05:00

A oddly-translated but still very informative article regarding the visual effects of Shadow of the Colosseus from DyingDuck.com.

Xbox 360 vs DS Lite releases in Japan

2006-03-06T03:26:00.000-05:00

Here's a couple of photos showing the lines for the Xbox 360 and DS Lite launches. I think they're in Shinjuku, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

Xbox 360
DS Lite

Splash Back: The next Tetris

2006-03-04T11:24:00.000-05:00

Confession: I'm a puzzle game junkie. As such, I can spot good puzzle games in seconds. And this is one: Splash Back
Simple concept, easy to learn, difficult to advance too fast. The type of game that will fill your gaps when you're writing papers and get stuck. (That's where I am right now...)

Yes, I should complete the post about Living Gameworlds before the next edition...

Beef

2006-02-27T21:46:00.000-05:00

I just don't understand the poor reviews gathering around Marc Ecko's Getting Up game. I don't think the tone of his response is going to win him any fans but at least I can see where he's coming from. Both the game press and less mature gamer crowd seem happy to roast him and his game in the process of proving him right.

Maybe it's exactly the opposite problem I had with Shadow of the Colossus but the much-maligned camera simply doesn't trouble me at all, and for everything it gets wrong there's so much good going for it. It does swing around when you reach the boundary of a level, which is a relatively subtle cue of "don't go this way," and it does occasionally shift oddly when you're in graffiti mode, until you realize that it's actually pointing at a civilian or cop who's about to hassle you. The "translucent avatar and walls" solution to obscured third-person view is given a very complex and visually appealing treatment. When it comes to stealth challenges, the appearance of "surveillance camera" reticles and static on HUD cleverly reminds the player that the character is being watched all the time... if not by the cops, then by the player. The implementation of this camera feature has far more emotional impact than the underlying "you have 5 seconds to get out of the cone of vision" game mechanic would naturally suggest.

In general, the game borrows conventions when they work well for the setting (PoP platforming, "rep" meters, the Buffy combat system, completion statistics), invents new ones when it needs to (texture selection and spraying, drips, a substantially different setting from other "urban" games) and brings a lot of new twists on old ideas (intuition, in-game music, game secrets, the protagonist can't shoot!). The game is surprisingly respectful of good game design while trying to introduce the concepts of graffiti culture as seen by Marc Ecko.

This is undeniably an "outsider" game. It had the backing of a seasoned developer team, but the motivation and experience of play is substantially rooted outside of game culture. The game does not make you feel like a badass, a hero or a cunning strategist. Instead, it makes you feel like an angry teen, constantly harrassed by external forces, looking for any opportunity to stand out, to "get up." Combined with a relatively complex message about class and power, and how criminality is defined within those variables, Getting Up could be an important tool in the fight for games to be recognized as a viable medium of expression for all kinds of different, culturally important messages. If only gamers could learn the value of appreciating what they don't necessarily agree with.

The Developers' Choice Awards!

2006-02-27T18:19:00.000-05:00

The Oscars are next week. Not long after are the Developers' Choice Awards, the closest thing the commercial videogame industry has to the Oscars. (No, I'm not counting SpikeTV's utterly patronizing annual Video Game Awards Show.)

The IGDA has announced the nominees, so I'm going to add my two cents.

BEST GAME

Animal Crossing: Wild World
God of War
Guitar Hero
Shadow of the Colossus
The Movies

For me, it comes down to Guitar Hero and Shadow of the Colossus. God of War was a dull genre exercise, regardless of its ultra slick production value. The Movies... eh. Cool concept, and I admit to having not played the game. But I get the feeling they nominated it simply for diversity's sake. And Animal Crossing is great, but it's just the same thing we saw on the Gamecube + online. In terms of games that appeared out of the ether and managed to make big artistic statements through sheer force of personality, I think Guitar Hero and Shadow are the only real stand-outs.

Between the two of them... hell, I dunno. I might edge more towards Guitar Hero simply because it, at the end of the day, is probably less flawed than Shadow. Shadow reaches for the sky and stumbles a bit. Guitar Hero has very few faults. Still though, both these games distinguish themselves by putting emotion at the center of the experience. One is about making you feel the magic of performing music. The other is about feeling the sweat, agony, and exhilaration of living a myth. Both are utterly human experiences, which is unusual for games.

AUDIO

Call of Duty 2
Electroplankton
God of War
Guitar Hero
Project Gotham Racing 3

Er... Electroplankton, I guess? Seriously, this category confuses me. Is it innovation in sound usage? Is it the technical proficiency? Is it the quality of the emotional experience the sound helps create? I guess I'd give Call of Duty 2 technical props, and Electroplankton innovation. But overall I guess I'd go with Guitar Hero here as well. In terms of combining all the aspects I mentioned into a cohesive, meaningful whole, I don't think there's much of a contest here.

CHARACTER DESIGN

City of Villains
God of War
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath
Psychonauts
Shadow of the Colossus

Ack! Shadow or Psychonauts? God of War, again, is strictly an example of slickness over imagination. Oddworld and City of Villains have more flair, but not like nothing we've ever seen before. Shadow is a no-brainer champion in terms of sheer artistry: the colossi are triumphs of imagination. But, on the other hand, so is the Pixar-worthy cast of Psychonauts.

If I have to choose, I suppose I'd go with Shadow. Psychonauts is awesome, but no more awesome than what Tim Schafer's done before. I doubt we'll see anything that matches the majesty of those colossi in a game any time in the near future.

GAME DESIGN

Animal Crossing: Wild World
God of War
Nintendogs
Psychonauts
Shadow of the Colossus

Nintendogs. Hands down.

Same story again with God of War. Psychonauts's level design was, I still say, rather pedestrian give the awesome potency of its concepts. Shadow was an impressive argument for minimalism and non-linearity, but I don't think it out-shadows the "Holy shit, why didn't I think of that!" quality of Nintendogs. Shadow merely stretched conventional game design concepts to their limit, but Nintendogs transcended them.

TECHNOLOGY

Battlefield 2: Modern Combat
Guitar Hero
Nintendogs
Project Gotham Racing 3
Shadow of the Colossus

Guitar Hero, Nintendogs, and Shadow strike me as the leaders here. I admit I don't know much about Battlefield 2 or PGM3, so they might be doing some amazing under-the-hood stuff I'm not aware of. But there's not much on the surface to indicate it. Shadow, on the other hand, screams hardware-twisting magic at a mere glance. I think we can forgive a little pop-up considering the developers somehow managed to squeeze a game from 10 years in the future onto the PS2. Guitar Hero isn't amazing graphically, but you have to admit you've probably never seen a better use of a specialized controller. Then of course there's Nintendogs, which transforms the Nintendo DS stylus from a cheap gimmick into the best videogame interface since the invention the analog stick.

I'd probably have to go with Nintendogs on this one. Shadow and Guitar Hero's achievements are just more impressive examples of what we've seen before. But Nintendogs feels like a revelatory marriage of software and hardware.

VISUAL ARTS

God of War
Project Gotham Racing 3
Resident Evil 4
Shadow of the Colossus
We Love Katamari

Shadow of the Colossus. Nothing else is a contender.

Okay, RE4 was pretty damn good. The way it realized its rural-gothic setting was effective in ways that horror games (including all the previous Resident Evil games) rarely achieve. God of War? Zzzzzzzzzz. Katamari rocks, sure, but we saw the same thing last year. None of these games approach the sum total impression left by Shadow's powerhouse visual design. If Michelangelo painted a fucking videogame, it would look like Shadow of the Colossus. End of story.

WRITING

Freedom Force vs. The 3rd Reich
God of War
Indigo Prophecy
Jade Empire
Psychonauts

I don't really have much of a preference here. I typically find the writing category a travesty, considering what passes for "writing" in videogames. This is the closest thing there is to a Best Story award, and none of the games I played this years that impressed me narratively are on this list. God of War is competent but unimpressive. Jade Empire, while I didn't play much if it, seemed about the same level as KOTOR: good, but not amazing. Freedom Force might be a contender if you count for comedy, but if it's anything like the original it's not much more than a big running gag. Indigo Prophecy at least aspires to something better, but it becomes so obnoxiously self-congratulatory in the process it undoes itself.

Out of all these I'd have to go with Psychonauts. Schafer's eccentric grasp of character and dialogue would be right at home in the next Pixar movie. However, if I could supply my own list I'd have gone with Dragon Quest VIII. It has snappy dialogue (translated, no less!) and a story that breaths real life back into the waning console RPG genre.

Single-player

2006-02-13T21:57:00.000-05:00

Raph Koster took the time to respond to Clara's previous post with links to his blog. I originally posted a comment in response, but it got pretty long... so here's the response in its own post.

Reading his elaborations, I think a major element of his argument is equating the medium of digital "games" to non-digital games. I'm not sure if we've gone through this on the blog, but I've certainly discussed with the other Game Eaters regarding how "game" is fast becoming a misnomer of the digital medium as we know it, dictated more by genre laziness than anything else.

Electronic Entertainment (i.e. E3) is a much more accurate description of the thing we've got today that tries to lump The Sims, World of Warcraft, Fatal Frame and Battlefield 2 under one banner. The majority of entities that are accurately described as "games" are dominated, or certainly improved, by multiplayer. Entertainment, on the other hand, is a much broader term than games.

I don't think any of us will disagree that even single-player games are often enjoyed as social experiences. Audiences contribute a lot and there's always discussion around the game. The same could be said about many forms of entertainment, such as movies. However, to produce an effective piece of entertainment, must the content be explicitly designed for the involvement of multiple people?

I, for one, don't believe it's a requirement. Gamers are clearly used to single-player games, and just because the "non-gamer" demographic tends to prefer social games doesn't mean that they don't appreciate solitary entertainment. Music is traded in a social context but the success of the iPod shows that the solitary experience of music can be enjoyed and appreciated by the mainstream. Many kinds of emotion get harder to achieve with increasingly larger groups of simultaneous participants, such as sadness and fear, but the popularity of Korean drama and horror games clearly indicate there's an audience that enjoys such emotions in their entertainment.

Business managers are constantly reminded that you can't ignore market data, no matter what you believe. The growth we're seeing from Nintendo is being spurred by games like Phoenix Wright, Nintendogs and Brain Training. Whether they are "games" is questionable. Whether point-and-click adventure, pet-care and brain-teasers are genres that work well for a single interactor is undeniable. I don't want your hand-me-down Tamagotchi, I want to bring up my own. Don't tell me the answer to the puzzle. Let me read at my own pace. The experience can certainly be shared, as anyone who's tried to play Nintendogs in public or taken part in the MIT Mystery Hunt can attest, but "non-gamers" seem to be liking voice recognition and math problems tuned for the individual, and there's real, observable market growth.

I would argue that multiplayer games are actually targeted at a different kind of "hardcore" - the player who is willing to set aside time for the enjoyment of strangers. While everyone is willing to do this on occasion, most modern societies don't bring up people with this set of values. More people live in "apart"ments than communes; when company profit encroaches on personal gain, many would prefer to leave; one is encouraged to get out of one's parents' house or town when one grows up. It might be better for mankind, in general, if everyone decided that they would choose to share their entertainment with others, but this does not necessarily make a compelling case for business.

I agree with Raph that it is counter-productive to think of digital "games" as an entirely solitary experience. No Game Eater would support that contention. However, what we now know as "the single-player game" has been enjoyed in a social context for quite some time, quite far removed from the solitary "aberration" he paints it to be. Even with his caveats, to simply proclaim it "doomed" makes it very hard to take his proclamation seriously.

Terror.

2006-02-13T17:05:00.000-05:00

You know... it is really hard to offend me. I was at an MIT lecture once where the audience was blindsided with 20 minutes of hardcore transexual porn, but it made me more bored than anything. This though is the sort of shit that really gets under my skin. I suppose there are two kinds of people in the world: the people who would find this kind of prank funny and those who would find it the most base form of human cruelty. I am one of the latter. Maybe it's because I was a child with a powerful imagination, and I remember what it was like to stay up nights literally screaming because of a single picture I saw in a ghost story book.

Pay close attention to the child's face in the video. Feel the laugh catch in your throat as you see how hurt he really is. You can see the horror cutting through the child's brain like a knife. I think a video of this kid being beat to tears would have felt about the same.

MMOS are the future... ?

2006-02-11T15:55:00.000-05:00

So a couple of days ago, big heads of the industry ("Lars Butler, former vice president of global online for Electronic Arts and current CEO of the upstart TWN; Laurent Detoc, president of Ubisoft North America; Raph Koster, chief creative officer of Sony Online Entertainment; and Peter Moore, corporate vice president of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business") got together to discuss that the future of gaming, which, according to them, must be online.

The highlight of the evening was a metaphor provided by Butler:
"Linear entertainment in single-player is to media what masturbation is to sex," Butler said. "It'll always be there, but it is not the real experience."

Let's leave aside the fact that making comparisons between videogames and sex is giving ammo to ultraconservatives, who don't like videogames or sex. I'm just tired of people to hear that MMOs are the next best thing. The gist of the panel can be summarized as "one-player games are going to die one of these days." Since many of the guys in the room seemed to be businessmen, it sounds as if the suits of the industry want money to be invested in online playing, since it requires bigger investment. This panel sounds like a pitch for investors--they mention "consumers" and not "players" once too often, as well as "shopping" instead of "playing".

MMOs are cool, but are just a different way of playing. Butler mentions that online gaming is to videogames what TV was to movies. And hits the nail on the head--they're two different media. As a media scholar, I must frown at the attitude of looking down on one medium and favouring another. Some people think that books are better than movies, some others think that movies are better than TV, and so on. Truth is, there are media that are better than others to do certain things, and if you want to tell a story from one medium into another, you have to adapt it. In the same way, it's different to play single player than multiplayer than online playing. I was not very interested in getting Mario Kart DS, since I've played all the others; I played the demo and I did not feel it had much to add to previous versions. However, now that my brother has it, I can't wait to get it and play with him, while he's on the other side of the pond.

The other problem I have with this panel is that they stress the fact that playing is social. Duh! That it's social does not mean that it necessarily has to be online. What about party gaming? What about watching how other people play? What about people making their own games, or inventing your own goals? I'm a bit creeped out at the attempt to make everything for me, including my social life, and transform a playground into a shopping mall because they're interested in making money. I'm also worried that the publishers decide what content is adequate, or not, which is another issue they tackle in the panel. (Remember the Blizzard GLBT controversy.)

Since Raph Koster is coming the the Living Gameworlds Symposium next week, I'll make sure he elaborates on his statement that "offline games are primitive". Sure, he's not talking about MMOs alone, he also refers to forums and online updates. But concentrating on connectivity, and how it can increase revenues, instead of improving gameplay, does not seem to be the path for a "revolution" in games.

Here is the Gamespot article and the link to the complete video of the panel. Mind you, this takes place in a business club, so don't expect academic theories, or gameplay discussions. They talk a lot more about selling than about playing. And they have to explain what machinema is (and don't get it right, BTW).

Reasons why I'm not crazy about the XBOX, 360 or not

2006-02-09T13:31:00.000-05:00

I don't own an XBOX. I'm not crazy about getting a 360--better graphics do not necessarily mean better games. I'm still a computer gamer, turned portable gamer because of necessity. Unless they start releasing great, innovative games en masse, I don't plan on spending $400 for an XBOX any time soon.

I have some other reasons why I'm not crazy to get an XBOX. One is that an XBOX is just a PC that is not customizable. That a system is easy to hack does not bode much good, how much thought did go in it? I came across this article, by the xbox-linus group, explaining the kind of thought behind it.
17 Mistakes Microsoft Made in the Xbox Security System - Xbox-Linux

Then, I saw this video about what a XBOX 360 can do to your game discs.

I think Microsoft should look into this problem...

Chibi-Robo

2006-02-09T08:02:00.000-05:00

Chibi-Robo is a new exclusive for the GameCube. You effectively play a little household robot in a house... think of a bipedal Roomba or Rosie from The Jetsons and you get the idea. You cook, clean, eradicate pests, and have to deal with the Toy Story-esque assortment of stuffed creatures that magically wake to life when the humans aren't looking. There are a couple of reviews out there for Chibi-Robo. A good number of them are relatively negative, citing how the Pikmin-esque day/night cycle and short "battery life" and legs of the Chibi-Robo hinder the ability to explore the game world.

Frankly, that's a load of bull.

The game gives plenty of options to upgrade your robot so that it has new means of mobility, extended "battery life" and longer time limits. To obtain these, you need to do two things: gain money and "spread the happiness," that is, make people (and sentient toys) happy. You make people happy just by doing regular chores, cleaning the dog's paw prints, picking up trash and occasionally doing a special favor for a family member. This earns you no small amount of "happy points" and "moolah," which raises your Chibi-Robo ranking (increasing your battery life) and allows you to buy upgrades to extend your day/night cycle. You can also buy new tools, and with them, you can start hunting little robotic pests and use their scrap to make teleportation devices to beam you across the house in a hurry. Game play is surprisingly leisurely for a game that has a timer as a primary mechanic, and there's always a power outlet nearby to max out Chibi-Robo's cells.

None of the reviewers completely miss these game mechanics. All the "problems" of the game are merely challenges to be overcome in a clear, logical manner. Why the frustration, then?

I think it largely comes down to the fact that your one compelling motive to do anything in the game is to make others happy. If this concept is not appealing to you, or if you find the characters annoying, you'll never get anywhere. On the other hand, if you're the type who likes putting a smile on others' faces, the pace of the game really picks up. Spending a little effort to do favors for individual NPCs yields hefty rewards. Despite the low detail of the graphics, the art style is cute, the family has some genuine dysfunctions that present many opportunities for you to cheer them up, and the music is top-notch in a Maxis sort of way.

You're a household robot, not the owner of the place. You're supposed to be patient, hard-working, and well-meaning. If you're willing to play the role, the game rewards you with plot and upgrades. If you're not willing to buy the fiction, that's not the fault of the game.

A Fun Experiment

2006-02-07T23:06:00.000-05:00

In a satirical post, a game developer puts game-violence statistics in perspective. The actual article includes links to supporting evidence, but in doing so, accidentally gives away the name of the game. I've reposted most of it here to avoid that from happening. Guess the game!

Fans of this game tend to follow bizarre rituals and wear odd costumes in an attempt to feel closer to the game. However, this behavior seems to be considered socially acceptable.

Over 20% of the people behind this game have been accused of committing a crime. It is unknown what percentage of those actually have criminal records.

Two years ago, West Coast fans of this game rioted. At least 80 people were arrested in a single evening as a result of their behavior.

Each year, almost 186,000 children aged 5-14 required treatment in the emergency room because they were emulating what they saw in the game.

Recent Congressional hearings led to nothing but rave reviews for this game, however. This is undoubtedly because of the large amount of tax revenue that these companies bring to the table.

Another high school music performance

2006-02-07T21:02:00.000-05:00

This time featuring Mario, Luigi, Peach and... Toad? As a percussionist, this warms my heart...

Truth is just as scary as Fiction.

2006-02-06T18:11:00.000-05:00

Remember how Metal Gear Solid 2 had this goofy plot about the U.S. government wanting to censor the Internet? The story went they were terrified with the unchecked flow of global information and wanted to create a filter, defensible by the military, to make sure Americans got only the information they sanctioned first.

Orwellian stuff, but not far from the real U.S. government's plans it turns out. A recent BBC article outlnes a declassified document called the "Information Operations Roadmap." The author explains:

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.

The above quote isn't even the half of it. Be sure to read the part where they talk about the U.S. military's plan to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum". (!)

Amazing stuff, especially considering MGS2 came out almost 5 years ago. Who says life doesn't imitate art?

Blizzard tells GLBT-friendly guild to stop recruiting

2006-02-02T05:11:00.000-05:00

An excellent opinion article on ShackNews goes into the details of this WoW situation. The comments are extremely unsurprising but still saddening, with a surprisingly large number of them stating that using racist or homophobic slurs is neither racist nor homophobic.

A Shacker and World of Warcraft player named James S. was aware of the guild in question. "I used to play on that server. Advertisements were merely of the form '< Oz > is currently recruiting members! We are a GLBT friendly guild!'," he states. "From what I recall (correct me if I'm wrong), nothing inflammatory or offensive." When I contacted him for further comment, he made the important point that MMOs are by their nature social games, and it is only to be expected that many players will want a place where they can speak freely, especially through private channels, about their lives.

In their attempt to protect players, the company has played it a bit too safe. In the case of Andrews' innocuous advertisement, it's tough to find any insulting language. In fact, language insulting to gays (and any ethnicity, and disabled people, and so on) runs rampant throughout chat channels in games like World of Warcraft, completely unprovoked. I see it every time I log in, any time of day, and it's disheartening to see it run rampant while Blizzard mismanages the situation by stopping legitimate guild advertisement. I do not suggest Blizzard institute a zero-tolerance censorship policy to compensate; rather, they should simply allow interested players to be aware of a guild that specifically does not want any part of that kind of insulting chat.

Publishers and distributors to blame for piracy

2006-01-31T13:24:00.000-05:00

I was reading this entry in Elastico.net (in Spanish) about Spanish gamers fighting for the re-edition of ICO for PS2 in Spain. There is already an online petition in the works. What's the big deal? The game is going to be re-edited in Europe, given the success of Shadow of the Colossus. But not in Spain.

For those who can read Spanish, this is what Playstation Spain says about the game. For the benefit of those that cannot, this is the crunchiest bit:

[...] Ico will be again on sale in February, to coincide with the [European] release of Shadow of the Colossus, and to please those fans who wish to enjoy this sensational game themselves. The bad news is that this title, of infinite sensibility, did not make many fans in Spain, so it won't be re-edited in this country. But if you can speak English and are curious about it [...], it may be worth it to spend a bit more and get an import copy.

I could talk for ages about the problems for monolingual Spanish people to speak English, but that's not the point. I could also talk about the problems there are in Spain to get hold of console games (PC is infinitely more popular)--my brother was telling me how Mario Kart DS was sold out in lots of places, and it seemed the re-stock may take a few months (if it takes place at all). I could also explain how current games (and consoles) are much more expensive in Spain, and how ordering a PAL copy of ICO will be not easy to get for less than 75$. But I won't... today.

Spain is one of the countries where piracy is most common in the world. It's part of the picaresque, I guess, and part of the culture--if we can get away without paying, we will. Of course, they can blame on the popularity of pirate copies for the limited releases of games. However, it is also true that they do not make it easy for gamers to get legal copies. As it turns out, the second-hand market constitutes a very, very small percentage of the Spanish videogame market. There are also very few specialized shops, and only in the largest cities.

The other problem is the choice, which is also very limited. My brother told me a couple of months ago how he went to FNAC, the main entertainment store in Madrid, and they only had 5 games for DS. 3 were the different versions of Nintendogs, which at least is a relief, because they were not FPSs or driving/sports simulation. RPGs have a really bad reputation in Spain, after a two notorious cases of murder related to table-top RPG and Final Fantasy VIII. So basically, there is not much to choose from, even if you're affluent enough to buy the games. What can Spanish gamers do? You can try import, but the generally limited second-language capacities of many gamers, and the general reluctancy to online orders make that an exceptional choice.

There's also the problem of translation--gamers expect games dubbed in Spanish (there was a petition for the dubbing of MGS3), which increases the cost of the publication of games. So gamers are to blame for this as well, and sometimes they get what they deserve--the infamous dubbing of Halo in Mexican Spanish is an example.

I guess that, as long as Spanish gamers are treated with this contempt -- refusing to release a great game in Spain, even if it is a European release -- Spanish piracy will continue thriving.

You too can be a fighter pilot!

2006-01-30T21:18:00.000-05:00

A link for this mini-game was passed along to me by a friend, who informed me that it's used to test fighter pilots. If you can get up to 2 minutes, then maybe the Air Force is in your future (^_^).

Try it here.

As far as games go, it's kind of interesting. Despite appearances, there is no randomness. In other words, it is possible to "master" this game by pattern memorization. That said, it gets pretty darn hard no matter how well you know it. So, couple of changes I might make:

Randomize the speed that the blocks bounce off the walls.
Add a scoring system that awards points for the shortest distance to a block.

Beyond those, the game would start to look very different I think.
お楽しみに！（Enjoy!)

The Second Coming of DS

2006-01-26T03:01:00.000-05:00

It's smaller, it's whiter, it's got 4 brightness levels!

Nintendo DS Lite
Release Date: 2006-03-02
Price: 16800 Yen
Old Size: 149 x 85 x 29 = 275g
New Size: 133 x 74 x 22 = 218g

At least SOMEONE gets it.

2006-01-25T17:57:00.000-05:00

I feel like I've been screaming into the wind for years about the moral depth of Hideo Kojima's work, but if we see more articles like this I won't be hoarse for much longer.

State co-opts DDR to make kids less fat.

2006-01-25T13:24:00.000-05:00

Score! Educational gaming moves up a notich as West Virginia teams up with Konami to use Dance Dance Revolution in school.

Bringing the health benefits and enjoyment that DDR provides to school children is a great way to combat childhood obesity that is caused by the sedentary lifestyle of today's kids. DDR has been a proven success in schools and this program with the State of West Virginia demonstrates the positive effects that can come from making DDR a part of one's daily routine.

How's that for serious gaming? What do educators do when they need a REAL educational game? They go to a REAL developer. Rock on, Konami.

Now if only games designed for education could be as good as DDR...

Now Jack targets MGS. How low can he sink?

2006-01-22T07:13:00.000-05:00

In the last couple of days, there's been some controversy about a guy who killed himself while posting at the Metal Gear Solid Unofficial Site forum. You can read the whole story at Gamepolitics. Of course, our friend Jack Thompson could not resist jumping on the wagon, given that the words "videogame" and "kill" appeared in the same paragraph, and that someone had actually died. He did not lose time to post in forums, writing insulting remarks for the whole gaming community. Since he's long run out of arguments, he resorts to plain abuse. He's like a bully that has lost a fight, and just starts kicking around in fury, just trying to hurt whoever's at hand, not wanting to stop because he'll have to bear his own shame. (BTW, what he does in the posts quoted is legally called libel.) We don't need to insult him back, he does a pretty good job of presenting himself as a *adjective of your choice* after reading the quotes.

This is the comment Jack posted in the same blog (the comment has been erased from the forum):

Your "gamer friend" will find peace through the Lord, Jesus Christ, but sadly it's too late for that.

There is a void in every heart. You can fill it up with the things of God, or the things not of God. This unfortunate soul chose to fill it up with combat games. The playing of these video games is masturbatory activity, meaning senseless self-stimulation. If you gamers could use a dictionary you would know that that term is not necessarily a sexual one.

The real tragedy here extends beyond the life and death of this one fellow. There are literally millions of young people and young adults whose despair is deepend by turning to the things of this world and then finding them meaningless.

All of you gamers need to put down the controllers and get a life. The utter inanity of the vast majority of postings here shows how vapid "gaming" really is.

You are one of the cheerleaders for this wasting of time and the wasting of lives. Do you feel any remorse for having contributed to this "culture of death?" Of course not. Hey, let's all play MORE games, and ignore all the really productive things to do with our lives.

Let's pretend to be shocked that a gamer might descend into deeper depression, as his gamer "buds," knowing he was killing himself, couldn't figure out how to call 911 themselves for him. That would have involved leaving their computers I guess.

He continued with his insulting remarks at the GameFAQs forum:

Yesterday Dennis McCauley reported, by starting this thread, the suicide of an American "hardcore gamer" who alerted his fellow gamers that he was dying. My posts in this regard upset many of you. So, I should like to sincerely apologize for the following:

1. Noting that this is not the first time Metal Gear Solid has figured in a suicide. See my op-ed in the Washington Times at http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040701-085600-3597r.htm. The Wellsboro boy committed suicide in the bathroom when his attempted "Columbine" went awry. His father correctly blamed the game.

2. I should further like to apologize for pointing out to pixelantes that obsessive play of such games feeds depression, and that the "gaming community," especially those in the industry that design these games to be addictive, are partly responsible for his demise. I apologize ahead of time for contacting his parents and telling them they should get a lawyer and sue the makers and distributors of Metal Gear Solid. I won't be that lawyer, but I'll help them find one.

3. I apologize for having to yet again change my email address in response to the great video game defenders of "freedom of expression" who inundated me with criminal threats, extortion, obscene emails, criminally harassing phone calls, and other stuff I had best not specifiy. Oh, and John at XXX-XXX-XXXX, I guess you missed the fact that the last punk who did this wound up in jail in Houston. Nice going, ace. Ever hear of "caller ID?" So, yes, I apologize for once again proving by your vigilantism what hypocrites drive the "gaming community." You people, along with Dennis McCauley, are so clueless that you actually conducted here, at this site, a "pixelante t-shirt contest," not even grasping the fact that a pixelante is one half rung above a bludgeoning skinhead, or cracker if you prefer that term.

4. Finally, I most sincerely wish to apologize for pointing out now that the European press got the facts in this story correct and Dennis McCauley did not. The gamers who had his phone number, his roommate who acted too late--all of them could have and should have gotten the police over there immediately, not "persuade him to call the police." The guy was committing suicide for Heaven's sake! You call the police immediatley, give them the phone number, and they can then instantly get in gear (metal gear, if you prefer) and get over there. Gamers are so out of it, they can't figure even that out.

Dennis McCauley concludes his crocodile tears, let's congratulate ourselves for being such a loving "gamer community" with his bathos-filled "May you find peace, gamer friend." Dennis, and the rest of you, pay attention: You find peace in Jesus Christ, not in GTA or Metal Gear Solid, or 25 to Life. You find it only in Him. The gate is narrow. Further, he was much more than a "gamer." In fact, his gamer status helped kill him, along with those who sucked him into the culture of death that games foment. And Dennis, he was NOT your "friend." You never knew him. You and the gaming community don't want to know him. Because if you know him, which is necessary to be a "friend," you will find that his real friends helped construct for him a world, a death style, that helped take him away to eternity.

I have sat with families touched by such tragedy. I understand it. You all couldn't care less. For that, I sincerely apologize, and for saying this yet again: Put down the controllers and get a life.

Jack Thompson

Of course he can't be the lawyer to sue the makers of MGS, since his license will be revoked for malpractice one of these days.

There should be a reference to him in MGS4.

The Silent Hill Trailer.

2006-01-20T14:02:00.000-05:00

Find it here.

Doesn't look bad. Looks like they played the fucking games.

Still though... maybe I'm just too jaded, but Silent Hill should, ideally, be the best horror movie since The Shining. At best, this looks like it'll be a decent Hollywood adaptation of the look, feel, and premise of the games. Yet somehow I doubt the storytelling ambiguity will be as... ruthless.

Silent Hill is just about the most disturbing horror IP of the last 10 years if you ask me. Stupid voice acting aside, it achieved the same elemental terror of Blair Witch, Jacob's Ladder, Night of the Living Dead, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It wasn't "just another horror story." It was, for me, one of the defining horror stories of contemporary society. Themes of societal collapse, the disintegration of the family, and body horror have never been more visceral or vivid. Though Silent Hill was a Japanese game, it captured for me the anguish of America's self-destruction. It's horrors were unspeakable: the Holocaust meets Middle America.

Maybe this is why I'm disappointed that the Silent Hill movie looks merely "good." It has the potential to be a definitive piece of horror cinema, just as it is a definitive piece of horror gaming.

Silent Hill has some incredibly potent imagery, and the filmmakers look like they've at least realized it's something they can take seriously. But it still looks like it's going to be a monster-oriented CG-fest. A scary monster-oriented CG-fest you can take seriously... but still a CG-fest.

Oh well. I'll see it of course.

The Gamer Vote

2006-01-19T22:13:00.000-05:00

Thomas H. Buscaglia, "The other game-crazed Florida attorney," has written a short-but-sweet article challenging gamers and developers to turn their name-calling into voter action.

...treat this as a call to arms. Get out and vote. And when you vote, make sure that you learn the position that the candidates that you are considering take concerning freedom of speech and how it implies to computer and video games. Otherwise, you may end up working in an industry that is significantly handicapped due to restraints on expression that none of us want to have to deal with.

Truth and Reconciliation

2006-01-16T20:53:00.000-05:00

Not a new news item, but still an interesting video clip of a high school orchestra performing a familiar piece from Halo. (WMV)

Live Action Mortal Kombat

2006-01-15T11:44:00.000-05:00

This is a very interesting remediation of videogames into home videos. I'm proud to say it's been made by Spanish people ;) The title is Mortal Kombat: La Pelicula (that is, The Movie), and depicts a fight between "Maraka" and "Chupetin" (Little Pacifier, like the thing for babies).

Enjoy!

Objection!!!!!!!!

2006-01-14T23:29:00.000-05:00

If you did not get Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney before Christmas, and you still want it, get ready to pay double. The game has been discontinued all over the world. That means, it's no longer being distributed. Your only chance of getting it is by buying it second hand, and those copies are going for $50+ already.

Why the hell did Capcom discontinue a game that has been both critically and commercially successful, after less than three months in the market? The shops we asked were sold out, and have not received any more copies; it's not that copies were covering in dust and they decided to pull them out. Whatever the reason, it's the first uber-stupid decision of the videogame market of the year.

I have to say I was suprised it was released outside Japan, but I just can't understand why Capcom decided to pull it out of the market. Is it that they think people are not going to play games that do not require button-smashing? One of the coolest things about the DS is that there are really original and different games for it, unlike the other next-gen consoles released last year. If publishers are going to bet for the games they think people want to play, that is, sports simulators and FPS, then the videogame market is going to be extremely boring. Academic-wise, yours truly would rather go back to her Shakespeare, rather than studying Halo 35, if that's what the future of videogames will be like :'(

Blu-Ray region coding scheme announced

2005-12-28T04:02:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting tidbit from GamersReports:

Masakazu Honda @ ITMedia reports about the final review version of the AACS contents management system for HD formats such as Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD. AACS LA consists of IBM, Sony, Toshiba, Warner, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita, and Disney.

+ Though Warner was eager to abolish region code and there were no objection until the final decision, film companies not in AACS LA opposed it and it was decided that region code stays in BD-ROM. But it undergoes reorganization. Basically, Japan and other East Asian countries except for China are moved to Region 1. The new region codes are

Region 1: North America, South America, East Asia except for China (India, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia etc.)
Region 2: Europe and Africa
Region 3: China, Russia and other countries

Of course, the gaming blogs are wondering if this will apply to PS3 games as well. As for where I am, Singapore's a bit of a weird state, because we're technically in the same "game region" as Japan, although not many people speak or read Japanese, and we're in a separate "Region 3" when it comes to DVD movies. However, since Japanese Xbox games almost always have an English language option, Japanese Xboxes are distributed and sold here more actively than PS2s or GameCubes, which are basically all imports or mods so that local buyers can play NTSC U/C games. Even the local Sony stores don't really pimp the PS2, although the PSP has a lot of visibility.

At any rate, this is probably somewhat good news for those North American fans of Japanese games. This includes the entire editorial staff of Game Eaters.

Sweet metaphor

2005-12-19T00:23:00.000-05:00

My student Elris is a(n American) football player. He struggles with words, but he's actually a sentient being. And he's even understood that in videogame studies, we cannot study rules and stories independently from each other.

The ludology and narratology view is the like peanut butter and jelly. It just would not be as good without the other.

I'm so proud of him. The comparison is so sweet.

So the ludology vs narratology debate should enter a new stage of contention: Who is the butter and who is the jelly?

WoW, what a musical

2005-12-14T20:47:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine passed on this link to me recently, and I felt it should be shared with all. http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=lr_HR-iIlYg

The group doesn't credit the original artist, so I will (with a lil help from my friends ;)

"The Internet is for Porn" by Avenue Q

おたのしみに！（Ｅｎｊｏｙ！=）

Games as Art on the NYT

2005-12-04T22:46:00.000-05:00

On the tails of Ebert's blog comes a more nuanced look at the games and art debate in The New York Times. Spielberg is cited in Ebert's place, without the peculiar claims of interactivity, while a couple of good points are brought up as to the emotions that games readily evoke.

Steven Spielberg last year offered one model for the medium to follow: cinema. In an address to students learning to be game developers at the University of Southern California, Mr. Spielberg, who has since contracted to create three games, challenged the industry to improve the storytelling, character development and emotional content in the same way it has enhanced the images and action. The medium will come of age, he said, "when somebody confesses that they cried at Level 17."

But movies are just one model for games to emulate. Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that they are equally close to dance, as a medium of performance, or architecture, as a medium of creating unique spaces.

Ebert just cannot let go.

2005-11-30T22:21:00.000-05:00

Roger Ebert has had a long antagonism with the medium of videogames... or so it would seem.

I first remember hearing his thoughts on games at a film festival I attended in 1999. I don't remember his exact words, but I do remember him commenting on the subject during a panel Q&A. He said something about videogames not having any substance or soul to them, that they were just pure stimuli. Those are my words, but I remember his gist was similar.

I am kicking myself right now because I used to have two e-mails from Ebert on this topic, but I lost them at some point. I'll try to remember them...

The first was a response sent to me after I offered to speak with Ebert on videogames. I was motivated by what he said at the festival, so I e-mailed him afterwards offering to teach him a bit about the medium just so he could have a more informed opinion. (This wasn't a completely silly offer since I was a student studying videogames and new media at UWMilwaukee at the time.) He politely declined but did claim--again, I'm paraphrasing from memory--he probably shouldn't have opened his mouth on a subject he admittedly didn't know much about.

The second response was to another e-mail I sent him about a year later. (I only e-mailed him twice.) My second message was in reference to a comment he'd made about current machinima being artistically empty because of its connection with the iconography of videogames. This really annoyed me because I thought he wasn't going to say stuff like that anymore, so I asked him why he insisted on judging videogames without real knowledge of them. That's when he told me [paraphrasing] he'd decided videogames were fundamentally different from movies in that they were interactive so they could never be what cinema was.

That was 5 years ago. And here Ebert is again, in 2005, spouting the same rhetoric on his website:

I [do] indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Ebert is a reasonably and literate fellow. I'm not expecting him to be converted to liking videogames, and I don't think it's important that he is either. What bothers me is his on-going insistence that videogames are, in fact, inferior to other media. I don't understand why he needs to make this claim. Why can't he just say he doesn't see art in the medium in its current form, say he's not interested, and just leave it at that?

Ebert is making a theoretical argument here. He isn't just saying he doesn't get it. He's saying he does get it. He's saying "I have analyzed the fundamental properties of these media and concluded that videogames cannot be art." I find this disappointing for someone of Ebert's intelligence.

Ebert will probably never change his mind, and that's fine. He can say whatever he wants. He doesn't have to care about videogames. He doesn't even have to understand the culture. I just wish he would realize that because so he has no business judging videogames, or gamers, or the value of videogame culture.

I've spent the last few years of my life with people who are considered pivotal figures in Game Studies. My thesis at MIT was about how cultural meaning is constructed in gaming culture. I am not claiming to be the greatest expert on videogames, but I am more of an expert than Ebert will ever be... and I am not alone in that.

When Ebert decides he's finally ready to sit down and learn something about videogames, I and others like me will be available to help him understand why games are meaningful to a generation of people. But until he decides to do that, he really should refrain from making such comments. They are obnoxious and insulting to an entire culture.

Totally Unreviewed

2005-11-30T00:53:00.000-05:00

Winx Club, Totally Spies and Sky Dancers have all recently been released for the GameBoy Advance, and I cannot find a single review of them on the Internet. Not IGN, not GameSpot, not Metacritic or Gamerankings, not even on Game Girl Advance. Now, I understand these games aren't actually targeted at me, a 29 year old man, but maybe they're interesting to the Game-Eaters readership, though no one really seems to write any comments besides the site's contributors and Darius. If people are actually interested in these games, let me know and I will go to the store, pick them up, give them a try and write up reviews.

It's sad that so-called "pink" games get so little coverage, despite all the press about how the female market is the game industry's best hope for growth. And some of them are quality purchases: Kim Possible 2 was a damned fine old-school Prince of Persia-type game that nearly snuck by me and most reviewers.

The Generation's Most Underrated Games

2005-11-17T10:53:00.000-05:00

With the Xbox 360 arriving soon, home console game developers are starting to wrap up their work on the current-generation and are beginning new projects for the so-called "next-gen" consoles. Next Christmas, it's possible that you'll see Xbox, Playstation 2 and GameCube games all squashed into a single "retro" shelf in most game stores. Or you might have to go to speciality stores where you'll find them alongside SNES and Genesis cartridges. This is already the fate of Dreamcast games.

For the gift-giving season, Game Eaters have voted on and put together a list of the games of the current console generation that we felt were underrated by both the public and the hardcore. They're not million-sellers like Grand Theft Auto, neither are they Critically Acclaimed Megabucks-on-Ebay games like Rez. This is straight-to-the-bargain-bin stuff, and while there's probably a good reason why they ended up in there, but in the end, they're still good games.

In case you're wondering, we've not included PC or handheld games because they don't work on the same generational cycles. The following list is presented in alphabetical order.

Top Cumulative Votes
Aqua Aqua (PS2)
Previously released as Wetrix for the Dreamcast and N64, this is a 3D falling-block puzzle game that combines fluid dynamics, frantic gameplay and deep strategy into a single package. Once you get a hang of it, it's easy to get stuck in the "just one more game" trap, and good multiplayer modes just make it easier to ignore the low texture quality of the graphics.

Chu Chu Rocket (DC, GBA)
We debated whether Chu Chu Rocket was really "underrated" and concluded that Chu Chu Rocket was extremely popular and recognized by most gamers who had actually played it and virtually unknown otherwise. The concept is simple: point mice into your rocket, keep cats away from your rocket. Put four players on the same board and the trash-talking quickly escalates. Reversals of fortune, spontaneous alliances and blistering speed and deep strategy easily make up for its rudimentary graphics.

Illbleed (DC)
In Illbleed, you play a fear-proof high school student trying to survive a horror theme park. It’s like Westworld but with horror movies. We guess it bombed because the premise was too goofy and the controls bizarre (you have use a special “horror
measurement device” to analyze situations.) However, its humor was witty and its gameplay innovative. It’s real camp that knows it’s silly, with surprises in both gameplay and story from beginning to end.

Ribbit King (PS2, GC)
It's basically miniature golf with the balls replaced with frogs. They're self-propelled, they're hungry, they hop along the course in a deterministic, yet always surprising manner as you try to bump them a little closer to the hole. Unlike other miniature golf games, missing the hole is often more amusing than nailing the stroke. Appreciating the original art design of Ribbit King is a matter of personal taste and the cutscenes are rife with videogame in-jokes and offbeat humor.

Technic Beat (PS2)
A rapid-fire rhythm-action game that successfully blends strategy with muscle memory, you move a cute character over a playing field filled with circles, each of which correspond to a different note or group of notes. Like all good music games, you'll need to pay attention to your ears as well as your eyes if you want to succeed in hearing the library of classic Namco videogame remixes in all their glory. Surprisingly, the game is not actually published by Namco in the US, but by Mastiff instead. The graphics aren't technically bad but its extensive use of particle effects just didn't make for great back-of-the-box screenshots.

Way of the Samurai (PS2)
Way of the Samurai (and its successor) was not much of a hit with the critics, possibly due to its seemingly short play time and odd mix of action and conversation. For some, though, it is perhaps one of the best samurai games to come along since Bushido Blade. The core of the game relies on innovative swordfighting mechanics and a complex multilinear narrative that lets you take one of the many sides in the game's small town. The richness of Way of the Samurai is only revealed with a second (or third) run through the game. If you've ever wondered what it's like to be a drifting rounin, this is a must play.

Game Eaters' Personal Favorites
Bust-A-Move 4 (DC)
Clara: There are about 30 games in this series, all with the same mechanics: you have to clear the bubbles on the screen before they get to the bottom. What makes this one different from the others? The DC version boasts the best controls, so that you can aim to the pixel by using the triggers of your controller. It also includes puzzles that use pulleys, which you have to balance, to bring a new layer of strategy to the games. You can edit your own levels. It also has great colourful graphics and catchy music and sound (these are a trademark of the series). Plus the most interesting collection of characters to play, from Bub and Bob, to the amazing Monsta, which is like a white jumping blob. Depending on how you're doing, they'll clap in joy, or jump in desperation (some of them get annoyingly wimpy...). All in all, this is the optimized, and most engaging version of all the Puzzle Bobble games.

Robot Alchemic Drive (PS2)
Philip: Few giant robot games manage to convey the scale of Robot Alchemic Drive. This game hands your character the remote controls of a Voltron-like machine and you'll have to command every discrete limb into motion, albeit in a surprisingly intuitive way. The catch is that you're still looking through the eyes of your teenaged protagonist, somewhere on the ground of the city-turned-warzone and while you're entering the combo for a double-fisted rocket punch you need to make sure you're not in the path of said attack as buildings are collapsing all around you. Add the so-bad-it's-good voice acting and a couple of dumb giant aliens and you have a great homage to classic Japanese Kaiju movies of the 70's and 80's.

Pac-Man Vs (GC)
Philip: This GameCube-GBA link-cable game was never released as a separate title but instead came bundled with a couple of other Namco GameCube titles. The Pac-Man World 2/Pac-Man Vs. bundle is probably the easiest to find in stores.

Nick: Have you ever wondered what it would be like if ghosts were real? Well in Pacman Vs., they are! The major difference between Vs. and the original is real people control the ghosts. When a ghost eats Pacman, the two players switch roles. The beauty of it all is that the player controlling Pacman uses a GBA to see the entire map and the ghosts are limited to viewing a small area around themselves. So even though the rules of the game haven't really changed, the experience is profoundly different than the original.

Sky Odyssey (PS2)
Matt: Sky Odyssey is, I dare say, a poetic videogame. It manages to take a simple concept, aviation, and strip away all the “realistic” aspects until you are left with the mythic weight of Man’s struggle against Nature. This game isn’t about looking at dials. It’s about the feeling, the emotion of flying. Why players didn’t connect with it I have no idea. Lack of marketing on the publisher’s side, or perhaps lack of a soul on the players’. No other game will make you want to quit your day job and become a pilot.

Philip: Being a PS2 launch title, going up against Tekken Tag Tournament and Ridge Racer V probably had something to do with this title's sales invisibility. The visual details may seem crude but Sky Odyssey really delivered on incredibly long sightlines, showing off the PS2's relative beefiness when compared to its predecessor.

That's it! Hope you enjoyed our list. Let us know if you'd like to see more of our favorite games!

Dance, Voldo, Dance

2005-11-14T21:00:00.000-05:00

A well-choreographed, extremely freaky (in more ways than one) dance music machinema starring two player-controlled Voldos from Soul Calibur. Gives a whole new meaning to "Soul Charge".

Mother 3

2005-11-08T02:43:00.000-05:00

Yes, I said "Mother 3".

The Doom movie isn't that bad

2005-11-03T21:18:00.000-05:00

Really, it isn't, and I'm having a lot of trouble understanding why people don't like it so much. Yes, the plot has changed and the baddies aren't from Hell. Was the original plot actually that good? Are people actually angry at the scriptwriters for coming up with a plot that made the monsters and action of Doom make sense when judged by movie standards? That actually had some twists?

Yes, it wasn't non-stop high-flying action and there were a lot of corridors. The game doesn't do much better in the corridor-and-halls department, and if you have don't have a break in the action, it's much, much harder to build suspense. Would critics have preferred a Doom movie that didn't even attempt to be scary?

What's more insulting to the game and fans of the game: a movie that actually tries its level best to take all its content seriously and justify the presence of every element on the screen, or a movie that faithfully rips everything right out of the game and highlights the silliness and campiness of the original game?

This was a low-budget movie, put together by a Czechoslovakian crew that, as far as I can tell, actually played the original Doom. The love for the game is in there and I think the director put more thought into the essense of the Doom experience than the average Doom player. This is evident in the film's nods to the experience of multiplayer Doom. The "handles" of the soldiers, the arena-like settings, the deathmatch at the end of the movie. Anyone who played a LAN party with the original Doom knows, eventually, someone's going to start a punchfest when he runs out of ammo. And it's in the movie.

It's not an overly serious movie and I'd say it's not even really scary. However, it has enough well-timed shock-scares to justify its Halloween release and enough gunplay and pithy quotes to be an enjoyable action flick. Flickering lights, teleportals, weapons floating in mid-air, even berserk mode are all in the movie, and they're all there for a good narrative reason. It even tries to put in its two cents on how it perceives the relationship between games and violence, a dialogue to which the original game was no stranger. It's just articulated in such a way that, in the end, may be too complicated and subtle for the whiny, disappointed IMDB-posting Doom "fans" to understand.

Snake versus the CIA

2005-11-01T21:12:00.000-05:00

I do not know the origin of this clip but it's a must-see for MGS3 fans out there.

But I don't WANT to kill the colossus!

2005-10-24T10:32:00.000-05:00

Penny Arcade has some ramblings about the moral confusion many are reporting about Shadow of the Colossus. It basically boils down to the colossi, which you are charged to destroy at any cost, being cute and sympathetic. This reminds gamers they have a conscience and makes them think about their behavior. It's made at least one gamer ponder the readiness with which we accept game mechanics (i.e. "Kill that big thing!") simply because they are convention.

I don't object to people being "disturbed" by the amorality of Shadow of the Colossus. But I do find it funny (and sort of sad) that it takes a game like Shadow of the Colossus to make us think about the ethics of our virtual behavior. As gamers we've killed countless human beings in games with the mechanisms of our conscience barely shuddering, but when we have to kill big cute creatures we suddenly feel like monsters.

What's more disturbing? Games that invent convenient excuses for you to not feel bad about killing (they're badguys, they're terrorists, they're aliens, they're assholes, they tried to kill you first) or games that just create a morally complicated situation and let the chips fall where they may?

I'm not saying the designers of Shadow of the Colossus were necessarily trying to make a moral statement. Indeed, the "exhilarating" music during the boss battles would suggest they expect you to feel some level of exhilaration when battling the sympathetic colossi. However, this makes the colossus battles exciting in the same way that the Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now is exciting. I consider myself profoundly anti-war, but that sequence still gives me chills. It's exciting, terrifying, disgusting, and exhilarating all at once. To me the battles in Shadow of the Colossus have a similar quality. There are times when the chorus swells as you're desperately hanging onto some equally desperate creature, running like wild across the landscape, and, barely able to see, you manage to plunge your sword into its back as it shrieks horribly. What exactly am I feeling as this moment? Guilt? Yes. Terror? Yes. Anger? Yes. Excitement? Yes. It's a complicated experience.

I really wish more games *let* you feel bad for committing acts of violence. Because if the reason we play certain videogames is to exercise our primal fantasies of violent conflict, we need those complicated mixtures of guilt and exhilaration to be exercised as well. That's the only way they really have any meaning. So if Shadow of the Colossus makes us feel sick at times, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

After all the game *is* about an obsessive character determined to bring his lover back to life no matter who or what he has to destroy to do it. If you've finished the game you'll know the price he pays is his soul.

The Hideoblog

2005-10-22T05:46:00.000-05:00

Kojima's blog is now available in English. Of course, a lot of it is about work on MGS4 but there's little snippets of his personal life and work experiences as well.

Video games make you cuss

2005-10-19T04:26:00.000-05:00

...if you're trying to get one financed, that is. Mercury News' Dean Takahashi has a nice little diatribe on the pitfalls awaiting the developer pulling money together for their game. Have a gander.

I don't know why it works. I'm just glad it works.

2005-10-09T21:23:00.000-05:00

Mario, Luigi and Peach are all going to be playable characters in EA's next SSX game on the Gamecube. While this would typically be a pretty banal tie-in, there's something about watching Luigi pull off insane snowboard tricks to a speed metal soundtrack that just clicks. Peach looks pretty hot too, although her face is still plasticky in a way that moustaches are able to camouflage.

1 2 3 4 5 rogue rogue

2005-10-04T21:49:00.000-05:00

I'm not capable of describing this World of Warcraft forum thread. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that it transcends any human vocabulary.

ESRBullshit.

2005-09-28T22:43:00.000-05:00

You won't believe this.

Okay, maybe you will.

Indigo Prophecy is censored. Turns out, some sex and nudity was removed from the U.S. version. So if you live in the U.S. and don't want to be patronized you'll have to shell out the extra cash to import Fahrenheit, the European version.

If you want proof, take this snippet from a developer interview:

"16+ was the rating we wanted. Otherwise it would be 18+ and people just told us our game would only be available in sex shops with that rating. There is nothing sexual in it that you wouldn’t see in a regular movie. But that is what we were told."

There you have it. The ESRB's M-Rating, the rating that is equivalent to an R rated film, is a joke. It allows for depictions of violence unheard of in an R rated movie, but flat out refuses depictions of sex above a PG level.

This is the moment when, I'm sure, some of you would point the finger at Rockstar and their Hot Coffee nonsense. But that's the easy way out. As much as Rockstar is messing things up by creating controversy, it is ultimately the responsibility of regulatory bodies like the ESRB to separate the smut from the art. The fact that they *choose* not to see a difference between GTA and Indigo Prophecy is both lazy and disgraceful.

But why is it the ESRB's fault, you ask? Aren't they just assessing content based on whatever values the broader culture advocates?
In a sense this is true. But, in my view, this is precisely *why* they should be putting their foot down. They have the ability to set and curtail trends as much as reflect them, and when the stakes are the artistic growth of videogames as a medium it is their duty to be more than limp reeds that bend any which way the winds of mass culture blow.

The debate over who's responsible for self-censorship isn't new. It's been going on in the film industry for decades. Remember the controversy over Eyes Wide Shut? That was an excellent example of the same double standard we're seeing evolve in the videogame world today. The X (later NC-17) rating, like the ESRB's AO rating, became associated with pornography. This was because the porn industry co-opted "X" into their advertising in the 70's, forever associating that rating with explicit sex. NC-17 was supposed to be a remedy to that, but the damage had already been done. Once people understood that NC-17 was just another term for X the change became meaningless... and filmmakers have been forced to "adjust" their films to R-rated standards ever since or else be refused normal distribution and advertising channels. One could argue this isn't the MPAA's fault, but the MPAA suspiciously doesn't do much to counter this notion, seemly very comfortable with the smutty connotations of NC-17. Nor does it seem, as the Eyes Wide Shut case proved, incredibly deft at recognizing the difference between sexual content that is intended to be pornographic and that which is not.

Sound familiar?

The relationship between culture, government, and industry-based regulatory bodies is obviously a messy one, and I don't claim to have all the answers. It is true that culture really is what needs to change in order for values to actually change. But it's also important to realize that culture doesn't change by itself, but as part of policy shifts that affect people. Organizations like the ESRB and MPAA are bottlenecks for these policies. They are where mature decision-making is needed the most. I read once that Brian DePalma was outraged that his 1980 film Dressed to Kill received an X rating by the MPAA. When he protested the response of then MPAA president Jack Valenti was:

"The political climate of this country is shifting from left to right, and that means more conservative attitudes toward sex and violence."

When so-called self-regulatory bodies openly admit their criteria is dictated by politics, you wonder what the point of such bodies is.

That's what I'm wondering about the ESRB right now.

Greg Costikyan's Manifesto Games

2005-09-28T20:25:00.000-05:00

Costikyan is going to start an indie game publishing company, and you're invited along for the ride through his blog. I've always thought the man had a point, although I was put off by the way he presented them. He always sounds like he's griping instead of trying to actually rally a change in the games industry. Frankly, I think this new direction is extremely promising...risky, yes, but worthy of support.

Sad thing is, this is less annoying then "PWNZ0R3D!!!ONE11"

2005-09-19T21:24:00.000-05:00

How cool is Street Fighter II? It has colors not found anywhere else! A fun, cringeworthy look back at Genesis-era advertising.

Guns of the Patriots.

2005-09-16T13:13:00.000-05:00

After 9/11 I would have thought no one would have the balls to make a political military game. But, just two months later, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty stunned me, like a slap in the face. I knew Kojima had devised his Orwellian nightmare vision of America before 9/11, but that's what made it so creepy. I wasn't expecting any real critique of America for a long time, until it was politically "safe" to do so... like all those Vietnam movies that weren't able to come out until the 80's. But MGS2 was like Dr. Strangelove. It just came out of nowhere and left you gasping "How did that even get out?"

For years I've been wondering what Kojima would do when he finally got around to finishing the Metal Gear saga. MGS3 was a sly jab at the black & white politics of Hollywood, but cloaked behind its retro, Cold War theme it wasn't overtly political. My theory was that Kojima was biding his time, wondering how the hell he was going to finish the series while the War on Terror was still going on.

And now we have it. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. The Patriots, as we know from MGS2, are the corrupt body that controls American politics, the puppet masters who keep elections a meaningless charade. We can only guess from MGS4's title that the plot involves The Patriots, and their war mongering, as a central theme.

And what else do we have? What appears to be a war-torn Middle Eastern city? Robots based on DARPA's design for Metal Gear roaming the streets? An old, grizzled Snake hiding from this superior military force in the ruins? And somehow The Patriots are behind it all?

Um... can we say Dark Knight Returns meets The Bush Administration?

Okay okay. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. Clearly, the Metal Gear game I want to see is one where Snake and Co. take down a corrupt U.S. government. But who knows what the final plot will be. I will say though... so far it certainly looks like it could be a dangerously political game. Given Metal Gear's previous politics, Guns of the Patriots promises to avoid the gutless, morally-neutral mush you find in all other military-themed games.

Goldeneye is the best movie ever based on a game.

2005-09-02T11:31:00.000-05:00

Did you know this? I watched Goldeneye last night, part of my Bond-a-thon. I hadn't seen the movie since it came out in 1995. All these years I've actually been more familiar with its characters and situations from the famous N64 game. Watching it last night flipped me out. Through the whole movie I was screaming "I've been there!" It felt more like the movie was based on the game than the other way around.

Why is this? I'm sure there could be various theories, but to me the obvious answer is because RARE's FPS actually created coherent spaces out of the locations seen in the film. This is different from a normal movie-to-game, where you usually get linear obstacle courses designed to create the events of the film. RARE wasn't trying to create the events of the film at all, just the world. It made the locations from the film places I could explore at my leisure. Therefore I felt like I had been there. Seeing the movie afterwards is like seeing a film shot in your home town.

This begs the questions of what it means to adapt film, or some other media, to a video game. I recently spoke with Espen Aarseth about this. We were talking about the Pirates of the Caribbean game versus the movie, and I remember he kept asking "But is the game really the same story as the movie?"

This is beside the point, I think. Adaptation don't need to be about story at all. Why can't they just be about a world? And I don't think even so-called linear media is just about events. Do audiences go to see Pirates of the Caribbean just to see a sequence of events, or is the sequence of events just a convenient means to illustrate a world?

Different media are limited in different ways. You can describe smell and touch in literature but in film it's almost impossible. One tends to adapt the aspects of fiction that carry over naturally from one media to the other. So what's wrong with calling a video game an adaptation of a movie if all it does is recreate the world of the film?

Goldeneye certainly works for me. Because it models the world and not the events it stands the test of time. Stuff like Enter the Matrix just gets it all wrong. I don't want the story. I want the space.

Shadow of the Colossus has bad graphics...

2005-08-30T12:29:00.000-05:00

...if you're high, that is. We just got the demo at work today, and some people--the Xbox owners--were remarking at how bad its textures were.

Maybe I'm weird, but I think Shadow of the Colossus has some of the best art design I've ever seen in a game. It follows the lead of Ico with breathtaking imagination. It's like a painting, a child's storybook come to life. And people look at this and all they can think of is texture quality? What planet do I live on? Can somebody tell me?

Of course everyone's entitled to their own opinion. If the visual design of Shadow of the Colossus doesn't grab some people, that's fine. But I'd chalk that up to just basic subjective taste. I am very, very tired of people poo-pooing graphics based on poly-counts, shading tricks, and wachamafuck. God forbid we should have a holistic view of game design.

Oh well. I suppose it's to be expected. Most people think Ray Harryhausen's work is lame compared to the latest CG special effects, so I guess that's just par for the course when you're talking about how the mainstream culture reacts aesthetically to evolving technology.

It's like the stamina mechanic, only harsher.

2005-08-24T21:19:00.000-05:00

An article about China's new (apparently mandatory) scheme to limit MMO gameplay. Basically, it cuts your characters' levels if you're playing for more than three hours, and after five hours you've basically at Level Pathetic. It tracks how long you've played and, since it should be able to tell whether you've just logged out and back in again, I'm assuming they're also planning to have it monitor a player's game-playing time across games.

The number of distributors who've agreed to the scheme is pretty decent, although given that some probably don't have source code access, the ability of the companies to deliver on their pledge is questionable. Still, no MMO developer wants to lose the Chinese market, I'd bet. Plus, as one of my friends noted, this might have an interesting impact on gold farming.

Shenmue 3 "nearly complete?" Whaa...?

2005-08-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

Here's a little article about Shenmue 3's next-gen plans. It's still not targeted to any chosen platform and code apparently needs to be "ported". To me, this sounds like either (a) they've completed pre-production design but haven't started production besides character and environment modelling and skinning or (b) they've actually finished coding up game functionality for some internal development environment and they really just need to do a porting job.

Frankly, I hope it's (a) since that'll leave them with the ability to incorporate next-gen specific enhancements (HDR lighting? better hair dynamics? vertex shaders? better environmental audio effects?), since we've seen what (b) looks like, and it looks like Shenmue 2 on the Xbox. A good game, to be sure, but without that extra layer of technical polish to distinguish it from the competition. If they really go whole hog and release the entire Shenmue story on a single SKU, it could really be a compelling product for a lot of adventure-game lovers, but people throwing US$399 at an Xbox 360 will want something that's going to, frankly, look and act like something that couldn't be executed on current-gen consoles with a few extra discs.

Using models that are on par with their publicity posters would be a good first step but "just add polygons" only gets you so far. I'll buy it regardless, since I want to see how the story ends, but I'd rather Shenmue expand its appeal to the visually-hungry mainstream than simply cater to the existing fanbase.

Brain-eaters.blogspot.com

2005-08-18T20:24:00.000-05:00

Hmm...George Romero has apparently licensed Land of the Dead to Groove Games, the publisher of Pariah. I wonder who they'll get to develop it.

Ossu! Tatakae! Ouendan!

2005-08-08T02:05:00.000-05:00

I just picked up Ossu! Tatakae! Ouendan! for the Nintendo DS and noticed that english-language reviews are pretty hard to come by. 1UP's preview gives you a pretty good idea of what the game's like. Having actually played it, I can tell you it's a lot of fun, as long as you're not one to equate polygon count to fun. I'm not sure how long its appeal will last but a good bit of it is playable without any Japanese knowledge. It even appears to have some multiplayer functionality.

Ouendan! is a rhythm game that has the player tapping and dragging on the touch screen in time with music. There's quite a lot of licensed J-pop in there, although they're probably not the actual artistes. The DS speakers do get a good workout with the music, and unless you're using earphones, you probably won't notice the audio compression. Buttons appear on the screen for you to tap as gradually-shrinking concentric circles cue you in as to the timing. For that reason, it's reminiscent of Technic Beat.

When I bought it, I had no idea that this game was developed by the makers of Gitaroo-man, but in reflection, it makes sense. Unlike Bemani games, iNiS's music games have narratives and characters. The "cheerleaders" in the game are three men in long black jackets, reminiscent of overzealous Japanese school pep squad leaders. Their formal appearances, combined with their Power Rangers-ey sentai-anime poses, make for fun juxtapositions. Marching band whistles and cymbals triggered by successful taps add to the cheerleading flavor. Do really well and the background will be lit with flames of passion and close-ups of the cheerers.

While the gameplay is functional and the music is good, one unique element is the game's use of cutscenes. Like Gitaroo-man, bridges in the music are filled with noninteractive animated sequences. However, Ouendan! uses an over-the-top manga/old-fashioned anime style that not only endear the characters to you but also give you an idea of how you're doing. If you play well, the characters accomplish epic-level challenges of the most everyday sort that bring them closer to forming their romances or completing their homework, with a big "O" or "X" capping each cutscene to let you know if you've done well or poorly. These breaks in incessant screen-tapping are also a good chance to give your eyelids a short rest.

Games don't get more culturally specific than Ouendan! but, if you dig bold manga art and the sound of J-pop and are looking for a rhythm game for your DS, you can't miss this one. You'll even be able to play it on your US-bought handheld without a hack.

Hollywood is Doomed.

2005-07-27T20:50:00.000-05:00

I saw the trailer for the Doom movie today.

You know... it really says something about Hollywood that they felt they had to dumb down the story for Doom.

My World Just Got Stupider.

2005-07-26T12:09:00.000-05:00

I am defeated by reality.

I was going to post yesterday about Jack Thompson's moronic accusations against EA. I never thought I could be embarrassed for such a scumbag, but Thompson's claims about The Sims 2 were so absurd I wanted to turn away from my monitor. I mean, claiming that The Sims is *worse* than Rockstar just because their game can be hacked to make the characters naked? Does this man LIVE? Does he breath? Does he walk on two legs, and converse with homo sapiens?

I get the feeling if I went to meet him it would be like meeting Yul Brynner in Westworld. Like in the middle of a conversation he'd start sputtering like a broken record "videogames-are-evil! videogames-are-evil!" and suddenly smoke would start coming out of his eyeballs and his face would peel away to reveal a circuit board.

So yesterday, as I was reading this, I was thinking that this might actually *help* defend videogames against censorship. Because it's easy to go after Rockstar, but I doubt even Lieberman, Grossman, and Clinton would go after The Sims 2 so eagerly. So by sticking his neck out that far Thompson would obviously get burned once EA clearly explained the difference between fan mods and official content, that this is how games have *always* been, and there have been nude mods of The Sims since the moment the original game was released.

But then I woke up today, and saw the headline "House Backs Federal Investigation of Rockstar Games."

So apparently the House voted to investigate Rockstar to see if they were "intentionally trying to deceive the rating board" by leaving their Hot Coffee code in GTA. And this is just great folks, because now the U.S. government gets to set a precedent for deciding, according to their own game-ignorant criteria, what constitutes "deception" when it comes to modding, unlocking, and otherwise tampering with game content.

So what could happen here? Could the government walk in to Rockstar and actually *decide* that locked content in a game, which is always technically reachable by anyone who wants to spend the time to hack the game, constitutes "deception" of the ESRB? Are we on the verge of seeing the government make decisions about what is "official" and "non-official" content in games?

I'm not saying there should be no definition or legislation about this, but I for one don't want the government deciding what constitutes the primary "text" of a videogame... especially not as a knee-jerk reaction to something like GTA.

So yeah. Maybe Thompson will get lucky, and because of this Hot Coffee bullshit the government will decide that anything moddable or unlockable constitutes a content risk too big to not regulate. Hooray for Rockstar. Hooray for Thompson. Hooray for the government.

My world just got stupider.

Wow, I agree with Greg Costikyan

2005-07-11T03:23:00.000-05:00

Truthfully, I don't have anything against Costikyan's opinions, although I often take issue with the way he presents them. However, anyone who's been reading my rants against Rockstar Games (mostly in LiveJournal) can probably tell that I agree wholeheartedly with the concept of bitchslapping Rockstar Games.

I don't really believe the alleged "Sex Minigames" are actually in GTA:SA, though, and it's certainly within the realm of possibility that the sexual content has been added by the mod. Then again, I haven't actually tried installing said mod. Even then, my lack of sympathy for Rockstar arises more from its approach to violence rather than sex. Rockstar's games just don't seem to have much to say about violence besides "it sells more SKUs." Sure, freedom of speech and all that, but it's a lot easier to make a case for it when there's some clear public benefit from pushing the envelope, and Rockstar's gratuitous-violence-just-for-the-heck-of-it doesn't help.

Chinese World of Warcraft Ad

2005-07-05T22:02:00.000-05:00

Here's a World of Warcraft ad for China. Looks like there's some cross-promotion with Coke going on over there. The ad itself is pretty funny. Requires QuickTime.

Free Second Life accounts

2005-07-01T23:13:00.000-05:00

Second Life is the MMO that I've been playing the longest and most consistently. It's not really a game, more like a chat room with lots of player-made content. It's been running for almost two years, and they'll be giving out free basic accounts to new members between 12am July 7th through 11:59pm July 13th. (PDT)

It's an interesting place to visit, even if you don't want to stay, and now you can visit for free. Staying costs you no money at all...no monthly fees, nada, and you can play as often as you'd like. You can do anything that anyone else can do in the game, except own virtual land. Owning land requires a premium account, which basically charges you a monthly fee based on the amount of land you own. What can you do with land? Uh...decor, and...set up stuff that keeps running while you aren't logged in, that's basically it. Lots of people make stores to sell their content creations. The company even permits you to sell your in-game cash for real money on a floating exchange. I currently make about US$8 of money a week, even when I don't log in.

Oh, the decisions

2005-06-29T20:38:00.000-05:00

Sooooo...a local game store in Singapore has copies of Chou Aniki: Sei Naru Protein Densetsu (PS2) for sale.

Should I buy it?

Rebelstar Tactical Command

2005-06-20T04:53:00.000-05:00

Apparently, the X-Com creators are making a Strategy RPG for the GameBoy Advance. It's not a remake of X-Com but some of the features do sound reminiscent of that venerable, scary franchise. Gunstar Super Heroes is still what I want on my GBA for Christmas, but I'll take an X-Com-like SRPG happily.

From the Serious Games email list

2005-06-09T20:02:00.000-05:00

Posted by Daniel Cook on the Serious Games email list:

"One of the common mindsets of folks doing Serious Games seems to be that Serious Games must be comparable to commercial games. Bull. In my experience, you can have a game using 10-year old technology that still makes the customer happy as long as it solves the business problem. If you are saving millions, no one gives a flying hoot about your lack of pixel shaders."

This is after a long, long thread about the value of graphics in serious games, which basically boils down to this: have pretty graphics if you can afford to, just make sure it's not at the expense of gameplay.

Simple enough. There's something about the way how Cook's quote reads that just amuses me, though.

Capcom X Namco SRPG

2005-06-04T06:27:00.000-05:00

I could explain the reasons behind my current euphoria, or you could just download the two videos.

In fact, the only thing keeping me from exploding into a million shards of consumerism (all targeted towards the nearest game store) is the fact that this game hasn't been announced for the US or European market yet. A couple of points that may escape your attention: it's a strategy RPG with an isometric view, so I expect they mean something like Disgaea or Final Fantasy Tactics, which is perfect in my book. It's not entirely clear if attacks have any skill element in them.

Bad enough that we don't get Super Robot Taisen in the english-reading world. If this one doesn't get a translation, I blame IGN entirely. "Characters are drawn via sprites...they don't look look as solid during fight scene"?!? What, are they expecting over 200 characters in an SRPG to get 3D animation? Unfortunately, that's probably a good example of how Joe Mainstream Gamer is going to react to screenshots.

Klonoa and Demitri and Megaman and Mitsurugi. The mind boggles.

My Game Studies, Part 0 - Intro

2005-05-27T13:50:00.000-05:00

I am starting a series called "My Game Studies." I've spent the last 5 or 6 years if my life studying videogames in academia. I'm on a first name basis with many of the key figures in the field, and I've studied with them. And guess what.

I still feel dumb.

This is why I've decided to revisit Game Studies, one article at a time. Whenever I read an article that is Game Studies related, I will blog about it, and hopefully this will help me remember what the hell I've read.

Doing the "right" thing in the games industry, Part 2.

2005-05-26T13:04:00.000-05:00

Gamecritics.com just posted an interview with Clint Hocking, lead-designer, head-writer of Splinter Cell 3. I spoke to him at GDC and he was really friendly. We didn't talk much, so I didn't know some of his more complex opinions until this article.

I didn't conduct the interview myself, but as a writer at Gamecritics some of the questions were mine. One of my questions was about--surprise surprise--what the politics of Splinter Cell 3 were. I was struck by the game's contemporary political setting, where enemy soldiers curse you as an American imperialist before you either knock them out or, more satisfyingly, stick a knife in their back.

Clint's answer was much what I expected--that he wasn't trying to make a political statement so much as populate his world with people whose motivations and beliefs seemed real.

I can respect this. I also respect (and actually agree with) Clint's assertions that it isn't helpful for people to whine about "evil corporations" squelching creativity in the name of profit. He's right that there are plenty of hard working creative people expressing their personal visions in this industry right now, some with more success, some with less. That's just the reality of any artistic medium involving big money and multiple investors. Art has always been commercial, and anyone who doesn't see the art in the current commercial landscape of games doesn't know what art is.

That said... there's a part of me that is disappointed with Clint's answer about politics in Splinter Cell 3. Maybe it is because I think compelling artistic expression exists in games that SC3 feels lightweight to me. It's not that I necessarily want the game to be more leftist and more anti-American (although that's certainly how I would have made it.) I guess I just want more depth to its ethical and political subtext and I want that woven into the interaction in a more meaningful way, regardless of whether it leans left or right.

For Clint, it seems like the real world politics and the ethical dimensions of Sam Fisher was just the spice of Splinter Cell 3.

If I had my way, they would be the whole meal.

Doing the "right" thing in the games industry.

2005-05-20T12:34:00.000-05:00

I had an interesting conversation yesterday.

My company is finishing work on a mobile sports game, and the way the art is done each player is the same body with different heads placed on top to create unique characters. It occurred to me that with very little programming time you could simply leave the player's heads out and replace the ball with a head model. Then you'd have a game where headless players where playing with a severed head.

To me this is obviously a much better idea than a normal sports game, so I jokingly suggested we include this "mode" as an easter egg. My colleagues liked the idea, but one mentioned that you need to watch out what you do with a license. He then mentioned something I'd never heard of, a case where a designer was fired from Maxis for putting male "bimbos" in SimCopter. This is a game I haven't played, but from what I gather SimCopter was already full of female "bimbos" so there was already an element of exhibitionist sexuality in the game. This designer, who was gay, wanted equal opportunity eye-candy, so he put some men in. Maxis freaked and fired him, allegedly for "putting in unauthorized content."

This really pissed me off. I told my colleagues that this was totally different from putting in severed heads in a game. They were using it as an example of how one has to be mindful of working on someone else’s IP, that you can't just exploit it for your own agenda. I can agree with that, but as a socially conscious individual I also think it depends on the agenda. If a publisher wants a family game and you fill it with blood and guts, that's one thing. But if they have a game that is already sexual and you merely include another sexual orientation, it is a clear case of discrimination for them to fire you. The fact that this man added the content without authorization is just a convenient excuse. If he'd added, on I dunno, people of mixed races without "authorization" do you think he'd have been fired? I somehow doubt it.

When I was at GDC I asked Warren Spector a question that has been bothering me lately. "Can you be an iconoclast and a nice person in the videogame industry?" I asked. He said, "Of course. All the people I know who are innovation-minded are some of the nicest people in the industry."

I dunno if I buy this. How can you be "nice" and respect the job security of your co-workers when the "right" thing to do is to make a (dangerous) statement against what is obviously an unjust double-standard? I suppose the guy could have brought the issue up with his superiors first, but on the other hand it seems silly since, had they said 'no', it would have been a clear case of discrimination all the same.

I'm not sure what the answer to this question is.

Being a gamer pays off

2005-05-12T10:09:00.000-05:00

This article gives a fast review of the benefits of being a gamer. This is preaching to the converted, but it's a fine article you can forward to those people who still think that videogames are brainless. They can teach skills, such as resource management, planning and complex systems; skills that can are basic an necessary for any job, including management. So there.

Being a gamer can also get you money, either in competitions, such as the Cash Prizes at Twin Galaxies, or by being a game tester, as yours truly will be this summer, if the legal / immigration paperwork does not get in the way. I'll make you jealous in another entry.

I'm an addict

2005-05-10T15:40:00.000-05:00

I have to confess it. I'm an addict. I can't stop playing LUMINES. I steal Matt's PSP whenever I have the chance and play. Yesterday I could not care less about eating, or anything else, I just had to play. I got to level 86 in single skin mode. And my biceps was sore when I finished. Then I realized I'm just completely addicted to the game.

Puzzle games tend to hook me up really badly. Before this, I had a serious Mr Driller gaming stint, and before that Puzzle Bobble 4, for which I specifically bought a second hand DC. But Lumines is more addictive that those two together.

How can yet another variation on Tetris have players so hooked up? It probably has to do with the variations on the model. There are only two colours, and you have to make squares with them. Sounds simple enough. The key is that the squares do not automatically vanish as you put them together, but you have to wait until a line sweeps them out. Still, the mechanics are very easy to get. The strategy is another kettle of fish, and that's key to get you playing anything for hours--easy to pick up, so easy that it can't be so difficult to really kick ass at it. And then you forget about eating.

The second factor of addiction has to be with entrainment. I'm borrowing this term from Brian Moriarty (of Loom fame) who in an amazing lecture(you should have seen it delivered to fully get the point) explained how games create patterns for the player to follow, this results in a rhythm that makes you flow with them. Lumines does this to perfection--combining catchy music with an addictive puzzle is lethal, even moreso if every move you make in the game also produces music. You become one with the puzzle and the music, you go with the flow and forget about the rest of the world...

Hopefully my addiction will subdue soon. I have Dai Gaissou Band Brothers coming. That's a true rhythm game, so I'll just change one entrainments for another.

Eiji Aonuma doesn't get it.

2005-05-03T23:22:00.000-05:00

Or, rather, we don't get it. We don't understand that the designers of Zelda aren't even seeing things in terms of this "Cartoony = Childlike, Realistic = Mature" idiocy.

It's silly enough that gamers in the West split hairs like this anyway. Nevermind that the so-called "realistic" Link is still a cartoon character. We just see bodies with textures and shadows on them and think realism... which, somehow, gets automatically associated with "adult" themes of... er, well... evil dark stuff, I guess. What the hell does "dark" mean anyway?

Eiji Aonuma doesn't seem to know, based on this interview. It's actually pretty hilarious. It illustrates perfectly the gap between EGM's adolescent mindset and the Zelda team's sense of style. How's this for a telling exchange:

EGM: [J]ust the realistic graphics alone might make it seem darker or grittier...

EA: [Long pause] It's very hard to say. We're not trying to make it a very dark game, despite that impression, but we are trying to create a big contrast. For example, it should sometimes be very dark, and other times very bright, so people can enjoy the sheer contrast.

Hello? Can we say "culture gap?"

Aonuma literally thinks this guy's talking about how light or dark the game is... which makes sense since in his mind there probably is no obvious connection between the look of the new Zelda game and mature, violent, and/or elements we otherwise characterize as "dark" in the West. A paraphrase of this conversation might be:

EGM: Yeah, but... oh come on! Link is all big and cool lookin' and stuff! Not like that stoooopid Link in Wind Waker. That means the new Zelda will be, you know, dark and cool and stuff, right?

EA: [bewildered] Uh... are you talking about the lighting?

Pirates of the Caribean MMO

2005-04-27T09:18:00.000-05:00

So there's going to be a Pirates of the Caribbean MMO http://imdb.com/news/sb/2005-04-26/#3
http://www.mmorpg.com/newsroom.cfm?fp=1024,768,1765543734

Mind this quote from the managing director of Disney Online: "Fans of the movies and theme park attraction will be able to live their own unfolding pirate adventure through the game, including searching for lost treasures and battling numerous enemies on land and at sea."

Well, there's already a very cool MMO that does this very successfully, Puzzle Pirates. It's easy to play, you can play for hours or for five minutes. There's swashbuckling, pillaging, drinking, gambling, ship crafting, rum brewing, dye mixing, and a bunch of other stuff (all made into puzzles). And it's not very expensive. Give it a try (you can get 10 sessions for free) before Disney realizes and tries to buy it.

Metal Gear vs. Splinter Cell.

2005-04-18T23:12:00.000-05:00

I've been playing Metal Gear Solid 2 and Splinter Cell 1 for the past week. I like them both, but I'm going to say something crazy: MGS2 is more accessible than SC1. From a gamer's point of view, this is absurd. MGS, in hindsight, has a very weird control scheme. It's fixed camera top-down, with many strange controller actions one needs to perform in order to do simple things like aim.

Wait... *thinks*

Okay, so let me take that back. The *basic directional controls* in MGS2 are more accessible than SC1. Although you need to do all these strange acrobatics to get to the 3D elements of MGS2's gameplay, the basic controls themselves are actually more sensible than SC1's. Up is up, Down is down, Left is left, and Right is right. SC1's behind-the-back controls are perfectly designed the sense that they are an intuitive evolution of the fundamentals of 3D gameplay (established in games such as Tomb Raider and Doom) but if you are unfamiliar with those genres it's basically very difficult to get the hang of them.

I once tried to "teach" someone how to play videogames, someone who hadn't played games but wanted to learn how to play them. And you know what? It was a LOT easier to teach them how to play 2D games than 3D. 2D games they got the hang of after a few tries, but when I popped in an FPS I could feel the enormous leap in videogame literacy it demanded. Even someone unfamiliar with videogames could understand that in MGS2 you press up to go up, down to go down, etc. But show someone who's never played videogames Time Splitters and watch how hard it is for them to come to grips with the look/move dual-analog philosophy of controls. And then there's body consciousness. Those of us that grew up with games like Ultima Underworld and Doom understand how a mere camera view can be, itself, an avatar. But this ain't as obvious to someone just starting out. It's just not as fundamentally intuitive to human experience as a simple control scheme rooted in 2D navigational concepts.

Not that a newbie gamer would necessarily find MGS2 accessible. Its control is esoteric in many ways, but that's not because its 2D controls are dated. It's 2D controls are the most accessible thing about it because they don't require a strong literacy of 3D interface design. SC1, on the other hand, requires this literacy in ways that make it less accessible to people who might like to play games but don't.

I've been having fun with both MGS2 and SC1. But MGS2 just feels more playful and fun to me. Frankly I can imagine someone not as interested in games understanding the basic nuances of MGS2 faster than SC1--its 90-degree angle architecture, its 2D controls, its simple punch-punch combat, and its insanely simple inventory GUI. These pieces may get really convoluted when they come together, but as isolated elements they show a strong conviction for the fundamentals of intuitive interface design... fundamentals that are based on much broader concepts of interaction than SC's evolutionary 3D paradigm.

My point is this. Although SC is in some ways a more intuitive game for gamers, I think MGS could teach us more about the fundamentals of design that might attract more people to videogames. Frankly I think MGS (both 1, 2, and 3) could do a better job of it, but the fundamentals they subscribes to have always been very clear...

And worth more study, I think.

Jack Thompson.

2005-03-25T10:30:00.000-05:00

I was trying to think of a more clever title for this entry, but nothing came to mind. Merely the name Jack Thompson should fill gamers' hearts with disgust. I was naive to think that perhaps because the Jeff Weise shootings (no relation!) didn't involve any reference to videogames whatsoever that would prevent idiots like Thompson from spinning their bullshit. But no. Apparently, this kid made some violent flash movies a while before he went on his killing spree. And, of course, like a fly on shit, Thompson is claiming the movies were modeled after Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt (surprise, surprise... does Thompson know any other violent games?)

I spoke to Jack Thompson once. It was scary. It was like talking to Hannibal Lecter on the phone. I called him out of the blue when I was a student at MIT. I'd read some crap of his where he claimed that adolenscents brains were "underdeveloped" and not able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality... hence they don't deserve to be treated like sentient beings with, you know, the ability to make decisions and stuff. He'd cited a Harvard study, but didn't give any details. So I called the phone number on his website. I wasn't sure if he'd answer at first, but eventually he did pick up.

His voice was... creepy. Maybe he gets lots of calls from gamers who scream at him and tell him what a dick he is. He sounded very tentative, like he wasn't sure why I was calling. Like he wasn't sure if I was on of "them." His tone of voice gave the impression of a guy sitting in his office with a loaded gun looking out the window. I didn't want him hanging up on me, so I played the student card. I explained how I was at MIT doing research on videogames (although I didn't mention Henry Jenkins) and that I wanted to know what the full citations were for the studies he cites, complaining, gently, that there didn't seem to be any references on his website. I remember him getting slightly defensive and explaining that his website wasn't meant to be taken as a hardcore research document. He said he did have citations for all the research he mentioned, he just hadn't posted them online... where people could, you know, read them. He told me the department where the Harvard study took place, and I thanked him and hung up. I felt weird. Cold, sort of.

Living Game Worlds - Round Two!

2005-03-17T11:15:00.000-05:00

Unlike Clara I didn't get to attend both days of the GeorgiaTech conference with Will Wright. (I had to work.) But I did attend the second day, and there were some interesting bits.

Spore is amazing. It is one of those epic game designs that people endlessly talk about but no one seems to be able to pull off. It's a game that begins like Black & White and ends like Master of Orion, all involving one smooth, simple interface that a child could use. I love Wright's designs, but curiously his games have never held my attention. They do for plenty of people, and that's great. But I'm still waiting for the Will Wright game where playing the game is more interesting that hearing Will Wright talk about how he designed it. I'd still much rather attend a lecture by Will Wright about The Sims than play The Sims. His Spore demonstration had me drooling, but I'll have to wait and see if my own experience of playing Spore is as exciting and delightful as Will's presentation.

Another bit that sticks in my mind is the Storytelling panel--YET ANOTHER storytelling panel. They seem to be at every game-related event. This one was more of the same, but it was shaken up a bit by some guy from EA Sports. God knows what he was doing on a panel with Michael Mateas and Chris Crawford. Don't you hate it when some mega commercial schmoe comes to one of these academic conferences and shows a "demo reel" that is basically an advertisement? I just felt embarrassed. Here we are trying to have a serious discussion about storytelling and the medium of games, and I'm hearing "YEAH! MADDEN 2005 RULZ! EA IS YOUR GOD!" coming out of the speaker a foot from my ear. Feh. At the end of the video I and the small crowd around me tried to stifle our laughter, but the feeling of hokiness was just too overwhelming. So yep, there it was, going from Madden's "innovative" feature stacking to Facade's indie sass. Would you like some chocolate syrup on your steak?

Will Wright receives the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize at Georgia Tech

2005-03-15T15:40:00.000-05:00

So let's start the entries of this blog in style.

Today was the day for the main events of Founder's Day in the Ivan Allen College, at Georgia Tech. The morning was dedicated to a panel on Community and Games, and the afternoon was dedicated to the award ceremony to Will Wright, as this year's recipient of the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize. These events are part of the Living Game Worlds Symposium here at Literature, Communication and Culture, today and tomorrow. As someone who missed GDC, I'm happy my department is organizing the symposium :)

The morning panel was really interesting: Ian Bogost compared videogame communities with soup (he actually has something for food and computers, as the students in his class can testify). He continued with the culinary example by showing The Grocery Game, where people compete to save the most in their grocery shopping in the real world. Then Celia Pearce did a presentation on how a group of gamers from Uru, the on-line version of Myst, have recreated some of the spaces in that game in other on-line games, such as There She did her whole presentation through her avatar in There, and the final touch was that she got to interview one of the players in the game, and he greeted the whole audience. In her configuration she could talk and be heard by the other player, and we could hear the other player too; if it had been rehearsed if would not have resulted so well. Finally, Michael Mateas spoke about code and expression, and put his finger on the question of how to make digital expressive tools accesible to people who can't code. Will Wright joined as a respondent to the panel, agreeing with the necessity of filling the gap between hard-core modders and casual gamers that Mateas highlighted.

Some of the questions got very interesting responses from the speakers, starting with the statement that virtual enviroments may not be real, but the communities that are built around them are. Pearce spoke about how MMO players seem to be first attracted by the game and the ideology that its procedures propose, to then shift their focus to the people they meet in the game. Copyright was also tackled, given that players are given the tools, but also the opporunity to modify the game--The Sims is famous for fostering this, though they have had to add a clause to sort of waive some property rights in order to allow these modifications. It was also mentioned that the MMO Second Life has actually granted IP to their players of whatever games or objects they built within the game. Finally, it was also pointed out that game designers do not really have the capacity to control what the players are going to do. As Wright mentioned, the fist thing that some players did in the happy-happy Sims Online was to organize a mafia that hit and harassed other players. He said that there is no need to design any crime-oriented activities in MMOs, because grievers will find the cracks in the rules and terrorize the gameworld.

The award ceremony at noon was a nicely organized event, where other people received recognition for their work at and after Georgia Tech. Will Wright was the star of the event, with a presentation where he talked really fast (and those of you who have already heard him talk know that he's a fast speaker already). The title of his talk was 'Stealth Communities', a flashy name for a great talk on how to reproduce real world events and systems in a computer, reviewing different theories that have been applied to computing (from Math to Chaos theory), and making it actually interesting. Will Wright armed with a Powerpoint is a guarantee of a good, enjoyable talk.

For those of you who want to emulate Will Wright, here are some hints:
- if you're getting a lifetime achievement award, dress elegantly, but do not forget your black sneakers. You're a geek, but you're also a genius, so it's okay.
- change your university major at least four times. If you also change your school, that's even better.
- Look for inspiration in movies. Watch 2001: An Space Odyssey, because that's what the future was going to be like when you were born in the 60s. The movie also teaches you that computers can be potential psychotic killers. Watch Earth vs. the Flying Saucers too (yeah, it's an actual film).
- make jokes about llamas in your games. It's a Monty Pythonesque reference (the original was probably the moose in Monty Python's Holy Grail).

We need more people like Will Wright. So start working on it.