DeathMonkey's Super Blog. That's right; Super.

Intriguing thoughts

2009-06-28T11:14:00.002-04:00

I love Dominion, Donald Vaccarino's fantastic game from last year and have been playing almost constantly since I got it. The expansion (Intrigue) is out in Europe but not in the states; my pre-order hasn't arrived, but I've been able to play 5 cards from the new set for free on BrettspielWelt. (Look for games that are set "random intrigue".)

Here are the cards that are included and my pithy insights into each of them:

Card: Baron
Type: Action
Cost: 4
Text: +1 Buy. You may discard an estate card. If you do, +4 Coin. Otherwise, gain an estate card.

Nice new use of estates and overall a quality card. If you have an estate in your hand, he thins your deck and gives you a sizable purchase bonus. If you don't, he gives you an estate. Perpetual motion money machine!

Card: Nobles
Type: Action - Victory
Cost: 6
Text: 2VP; Choose 1: +3 Cards; or +2 Actions

There used to be no decision when it came to what to buy with 6 money, and now they're still isn't. You buy this card because there are fewer of them than golds and he chains with other nobles like crazy. Drawing 2+ of these guys is great; combo-ing with a throne room is divinity. (Granted almost everything combo-ed with a throne room is great.)

Card: Minion
Type: Action - Attack
Cost: 5
Text: +1 Action; Choose one: +2 Coin; or discard your hand, + 4 cards, and each other player with at least 5 cards discards their hand and draws 4 more cards.

Not the best 5 cost card, but a strange attacking library variant. I buy these and chain them together, then reset my hand if I didn't have any money in my final hand. I think this is the card makes action chaining decks more viable. Works well with extra action cards (village, festival, noble), because having more than one action after the discard is key.

Card: Swindler
Type: Action - Attack
Cost: 3
Text: +2 Coin. Each other player trashes the top card of his deck and gains a card of the same cost that you choose.

If you thought the thief was evil, you haven't played with this guy yet. The key words are "you chose". You know what costs the same as a copper? A curse card. You can turn opponent's estates into lots and lots of chapels, their gold into adventurers, and other truly awful things. Has a pleasant side benefit of making the game end much quicker because lots of cards are trashed and picked up. Less effective later in the game because at the 3, 4, or 5 cost level because it's often an even trade. Swindling an opponent's province when they're in the lead (trashing their province and having them pick up another one) can cause biblical lamentations.

Card: Upgrade
Type: Action
Cost: 5
Text: +1 Card, +1 Action. Trash a card form your hand. Gain a card costing exactly 1 Coin more than it.

I think this card sucks, except for being a cowardly (and chaining) man's chapel. (Throw away a copper/curse, nothing costs 1, so you don't have to pick anything up.) Otherwise you need a very even spread of cards on the table for you to climb the cost ladder successfully. All other main set 5 cost cards are better buys. (I'm right until someone beats me with this card!) Remodel is superior and cheaper.

If these five cards are an indication of the quality of the set as whole, Vaccarino may earn my "boardgame of the year" two years in a row. I can't wait for the set to come out!

Civilization Revolution

2008-07-08T00:32:00.009-04:00

After wrapping up core development a few months ago, Civilization Revolution (CivRev) is finally being released in the US this week on the Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo DS. I have been thrilled by the response to the demo on various message boards; CivRev is quite a different game than most console experiences and it was never completely clear to us how the public would respond. Thankfully, most have understood what we've tried to with the series and embrace it as its own thing rather than Civilization 5. I've been particularly proud of the responses of players who have never played a strategy game like this before. The sort of wide-eyed "there can be games like this?!" response makes me feel like we helped expand what people think of games by a little bit.

Developing CivRev was quite a challenge for me because it was the first time that I was a lead in charge of other developers, the first time I developed a console title, and the first time we used Scaleform's GFX (a flash interpreter) to process and render the interface. Any and all accolades were won by my great team: Brittany Steiner, our flash genius that carried one of the heaviest loads in the development on her first project, and Russell Vaccaro, who simply would not stop trying to make the interface look as great as possible. Without the herculean efforts of these two individuals, CivRev would have been a much poorer experience.

The success of the entire game can be credited to Sid Meier, who, among his many skills, can imbue all of his games with his unique charm and friendliness that makes them somehow more intimate and engaging than other designers. I particularly appreciate his patience with me; I'm sure he wanted to throttle me more than a few times during the project.

I hope you have a chance to play the game. (Demos are available online for the Xbox360 and the PS3.) CivRev is one of the best games I've had the opportunity to work on and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Wall-E

2008-07-07T05:05:00.003-04:00

This post includes complete, fun-negating spoilers. Do not read if you haven't seen Wall-E yet!

The first two thirds of Wall-E (until the Captain starts talking) is amazingly great. Pixar's greatest work, including the Incredibles. They have effectively a silent movie with a robot on a destroyed, garbage-filled Earth that is compassionate, warm, and endearing. Before Wall-E, Lucas owned robots. Wall-E makes R2 look like a 8-bit hack. His bazillion-points-of-articulation eyes, insanely clever physical design, and his collection, organization, and adoration of unique human garbage makes him brilliant. Pixar excels here because I believe robot humor is all about making you think the robot is a human, then doing something unexpected to remind you it's not. Pixar's creativity shines brightly through constant surprises. The first 2/3rds played out beautifully because they relied on the roots of Chaplin movies; an instantly beloved protagonist and inventive physical comedy.

My problem with the last third (it may have been shorter than that but it seemed to go on forever) is that much of the lightness and artistry of the first two thirds is trashed through clumsy Pixar-rhetoric dialog by the captain and the jabs at modern human society going from subtle to street-corner preachy. The giant (30 minute plus?) chase scene was a soul-sucking endeavor that lacked much of the creativity that the rest of the movie exhibited. (Monsters Inc. is the textbook example on how to do a final chase scene.) The crazy robot ward was a highlight, until they went from the loony-bin to the wacky off-beat mascots featured in nearly every animated movie. The final scene of bringing Wall-E back to life might have not been completely cheesy had the last half-hour not sapped all my suspension of disbelief.

Few things are more vexing than something that is mostly magnificent but partially crap. Wall-E could have been Pixar's best movie had they never set foot on the human spaceship.

Picross DS

2007-07-31T15:07:00.000-04:00

Picross DS was just released in the US, and if you like puzzles like Sudoku it's well worth your inspection. I've been playing the UK version (thinking that it would never come out in the States) and there are tons of puzzles and a surprisingly good online competitive mode. Picross (officially known as nonograms) have been around a while; it's frequently part of Games Magazine.

Here's a free flash version to try out!

Resident Evil 4 Recant

2007-07-30T07:50:00.000-04:00

It has taken me three attempts at playing Resident Evil 4 (twice on the Gamecube and now on the Wii) before I finally realized that everyone was right and I was wrong. Resident Evil 4 is a fantastic game.

I love the aiming the gun with the remote. While Nintendo did a good job of translating Twilight Princess from a GameCube game into a Wii game, Resident Evil 4 gun battles feel like the game was designed from the ground up to be played with the remote. It's easy to switch between targets quickly and "juggle" a group of oncoming cultists/zombie/crazies through quick kneecap shots. Capcom plays the tension of "too many zombies, not enough ammo" like a violin.

Other aspects of the game lack the elegance of the aiming; the inventory screen is obtuse and frustrating by using some rather obscure buttons (the + and the 'c' button). It certainly doesn't ruin the game, but it's a missed opportunity to not use the remote to drag and drop in the inventory screen.

Anyways, there are pages and pages of people praising Resident Evil 4 and I wanted to add my voice to the chorus.

Feeling more at home on a Planet

2007-03-11T13:37:00.000-04:00

Sony's Game Developers Conference keynote had two memorable components: the introduction of Home, their Second Life-styled real world, and Little Big Planet, a game about users creating their own game levels and sharing it with others.

The contrast between the two could not be greater. Home appears as a 21st century Microsoft Bob-style metaphor of all the functionality of the Playstation 3. Users can design and layout their realistic environment, and, as repeated multiple times during the presentation, players can purchase merchandise from the Sony store online to show to their friends. The question that comes to my mind when thinking about Sony's Home is "what's the point?" Second Life conjures up a similar question, but the level of flexibility and sharing is miles beyond anything Home offers.

Little Big Planet approaches the "problem" of what to do with an internet connected console with an entirely different, more interesting and plausible approach. Instead of trying to provide a physical metaphor and community about all of the activities available on the PS3 console, Little Big Planet focuses on a few users working together to create content (in this case, game levels) for themselves, and then the ability to share these creations in a community about the game.

Home is community for community's sake. Little Big Planet attempts to provide a community to extend the value and enjoyment of a game.

My Brother and His Game

2007-01-04T18:32:00.000-05:00

While wandering around the Atlanta Airport this Christmas, we found an ad for Todd's first game as a lead designer. Brain Challenge has received great reviews even though it had a tumultuous (and extremely brief) development cycle. I've only seen advertisements for the games I've worked on inside gaming stores or magazines; seeing something you developed advertised in an international airport has got to be a treat.

Help! I'm Hooked on the Virtual Console!

2006-12-18T21:45:00.000-05:00

I should never have entered my credit card number into my Wii. In the last two weeks I've already purchased four games: One sublime classic (Gunstar Heroes), an interesting Sonic Team platformer (Ristar), one of the first console turn-based strategy games (Military Madness), and a nostalgia-fueled waste of $5 (Ice Hockey^[1]). The Virtual Console lineup started with some fantastic games (Mario 64, the NES Legend of Zelda), but the most tempting nectar are the Monday releases of Genesis and Turbo Graphics 16 classics that I've never played before.

Part of my enthusiasm for the virtual console comes from my bizarre laziness when it comes to changing games. Inertia is overly involved with my gaming choices; if the disk is in the system, then I'm probably going to keep playing that. It's as if taking out game disks is so hard. The Wii lets me play all these games without having to get out of my seat! It's great! My PC theoretically has the same feature, but it requires disk swapping too for all the major games, despite the fact that it's too old to run Half Life 2, much less Relic's awesome Company of Heroes.

Anyways, congrats Nintendo for somehow squeezing even more money out of me. Now I need to remember to pick up Bomberman `93 before I go on vacation for some multiplayer action. . .

^{[1]Ok, Ice Hockey isn't awful; it aged poorly and debuted in a transitional era of game design. Nintendo's Tennis game on the VC, on the other hand, is an atrocity. Not only does the Wii already come with one of the best tennis games ever made, the NES Tennis game was never good, regardless of when you played it.}

Christmas DS Haikus

2006-12-17T11:37:00.000-05:00

A few of co-workers have gotten Nintendo DSs for themselves or their family and some have asked me what I recommend. Well, how about recommendations in haiku form? Everybody loves that!

Elite Beat Agents
Male cheerleaders? Huh?!
This comic music game grooves
even with Believe^[1].

Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime
Look what's on my head!
I'll fire it from my huge tank!
Hope you like mad puns.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
Has Metroid-vania^[2]
ever been done better? No.
Take notes, Nintendo!

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
Nethack^[3], lose no sleep;
It's a puddle to your lake.
Still, fun in the car.

^{[1]Yes, Cher's Believe. While some may question the track list, Elite Beat Agents remains a fun game no matter how many hundreds of times you've heard the songs.}
^{[2]Metroid-vania is a sub-genre of 2D platformers defined by their maze-like non-linearity and the collection of abilities that open up new areas to explore. The first Metroid-vania was Nintendo's Metroid, and later Konami's Castlevania games began mimicking them.}
^{[3]Nethack is probably the most bestest game ever made. It's free, amazing, rendered in ascii, and nearly as accessible as Finnegans Wake.}

Excite Truck! quick impressions

2006-12-14T18:42:00.000-05:00

These impressions are from ~30 minutes of play time.

I got it today from a co-worker. The controls feel almost uncomfortably loose; it takes a while to go from the analog stick to tilting of the wiimote in a racing game. It's seems closer to an SSX than a typical racing game in that it's more about crazy jumps than riding a tight line. It rewards "style" driving more than any other racing game I've seen. Progression through the game is based on the number of points you accumulate through the level. You get points for doing stunts, jumps, and smashing up others cars as well as your finish position, so theoretically you can come in last and still "win" and get an S rank. (It's certainly easier to get an S rank with the 1st place bonus points, but it's possible otherwise.) There's also these bizarre power ups that deform the terrain; typically they make steep ramps for some ludicrous jumps, but sometimes they just make a ditch. (Maybe some are bad? I dunno.)

For those who like to tracking how many crazy things they did and unlocking stuff for it, ExciteTruck may be one of the greatest games ever made. It counts how many times I've made tree runs (driven a good distance between trees), seriously wrecked other player's cars, and how many times I've made jumps that lasted over 30 seconds, and a bunch of other stuff I don't completely understand yet. Each time you complete a goal, you get a trophy and/or unlock a car. Unlocks are also car-based too. They track how frequently you've raced with a given car and how many S grades you've gotten with it and will unlock new types of that vehicle as you progress. Unlockable rewards come at a brisk pace but not so frequently that it feels like ExciteTruck is begging for your attention.

If there's anything to gripe about, the graphics look somewhat dated and plain. Most of the time you're flying through the air, doing huge jumps, and you're too busy driving to nit-pick. Yet when you crash and are mashing the button to get your "pity boost", you have time to stare at the thing you hit and think "yeah, that tree is probably less than 30 polys". The game appears to run at 30 fps, maybe even 60.

I got it for $30 and felt like it was a fair deal. If I paid $50 for ExciteTruck, I may have been left wanting.

Suspicious Figures

2006-11-30T21:45:00.000-05:00

Going through photos tonight, I found a picture of Todd and Vicki that I think captures them both pretty well. The photo was taken by Vicki without my permission.

My Week of Zelda

2006-11-26T08:06:00.000-05:00

All the stars aligned for a week of gaming: the Nintendo Wii was released with the latest Zelda game the week before Thanksgiving and I had vacation days to burn, and my brother, Todd, was in a similar situation. So he took the bus from Manhattan on Monday and we tag-teamed the game, swapping between each dungeon, until it's completion last night. Todd and I have done this a number of times many years ago, but the change to act like children again and play (and complete) a game in one of our favorite series together made this week one of my most enjoyable vacations. No small credit can be given to Bessie who demonstrated saint-like patience with the bleary-eyed bums in her basement yammering on about heart containers, master keys, and the saddening absence of Tingle. She did indulge in some some light jeering, saying that Link is such a cute elf and wondering where Legolas could be.

I have a good bit to say about Twilight Princess, the Nintendo Wii, and the Zelda series in general, so I'm breaking a single long post into a bunch of shorter ones. I hate reading spoilers so I'll try to keep most specific details in the footnotes.

Todd Loves The Tingle

2006-11-01T18:11:00.000-05:00

Todd: This game needs a Tingle^[1]!
DeathMonkey: :&
DeathMonkey: what game?
Todd: My game.
DeathMonkey: hmmm
Todd: Come on, every game needs a character that just
freaks you out in it. :)
Todd: Hope he's in the new Zelda^[2].
Todd: If he's not I'm gonna be UP-SET!
DeathMonkey: I'm sure he will be
DeathMonkey: Though I'm really concerned about him being
realistically rendered. :&
Todd: And this time he'll be "realistic". :P
Todd: Hahah
Todd: Nintendo should pull a MGS2^[3]. :)
DeathMonkey: :&
DeathMonkey: NOOOOO
Todd: Buy a Zelda game 3 hours in you're Tingle!
Todd: On an epic fairy quest!
DeathMonkey: NOOOOOOOO
Todd: Best joke EVA.

^{[1]Tingle has always been disturbing. He's a 35 year old "fairy" that's appeared in the Legend of Zelda series. His catch-phrase is "Tingle-Tingle, Kooloo-Limpah!"}
^{[2]Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess is the next game in the series.}
^{[3]Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is infamous for advertising the game in the US as the player controlling the macho Solid Snake throughout the experience, but actually the player begins the game controlling Snake then ends up playing as the somewhat effeminate Raiden after the first few hours. This was a wildly unpopular, but deeply funny, trick.}

A Science Nerd's Halloween

2006-10-28T13:05:00.000-04:00

I've started listening to Scientific American's 60-Second Science podcast this week and they had an excellent Halloween story that's too good not to share.

Golden Spike

2006-10-03T16:55:00.000-04:00

Sid Meier's Railroads! went gold early Monday afternoon and should be hitting the shelves around October 17th.

While I don't think it'll ever be "fun" to finish a game, working on Railroads! with my team at Firaxis has been an awesome experience from beginning to end. I'm immensely proud to have worked with these individuals and, for the first time, feel that I contributed a significant portion to the final product.

It's hard to know how well an economic strategy game with trains will do in one of the toughest Christmas seasons in years (with the PS3 and Wii launches and the World of Warcraft expansion), but I hope that it surprises some people who wouldn't normally expect to enjoy laying track, dropping depots, and routing trains. I've always enjoyed economic strategy games, and I feel like we've made a title that stands with the best of them.

Official site (Best promo site for a game I've worked on.)
Demonstration Video
Previews: GameSpot, 1up
Demo: FilePlanet, 3DGamers

DS Lite!

2006-06-11T17:46:00.000-04:00

Just when I think that I'm somehow less nerdy that I was before, I do something that not only fastens the geek badge to my chest, it shines it up and makes me puff my chest out. That's how I felt at 8 a.m. this (Sunday!) morning driving around to various Targets and WalMarts trying to get my hands on Nintendo's revision of it's workhorse handheld.

I wouldn't have felt the nerdiness as pronounced if I didn't have company. When I wandered into Target, there're four other people awaiting the system's release. A father and his 10 year old kid, and a young Asian couple. The Target said that it would release on Tuesday instead of Sunday, despite people arguing that Nintendo's own website listed it as releasing today. (I heard the manager say that they sold some of the systems early, and Nintendo may have fined them and forced them to release it at a later date. Who knows.)

So I headed back home, called around trying to find the system somewhere. Called a WalMart, asked for the electronics department, and asked if I could get a DS Lite. The lady said "Oh, today's June 11th? Yeah, we got `em." I hang up and head over. Standing around looking for someone in the electronics section, it's easy to find others milling about waiting for the system. 20-something? Check. Overweight? Check. Pale complexion? Check. I'd say something about these unwashed masses, but I match all the above criteria and was wearing my Sega Dreamcast t-shirt I got back in 1999 to top it off.

Anyways, how's the system? As others have said, it's bright, light, and what Nintendo should have released in the first place. The glossy finish more than hints toward an iPod feel, and gives the gadget a "ohhh, I want to take care of this" shininess that Apple's music player and the PSP have. If you liked the original system, you'll enjoy playing games on the DS Lite more. It's quite similar to the upgrade from the GBA to the GBA SP. I have no regrets with the upgrade.

If you're on the fence, these great videos by Cabel demonstrate the system almost as well as holding it in your hands. Nintendo should hire this guy to make commercials for them.

World Cup 2006

2006-06-11T13:42:00.000-04:00

This is the first World Cup that I've paid attention to; I've seen matches in the past, but I didn't care at all. The reason I care now is sort of weird and embarassingly speaks to how much games influence my life. I've developed interests in my life from topics of videogames I've enjoyed. I've read Theodore Doge's books about Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Julius Ceasar from working on the expansion pack for Rise of Nations. Started looking at Wassily Kandinsky's art after being mesmerized by Rez. Now I'm watching the World Cup thanks to Winning Eleven.

The World Cup often has great matches. The lack of commercial breaks makes it a great viewing experience; games typically clock in only a few minutes later than the 90 minutes played. The level of enthusiasm of the crowd and the players on the field is nearly unmatched, even in the preliminary games. The tournament is quite short, so every game, every goal can have a drastic impact on how far a team gets in the tournament.

The tournament's already started, but there have been some excellent matches. The Germany - Costa Rica game had 6 goals. Both teams seemed to have thought defense was largely optional. (Frings's goal in the 87th minute is an early candidate for goal of the tournament.) The Argentina - Ivory Coast game showcased how incredibly talented Argentina is and how much Drogba alone could make a difference on the Ivory Coast team. The best team I've seen play thus far is Holland; cool, methodical team play, with brilliant outbursts by Robben. As with most of teams I've seen, their defense could be improved, but overall I think they will do well. I can't wait for the Argentina- Holland match on the 21st.

How to Pitch a Game

2006-06-04T09:31:00.000-04:00

Paul Barnett of Mythic Entertainment gives an inspired pitch for Warhammer Online. Barnett is a master; it is hard to watch his funny, involving, and informative spiel without getting excited about his game. Brilliant!

Railroads! Developer Humor

2006-06-03T15:53:00.000-04:00

Friday afternoon, Don, Casey, and I were "testing" Sid Meier's Railroads multiplayer. The game involves laying down railroad track, building depots, buying and routing trains around to pick up goods at certain industries and deliver them elsewhere to make money. The way to win the scenario was by buying out all of your opponents' stock.

Anyways, Casey was having a good game and I was having a bad one, and he bought me out pretty early on, with a complimentary "suck it!" when he purchased the last bit of my stock. When you buy out a player you get ownership of all their tracks, trains, and stations, but somehow I was still making money even though I was out of the game. It turns out when a buyout occured, the trains change owners but the train cars did not. So Casey's trains that were once mine weren't making him any money; in fact, they were actually losing money because he had to pay maintenance on all of them while I (a "dead player") was taking all the revenue.

"Haha, you're going to have to sell all my trains!" After laughing at him for a bit, I started helping him by pointing out which trains were mine to get rid of. After deleting a few, He deleted a train leaving a coal mine with three full cars.

"Dude, you deleted your own train!"

"No, that was your train." Casey replied.

"I never built that track! I didn't deliver any coal; I swear that wasn't my train." I insisted.

"That had to be your train, I didn't build that track." Casey said getting confused.

Suddenly, Don piped up: "Hey, what happened to my train!?"

Looking on Don's screen, he was staring at the coal mine and piece of track Casey and I were arguing about. "I just bought a train and it disappeared!"

After a good laugh, I went upstairs and added the code that prevented players from selling other's belongings.

Sorry for the personal junk

2006-04-30T19:09:00.000-04:00

Where's my amazingly lucid, erudite comments about current videogames? What's up with all these stupid photos?

I like taking pictures. My parents got me a camera. I tend to take the most pictures when my family is around. Voila.

Here's some videogame stuff: Winning Eleven 9 is awesome. I wish Nintendo would release the DS Lite in the US before I die. (Or before the "New" Super Mario Bros.)

2006-04-30T19:03:00.000-04:00

My favorite shot with our new camera.

2006-04-30T19:02:00.000-04:00

Untrustworthy fellows.

2006-04-30T19:01:00.000-04:00

My family resting in the National Art Gallery. You can tell a lot about people's current emotions by their facial expressions.

"Wii": the moment the Revolution died

2006-04-27T19:36:00.000-04:00

Names, by their nature, are definitive things and perception is more potent than reality. In the most crucial moment of Nintendo's existence, they cover the shoulders of their best hope with an albatross of a name.

Guitar Hero 2

2006-04-17T17:45:00.000-04:00

November. Second controller can play rhythm or bass guitar.

Really late 2005 game thoughts

2006-02-18T15:01:00.000-05:00

I was going to write a reasonably big 2005 wrap-up post, but being mid-Feburary I don't see the point. I did write a couple of short reviews and I'd hate to see them go to waste. So here we go!

Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney ds

Who said adventure games are dead? There's not much game there really - Capcom avoids the dreaded adventure game "getting stuck" by making a linear path with limited choices. The amusement comes from great characters and dead-on comic timing. It's 3/4ths Matlock with 1/4th of wacky Dragonball Z thrown in. Don't expect to learn anything about law, but you're sure to laugh and have a good time.

Yoshi's Touch & Go ds

Maligned as a throw-away tech demo, YT&G is the most refined touch-screen arcade game I've played. There's none of the structure, the bosses, the fire/ice/jungle levels that players tend to expect of platformers, but there's a surprising richness to the game in balancing the needs of clearing the Yoshi's path, collecting ammunition, and drawing lines about him.

From the wilderness

2006-02-18T13:28:00.000-05:00

My life's been interesting for a while; finally things have settled down a bit.

I left my position at Big Huge Games and recently joined Firaxis to work on an unannounced title. I wish Big Huge Games the best; I'm extremely proud that I was invited to work with them on Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends. (Rise of Legends has been getting some excellent previews, btw.) They are an exceptionally talented development team. I wish them the best of luck and I hope Rise of Legends tops the charts for a long time and my friends make a lot of money.

That said, I'm thrilled to be working on this project at Firaxis and will share details as soon as I have a chance.

In other news, my brother, Todd, got a job designing cellphone games at GameLoft in Manhattan. We both want to be game designers and I'm a bit jealous that he gets his shot first. It's his dream job, but he's not much of a big city guy. Seeing some hilarious stories on the horizon, I harassed him into making a blog about his experiences moving up to NYC and starting his job. I'm sure his stay in Gotham will be challenging, but he'll leave with a number of great games that he designed and enough stories to keep everyone entertained for a while. Good luck Todd!

Mario Kart DS

2005-11-24T19:39:00.000-05:00

I love the Nintendo DS and it has been blessed with a growing mountain of great, interesting games, but it has lacked a killer app to point to and say "here's why this is such a great system." Mario Kart DS is the system's Halo. Its Soul Calibur. It's the best in the series and its new tweaked rules and weapons, incredible track design, and multiplayer content make a stunning package that no DS system should exist without.

Slipstreaming, the most substantial addition to the core gameplay, introduces an excellent risk/reward component to the series. Tailing another driver is typically a dangerous practice in Mario Kart games; most items can be dropped behind characters to force any tailgaters to spin out. In Mario Kart DS, driving in a character's wake provides a moderate speed boost. Remain there a few moments, and you're rewarded with a larger boost that often slingshots you in front of the character you were tailing.

There aren't many changes to the weapon lineup, but many of the best weapons of Double Dash!! have been refined and revisited and are now available to all characters. The Chain-Chomp has been brought back as the Bullet Bill. Wario's Bob-omb is back as well and is extremely devastating when dropped behind.

The single new weapon is the Blooper, a squid that will shoot ink on all your opponent's driving screens, forcing them to drive with the "map" screen displayed at the bottom. While the weapon is mildly annoying, it does get the player looking at the bottom screen. Driving on the map screen becomes surprisingly comfortable with a little practice. The map screen also lists what weapons characters have; useful knowledge when attempting to slipstream safely.

There's 32 racing tracks in the game; half new courses, and half "classic" courses from previous games in the series.

The new race tracks in the game are an excellent group, without a dud in the lot. There's a number of new creative tracks. Waluigi Pinball has players racing through a neon pinball machine while someone is playing it, trying to avoid being crushed by giant pinballs and avoid getting knocked about by the flippers. The Tick-Tock Clock track involves driving through the mechanisms of a giant clock with huge turning gears that serve as driving surfaces. Peach Gardens has players zipping about a giant hedge maze, encouraging the use of the map screen to find the best route and avoid wandering chain-chomps. Many of the other tracks are customary entries, but are often the best iterations of their type. (Particularly Wario Stadium, Bowser's Castle, and Shroom Ridge, the new highway course.)

The classic courses are a bit of a mixed bag; not all the courses have aged well and they suffer by being listed directly below the best set of new tracks the series has seen. The SNES and N64 tracks have aged the worst. SNES tracks flat, simple, and sometimes punitive designs (like the deep water pits in Koopa Beach 2) reveal how far we've come in 14 years. The N64 tracks destroy any nostalgia toward Mario Kart 64; the tracks are frighteningly uninteresting and ugly. (OK, Moo Moo Farm is still fun to play, but that's it.) The tracks plundered from Double Dash!! and Super Circuit feel much more modern (duh) and are largely great to play.

I'll discuss multiplayer, specifically playing over Nintendo's Wi-Fi network, in an upcoming post. It's largely well implemented but with some aggrivating quirks. Regardless of any quirks, it's always fun to race other people and even if Mario Kart DS didn't have multiplayer, it'd still be the best game on the system.

Shadow of the Colossus

2005-11-20T08:42:00.000-05:00

In Shadow of the Colossus, you assume the role of a young man trying to reverse the death of his lover. He travels to a temple at the end of the world and is tasked by a mystical voice to defeat 16 colossi to bring his beloved back to life.

These colossi are awesome, giant beasts made of stone, hair, and metal. Some tower over you like living skyscrapers and the ground cracks as they walk about. Though they have an unfamiliar shape, they aren't exactly monsters. You don't find them attacking villages or setting fields ablaze; they are most often pacing about a remote cove. While their scale is jaw-dropping, their gaze can leave the deepest impression; while some throw looks with squint-eyed malice, many look with open, empty eyes like a bear at a zoo.

Your quest to kill these creatures doesn't allow you the unassailable moral high ground as other games do. You are told to kill all 16 of these creatures to bring your lover back; exchanging sixteen (arguably) innocent lives for one. The player isn't given a choice to approach the problem any other way than to kill the creatures. There's a sequence to which colossus you have access to, so you have to defeat the current colossus to be able to see the next one.

In gaming terms, Shadow of Colossus is a series of boss battles. While some of these conflicts are immensely satisfying, the typical form of a boss battle can make it a trying experience. The game itself, in terms of action challenges, is relatively easy, but solving the puzzle of getting onto the creatures is either trivial or blindingly frustrating. As with all these types of encounters, determining the pattern and weak points is critical to success. If the solution comes quickly to you, it is simply a matter of execution. When you don't know what to do, the action comes to a stand-still and frustration sets in quickly.

Shadow of the Colossus is similar to the old adventure game genre in that when you're stuck on a puzzle, there's nothing else to do. At these points, the player either soldiers on trying everything they can think of to solve the problem, cave in and load up GameFaqs to solve the problem, or turn off the game, probably not to return to it again. As I played through, I slowly went from the good soldier to the GameFaq'er.

The camera during these battles sticks with you like a fickle friend. When you're on the right path and doing well, it's right there with you helping you along. If you're not exploring the right path, it tends to give you the worst possible view of the action, only adding to the frustration. Ico's camera had a similar tendency, but the slower pace and few time-based challenges absolved most of the frustration.

Many people are citing Shadow the Colossus as "art". Whether or not it is art depends on how broad your definition of art is. I have a very broad definition, so I believe all games are art, along with all tv shows, comic books, used car commercials, and newspaper coupons. I tend to value art according to three criteria: craftsmanship, what it reveals to us about humanity, and what it reveals to us about the medium. I believe Ico was a better crafted game that revealed how engaging a quiet, peaceful puzzle/maze navigation game can be. Aside from the moral positioning of the main character, most of what Shadow of the Colossus has to say isn't very interesting. It is well crafted in many ways (the design of the world, architecture, colossus design) but the fickle camera and the adventure game-style frustration make for a middle of the road play experience.

Harmonix Fan Mail

2005-11-20T06:45:00.000-05:00

I've been rocking out to Guitar Hero for the last two weeks and wrote the following fan mail to the awesome folks at Harmonix:

Wow; Guitar Hero is awesome!

The music selection is sublime, the art direction is inspired, the difficulty progression is smooth (ok, maybe not with Bark at the Moon), and the whole feel of the game is great. The loading screen help text is hilarious (the first time I saw the "Freebird" one I almost cried), everything about the game is great.

I hope you sell millions of copies of the game and I can't wait for an expansion!

Good luck!

Soon after I send my message, Mike Dornbrook, COO of Harmonix, replied:

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the kind words - reactions like yours are the reason we do this.

If sales keep up like they have so far, there's no doubt we'll be doing sequels. We've got *lots* of ideas for improvements!

Rock on,
-Mike

Digging around a bit on the company web site, I found out that Mike worked on the Infocom classics Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

Anyways, I've been a Harmonix fan since Frequency, but after talking with Mike and reading the latest Edge article on the company, I can't contain how big of a fanboy I am. Not only do they make sublime games like Guitar Hero, Frequency, and Amplitude, they are tremendously nice and refreshingly humble about their amazing work.

IBM TJ Watson Gaming Talk

2005-11-19T18:12:00.000-05:00

I had the great fortune of being invited by Tracee Wolf to give a talk about gaming to the Human Computer Interaction Professional Interest Community group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. Tracee was a huge help in getting the talk ready, with hour long phone calls getting my presentation content to be as useful and interesting as possible, and Jason Ellis (aka Plucky) was werd as always helping resolve all the technical issues and showing me around his work.

Here's slides of the talk I gave, brought to you in PDF form by Mr. Ellis.

Howl's Moving Castle

2005-06-11T07:51:00.000-04:00

"That was like a dream." said my brother as we climbed in the car after seeing Miyazaki's latest film. An apt description; the sheer amount of creativity and incredible vision Howl's Moving Castle presents is often only available in our dreams. But like our dreams, Miyazaki's movies tend to stop intead of end, leaving us scratching our heads and wondering what it all meant. Attempting to reconstruct the plot into a coherent whole is frustrating and futile. Yet why would we? Are our dreams any less beautiful because they lack a fitting conclusion?

While I prefer watching Studio Ghibli films with the subtitles instead of dubbed voices, I can't imagine seeing Howl's Moving Castle without Billy Crystal's Calcifer. His wry, sarconic delivery perfectly suits the character and, like his performance as Mike Mike Wazowski in Monsters Inc., it just wouldn't be the same without him.

Rise of Legends

2005-05-10T08:35:00.000-04:00

This post could also be titled:

What I've been doing the last few years
Why I haven't posted in a while (and probably)
Why you probably won't hear much from me for a while longer

I've been working hard on Rise of Legends, the next game by Big Huge Games. Technology, magic, RTS!

Being completely biased, I think we have an amazingly talented development team and I hope you agree after checking out the media at the bottom of the article.

Previews
PC IGN
GameSpot
GameSpy

Screenshots (all)
Glass Dragons over a Vinci City
The Doge Hammer fires away. . .
and you don't want to be at the wrong end of it
A towering Vinci City
The outer map for our campaign

X-Com on Game Boy Advance!

2005-03-31T14:49:00.000-05:00

Well, close, but not exactly. The developers that of X-Com (as well as Laser Squad Nemesis) secured a publishing deal with Namco for a 3rd person squad based tactical game for the Game Boy Advance.

The press release mentions a number of multiplayer options offered (hot seat, link play), but I can't help but think this would be suited far better to the DS when internet play is available. Regardless, I'm glad it is getting made.

images

Meteos

2005-01-30T13:24:00.000-05:00

Q Entertainment's Lumines has become the outstanding game of the PSP launch, and their Meteos looks to deliver a complimentary experience on the DS. Where Miziguchi's Lumines creates Rez-like synesthetic epiphanies by merging sight, sound, and gameplay, Sakurai's Meteos appears to be a more workman-like piece, true to the designer's Nintendo heritage, that looks to be a faster, more tactical puzzle game. Both titles are distinctly appropriate for their platform; Lumines provides a spectacle on the PSP, Meteos utilizes the DS touch screen for its main game mechanic.

1up has a lengthy preview of the title and a Tokyopia interview with Miziguchi provides a bit of insight into the development of Meteos.

I've also dug through Meteos's Japanese web site to get more information. These translations are using Google's translation tool; while it could hardly be considered readable English, the combination of images allows you to get an idea of how the game works.

Text:
Main Site
Gameplay description

Movies:
Two Player Meteos supports up to four!
Single Player Shows various alien types and the effects of their planets
Menus

I was initially quite concerned about two of my favorite designers falling from their heights of major projects at Sega and Nintendo to making (what I thought were) budget puzzle games for Bandai. I should have had more faith.

Resident Evil 4 Haiku

2005-01-24T09:34:00.000-05:00

shuffling awkwardness
"That's not scary. It's just dumb."
same crap, different view

Metal Gear Solid 3: Kojima's Redemption

2005-01-17T11:57:00.000-05:00

Metal Gear Solid 2 was a fine game spoiled by creator Hideo Kojima's creative hubris and lack of editing. In the third MGS game, Snake Eater, Kojima reigns in his post-modern showboating and gets back to what we like; making thrilling games that tell fun stories.

Snake Eater's 1960s jungle setting teems with vegetation and wildlife, making the most convincing virtual jungle I've seen. A number of gameplay tweaks create a survivalist feel: Snake must hunt wild animals for food, perform medical care on himself, and use camoflague to sneak through the brush successfully. These additions do much to establish the setting.

Unfortunately, the core gameplay mechanics have not aged well. Controlling Snake is needlessly complex and fussy for tasks like climbing on top of boxes or crawling in the intended direction. Moving stealthfully is now a daunting task due to the zoomed in camera and a "realistic" lack of radar. Stealthy play often requires more effort than many are willing to exert; players must constantly switch to first person mode and cycle through various devices like thermal goggles and directional microphones to determine the location of the enemy.

Thankfully, being discovered is rarely a big deal. Snake can be surrounded by enemy agents with assault rifles and lose only half his health. The game rarely requires the player to remain hidden.

While the core gameplay is not in top form, the boss battles in MGS3 are the best of the series. The highlight of the game is an unforgettable sniper fight covering a few square kilometers of dense jungle terrain. This isn't a 5 minute long Sniper Wolf-style hallway shootout; two hours of cat-and-mouse, crawling through the brush hunting your enemy down while he's trying to do the same. It is the ultimate realization of a Metal Gear Solid encounter that combines taut boss encounters with robust stealth mechanics.

Storywise, Snake Eater is as stupid and over-the-top as you'd assume, but less pretentious than MGS2 would have you expect. The Metal Gear world remains a bewildering concoction of a hyper-realistic "Soldier of Fortune" adherence to period weaponry, eyebrow-raising revisionings of historical events like the Cuban Missle Crisis, and super-villian style enemies that use photosynthesis to heal themselves.

Even though the story is silly, overly complex, and head-scratchingly confusing, the characters and action scenes make it remarkably enjoyable. The characters are amusing to watch, such as the young Revolver Ocelot and love interest Eve. The "Boss" character, Snake's mentor, deserves special recognition. This virtual actress, through uncanny animation and superb voice direction, steals every scene with her powerful presence.

The action scenes are sublime and collectively surpass any action movie I can recall. The scenes are kinetic and brilliantly choreographed, and can be used as convincing arguments that cutscenes do have a place in gaming.

Viewtiful Joe 2 Haiku

2004-12-18T10:47:00.000-05:00

girlfriend, more puzzles
first Joe thrilled, now indifference
Crapcom strikes again

Metal Slug Advance

2004-12-13T18:54:00.000-05:00

Metal Slug Advance is the best possible realization of SNK's run-and-shoot series on the GBA. It is a technical marvel; the rich, over-exaggerated animation that made the series stand out in arcades is achieved with vastly inferior hardware. This portable entry in the series suffers only rare slowdown and a few lost frames of animation.

While the game looks like the early arcade entries, the gameplay is modified to fit a handheld. A health bar replaces the arcade's one-hit death system. The arcade versions of Metal Slug can be conquered in less than an hour given a few pockets full of quarters. (Or a PC capable of emulating the hardware.) Metal Slug Advance addresses the inherent brevity of their rich worlds with an adroit card collection system. Cards are hidden throughout the game worlds. Most of the cards are trinkets, but others provide benefits like increasing the armor for your vehicles or doubling your ammo supply for a weapon. The catch is that in order to keep the cards you collect in a level, you must complete that level without continuing. For the first time in the series I'm forced to consider the best approach to surviving levels and I end up appreciating the game mechanics more than my virtual quarter-munching practices allowed before. Less obsessive-compulsive players can abandon card collecting and leverage an infinite number of continues to power through the game, but the benefits from the power-up cards can make an aggressively challenging experience more approachable.

Metal Slug Advance is the best console iteration of the series yet, but it has some aggravating flaws. The health bar is a welcome addition, but falling into a pit still causes an automatic death; it feels particularly unfair when you're "juggled" into a pit after being bounced back by an enemy attack. The frequency that the enemies respawn can be quite troubling when you're dodging enemy attacks by moving to the left and right, only to re-introduce defeated enemies as you scroll the screen. Some areas require careful maneuvering to avoid facing a never ending barrage of foes.

Metal Slug Advance does not stray far from familiar ground, but it is the only handheld version of the series that approaches the wacky, chaotic bliss of the arcade editions. SNK demonstrated with the Neo Geo Pocket Color that it understands handheld game design at least as well as Nintendo. Metal Slug Advance is their first title on Nintendo hardware to continue that legacy.

Go-Go-Go-Go-Go. . .

2004-11-17T21:02:00.000-05:00

I've been playing some Go lately on Little Golem. Ok, maybe a lot. While anyone familiar with playing turned based games over the internet can tell plenty of stories of games puttering out after a few turns and going nowhere. Little Golem has a silver bullet: parallelism.

Little Golem encourages you to get into plenty of games at going at the same time. The result reminds me of an old commercial where it showed Gary Kasperov playing against a hundred junior chess players at once, walking down a row of chess boards, pausing an instant, making a move, then going onto the next. Except online everyone is walking between every Go board making their move. Physically impossible and incomprehensible, but online it makes perfect sense. I'm currently involved in over 20 games of Go at the same time. I'm playing against a friend at work, against my brother, two sets of rating matches, and a few tournaments.

Go is a tough game, and sitting down to play a 19x19 board for a few hours can be a mental marathon. Loading up your browser during your lunch break and making four moves in as many different games is far less exhausting. You can easily browse through previous moves to get a context of the flow of the game, but you often don't need it.

Anyway, I'd love to play anybody reading the site. Make a Little Golem account and invite DeathMonkey to a Go match. Or join one of the many Go tournaments and I might see you in there. I'm awful, so don't worry about losing to me. If you want to learn how to play, I found a cool interactive guide to get started.

Hope to play against you!

Nintendo 2005 Q1 and Q2 Release List

2004-11-13T13:53:00.000-05:00

Nintendo released its US release list for the first half of 2005.

The biggest games on the list for me are the two Fire Emblem games (GBA & GC) and two WarioWare games (GBA & DS). I'm also glad to see the GameCube bongos will get more playtime, with Donkey Kong Jungle Beat and Donkey Konga 2 both coming stateside.

Nintendo has yet to announce a title that encourages me to preorder the DS. WarioWare is the only title with a release date that I would hate to miss. I'm probably most interested in Nintendogs, Jam with the Band, and Animal Crossing DS, all announced, none with US release dates.

Will Wright Talk Online

2004-11-12T13:51:00.000-05:00

I've had the fortune of hearing a few talks by Will Wright at GDC and finally one of his presentations has been released in an hour long MP3.

Recommended listening.

PSTwo!

2004-10-30T08:45:00.000-04:00

I am now a proud owner of the new PS2 thanks to a surprisingly good deal at EB. Quick thoughts on it so far:

Size Wow. I thought the GameCube was a small system, but it towers over the PSTwo and looks to be three or four times the volume. The size and color make it difficult to find when you are looking for it in a messy pile of game systems. (Not that I would know of course. This is purely hypothetical!)

Top loading Argh, I wish it was a side loader so I could pile other systems on top of it. The top panel feels a bit flimsy, but hopefully the top loading will allow boot disks to emerge allowing region-free play.

Loading times The loading time for games seems to be sped up a slight amount. Winning Eleven 7, a game that has load times of over a minute, probably had 10% less load time compared to my previous system. The 10 second load times of Taiko Drum Master have virtually disappeared. From the few games I tried out, it seemed the shorter the original load time was, the greater the speed up. My guess is that the new drive has improved seek times compared to the original form factor.

ESPN on Georgia Tech

2004-10-29T16:29:00.000-04:00

The latest installment of ESPN's recent sport series on American football in the US discusses the sport at Georgia Tech. Sorta. The article is more about how few students at Tech (in particular undergrads) care about football because they are simply too busy doing their work to goof off.

From my experience, the article is largely accurate. I think the overall intelligence of the students is a bit overstated. There are quite a few geniuses, but Tech was largely populated by mere mortals like me. The overwhelming volume of nerdiness, though, was perfectly conveyed by the article.

From my time there, I feel Georgia Tech presents a relatively unique college experience. Most people I talk to speak of the "good times" in college, the parties, the excessive drinking, and what not. I don't drink, I'm not very good at parties, and I really wanted to get something out of college rather than watch it pass by in a chemically induced stupor. (Most of my four years were indeed spent in a stupor, but caused from lack of sleep and stress rather than raucous partying.) Still, people talk about all the random things they did in college, all the fun they had, and I try to look like I know what they're talking about.

The Georgia Tech experience to me was somewhere between a boot camp and the third ring of Hell. The oppressive amounts of work, professors that seemed more willing to punish you for your lack of knowledge than willing to go out of their way to teach you, and a student body with the collective mindset of "every man for himself." I think if the ancient Greeks saw Georgia Tech, they'd think it was some sort of prison instead of a learning institution.

The only good memories I have of college all involve my then girlfriend, now wife, Bessie. My favorite involves blowing off studying for a final the next day to go walk hand in hand in the falling snow.

I left Tech with three good things: a wonderful woman, a decent education, and a firm conviction that the worst parts of my life had already passed.

Love Letters in Ancient Brick

2004-10-24T08:03:00.000-04:00

Ignatz the Mouse wants nothing more than to hit Krazy Kat in the head with a brick. Krazy Kat loves being the target of Ignatz's masonry affection. And the local policeman, Offica Pup, struggles to keep them apart.

I first heard of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" comic strip in Bill Watterson's 10th anniversary Calvin and Hobbes book, where he cites it, along with Peanuts and Pogo, as the strongest influences of his work. Also in the book, Watterson laments the contraction of the comic strip, from full page canvases in the first half of the 20th century down to the three tiny frames we have today. I never understood this complaint until I got my hands on a collection of George Harriman's work.

Krazy Kat is like no other comic I've seen. The way the central themes of violence, love, and justice are juxtaposed is far more twisted and challenging than anything I've seen on a comics page. The interactions three primary characters, in particular Krazy Kat's interpretation of acts of violence as love, challenges the reader to create some allegory to resolve the relationships in the comic. Krazy Kat can yield to many explanations yet never fully completes any.

The presentation is as challenging as the central theme. Herriman boldly toys with the comic format; creating strips designed to be read backward and forward, characters manipulating and viewing past and future frames, and single frame interludes in the middle of the page that have nothing to do with the short story surrounding it. The character dialog can be difficult for modern readers because many of Herriman's characters speak phonetically, allowing him to define how his character's sound, not only what they say.

Krazy Kat is a challenging comic to read. I've owned one volume for over a year, and it has taken over dozen perusals before I realized the depth and richness George Herriman's work.

Hey Yankees

2004-10-21T01:03:00.000-04:00

The DNA tests just came in. Your biological father turns out to be Curt Schilling.

Hey New York, nice work on the loss. The disappointment. The biggest meltdown in baseball history.

And you lost to the Boston Red Sox. The shame. The shame.

Hey Sox - go break the curse.

Rez Follow Up Part 2?

2004-10-18T17:35:00.000-04:00

With Nintendo's recent revealing of the DS lineup, Miziguchi's Studio Q released screenshots for its upcoming title, Meteos. While I was willing to give Lumines the benefit of the doubt, the studio announcing another handheld falling-block puzzle game has erased all my optimism. Take a look at the screenshot below; it is frankly embarassing. And the knife to the belly: the lead designer is none other than Kirby creator, Masahiro Sakurai.

Oy vei.

Paper Mario 2 Haiku

2004-10-18T13:02:00.000-04:00

Brilliant happy game
but don't make me walk so much
two visits is fine

The Visual Evolution of Mario

2004-10-08T11:27:00.000-04:00

NFC Games has an excellent article on the visual evolution of Nintendo's Mario character. Comparing and contrasting the various character designs over the last two decades is enjoyable, but I don't agree with a bit of the analysis. The "Jumped the Shark" Mario section largely features designs not created by Nintendo's core development group in Japan - rather by Square and NST, Nintendo's in-house team in the US. I'd consider the Paper Mario 2 iteration of Mario to be the de facto 2D version of the famed mascot rather than the blurry Donkey Kong Country-style mess in Mario vs. Donkey Kong.

Katamari Damacy

2004-09-23T21:10:00.000-04:00

The rolling, sticking, never-stopping, ever-swelling clump of stuff that makes a star of out everyone and everything.

Namco's Katamari Damacy is one of the most original and charming games that I've ever played. During the game, you roll around a sphere around various places. Smaller objects, like tacks and matches, stick to it, bigger things don't. Yet your katamari grows as things stick to it, and the once unassailable blockades become fodder for your ever-snowballing pile of junk.

The initial enaging element is, haha, look what I just rolled over and squished onto my ball. The secondary element of the continuous increasing of scale is surprisingly and lastingly engaging. Often you'll start a level rolling over tacks, rolling around the heels of towering humans. After a minute or two, you're knee high to them, then soon enough you can knock little children over and consume them! Then cars! Then buildings! The epiphany that occurs when you realize that what once was a limitation is now an asset is a great sensation.

It is hard to discuss Katamari Damacy without continually praising the insanely catchy music. The wide array of musical styles all imbue the game with a sense of playful wonder that frames the innocent element of the player's all-consuming mayhem.

I recommend Katamari Damacy to anyone who thinks rolling over a bunch of little girls is even slightly funny.

postscript: ~~I found mp3s of the music! Enjoy and share!~~ Argh, the link up and vanished on me. Contact me if you need them.

postscript: Penny Arcade put up one of their funniest comics about the game. Good stuff.

Rez Follow Up

2004-09-23T07:29:00.000-04:00

Miziguchi called my bluff and did have something in the bag. While Rez was a music/shooter, his new development team (Q-Entertainment) is seemingly mixing a Tetris-style puzzle games with his electronic music vibe.

SPOnG reports:

[F]rom what we can make out, the player interacts with a set of blocks in order to manipulate a graphic equaliser, therefore impacting on the game?s soundtrack in some way.

I'm somewhat disappointed to find that the gameplay appears to be one of the least interesting in any gaming genre. Falling blocks is so 1988. Still, Miziguchi turned a rail shooter into one of the most enthralling experiences, so there's more than a chance he can pull through again. I'm quite disappointed that this is going to be a PSP title. With an awesome Christmas season and the DS being released, the thought of burning $400+ on a PSP just to get some personal time with Miziguchi's latest is torture on the pocketbook.

How could you not rub this?

2004-09-22T19:50:00.000-04:00

Update: This game is coming to the US (?!?) as "Feel the Magic: XY/XX" and IGN has some interesting gameplay details.

Alright, I may have dissed Nintendo's approach to the DS, but the few games that have been announced may make the system the official DeathMonkey Best Console of All Time Forever Plus.

Why?

Because the games sound so friggin' weird.

I thought the surgery game would be the most bizarre title to launch on the system, but it ain't got nothing on the Sonic Team's Kimishine.

This is a dating sim where you try to hook up with a chick by RUBBING THE SCREEN. Woah. While this game has got to be more appropriate than it sounds, but with a one-line description like that, I'd be shocked to ever see it on a WalMart shelf. The original working title was "Project Rub", which the team claims it was an Engrish pun with "Project Love". Gotta "rub" puns that reinforce racial stereotypes!

Ok, I'll stop with the rub/love thing now. Promise.

All you need is rub! Hahahahah. Sorry.

Two Sexy!

2004-09-21T13:59:00.000-04:00

Sony revealed a new PS2 form factor (informally dubbed the PStwo) to be released in mid-November. The original form factor suffered from a nouveau/retro 1980's VCR sort of look, but this razor thin sleek new shape makes me want one all over again.

If anybody has any ideas on how to convince Bessie to get me one, drop me a line.

If the DS launches in November, will anyone care?

2004-09-14T13:38:00.000-04:00

A recent WalMart faux pas showed that the Nintendo DS is releasing at the end of November with a retail price of $199.99. Regardless of the validity of this specific information, several industry analysts agree the Nintendo DS is launching by the end of the year.

The trouble is, in this most crowded of Christmas seasons, Nintendo hasn't brought the hype. There's no "gotta-have" flagship title announced that tend to drive these sort of launches. (Then again, the last Nintendo system to have one was the N64's Mario 64.) The noise generated from E3 has subsided and there has been an acute silence on the PR front for one of Nintendo's most important hardware launches to date.

Sending a clear message to gamers that the DS is cool and desirable will be difficult to convey with the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by other game companies through the typical media formats this Christmas season. Convincing gamers that they should spend $200+ on new hardware with so many anticipated games coming now will be even more difficult.

A Game Called Wanda

2004-09-10T08:22:00.000-04:00

Update - Here's a movie of the game from the SCEJ web site. Looks awesome!

The second game by the Ico team is Wanda and the Colossus.

And the details from Quarter to Three's Japanese wunderkid, Kitsume:

In the game there are only three characters the designers characterize as "living" (and one of them they do so vaguely). The rider of the horse, the horse and a girl found in a wasteland altar, who they say of, "Is she living? Is she asleep? It looks like a girl who has completely lost her soul..." So the main character wants to resusciate here somehow and determines to fight the "colossus."

The horse will form an important support role and by pressing the R1 button, you'll be able to get a grip onto a colossus. Then you'll be able to try and climb it and find its sweet spot. The designers say they want to make the giant golem-like creatures seem less like monsters and more like mysterious entities, as well as they aim to create the field out of the colossus themselves. (Though there will be several locations they stomp around, such as a desert, ruins and a prairie.) The colossus will have very different feels to them, with some of their bodies being more like a maze, others incorporating action elements and still others being conveyed in a more puzzle-like sense. The emphasize the colossus creatures will never stay still, they'll always be moving.

They felt when they started to follow up ICO, at first they chanced upon something that felt too much like a sequel so then they challenged themselves to do something quite removed from the first game and the concept gradually unfolded. Wanda and the Colossus is aiming for more scenes of riotous action, but in a desolate, loud way. The team stresses they are no more eager to tell the story with words and such, and are pushing all their energy in trying to do mostly with images like the first game. That it will be like an action game, definitely weird, but not so strange that its hard to understand.

Not what I expected, but I'm happy that the development team wasn't complacent to deliver a mere sequel. I dearly hope this game gets a US release.

Pikmin 2

2004-09-06T17:43:00.000-04:00

OK, I was wrong. Pikmin 2 is great and is what the first game should have been. All that was wrong about the rushed, incomplete original is fixed in a beautiful, decadently polished experience.

The thirty day time limit of the first game is gone; take your time exploring the worlds and collecting treasure. Once you get the original three Pikmin types, the game opens up to be a refreshingly non-linear experience. Go anywhere, do what you want to do, just get enough money to pay off Olimar's company debt.

To replace the tension lost by removing the time limit, the overworlds in Pikmin now have a few dungeon entrances tucked throughout them. Only the Pikmin in your current group can be brought into the dungeon and you have to play it smart because you can't grow new Pikmin underground.

The dungeon floors, in a surprisingly turn, are laid out randomly. Most of the time a floor contains a landmark puzzle or enemy encounter, but the position and order of the elements change each time you re-enter or restart the level. Theoretically this could be less enjoyable than the lavishly architected overworld areas, but these are dungeon crawls right of Diablo or Nethack in the best way. Dungeons are about combat, about turning the tables on some subterrainan predators and making it to the next level while suffering the fewest losses possible. The creatures in the original were a blast to fight, and with nearly three times as many critters as the original, these battling underground romps make the most out of Nintendo's insanely great creature design.

The two new Pikmin provide new delicious decisions. My favorite are the slight White Pikmin that are immune to poison, and also nefariously poisonous to consume. If a predator just happens to munch down on one or two, the predator can die outright. White Pikmin are difficult to acquire and are also essential in finding hidden treasure, so the choice to sacrifice a few to win a battle that could potentially cost you many more is the type of meaty game element the original lacked.

Olimar is not alone on this journey; the Louie joins him as a second Pikmin commander. Having two commanders gives the player the ability to multitask. Instead of having to babysit the Pikmin while they're knocking down a wall, building a bridge, or carrying something back to base, you can split off with the other commander to explore or work on another task. Splitting up is only required for a handful of puzzles, but it can drastically reduce the amount of time spent waiting.

The greatness of Nintendo's latest doesn't overwhelm you; comes from the consistent delivery of happy surprises, through the new crazy enemies, creative new uses for old Pikmin, and clever puzzles that continually keep the player's interest high throughout the experience. Pikmin 2 shows that, despite all reports, Nintendo's charming, imaginitive brilliance still lives.

Astro Boy Haiku

2004-08-19T20:12:00.000-04:00

Astro's dashing dodge
mob brawling, boss encounters!
bland flight; still Treasure.

Warcraft 3: Quick Matches (Eventually) Made in Heaven

2004-08-07T07:43:00.000-04:00

I stink at Warcraft 3. I enjoy RTSs and can play a competitive game of RoN, but Blizzard's latest strategy game rewards the type of micro-management click click click play that I can't keep up with.

I borrowed the game at work and decided that I had to play quickmatches on Battle.net. (Quickmatches, or auto-matchmaking, allow the system to try to provide you an opponent of near equal skill.) The first five or six games were a little rough. OK, very rough. Most games involved an army of a dozen or more giant Undead spiders crashing through my Human town where two grunts and a rifleman die valiantly before I resign. After about 6 crushing defeats, the auto-matchmaking system seemed to say "oh, wow, you DO stink" and the opponents I began matching up with were far more appropriate to my skill, even too easy. Now I'm often the terror with the giant army crashing through my enemy's base; maybe not with the precision and awe-inspiring skill that I succumbed to my first few matches. I'm not complaining - it is nice to be on the other side for a change.

I believe the reason I had such a tough time my first few games was to counteract smurfing. Smurfing is defined as a veteran player creating a new account to get easy wins against n00bs like myself. It is a rampant problem on quickmatch systems for RTSs. Blizzard's approach to the problem seems to assume that new players are actually smurfers until they lose enough times that they never reap the advantage they are seeking. Battle.net assumes guilty until proven innocent. It was certainly unpleasant and humbling to go through this harsh initiation process to determine "why, yes, you really are new." I finally made it through the gauntlet to reach "fun", yet I wonder how it effects true novices who have never played an online RTS before. Nobody likes losing and I can't imagine someone like my extremely competitive Dad going through 6+ games of horrible losses before they have a chance at winning.

Okami in Motion

2004-07-30T17:42:00.000-04:00

Clover Studio, responsible for the superlative Viewtiful Joe, has released footage of their latest project, Okami. (28 meg mpeg) While the movie reveals nearly nothing gameplay-wise, the game's amazing art style is gleefully showcased. Clover Studios is trying to render the world of Okami in the form of a moving classical Japanese painting. The environment in the game seems hand painted and, in a clever use of bump-mapping, Okami presents the "background" of the world is as piece of parchment.

Most games attempt to develop an immediately engrossing visual style through photo-realistic rendering. To my knowledge, Okami challenges the player visually more than any game to date. The entire artistic conceipt is an attempt to make the player believe that they are looking at a moving parchment painting on a video monitor.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

2004-07-20T07:33:00.000-04:00

Bioware's latest RPG always interested me because of the stellar reviews and decent word of mouth, but it had an uphill battle to fight in my mind. Star Wars is dead to me after the ruthless debunking of my childhood myth during Episode I and II. I've never liked Bioware's games and I played it on the PC. Not that there's anything wrong with the PC, aside from the 30+ minute installs, the patches, the crashes, and (what I assume is) a poor interface conversion from the XBox. While installing yet another driver to prevent KotOR from crashing when trying to load a save game I kept thinking I would be playing happily right now if I tried the game on XBox. Oh well.

The first hour of KotOR fits the quality level established by Episode I & II. The player starts in a starship under attack by Sith forces, fast paced John Williams-style music soaring and battles erupting in corridors. What is the player doing? Wading through clumsy, long-winded tutorials on how to manipulate their inventory. The sensation was jarring and irritable, like watching CSPAN while blasting a Ramones album on the stereo. I'm sure the game taught me all I needed to know to succeed, but it failed to explain why the heck I should care.

The coup-de-grace? I died during the tutorial; or should I say - they killed me, then had the nerve to throw me back to the opening menu and force me to play through the whole tutorial again. Maybe I'm old, maybe I suck at games, but if you want me to play and enjoy your games, give me some time to decipher your game rules before you force me to replay a portion of your game.

I was ready to turn off the game then and be done with it. The first 15 minutes of any game are the most critical time and should show players why they should spend the time playing. KotOR failed in this way more than any modern AAA game I've seen. Still, it is considered a AAA game for a reason - it received a number of game of the year awards and is one of the highest rated games in the last few years. I must be missing something.

For three hours in I fought some Sith and alien scum, got some more party members (including a wookie!), and completed some quests. My initial rage yielded to apathy. The empty steel hallways did little to engage my imagination.

The combat is visually dry, full of the silly, meaningless animations that come from synthesizing board game rules into real time graphics. Engagements did nothing for the brain either. Each character would use their assigned weapon (either a ranged or melee weapon, melee being heavily favored in the game) to attack the enemy and the primary decision during combat is if and when to throw grenades.

Conversations with NPC characters felt like a survey out of a teenage girl's magazine. (Press 1 to give money to the beggar to feed his family. Press 2 to kill the beggar and sell the remaining organs to pay for that gnarly double-sided lightsaber upgrade.) The only apparent effect these ABC after-school special morality choices provided was how far up or down I went on my personal light-to-dark side meter. None of the characters seemed to recognize and respond to who my character was.

The promise of KotOR is that my behavior will affect the world around me and that I will see repercussions of what I've done. I believe that the central issue with multi-path narratives is that, like in real life, people rarely see how their actions could have created drastically different results. If, within my 5 hours of play time, I could have ended up on a completely separate plot thread, there was no indication from my side of the game that those possibilities were available.

I didn't play to the point where I got force powers nor a lightsaber, nor did I care to. All my friends that have played the game say it does get better once force powers are obtained, but I've yet to find anything in the game thus far to engage me, no nascent promise that I want to see fulfilled. Unless someone convinces me that there is a radical change in the combat system and the NPC interactions, I'm not likely to load the game up again.

$5 game sale at Circuit City

2004-07-04T21:14:00.000-04:00

Here's a list of the games and there's some great ones in the lot: Frequency, Ico, Viewtiful Joe, Ikaruga, TimeSplitters 2, even Rez(!).

Ideally, you can pick up half a dozen of the best games ever made for $30, but my experience with these sales at Circuit City has not been positive. The selection at my nearby stores has been poor and the staff uninformed and overworked. The allegedly on-sale items were not separated from the rest of the merchandise and some items still rung-up at the full price.

Hope you have better luck than I've had. ;)

Spiderman 2

2004-07-04T21:01:00.000-04:00

Wow. It hurts me to say that since I'm such a snob of the mainstream, but the biggest Hollywood blockbuster this summer is well written, well directed, and well acted. I found the first movie to be uneven; interesting moral quandaries for Spiderman but Dafoe's Green Goblin was overplayed and unsatisfying. My hope for the sequel came from Peter Parker's closing monologue about the struggle to choose to do good.

The second movie dives right into these issues with Peter Parker struggling to maintain his personal and financial life while performing the endless tasks required of a superhero. The conflict hinted to at the end of the first movie erupts to a climax, making for a gripping internal struggle. The super-villains in Spiderman movies are nearly footnotes; they are physical threat that forces Spiderman to make the decisions that make the movie emotionally fulfilling. Everyone knows Spiderman will win the day and die only when the movies fail to be profitable, but the choices he makes in his life are not too far removed from our everyday lives and don't have the simple black and white answers the superhero conflicts typically involve.

Thankfully Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus makes for an exceptional footnote. He underplays the part to great effect. He's a good man gone wrong, and his stoic delivery is refreshing after Dafoe's over the top giggling Goblin.

The superhero clashes are thrilling, among the best I've seen in a superhero movie. Raimi makes good work out of Doc Oct's wall walking ability, pitting the two characters in some inspired set pieces. Watching the two just pummelling each other is a thrilling experience with Doc Oct throwing, grabbing, and crushing with his giant tentacles while Spiderman hops, leaps, and dashes in to try to stay alive. These scenes will be worth the price of the DVD alone.

Spiderman 2 concludes with a surprising amount of closure of major conflicts. Possibly too much. It is as if Raimi hasn't signed on for the third flick and he wanted to get all the good bits in while he's in charge. Where the first movie's denouncement bridged well into the sequel, there's far less momentum going into the third.

Well, for those that haven't seen the movie yet, I'll try not to spoil everything. But for those who have and are interested to read more rambling prose, highlight the text below.

A large number of great sources of conflict seemed to be resolved at the end of the flick. Mary Jane realizing Peter Parker was Spiderman, her commitment to him, Aunt Bea's acceptance of Spiderman and implicit declaration that her nephew was Spiderman removed much of the series emotional baggage. I also can't say I'm looking forward to a second Green Goblin villain. I was hoping for Venom, but at least Spiderman fighting his friend maintains some of the emotional conflicts that are the hallmark of the series. It could be good, but it'll be tough to top the emotional punch of the second movie.

How to do an E3 Recap

2004-05-18T21:50:00.000-04:00

Gamespot interviewed Michael Pachter, the senior vice president of research for investment banking and brokerage firm Wedbush Morgan Securities. While his title might suggest that he doesn't know anything about gaming, his responses to questions are insightful and exceptionally opinionated - in a way I like!

Here's on of my favorite snippets:

GS: What's the conventional wisdom say when looking at Microsoft's decision to can its sports lineup? Is it that they can't compete with EA's sports lineup?

MP: It's not just that no one can compete with EA. Microsoft [games] suck! I guess their tennis game was good--Top Spin. Microsoft should can all games that they developed and should have bought somebody who knows how to do it.

GS: Have they bought anyone in recent history that knows what they're doing?

MP: The Rare guys were great developers for the N64, but they didn?t do anything for these guys. [Microsoft] made some really bad decisions. They should have bought EA. They screwed up.

Ouch! Love it!

Follow the Little White Ball

2004-05-18T20:04:00.000-04:00

This cool toy is the type of thing that I've been dying to do for years but really don't have the ear to get it right. A fantastic way to spend 5 minutes or the better part of an hour.

Josh Nimoy has a number of other cool toys to play with; I especially enjoy his Textension project that plays with text as 3D objects. I actually did do a project like this.

Sega: Another Foot in the Grave

2004-05-18T11:08:00.000-04:00

According to EuroGamer, Sammy, a game publisher most known for its pachinko gambling machines, owns 22 percent of Sega and will purchase the remaining 78 percent by the end of the year.

And the knife to the stomach:

Satomi-san, who will be president of the new merged company, has previously expressed his desire to see Sega focusing increasingly on the arcade market, and hopes to use the company's development talent and wealth of intellectual property to build on the success of Sammy's low-cost Atomiswave arcade system.

Will the creative nucleus of Sega survive yet another blow to their collective pride? Probably, but with an ever-increasing arcade-centric approach, will anyone outside Japan be able to tell?

Wise from thy gwave!
Sorry. Had to do that.

I got blisters on my fingas!

2004-05-14T22:09:00.000-04:00

SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium

I played so much Match of the Millennium since Friday that I developed a tiny blister on my thumb from the fireballs, dragon punches, and spinning pile-drivers I've been landing. Or trying to land, at least.

This potentially weekend crippling injury hasn't stopped me from continuing to bust some heads, mainly because Match of the Millennium is one of the best handheld games I've played. MotM is to the Neo Geo Pocket Color what Tetris, Link's Awakening, Mario Golf, and Advance Wars are to Nintendo handhelds.

SNK's flagship title for their handheld is exceptionally polished and full featured. There's no shortage of things to explore in the game; there are a few dozen franchise characters from both Capcom and SNK to play, solo, tag team, and 3 character team modes, a few different fighting styles, and a Olympic themed mini-game system that are great to play when you only have a couple of minutes to get your game on.

Technically, the MotM is a tiny miracle. SNK's other fighting games on the NGPC play extremely well, but often only a few frames of animation represent a complex move resulting in some visual stuttering. With MotM, you don't notice any frames missing; it looks like the game is running on completely different hardware than the other games on the system.

RTS + Pinball?

2004-05-14T14:37:00.000-04:00

Every E3, there's usually one or two little gems that I can't wait to get my hands on. This year it comes as Odama from Yoot Saito, the mastermind behind Seaman, for the Nintendo GameCube. Here's a snippit on Odama from GameSpot:

. . . Odama is fundamentally a pinball game, and bears all the basic traits of a good pinball game--realistic physics, the ability to tilt the board, and so on. However, the pinball happens to take place on a historical battlefield. And what you need to do, in order to help your army achieve victory against superior enemy odds, is use the odama--a gigantic, metal ball--to bulldoze enemy forces, buildings, and defenses, so that you can clear a path for your army's siege party to reach the enemy warlord. How's that for strange?

Who says RTS games can't be innovative?

That's Incredible!

2004-05-14T12:51:00.000-04:00

From the new trailer the next Pixar movie is going to be, wait for it, incredible. It certainly has a more teenage feel than Pixar's earlier work with some serious Hollywood style action sequences and lots of explosions!

I'm dying to see it.

Free Radical Design!

2004-05-08T14:19:00.000-04:00

TimeSplitters: Future Perfect
16 player multiplayer on the PS2 version. This is a bit of a blessing and a curse. Blessing because the TimeSplitters series needs to be online like hot chocolate needs marshmallows; curse because the PS2 version of TimeSplitters 2 is crippled by load times up four times as long as the other platforms, plus it ain't nearly as pretty. If Future Perfect somehow supported XBox Live (a possibility with EA's "surprise" announcement of their support of Microsoft's online gaming system), that would be reason enough for me to buy the system. Well, Full Spectrum Warrior may cause me to break down anyways. . .

Second Sight
Its hard to determine which I'm more excited about: the next TimeSplitters or Free Radical's first non-fps with an actual storyline. Looks like the game has psychic powers, stealth, and some gunplay - rarely a boring mix! Here's an SAT analogy for you geeks out there - Factor 5 is to Hoth Missions as Free Radical Design is to? The answer?

Siberian outpost levels!

Prince of Persia 2

2004-05-07T19:21:00.000-04:00

Looks cool, but the IGN article that came with the picture has me a little scared:

What was wrong with the original Prince? Camera, pacing, easy enemies, no boss fights, sand creatures who felt fluffy...? Prince of Persia 2 promises to remedy this -- all of this. Combat will be the biggest change. Ubi is touting a new "freeform" combat system that will allow gamers to string together any attack or move to any other. The result is rumored to be something akin to Tony Hawk, not necessarily in terms of specific control and button layout, but rather in how it will be possible to move from a swipe to a stab to a summersault to a rail slide, or heel grab, or whatever.

I've agreed that the camera had issues, but I thought they did have boss fights? And since when do boss fights make for a better game? Who thought the creatures in the first game were fluffy? I also didn't mind the game's "ease", I had issue with the poor feedback and widely varying difficulty. Concerning the combat, their innovative "freeform" system sounds a lot like something I've heard of called a "fighting game", where you can string together attacks to form things called "combos." Way to ride the bleeding edge, UbiSoft.

GMail!

2004-04-25T16:40:00.000-04:00

I assume thanks to being a Google blogger, I was invited to use their new GMail system. What's cool about it: they provide every account with 1 gig of searchable storage space. Downside: they peruse your mail to provide ads at the top of the page. That sort of information could be used for all sorts of nefarious plots and plans, but could they be any worse than what Microsoft is already doing to Hotmail users?

Oh, and I got scott.lewis@gmail.com. I actually got my own name. Rulin'!

Hellboy

2004-04-25T16:35:00.000-04:00

A friend from work let me borrow a few Hellboy comics and wow, good stuff. Mike Mignola's paranormal storylines can require more than usual suspension of disbelief, yet his engaging, witty characters, brilliant gothic art, and amazing page layout more than make up for it.

GDC 2004: Day 2

2004-04-10T13:37:00.000-04:00

Wow - Day 2 of GDC coverage nearly a month late!

Game Design: A Love Story - Raph Koster, Warren Spector, Will Wright, Eric Zimmerman

A lightweight session with Warren Spector, Raph Koster, and Will Wright all designing games about "love." Raph Koster blatantly ignored the instructions of "no interactive fiction" and created a multiplayer romance novel game called "Passion's Tender Embrace" where people play out different parts of a generic romance novel online.

Warren Spector didn't finish a game idea claiming "I just can't design a game that doesn't have guns." He discussed what he thought was needed to make a game where the player falls in love with a computer character. He clearly did a lot of research on the subject but the design area he was approaching was very difficult and possibly intractable.

Will Wright made (yet another) sublime presentation. He proposed a mod called "Collateral Romance" for Battlefield 1942 where lovers, initially separated, had to find each other in a war torn battle field then make their way to safety. This would be a standard BF1942 server with the two sides waging war against each other and there was no punishment or benefit to killing these civilians. I think this is such a brilliant idea - two seperate audiences playing completely tangential games in the same game world. This is not the first time the Sims designer has tried to hijack a multiplayer game - in his keynote three years ago he talked about how he would play Tribes and attempt to make peace with the opposing side. He said it was "really hard" to make peace with a group of heavily armed 12 year olds.

What Lies Ahead in the Ever-evolving Interactive Entertainment Industry? - Tetsuya Mizuguchi
Miziguchi's presentation, while he spoke in extremely good English, was typically Japanese. It wasn't a discussion of the subject matter; more of a hour long portfolio presentation. It would have been a disaster if Miziguchi hadn't of made some of the most amazing pieces of software to date.

The overview of his career was interesting and gave some insight into how he came up with the idea for Rez. His initial project was a movie ride for Sega where the audience sits in a tilting vehicle. (Think Star Tours.) This initial project, made in 1992, was shockingly similar to Rez with its trance music and the feel of flying through a sci-fi environment. For 1992 technology, it was surprisingly fun to experience even when sitting in a GDC conference room.

He talked about Space Channel 5 a bit and showed an early (and truly awful) clip of the first version of the game. The initial prototype movie involved the name "Space Channel 5", a scantily clad blonde(!) chick with a space helmet, shooting aliens, and the main theme "Mexican Flier". It doesn't seem like they had any idea of what the game would be about, but they went ahead with it anyway.

The game design initially came from the musical "Stomped" where the performers would clap and expect the audience to respond with the same clapping pattern. The performers would do one pattern and the audience would respond, and then the performers would do a more complex pattern. This would continue until the performers would do an outrageously complicated rhythm and then the audience would laugh as a response.

To develop the game, the design team and artists would have a weekly session where they would try to move around in a funny manner and figure out amusing things to do with the animation. They showed a videotape of these sessions and they were indeed bizarre. The lead artist would think of an idea that the other artists would have to mimic; in the case that was shown, waddle around pointing quickly and having a surprised look on their face. Then all the artists would move in a big group and attempt to mimic this action. Miziguchi said that they lost two female designers due to these sessions - they were too embarassed to perform these silly actions in front of other people.

He then continued to talk about the Space Channel 5 cell phone that had Ulala as the "personal assistant." I thought this was a niche device in Japan, but Miziguchi stated that it sold over 8 million copies. One of the wackiest elements of the phone was that Ulala would talk to you after you completed a call and ask you how much you enjoyed it. I assume you'd type in a number ranking and the phone would track which callers you enjoyed talking to the most. Funny stuff.

When he talked about Rez, he said his goal was to "see how far a game could go to make you feel good." The two major inspirations for Rez were the audio/visual connection in raves. He also said that he got a lot of inspiration from a videoclip he saw of a street corner of an unnamed African city where a group of people were creating music using clapping, humming, and rhythm provided by elements of commercial waste. (Bottles, tin cans, serrated pieces of plastic.) The music was mesmerizing and he said he wanted to capture the groove of making that music for game players.

When he talked about where he wanted games to go, he talked about applying to the very essence of humans; those natural, subconcious basic instincts that are known by every person regardless of culture. I find this very interesting because it is a completely different approach than Masahiro Sakurai's risk and reward talk and all the work that I've done at Big Huge Games. I think that's a big reason why I'm attracted to his work is that it appeals at a much more primal, immediate level than a typical videogame.

As for future titles, he sounds quite unemployed. He says that there are "ongoing talks" with unnamed parties about making games and mentioned that he's really interested in the PSP and Nintendo DS. Specifically he was very interested if the PSP would ship with headphones and was eager to work on a Rez-type game with a system that could completely consume the user's senses.

Experimental Gameplay Workshop - Jonathan Blow et al
I was able to attend the first session of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop three years ago and it was the best GDC session I'd ever attended. This year's presentation didn't let me down at all.

The three hour session was broken down into several sections. The first hour was spent discussing the results of the Indie Game Jam 2. This year's focus was using a 2D physics engine and the different games created were overall very excellent. There was a weird caterpillar game, a bouncing stick game, a game where you balanced a board on a wheel, a yoga game, and this weird fruit picking game by a fellow from Maxis. They had some issues developing this years games because there are so many assumptions with a physics engine that it is hard to determine if it can realize your game components. They said there were more games ditched at a later stage this year than any other year because the programmers would get to a point where they discovered that the cool thing that would make their game fun would be impossible to articulate in the physics engine in the time available. They talked about how they would try to balance their game by tweaking the elements of the physics engine, and with one tweak, another tweak would need to be made, and another tweak, and another tweak and soon the code would start breaking and the game would behave entirely differently than they originally anticipated. I highly recommend downloading the demos and checking them out. Unfortunately they were designed to be used with PS2 controllers so I don't know how well you could play them with typical mouse and keyboard PC components.

Other notable talks were Ken Perlin's interesting project to make a programming environment where girls would be encouraged to learn to code. He said that between the ages of 10-13 boys become more inclusive making them more likely to pick up the solitary activity of programming, girls at the same time became more socially involved. So he's creating a real time environment where kids can work together, share code, and direct these cute little bipedal things to do hop-skotch or skip rope. (Sounds a lot like AquaMoose3D, except, well, I shouldn't say. . .)

The designer of Katamari Damashii came to demo his game and talk about the process in designing it. For those unfamiliar with it, the game is about this little midget guy rolling around a ball and things in the everyday world stick to it. Initially only small items will attach themselves - tacks, paperclips, but soon the "snowball" will grow large enough to adhere small birds and soda cans. The game is a riot to watch, especially when something long gets attached to the ball and it flops around rather than rolling smoothly. They showed other video of the game where the ball was at a human-sized level and they showed cops running and shooting at the ball (gta3 style), only to be "snowballed" and made part of the giant mound of trash. The scale of the game seems to gradually increase, with another humorous segment had the ball rolling through a metropolis and getting skyscrapers attached to it. The grande finale was what the designer "made the game for": it featured a map of the globe and you could roll around and pick up the countries. You had to start small initially, so you have to roll around northern europe and south asia to get things going, then northern South America to get some larger countries. He said that Russia was the last one you could pick up and it was "really hard" to get. When asked how such innovation was possible in Japan while the US had such derivative games, the designer said that he thought the opposite was the case and he said that his game getting made was a "miracle." (I believe the designer is correct - a report found that out of the top 100 videogames in Japan, only 2 were original titles. The rest were sequels.)

I want to describe the intro movie for Katamari Damashii, but I feel like I can hardly do it justice. Think of a super-saturated technicolor Noah's Ark + South Park with dancing giraffes and giant purple guys with capes. It's even weirder than Oh-ha, and that's hard to top.

While the novelty and creativity Katamari Damashii should be commended, the game looked too simple to be enjoyable for any time over half an hour. There didn't seem to be any challenge or any payoff other than "haha, now look what's now stuck to the ball!"

Two grad students from Stanford presented Haptic Battle Pong. Best game name ever. It is a very interesting game where you manipulate a stylus to orient your paddle in the game world. There are various effects where you can mess with your opponent in real time so that they will feel you pushing their paddle around to mess you up. Too bad the game requires two $15,000 controllers to play otherwise I'd love to try it out.

There were two short talks during the session. One on the manipulation of time in last years games, focusing on Max Payne 2, Prince of Persia, and Viewtiful Joe. The other was a bit on WarioWare by a guy from Maxis discussing how it broke down games into simple, enjoyable atomic elements and then, during boss battles, created more elaborate, enjoyable sequences by combining the discreet elements into a larger experience.

Overall, the session was very inspirational because there were a lot of people doing a lot of exciting work and thinking about a lot of exciting things. I love how the Indie Game Jam shows that cool smaller games can be made in less than four days using an existing engine. Making a game in less than a year and a half seems revolutionary; four days downright instantaneous.

GameHotel
Boy, this was freaky. The GDC conference center was remade to be this stylized hotel lobby and the guests pretended that they were visiting this "hotel". I'm not that surprised that the first GameHotel debuted in France. Some guests they had almost nothing to do with the game industry, including some designers of "urban vinyl" from KidRobot, and some cool French guys that made weird (but excellent) MTV videos.

From the game industry, they had Phil Harrison, head of Sony Entertainment Europe up for an interview to talk about EyeToy and the game industry in general. When asked a question about a "big game magazine" saying that games were no longer stylish while a French newspaper recently had an article saying that "games were finally stylish", Phil Harrison took a moment to mention that "the magazine in question is Edge from the UK" and that they were the type of people that they would reject something when it became "too cool" and mainstream. He then noted that the Edge staffers in the audience weren't laughing. If I worked for Edge, I'd be so proud. Do you think EA, Sony, or Nintendo gives a crap about what EGM or PC Gamer editorials say? Yet Edge saying that "games aren't fashionable" really rubbed the president of Sony Europe the wrong way - awesome! That said, he seemed like an extremely cool dude; certainly not like the other suits I've seen at the show. One other interesting thing he said was that there was an element of "unlocking" extra games in EyeToy and he told them to take it out because the audience they were targetting wouldn't understand at all why they wouldn't have access to everything in the game immediately. The development group was saddened by this, but I got to say it was the right decision for the EyeToy market.

Masaya Matsuura presented a new game, VibRipple, and a whole new genre to the world. While the "trampoline action photography" genre may certainly be new territory for game design, I'm pretty sure that VibRipple will be both the first and last title in the genre. The game involves jumping on images, either stock photos from the game, ones downloaded from the internet, or from your digital camera, and "pulling" various creatures out of the photograph. They tried to play initially on a photo of Phil Harrison's face (something I'm sure will be a part of an Edge mag article) but Matsuura (and his helper) repeatedly lost. Then they used to stock photo of a piece of pie and it seems the game involves jumping on various colors in the photo to pull out little icon creatures. A few jumps on some strawberry filling and you collect a cool red crab creature. Jump on some other color and you get another creature. At the end of the level (who knows what determines how long you get to play) the Vib rabbit character will sing a weird song about the characters you collected. Matsuura said the game would be available in Japan by this summer! I'm not entirely sure how fun this game would be, but I would love to have a chance to play it.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi also talked for a bit without a translator. Both Matsuura and Miziguchi didn't use a translator, and while their English is excellent, the interview format required them to pause and formulate (often unintelligible) responses made their sections plod at a snail's pace.

As a whole, GameHotel was a bit of a letdown. It was clear there was a lot of money spent on the set and making awesome MTV style montages for the various videoscreens around the set. They had a great line-up of people, but with the exception of VibRipple, there was a content-free experience.

I hope to get Day 3 posted by the end of the weekend, but at this rate, I'd be happy if it arrived by the end of 2006. . .

Bessie's reply

2004-04-07T14:40:00.000-04:00

Bessie says:
"Don't listen to Scott. My singing rocks! He is just jealous that I am the next Whitney Houston. Thank you. -Bessie"

Does that make me Bobby Brown? Do I need to check her into rehab?

Bessie cranks up the Amplitude

2004-04-07T14:03:00.000-04:00

Serendipity! Last weekend I was doing the dishes singing FreezePop's "Science Genius Girl" and Bessie said that she wanted to play Karaoke Revolution to sing it with music. I immediately tried to defuse the situation. I dearly love my wife, but I must either be out of the apartment or unconscious when she dons the KR headset. So I humbly recommended Harmonix's sublime Frequency as an alternative, because the "Science Genius Girl" appears in that game as well. Shockingly she agreed and I got her in front of the PS2 sans headset.

Bessie had some difficulty completing the initial few songs in Frequency. Her opinion of the game was not improved when the game actually booed her if she failed a level. Frantically struggling to keep this dim light of gaming interest glowing, I hastily replaced Frequency with its successor, Amplitude. Harmonix mentioned in its post mortem that they did significant usability testing on Frequency in order to make Amplitude a more accessible game. Among the lessons learned: There should be an easier initial set of levels and the game shouldn't don't mock when you fail. *Shocker!*

Did the experiment work? Bessie was able to complete the first few stages of Amplitude with ease and the gentle difficulty curve has improved her skill while rarely failing to complete a track. She's gotten much better at the game - she knows how and when to use the powerups, which ones are useful, and how to transition between tracks to keep combos going. Most shocking of all - she is having fun and plays without my prompting. When I saw her turn on the PS2 after Frazier last night, I nearly fell out of my chair. She jokingly picked up my GBA in response and said "Wow, this Fire Emblem stuff is cool!"

Oasis!

2004-04-06T20:59:00.000-04:00

I ignored Mind Control's little web game when I passed by it at the IGF. Something about the weird dude on the left side of the screen and the scarab with sparkles freaked me out. It won the "Innovation in Game Design" award and I thought I should give it a shot.

Oasis is Civ on speed after a few mountain dews. Cities, roads, mines, technology, research, armies, barbarian hordes come flying at you at a blazing pace. Everything is simplified to make you want to play fast and furiously. The tension between exploring the map, building roads between your cities, and investing more workers to do research is tight and enjoyable.

Fire Emblem on GameCube!

2004-04-02T08:18:00.000-05:00

Arriving in Japan Winter 2004! Hopefully in the US by Summer 2005 if the localization can get done by then.

There was some images of Japanese ads that I linked to, but they've been taken down, so I have to link to the lame ign galleries. The images aren't very clear. :(

Edit: Some blessed soul translated the previous advertisement for us to peruse. Hurray!

Next Intelligent Systems Game - Paper Mario 2!

2004-03-31T14:37:00.000-05:00

Here's the 1up article outlining the Next Big Thing for Intelligent Systems. Can Nintendo R&D 1 do no wrong? Consider that Advance Wars 2 is the worst game they've made in the last 10 years, and Advance Wars 2 one of the best console strategy games. I think Bessie would like to send a special "thank you" to Intelligent Systems by developing two of the three biggest gaming time sinks in the last few years. (Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and Rise of Nations, natch.)

Plus, there's supposed to be an announcement about the next Fire Emblem game sometime in April. Hopefully it'll be in the US by the end of the year. . .

Here's some screenshots from IGN.

Yeah, I know, Day 2 and 3 of GDC isn't up yet. So sue me.

Such tough choices. . .

2004-03-25T10:49:00.000-05:00

Carmack or Miziguchi? Doom 3 or Rez? Sega's old wonderkid wins a "no contest" in my book.

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is this afternoon and Game Hotel is tonight! The Experimental Gameplay Workshop was my favorite session in previous years and I can't wait to see what new side projects people have been working on. I'll try to write tonight if I see anything worth mentioning.

GDC 2004: Day 1: I'm such a fanboy.

2004-03-25T03:20:00.000-05:00

Aside from some outrageously stupid talks and Microsoft's keynote that turned out to be a press conference, I would say one of the best GDC days I had.

Risk and Return - Masahiro Sakurai
Sakurai recently left Nintendo and is now an independent developer. He was the lead designer of the first few Kirby games and the Smash Bros series at Nintendo. I think he was one of the people that made Nintendo great for so many years. Unlike most Japanese presenters at GDC, Sakurai's presentation was well organized, had an interesting, generally applicable thesis, and the slides were brilliant.

The talks focus was how risk and reward systems in games are tied together; the more risky a situation is in a game, the greater the reward can be generated from overcoming it. The example that I can think of is having your ship abducted in Galaga. It is a highly risky move that you can bet your whole game on, but the rewards of successfully reclaiming your captured ship makes the game mechanics worth playing. Players can choose a "low risk" path and not try to lose the extra ship, but players that attempt this higher risk path will get more enjoyment out of the game. To explain this theory, he analyzed Space Invaders in great detail. For most game design talks at GDC, you couldn't pay me enough to listen through some random designer pontificate on why Space Invaders was cool, but Sakurai's presentation was spellbinding. He briefly outlined how Space Invaders worked (with handy animations) and then explained precisely how the game was balanced and how different factors influenced the overall game balance; such as the size of the enemies, the reward for killing them, and the enemies "field of fire" and how the game was based around the player working around that. I've only briefly played Space Invaders but Sakurai's presentation made me feel like I'd played the game for a dozen hours. He then continued to explain his risk/reward theory using a number of different popular games from a wide variety of genres as examples. He talked about the inherent risks in fighting games like Virtua Fighter, how the risk/reward system is inherently based in racing games. (You want to go fast around curves, but going fast means you might hit the wall and slow down a lot. Succeeding in going fast around a curve means you'll be going much faster than if you were more careful in the corner.) He also talked about Fire Emblem for a good 10 minutes and concluded with the point that intrinsically, all games are strategy games. I did all I could to resist going up there and hugging him. He also talked about games that strayed from his theory (music games, sims, sports games to some degree) and explained how they succeeded even though they lacked the risk/reward system that more conventional games have.

Being the dorky fanboy I am, I got his autograph on my copy of Smash Bros. Melee. I wish I got it on Kirby's Adventure but I couldn't find it in my apartment before I left. As he was signing it I was going to ask him to draw Kirby on the cover until I realized he already did. I would consider it my most prized possession until about 5 hours later.

Game Design Methods of ICO - Kenji Kaido, Fumito Ueda
While this talk was certainly more typical of Japanese developers of GDC, it certainly couldn't cover more a more dear gaming subject to my heart. I love ICO and I think it is one of the best, most wonderful things the gaming industry has ever created.

The presentation involved Kenji talking about the overall goal of the game (boy meets slightly older girl, holding hands, exploring and puzzle solving) and interspersed it with presentation movies from various points in development. ICO started as a truly bizarre Lightwave movie in 1997 that featured a town setting, explosions, and flying robots shooting laser beams! Even the main characters were as mixed up as can be. The boy didn't have horns - the girl did, along with "cursed tattoos." They looked very different than their final forms. The boy was very young; he looked no older than 8. The girl wasn't a ethereal angel, but wore shorts and a t-shirt. Virtually nothing of Ico was there other than the holding hands.

They created a new demonstration video every year and each year the presentation inched slower toward the final goal. They showed it in its initial interactive form as a PS1 game. The game was still rather unrecognizable - the enemies were more detailed knight-style enemies and few of the trademark locations had been distinguished. The first two recognizable areas they seem to have developed was the first tree area and the underground waterfall that seemed to be a part of the first playable demo. Everything else was either cut during development or in too primitive a form for me to recognize.

The transition from knight enemies to the shadow creatures occurred when they went from PS1 to PS2. The greater graphic fidelity made the enemy's kidnapping sequence feel too harsh, they said. Making them shadow creatures somehow lightened the interaction.

Less than six months out, Yorda was still fairly distant from her final form. She wore long braided hair, continued to wear leggy shorts, and her clothing was fairly colorful. Ico's transition was much more consistent. He slowly grew older and evolved the basic characteristics that made the character.

The sole interesting point from the question and answer session that followed was that the reason that the main characters couldn't communicate with each other was to force the "hand-holding" to make sense within the game world.

It was interesting to see how the game evolved over the years but the talk itself wasn't as enlightening. And no, in spite of all the prying, nothing was said about the Ico follow-up, only that they were working on "something."

I got my copy of Ico signed by both of them. Other autograph seekers had the awesome European/Japanese cover signed while I got my retardo US cover signed. Still - something about having an artifact to remind myself that I got to meet these visionaries makes me very, very happy.

I think when I'm no longer amazed when I meet someone who has created a game I adore, it is time for me to leave the game industry.

The Full Spectrum Warrior Camera System - John Giors
This was the most useful GDC session I've ever attended. A well organized talk with precise info on algorithms and implementation details immediately applicable to issues that we're currently having. The speaker was a bit nervous and a little stiff, but he certainly knew his stuff.

Independent Games Festival
The IGF section of GDC, imo, completely owns E3. No booth babes, no blaring loud music, no stupid licensed games. Just a bunch of poor developers trying to make their mark in the industry. All the games are complete and readily playable at the show, often with the lead designer/programmer/producer standing right there to help you figure out what's going on. Seeing these guys helps remind me what is so amazingly great about the industry and how much farther we can go with this videogame thing. The IGF is the best thing about GDC.

Pikmin 2 - Zzzzzzzzzzzz

2004-03-17T22:55:00.000-05:00

What the heck is up with Pikmin 2? The first Pikmin game was an interesting take on a console RTS/puzzle game; flawed, but well worth playing. I played Pikmin 2 at E3 and it was so similar that I had to remind myself I was playing the sequel. Now a year later more screenshots from IGN and Pikmin 2 looks. . . almost exactly the same. I was hoping N would do something to turn this title around and give it more reason to exist than to fill up an increasingly vacant release schedule.

1up gives mad props to Sony

2004-03-17T15:58:00.000-05:00

1up has published an incomplete, but compelling list of highlights of Sony's internal development teams consistent weirdness. As much as I want to hate Sony, I love PaRappa, Frequency, and Ico far too much to complain about their dominance of the console domain. If you're going to use the money you make from all those bazillion copies of soulless third party drivel to create a few beacons of creative light, well, I hate to say it, but long live the king.

What I've Been Playing

2004-03-17T15:22:00.000-05:00

Thoughts on games I've recently played:

Prince of Persia - UbiSoft took Ico and made it all Hollywood. Know what? It isn't a dumbed-down knock-off but a carefully crafted homage with enough popular elements to make the game style appeal to a broader audience. The game features a rewind system that I can't imagine playing another platformer without. The platforming itself is darn good - Bessie often commented on how cool it looked as I was playing through it. In the included making-of feature, they say the Prince in PoP has more animations than any other game character and it is hard to argue the point after seeing the game in motion. The camera system of the game is bipolar; randomly switching from functional and cinematic to downright ornery and back again. Combat is also a let-down for such a well polished game. The Prince fights breathtakingly, but playing it feels sloppy and rarely second nature.

Beyond Good and Evil - BG&E is an amazing game that has been tragically overlooked. The designer of Rayman made this third-person game that borrows a dozen game mechanics from a number of genres (stealth, fighting, photography, racing, platforming, puzzle), mixed them beautifully with inspired art direction, and created a richly textured and consuming experience. Before BG&E, adventure games this good were only made in Kyoto.

This game is now $20 on all platforms and has one of the best game soundtracks. BG&E only sold seven copies total worldwide; why don't you make it eight?

Super Mario Bros. 3 - Wow, what an awesome game. I know, I'm about 15 years late on that opinion. I didn't like the game much when it first came out, but its 2 minute levels made a perfect companion to the 10+ minute compiles at work. Each level is gameplay poetry, each section expressing something unique and imaginative. The handy quick save makes it great to play when you only have a few minutes to get your game on.

Culdcept - I love strategy games and I love the ease of playing games on consoles, but most console strategy games are simple derivations of X-Com or Empire with square grids and tactical battles. I was interested in Culdcept because it is explained as a bizarre combination of Magic the Gathering and Monopoly. I probably spent over a thousand dollars on Magic back in the day (stopped playing with Alliances) and the thought of having a intricate gameplay system for a budget price of $40 makes me excited. Monopoly though? Hmmm. The only worse choice could have been Trivial Pursuit. I had to play something this weird.

Verdict? Interesting and at times compelling, but too random for my tastes. Imagine being dealt a poor hand in a card game. Then imagine an unfortunate dice roll in Monopoly. Since Culdcept is a combination of both of these games, the frustration of having either of these is magnified by the presence of the other. Great hands can be ruined by crappy rolls, crappy cards can spoil divine rolls, and too frequently there's no decision at all to be made on your turn.

Disgaea - Yet another console tile based tactical game. I probably didn't give this one enough of a chance to get a good verdict, but it seemed to be too much of the same and more of what I didn't want. I want more meaningful decisions in games, not combo-rific ways of dealing three and four digit damage to brain-dead opponents.

Sequels!

2004-03-17T14:13:00.000-05:00

As much as I love a new unique game, here are some sequels I can't wait to get my hands on:

New Fire Emblem! To be announced in April, I hope the game sold well enough in the US to make localizing the game worth the money. I'm still playing my favorite game of 2003 and I'm looking forward to the next adventure.

Viewtiful Joe 2?! This is only a rumor, but I'm more surprised than I should be about Capcom developing a sequel. I consider Viewtiful Joe to be a masterpiece, and unfortunately, it has sold like one. Almost all my favorite recent games (Ico, Beyond Good & Evil, Rez, Frequency, Amplitude, Fire Emblem, etc) have not found a large enough audience to be profitable. In that regard, I'm very excited that one of the best games of last year has been given another chance to find its home in the heart of mainstream gaming, or at least a larger audience than the first. On the other hand, who am I kidding? This is Crapcom, the masters of destroying the memories of their beautiful unique creations with thousands of uninspired sequels. They've released a "new" MegaMan game every hundred days for the last 15 years. Don't make me bring up Street Fighter either. Yeah.

Mario and Donkey Kong. This looks to be a remix of one of my favorite original GameBoy games, Donkey Kong. Not that Donkey Kong Country crap or Nintendo's first successful arcade game, but an original platforming/puzzle game designed and produced by Mr. Miyamoto himself. Whether this new entry will live up to its predecessor is to be seen. I don't like the new look that apes (haha) Donkey Kong Country/Yoshi's Story-style shiny 3D rendered as 2D. Only more blurry. Much more blurry.

Are you ready for some futbol?

2004-03-17T14:01:00.000-05:00

World Soccer Winning Eleven 7 International. 15 syllables of nonsense, one amazing futbol game. Before I start coating the game with praise, a fair warning: the menus are the very definition of byzantine, the graphics and animation are sub-par, loading times aggrivating, the tutorials oppressive, and the commentary starts repeating within the first couple games. No matter; when you're running on the pitch you can feel the magic. The controls are analog and smooth as butter, and the game design the clearly illustrates the cost/benefit of certain maneuvers. When you lose the ball, you always know why. I typically don't like sports games but I'm starting to love this one.

These images may not be suited for those with sight. . .

2004-01-04T21:15:00.000-05:00

Pictures from Christmas. I swear I must have been on crack, but I find these to be funny.

A very special demon-possessed Christmas morning with Vicki and Tracy. Vicki gaps in shock, while Tracy, no stranger to hearing evil cackling in her head, looks to make a move on Vicki's Christmas present.

Vicki got a Panda hat from some store. Bessie et al thought it would be funny if I wore it, held her stuffed sea lion, and looked really sad. As a whole, I do believe the picture looks sad, intentionally or not.

"Why are all American girls so rough?"

2004-01-04T00:00:00.000-05:00

Bessie and I had Mark, John, and Ladzer (pronouced la-zhay) down for dinner and gaming. Bessie made fried eggrolls for the first time and they turned out extremely well - I ate far too many and I think everyone else really enjoyed them as well. We played some Call My Bluff, Boggle, and EyeToy, but I had the most fun with Mamma Mia and Bushido Blade.

Mamma Mia

Kevin, being an uncanny great gift giver, gave me this card game for Christmas along with the awesome Stikfas guy I posted about earlier. Again, like the action figure, I was a bit skeptical when I got it but it turned out to something I really enjoyed. I like finding games that fit situations in my life, and Mamma Mia is a great fit for an informal party game.

Mamma Mia is a pizza-making game by Uwe Rosenberg, the mastermind behind Bohnanza, one of my favorite trading games and an experience that I always walk away from with a smile.

I stink at describing game rules, so here's how BoardGameGeek summarizes Mamma Mia:



Each player is given eight different pizza orders to fill, and on his turn adds ingredient cards (pepperoni, mushroom, pineapple, green pepper, olive) and then an optional pizza order to a common pile. After the draw pile is exhausted, the common pile is flipped over and the cards in it are sorted by ingredient until an order comes up. If there are enough ingredient cards to fill the order, the player scores it. If there aren't enough, the player can either make up the difference with cards from his hand or put the order back into his 'to be filled' pile. After three rounds, the player with the most filled orders wins.

The game is simple to learn and understand, but no serious gamer would ever confuse it with Amun Re or Acquire. This is an advantage in many respects - it is a light party game, appropriate when you're sort of full and not in the mood to carefully calculate your next move. Bohnanza is a superior game but it's initially complicated turn sequence results in a lot of helpless, unhappy thrashing for first time players. Mamma Mia is strategically comparable to Bohnanza but is far easier to pick up and play, making it a great box to bring to the table when your audience may be a bit dubious about board gaming.

Mamma Mia is fun, quick, easy to learn, and dirt cheap as well.

Bushido Blade

Mark and I played about 70 matches of Bushido Blade tonight and I remembered how much fun I had with this game playing against Todd.

Bushido Blade is a samuari combat simulator. You choose from around 8 different characters and eight different weapons in one on one battles to the death. One clean hit will kill your opponent in a quick plume of blood. No health bars, no power-ups, and combo attacks usually involve hitting the same button twice quickly. When you land a blow that isn't fatal, you can injure your opponents arm making their blows less powerful or swipe one of their legs and force them to fight on their knees. The brutality and finality of the game make a memorable experience.

Fights often end in less than 10 seconds, often in an initial vicious exchange. Death comes quickly and most easily dealt when you block or avoid an opponents blow. This allows feints to be a central element of the game and makes for a more mental engagement than the secret handshake competition known as modern fighting games. When a conflict does last more than 30 seconds the intensity is almost unbearable - everything is riding on being the one to deliver the decisive, lucky blow.

It seems one of the central design tenants was to reflect the blind, cold injustice of real life; sometimes the healthiest warrior dies to a flailing swing by a opponent with a broken arm crawling on the ground. This so unfair, so wrong, so incorrect, so risky, yet so beautifully intentional.

Space Channel 5 Part 2

2004-01-02T10:17:00.000-05:00

Space Channel 5: Special Edition, including both Part 1 and the previously unreleased Part 2 for PS2 - $15 at EB Games. How could I resist? Miziguchi and his UGA studio are one of those developers that get my money for a game without needing to read a review. Their Kandinsky-inspired Rez is one of the greatest videogames ever made and Sega Rally is one of my favorite racing games. Space Channel 5 was an enjoyable distraction on the Dreamcast. For me it was the only character-based music title that approached PaRappa. The style of Space Channel 5 was fantastic; sort of a neo-70’s musical with smooth spaceships in bright colors. The main character, Ulala, is among the most charismatic game characters created. She’s sexy and effortlessly cool. She’s cheerful and upbeat without sounding like an empty-headed southern California high school cheerleader.

The style of Space Channel 5 was remarkable; the gameplay was a simple interpretation of the call and answer mechanic popularized by PaRappa, where the game will play out a series and the player has to match the input in rhythm. Fortunately, the style and fantastic music helped overcome the uninspired gameplay.

With Space Channel 5 Part 2, UGA and Miziguchi achieved the basic goal that so many others fail at; they looked at the original title, removed all that was bad, included and improved on what was already good, and introduced enough new elements to make the title feel new while maintaining the spirit of the original. I know, file it under "well, duh", but honest reflection and the insight on how to significantly improve it seems to be a rare quality in the game industry.

The most notable addition to the main game mechanics is the ability to hold notes (i.e. “leeeeeeeft!”). While no one would confuse this with the next generation of game input systems, it expands the player’s expressive ability of the first game without significantly increasing the complexity of the controls. The new addition is integrated effortlessly into the music, and is used infrequently enough to punctuate important sequences.

My favorite new "areas" are the jam sessions where Ulala plays an instrument in a competition with another character. The interface is simple – pressing any direction on the directional pad is all that is needed to play the instrument – but the resulting sensation is awesome. These jam sessions are memorable and enjoyable because they capture the essence of that is cool and fun to do with the instrument. Even though the input is nominal, it feels like you’re laying down a killer guitar riff. These jams also help mix up the pace from the shooting of aliens and rescuing of hostages.

What makes the game thrive is the level of refinement that often separates the great from the good.. One of the more enlightened elements of the original Space Channel 5 game were sequences where the inputs are represented graphically, giving the player a visual reminder of what they needed to perform. Part 2 runs with this idea, featuring far more sequences using this feature, even toys with the player visually at the end of the game. The challenges in Part 2 are also mixed up to keep the player mentally engaged; the levels aren’t always a continuous sequence of ever-longer patterns to remember – sometimes the challenge is created by mixing up long holds, changes in pace, off-beat patterns, or switching up shoot and rescue. The game is much more engaging throughout because the mechanics are continually toyed with in interesting ways.

Michael Jackson makes another cameo in Part 2 to great effect. While it is hard to separate the entertainment entity with the freak that sleeps with 12 year old boys, the game shows off what was so cool about Michael Jackson with dance moves stolen from his prime. (I shout out “Haha! That’s from Thriller!” “Billie Jean!” “Black and White!” and laugh maniacally when he’s on the screen while my sisters-in-law think of tasteful ways of leaving the room.) His high and distant voice perfectly matches the other-worldliness feel of the game and his lines, both through script and spaced-out delivery, remind us how surreal it is having Michael Jackson running around in a videogame.

I’m so pleasantly surprised at how well Space Channel 5 Part 2 has turned out, both in being orders of magnitude better than the original game and being enjoyable when compared against more modern music game titles. Without less pretentious qualifiers, it is one of the best music games I’ve played and one of my favorite titles released this year. It is a refined and joyous play experience that should not be missed by the open-minded. It is a shame that Part 2 is probably the last Space Channel 5 game that we’ll ever see; the series has not sold to expectations and Miziguchi has departed Sega after yet another merge/reorganization. Even though this is the end of the series, I find it encouraging that Miziguchi continues to develop so rapidly as a game designer and that we can only expect greater things in the future.

Oh, and in response to certain sisters that say I don't have enough personal things in my blog, I had a fantastic time playing through Space Channel 5 part 2 with Tracy and Vicki. Heck, I hanging out with them in Macon was some of the most fun I've ever had. Taking turns on SC5, laughing while Tracy gingerly whacks kung-fu people as she plays EyeToy, playing Carcassone with Vicki, the long walks where we'd all make fun of people's houses, and singing along to Beatles songs. Oh, and the food; every meal was an amazing Chinese feast prepared by Bessie's mom - I probably gained 10 pounds and I won't mind the hours I need to spend on the exercise bike to get me back into, um, programming shape.

Stikfas - more action figure dorkiness

2004-01-01T21:24:00.000-05:00

Action figures to be the epitome of dorkiness. Granted, I've posted about awesome (and expensive) monkey action figures and my monitor is guarded by six Pokemon figurines and a bunch of painted RoboRally pieces, but I'm not a geek in denial. Really.

Anyways Kevin got me a Stikfas Alpha Male for Christmas. At first, I was like, oh, cool, this is pretty neat. Then I put him together and Todd started posing him and the awesomeness was revealed to me in a beam of white light. Their posability is remarkable - they can stand on one foot and almost any possible human pose can be accomplished with a little determination. While the sets of Stikfas include stickers and whatnot to decorate your dude, the abstraction of the model means that the only the human pose reflects their persona; they can be male, female, angry, happy, indicated by their pose. I've been posing my Alpha Male all week when I'm building the game at work; he comes with about 20 weapons that makes him frequently act out scenes in action movies. He sometimes goes into John Woo double pistol mode, sometimes he shoots his uzi from the ladder that he uses to climb my monitor, other times he fires his shotgun from behind his riot shield. He's just awesome to play with.

If you're interested in these guys at all, make sure you shop around; the prices vary wildly online. I'd suggest using Froogle - I found a really great deal on the knight dude from Sears of all places.

Here's some more pictures of ones that I'm dying to get my hands on. . .

Turkey Day Aftermath and what not

2003-12-06T11:08:00.000-05:00

Visited my family and my new in-laws for Turkey Day and had an extremely relaxing time. I got my brother a Go board for his birthday (along with the excellent Mario & Luigi). Todd and I played once, but my Dad and I played four or five games, all very close. Go is such an amazing game. Bessie and Todd played a few hours of Mario Kart: Double Dash!. I wasn't impressed with the game when I saw it in May at E3, and I'm still not impressed with the single player, the cooperative play makes it feel really fresh. (The two players ride on the same kart; one drives and the other uses the items and helps out with powerslides.) It's no Halo coop, but it requires enough communication and synchronization to make it really feel like you're racing together. It was a great way to spend time with my side of the family.

Visiting my in-laws was quite a treat as well. Mrs. Yang always tries to stuff me with the sheer volume of food she prepares, and I always oblige because it tastes so good. Vicki and Tracy are always awesome to hang out with and play games with. (Tip: tickle their feet while they sleep - tiny Asian girls threaten you with demonic voices!) While I was there I saw My Neighbor Toronto and decided that if given the chance, I would buy a cat bus.

Altogether awesome trip. Now I'm snowed in here in Baltimore and spending my time blogging, cleaning up the apartment for some friends that will hopefully be able to make it over, and trying to finish up Fire Emblem.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

2003-11-23T11:57:00.000-05:00

Master and Commander is fantastic. Directed by the Truman Show's Peter Wier, it's a period fiction piece about a British ship and it's brave crew engaging a larger, faster Napolean galleon that hunts them like a phantom. Think Das Boot with sunlight, humor, and movie-star charisma. I actually enjoy the movie more than the German classic.

M&C is a thinking guy's action movie. The film is beautifully shot, visual poetry of 19th century sea vessels and the men that sailed them. The cast is fantastic, especially the two leads, Russel Crowe and Paul Bettany as the ship's captain and doctor, respectively. The sea battles are logical and visceral. Unlike most war movies, the scenes between the battles are no less captivating.

Master and Commander is of my favorite movies released this year, along with Lost in Translation.

Neo Geo Pocket Color

2003-11-23T11:23:00.000-05:00

Amazon ran a sale about a week ago on Neo Geo Pocket Colors - a handheld system by SNK that was launched around the time Pokemon became a household word. The system went unnoticed while Nintendo's pocket monsters took the world by storm, but SNK singlehandedly released a large number of quality games for their system - the majority well made miniaturized versions of their established arcade frachises. While the selection had an overly generous portion of fighting games, the console's library has only a few stinkers in the lot; a sharp contrast to the quality needle in the haystack of licensed mediocrity that is the Game Boy library. Had Pokemon never hit it big, Neo Geo is one of the few handhelds that had a chance to survive against Nintendo's Game Boy systems.

The System

The NGPC is a nice piece of hardware. The screen is one of the best reflective screens I've seen, easily better than the original GBA screen. In terms of hardware horsepower, it is about a third of the way between Game Boy Color and a Game Boy Advance. According to the box it claims 40 hours on a pair of AAs - with the batteries that came with the system I got less than 15. The control stick appears to be analog, or at least as analog as a NES Max controller. It makes a clicking sound when you push in one of the cardinal directions - I like that. I'm a big fan of analog joysticks, but it is odd that a handheld ripe with quality fighting games doesn't have a tap-tap-tap friendly directional pad. The two gameplay buttons feel firm, but pressing them hard causes the system to vibrate like a Sega controller. Ergonomically, the Neo Geo Pocket Color is slightly less comfortable as a GBA SP.

I ordered three games with the system: Samurai Shodown 2! (a samuari fighting game, natch), Capcom Vs. SNK Cardfighters Clash (trading card game), and Metal Slug: 2nd Mission (side scrolling shooter).

Samurai Shodown 2!

When I first popped the samurai fighting game into my NGPC, limitations of the handheld system immediately became clear. My recollection of the Samurai Shodown! series was from the arcade games that feature vibrant colors, detailed backgrounds, and extravagant animation. The handheld version feels threadbare by comparison. The characters are rendered with three or four colors and and the most elaborate attacks may be composed of five frames of animation. The audio is poor, with only a few attack sound effects.

15 minutes in, the quality and clear effort invested in the title helps ease any qualms about any technical inadequacy. There are over twenty characters to choose from, each with two styles of play, and I've seen at least half a dozen stages. Many of the characters reflect different aspects of samurai combat with the various stances while others use staves or rapiers. While the animation is sparse, the frames they choose express the force of the moves well.

One of my favorite things about Samuari Shodown 2! is that with only two buttons on the NGPC, one of them is used for parrying attacks. You can still pull away to block, but I love the mind-games involved with accurately predicting when your opponent will strike. I like that defense is a focal, proactive element in battle and not a simple matter of guessing high, low, or middle after you've finished mashing your buttons.

The special moves in the SS2 are familiar ones - mostly variations of the basic Capcom fighting game moves (fireball, dragon punch, etc.). A fighting game must provide me some juicy carrot in order to learn a new set of secret handshakes - ones that borrow conventions allow me to play and appreciate the game at a higher level sooner. I'm glad Samauri Shodown 2! does this.

I'll write reviews of Cardfighters and Metal Slug sometime later. . .

Oh yeah - this SNK ad rocks.

Fire Emblem - Persistently entertaining

2003-11-16T01:21:00.000-05:00

I'm a big fan of Nintendo's Intelligent Systems; who wouldn't be after Paper Mario, Mario Kart Super Circuit, Advance Wars 1 and 2? Their latest game is Fire Emblem, a long running series in Japan making its first English debut.

Comparisons to Advance Wars are inevitable - turn-based strategy game, grid map, and little groups of units battling it out. At the first play, it may feel too similar to some gamers, but differences emerge making Fire Emblem a completely separate interpretation of how to make a tactical strategy game. The RPG elements included in Fire Emblem provide depth and character without sacrificing simplicity. Characters only use one type of weapon and no armor. When characters reach a certain skill level, they can advance to a new class (i.e. knights to paladins) which allows the character to use another type of weapons, further extending their usefulness. The weapon types follow a rock-paper-scissors approach, or in this case, swords-lances-axes. There are three types of magic that interlock in a similar manner. While the mechanics are simple, maneuvering your squad to get the right match-ups is a challenging and ultimately pleasing puzzle.

One of the notable features of Fire Emblem is mortality of the characters. When characters die in a level, they cannot be brought back to life and do not return for subsequent battles. Exit stage left, thank you for playing. Fire Emblem tries hard to keep the player as honest as possible by transparently saving after every menu selection. If you attempt to cheese the game by turning off the GBA as a character dies, when you turn your system back on, you'll be treated to the same death scene each time you load your game. The only way to save your characters from death is by replaying the entire level. When a scenario can span 30-45 minutes, restarting can be a significant sacrifice to save a less favored character.

To further endear players to their units, characters that repeatedly end turns next to each other develop support relationships that provide bonuses when they fight together. It takes dozens of turns to develop these relationships and the bonus is worth the effort. A death of one of a partner in one of these relationships is a crucial loss of time and effort, making the decision on allowing a character to pass away even more difficult.

While the rigid approach the game takes to standard save/reload cheese may come off as annoying, it does much to make the game world more vivid to the player. Characters are almost as close to living things as could exist in a videogame format. You become attached to them because they can be so fragile and must think seriously about the consequences of leaving a weakened party member exposed to enemy forces. (In a brilliant turn, the game allows some characters to rescue other characters by scooping them up and dragging them to a safer location.)

That said, the scenarios are entertaining, well scripted, and have a wide enough amount of variety to keep the game fresh throughout the experience. Some levels feature fog of war, indoor battles with locked doors and breakable walls, anti-magic wells, or special requirements like defending a certain character. My favorite levels are ones where your group of a dozen soldiers has to split up and accomplish different tasks, almost in a Mission Impossible-style. Deciding who to bring on the mission, how to divide them up, what equipment they each need, and synchronizing the battle so that everything falls into place is supremely satisfying.

There's nothing that an experienced gamer hasn't seen before in Fire Emblem, but I've never seen those components stripped to their essence and combined in such a elegant matter. Fire Emblem is the only console strategy game that can be compared favorably to Advance Wars, and that's all the praise I need to give.

What I want for Christmas

2003-11-09T12:57:00.000-05:00

Jellis sent me the link to KidRobot a few days ago and I've been checking it out. I'm not a big action figure guy (they're just geek-dolls, really), but this special ape dude (*cough cough* DEATHMONKEY *cough*) caught my eye and hasn't left my mind since. I want him for my office. I think he's awesome.

Matrix Revolutions

2003-11-09T09:22:00.000-05:00

After reading such positive reviews, it was my geeky duty to go see Matrix Revolutions bearing as low of expectations as one could take. In that regard, it was better than I anticipated - it was no Waterworld, but not much better. As dozens of other reviews attest, the proceedings lack any human emotion, the viewer is completely detached from any of the characters, and the Wachowski brothers (siblings?) expect us to subsist off of heavy handed, half-baked religious symbolism, that through all the crosses, the buddas, and pronouncements of belief when what is stated is neither unique nor interesting. And don't go in expecting closure either, or to leave with any fewer questions than you walked into the theater with. One thing is resolved - that I'll watch the fourth movie in the Matrix series when it runs on TBS.

I will say that the battle for Zion was far more impressive and enjoyable than I anticipated - usually battles that involve a bazillion enemies leave me cold and bored (see Two Towers), the Sentinels attack on Zion was sufficiently innovative and well imagined to be a high point of the movie.

There are only two good reasons to submit yourself to such expensive mediocrity: 1. The special effects are pretty insane, and for the most part vastly improved over Reloaded. Worth seeing up close on a big screen. and 2. Your pathetic geeky persona urges you to see this movie in the theater with the same masochistic drive that makes you to pay $8 to suffer through The Attack of the Clones.

Go

2003-10-26T07:58:00.000-05:00

I played my first game of Go tonight against Bessie. I work for a game company and have spent (or wasted) a great portion of my life playing all sorts of games, but I was uniquely awed by the subtlety and beauty of this Chinese masterpiece. Simple rules. Timeless asthetics. Fathomless depth. When I spend my money and time filling my life with typical video and board games, I sometimes question how selfish and empty gaming is. Games can be a more viceral fantasy reality than any type of fiction because they're first person experiences. Games can be about making someone feel smarter, more talented, stronger, and/or more powerful for some fleeting moment before they return to their less exceptional reality. Besides a small (mostly synthetic) ego boost, games don't really add people's lives; they rarely enlighten the player about themselves or the confusing real world.

For some reason, Go was different. Maybe the sharp contrast of quality makes me think Go is more than it really is - like going from perusing the latest issue of Aquaman to digging into Paradise Lost. I dunno.

Yankees lose World Series to some random team

2003-10-26T07:31:00.000-05:00

I hate the Yankees and I'm glad they lost. I'm not sure who the winning team was, it may have been the Tampa Bay Lightning or the Cincinnati Bengals - I don't really care. It's good to stick it to `roid-raging Roger Clemens, their goon-like coaching staff, and of course, the man.

Life is Viewtiful

2003-10-11T01:27:00.000-04:00

Capcom has tendency to make one amazingly great game every decade, sometimes even define an entire genre, then spend the next 10 years demolishing their accomplishment by flooding the market with cheap, quick follow-ups. Mega Man was Capcom's claim to fame in the eighties. Street Fighter 2 reinvented arcades in the 90s. Both games spawned dozens of sequels, and their brilliance dimmed with each ever-diminishing, apathy-inspiring release. And from about two hours of play time, I predict there will no fewer than three thousand Viewtiful Joe games by the year 2010. At the end of the decade will the gaming public be bored with Joe's immaculate art direction and fluid kung-fu battles against robot dudes? Who knows, but it's really fun to play right now.

It is surprising to me how mature Joe is as a play experience. The game's controls are introduced in sandbox tutorials that allow the player to test out their abilities on a endless set of enemies without fear of dying or losing any progress at all. Try out the new move as long as you want - when you feel comfortable, press start to continue on with the game. It's such an elegant, yet simple idea, I'm shocked I haven't seen it in any other titles.

Viewtiful Joe challenges the most seasoned gamer, but doesn't punish. The old staples of lives and retries exist, but with every attempt you accrue money to spend on special abilities to improve your character. Those who are not talented enough to beat a level in the first few tries (like myself) will find themselves with a fortune to spend on powerups (including extra health meters and new abilities) that help comphensate for the amount of effort put in and make the next level that much easier. More talented players that breeze through the level in fewer attempts will find the game become more difficult as they progress, providing an interesting way to insure that the game is challenging for players of almost all skill levels. There are a lot of subtle touches in a game so clearly punk.

Alright, I'm going to bed.

How much is that kitty in the window?

2003-10-06T11:57:00.000-04:00

In case ya missed it, here's the full story.

Everybody loves a Bohnanza

2003-10-05T21:04:00.000-04:00

Had some friends over on Saturday night, cooked them dinner, and played a game of Bohnanza. While I've played the popular bean trading game dozens of times, often enough to be completely tired of it, I always have a great time playing it. Just rubbing shoulders with people, yammering about how you'll give TWO blue beans for one of their stink beans is worth playing the game for. Who cares if there's no real strategy in the game. . .