Confessions of my Gaming Mind

Administrative Stuff: Welcome to 2012?

2012-01-11T13:03:00.003-05:00

My last post: November 16th? YIKES.

Sorry folks, busy with stuff, didn't feel like making time to make posts, etc. Yup, I know it's a pretty bad excuse, but hey, it's a new year, let's start over, right?

I've got a few things on my mind right now, covering a bunch of games I just got and played through in the last month or so (Mario Kart, MW3, AC:R) , and it's just a matter of typing them all in. Siri, dictate!

Fingers crossed, first post, this friday!

(Also of note: Yes, I've rolled in adsense, might as well. Leave feedback if you don't like it)

Quick Impressions: Mario Kart 7 (3DS)

2011-12-15T00:24:00.003-05:00

Mario Kart has always been an interesting franchise to look at. While it was an innovator, creating an entire sub-genre with the original Super Mario Kart on the SNES, the core gameplay also hasn't changed much throughout the years. While Mario Kart 7 seems to bring to most drastic changes yet to the cart formula (moreso than bikes did in Mario Kart Wii), the old adage "the more things change, the more they stay the same" totally applies here.

Mario Kart 7 (Completed 50, 100cc on 3 stars gold, working through 150, raced a bunch of online ghost and played a few games on multiplayer)

One of the most talked about feature with Mario Kart 7 is that they aren't just go karts anymore (like Nintendo ever pretended they were). The inclusion of water and air traversal may seem gimmicky like the bikes in Mario Kart Wii, but it actually plays out much better than the one-off Wii addition. Tracks were designed with multiple branching paths to support this mechanic, forcing players to choose their traversal route (and the consequences) related to them. The para-gliding mechanic works fantastically, as the extra mobility in both height and speed variation adds additional depth for players to make choices in taking extra risks; however, the water propeller section was only useful in a handful of courses.

It's also interesting to note that this "new mechanic" isn't new:Diddy Kong Racing, originally released as an alternative (from Rare/Nintendo) take on Nintendo's Mario Kart series, added two main differentiating features: a large hub world, and three types of vehicles: Planes, Hovercrafts, Karts. Certain tracks allowed players to choose different vehicles, and these significant consequences to the race outcome: planes are forced up over the tunnels, and the tunnel, while longer, contains powerup items. Mario Kart 7 cleverly adopts a similar "choice and consequences" loop, allowing players to make those choices within the game on the fly.

While Mario Kart features iconic characters and frantic action, players will also undoubtably remember the various tracks that make each game memorable and unique. Ask any fan of Mario Kart and instantly they can tell you which tracks stands out from each iteration of the game. For me: Royal Raceway (Mario Kart 64), Baby Park (Mario Kart Double Dash), Airship Fortress (Mario Kart DS)... For me right now, it's hard to pick a favourite from this new one: The new Rainbow Road Wuhu island tracks is an interesting concept, forgoing the 3 lap count for one giant sectioned race; the new Bowser's Castle and Wario's Galleon offers up plenty of multi-path choices and interesting turns. It might be early to say this, but Mario Kart 7 has probably the best track selection out of all Mario Kart games.

In addition, every game since Mario Kart 64 have included 16 "Retro Courses", fan favourite tracks from the games past. It's interesting to observe the choices and what get's picked. I once had a discussion with a friend on exactly why certain tracks were picked, and I had a fun time researching this. Initially we both quite disappointed that Luigi's Mansion was included again; it turns out this is it's second appearance. I guess we've played Mario Kart DS too much.

Every batch of Retro courses will contain 4 original tracks from the two most recent Mario Kart releases (in this case, 4 from Mario Kart Wii, 4 from Mario Kart DS)
The retro course has not appeared as a Retro course before (with the exception of Mario Kart Super Circuit, which included all tracks from Super Mario Kart)

With these rules in mind, I was somewhat disappointed at the choices picked, the most notable with the absence tracks like Royal Raceway and Tick Tock Clock (both pictured above), as they both contain elements that can easily be used with the new hang-gliding mechanic, which leads me to my final thought....

When considering what tracks were to be included in Retro Course, there was probably a lot of design decisions in contrast to previous iterations. In Mario Kart 7, Retro courses had to be retrofitted to take advantage of the new features (and old unusable ones were removed). Elements like the stunt jumps in Mario Kart Wii, notably in Koopa Cape and Maple Treeway, were removed, making the 180 degree hairpin much more interesting. Older tracks tracks added additional ramps and jumps, allowing for additional hang-gliding sections (the biggest impact can be found in the older tracks like Kalimari Desert, taunting players to risk going off-road for the possible shortcut).

In fact, it can be observed that there were more tracks that were "suspended in mid-air" than on ground, which makes the omission of tracks like Tick tock Clock and Royal Raceway even more obvious when you think about it. Tracks like Airship Fortress and Waluigi Pinball only featured a forced jump section where players have no control over the glide time, robbing players of the new experience that they were promised.

Well, that's all I have for now. I guess I may do a full grind review in the future if I ever get three stars on 150cc.

On My Mind: The Problem with Numbers

2011-11-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

The problem with numbers and statistics can be used to show anything that the study wants you to see, and people should a)read between the lines, and b)think about what the implications of such numbers mean. I'll give you an example (and extract some of the points that I'll discuss):

Gamasutra: 81 Million play Social Games Everyday

The 2011 PopCap Social Gaming Research survey, as conducted by Information Solutions Group and commissioned by PopCap, noted that, in comparison, 81 million people play social games at least once a day. In terms of spending on social games, the report explained that 31 million players have spent money on in-game purchases, up 86 percent year-over-year.

What is the definition of Social Game here? Is it strictly a game on Facebook? How about on the iPhone games that are networked? Where would something like Farmville on iOS and Facebook count? Without this context, it's much harder to understand what's the demographic that makes up this audience.
81 Million is a pretty impressive number, but what would be more interesting and useful is, how many different games do they play (or is it just one)? If all these people only play one game, and never migrate, then the market isn't really as big as it seems (You can see this in WoW, MMOs are huge if you count WoW, if you take WoW out of the equation, you'll realize that the player pool is relatively small).
31 Million Paying user, now that's a much more accurate title for the article, but I guess it's not as splashy as 81 million active users. As for spending; is the question phrased as: "Have you ever spent money on a Social game?" If so, then the percentage will always rise! Better questions would be "Have you spent money on a social game in the last 6/3 months" or "What was the most you have spent in a game?" If 31 million players only paid 99cents for an item once, then 31 million income looks pretty bad for a 81 million Active User. Most social games rely on the freemium model, and the idea that the small group of paying users pay to cover the operating and profit cost for everyone else; knowing the breakdown of how this money is spent, and where it's spent is important.

The survey also looked into the ages of social gamers, and showed that 30 percent of social gamers are under 30 years of age, compared to 19 percent in 2010. 20 percent of all U.S. social gamers are over 60 years old, compared to just 7 percent in the UK.

The breakdown of the makeup of player base is also interesting: Gaming have long been stuck as a "toy" category, and many were glad to push the percentile out of that category as it was perceived that the middle age group (especially Single Male demographic) spends disproportionally large amount of dollars for entertainment (and the recent release of Skyrim, MW3 and other countless collectors edition validates this). While reaching a wider audience is nice, it's questionable about their willingness to spend: an active user is relatively meaningless to your game if they never spend a dime on it.

ISG explained that the social games surge is a "newer phenomenon" in the UK than in the U.S., as 38 percent of UK social gamers have been playing social games for more than 2 years, compared to 51 percent in the U.S..

The word "surge" and "phenomenon" should start scaring you right about now. Consider the recent valuation of Zynga and Rovio, with the latter being the most interesting. A company with one title scoring that much valuation? I'm not going to bother predicting gloom and doom now, but just entertain a thought: Would the audience leave en masse? And what would happen?

In some ways, it's no different than the Wii. Remember the Wii "phenomenon", where millions flocked to Wii Sports? They stayed with that game, not needing any other experience, and never picked up anything else. It's somewhat scary to see the parallel between Zynga and Facebook; Rovio and Mobile; Nintendo and Wii: It may be profitable if you are the company in the driving seat, but good luck if you're coming into the market behind them.

Administrative Stuff: Dare to dream stupid big

2011-11-14T07:59:00.004-05:00

At somepoint in 2001, I was still in high school, working on a yearbook for the graduating year. At that time, we wanted (and got everyone) to write something besides their pictures. It's all too cheesy now to even revisit, but one interesting thing I did back then was to stamp down a date 11-11-11.

...no I didn't predict or call out Skyrim back in 2001.

I think back then, I said I'd give myself 10 years, to make something interesting. Back then, I didn't know much about games other than playing a lot: 10 years, to become lead design on some game, and have it ship on that date, "wouldn't that have been something".

Things never turn out the way they should, oh well. Now here I am, sitting at a Starbucks, hacking up some XML datastruct for a hobby project...

I dreaded that date coming, only because it was pushing ever closer to that "failed goal", but it also made me work that much harder to ship what I'm working on now (yes, I'm still working on it, I blame feature creep).

Eyes bigger than my stomach? Maybe, but you won't get there without dreaming stupid big.

So, see you again at 12-12-12?

On My Mind: What is a game designer?

2011-10-21T00:30:00.013-04:00

While I'm still on my job search process, I've start to notice something really wrong with the games industry, and more specifically, how we define roles within the industry.

What is a Game Designer?

I've had this happen to me many times: relatives, friends, or other general acquaintances would find out I "make games", and I would go on and give them the 30 second explanation. It's often half assed, and just covers a general overview of what I could be doing, like "yes I make the stuff you see on screen" (WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN). I'm not sure if this post is trying to set the record straight (and I'm sure I'll get stuff wrong), but at least some of my observations (mostly anecdotal):

1) A Game Designer has to do everything and nothing at the same time

In a very broad stroke: A Game Designer has their hands in every point of the game development. They're the people that define the look and feel, the experience that the player interacts with, yet they also don't deal directly with any of the actual complexity that exists in the game. While it is true that great art and technology is what the players will first see or use, it's pretty much up to designers to make those first impressions last with a fun and interesting experience.

Depending on the size and scale of the project, a designer could be coming up with the overarching idea, how players interact with the game, the player experience, the general visual design, right down to the minor details of timing and visual feedback. Yet without programmers or artists to support and implement their ideas, they're just that: ideas. You put 5 designers together in a room, and at best is you'll have the world's greatest theoretical game idea. In this light, a game designer is very much like a project manager: ideas are like project requirements, and it's the designer's job to come up with new solutions to solve problems as they arise. Sure, it'd be great if they can predict all possible problems and avoid them ahead of time, but able to change course when problems happen is also a much needed, yet often not talked about skill.

You'll know you have a good designer when they appear to not do anything, yet get everything right in a game. A game can have great artists and great programmers working on it, but if you have lousy designers, no one will care how visually stunning or technically amazing the game is.

2) A Game Designer wears multiple hats at any given point

Most people outside of games think Game Designers is this fancy job where they sit around and just play games all day, which couldn't be further from the truth. However, the idea that all Game Designers do nothing but just come up with ideas is also pretty off-base. It's also interesting to note that this idea of what designers do isn't limited to people outside of games either.

It's interesting to note that the Japanese term for Game Designer typically is "planner", as their job covers issues like schedule management, bug tracking and workflow organization on top of actual game design. While the typical western design won't have to deal with scheduling (job of the Project Manager) or bug tracking (that's for QA), Game Designers still don't get a free pass in terms of just sitting around and coming up with ideas.

If there's one word that sums up what a Game Designer would do, it'd be this:

Communication

In addition to coming up with "the kick-ass" idea and the "nitty gritty details", the primary job of a designer should always be communicating with the rest of the team: relaying programmers concerns to the project managers that more time is needed to finish a feature; relaying artist's need for better tools to programmers, working out solutions to focus on certain features to satisfy manager's timeline, etc...

In this sense, a Game Designer would practically be a part of all the teams: they would need to be able to talk to programmers, understand a general sense of the code, and translate that back to the manager; or be able to talk to artists and understand how animation works and relay info back to the programmers. It's not just, "hey it'd be cool to have explosions here, here and here..."

3) Game Designers with the same title can mean different things in different environment

My last job title "Game Designer" was probably the most generic and boring titles out there, and it also doesn't tell people a whole lot about what I do either. This "problem" isn't specific to just "Game Designers" either: a quick search on what Level Designers do ranges anything from event scripting, stage and geometry design(level blocking), to even the visual design of levels. What's scary about this is if you as an professional puts down "Level Designer", you better be prepared to cover the entire spectrum of topics like level flow and movement, to path traversal, environment blocking, to even visual design or event/AI scripting within the topic of level design.

These can all be considered level design, so what's a level designer expected to cover?

This inconsistency potentially leads to many problems: A combat designer on a 3D action game (like what I did before) won't even share the same language and understanding as someone who's a combat designer in a FPS: both designers would be concerned about "timing", but their priorities and concepts won't directly translate to the other.

Where this annoys me the most, especially during my job hunt, is realizing that even if I say I've worked on combat design, depending on other people's understanding of it, could mean completely different things. It's quite possibly the only branch of game development that faces this issue: You ask programmers and artists what their title is, and you'll have a fairly good understanding of what their speciality is - an UI programmer's role and job description will never deviate as much as game designers; Someone who is a user experience designer on one game will wildly differ in experience to others with the same title.

4) Not all Game Designers work with the same scope

A full game production is a fairly large task, and there's a huge difference between different design scope. The above picture of SimCity and The Sims is a pretty good representation of how big the gap can be.

I recall a conversation once with a few designers on who works well with which scope, and I found that discussion very important in identifying everyone's strengths. Not everyone is going to be great at looking at the big picture of the game; nor will everyone be great at looking at the nitty gritty details. As an example, you want someone who understands the nuisances of ammo capacity and reload working on game balance than someone who doesn't understand it.

I'm not suggesting the idea that you pigeonhole someone strictly in their own specialty, but don't confuse idea contribution with idea implementation: everyone is entitled to ideas and opinions, but having a macro designer implement fine details and vice versa can only result in frustration all around. Someone who focuses on the Big Picture may just brush off minor details as unimportant, and would only suggest sweeping changes when things don't feel right; someone who fine-tunes details maybe over-specific on the big picture, which doesn't work well with the ever-changing dynamics of a game project.

?) A Game Designer "should" have a general understanding of all types of games

Here's one that I thought about putting down, but I don't know whether this is true at all. Personally, I think I try hard to "cover" as much ground as I can, but I know that I can't possibly know it all. I know I don't play enough RTS to say anything too meaningful in a development environment, so I wouldn't dive head first into it if I was given a choice. I feel that a good designer should always "know what they don't know, and know where to get help".

However, this also runs directly head-on against what a game designer needs to do in a production environment: be the person that has all the answers, ensuring everyone understands the direction even if it hasn't been determined. I hate to think what kind of projects have run into this issue, and what the results could have been.

Here's a thought experiment that I've repeated over and over: let's assume you as a designer was dropped into a project of X genre, how well would you fair? What kind of decisions would you make? How comfortable would you be with telling people your ideas? Here's an example:

With the recent launch of NBA Jam and upcoming NFL Blitz, what if EA said: "hey, let's get working on Wayne Gretzky 3D hockey" again (or better yet, Midway's "NHL Hitz"). What/how would you approach it?

Obviously, the quick and dirty answer would be: know the sport, know the history of the series, the expectation of the genre, what fans expect from it, and built upon that... seems to easy, right? Well, maybe not: How much rubberbanding should the AI have so that the game still feels interesting without feeling cheap? Is having power-ups within the game too "gamey" and not true to the sport? How much of a role should checking have in the game? As an arcade game, how much complexity should the control scheme have? Suddenly, a simple idea of a game balloons into something much more complex and much less defined.

Sure, personally I know what an RTS is, what mechanics are involved, etc, but I know I don't know enough to make a gut call on anything about people's design choices other than being the casual observer. I think I can say the same thing to many other genres, and I sometimes get a good chuckle from others who think they have all of it covered. As much as Miyamoto is an awesome guy who's done great things with games, I highly doubt he can make Halo. He can "make" an FPS, I have no doubt, but will it understand the nuances that people expect from shooters if he hasn't made one before (or is immersed within the genre itself)? There are reasons why certain dev teams dedicate themselves to a specific genre: you retain the people with the knowhow in that genre.

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I'm pretty sure I've rambled on for too long, and I still probably wrote stuff that doesn't make sense. I hope I've clarified some of what I do (or did). Feel free to add comments or ask questions and I'll see if I can append to this.

On My Mind: Inverted control

2011-09-30T11:28:00.003-04:00

For those who don't know, Inverted Controls is the idea that the look/move operation is done inversely to the control input. Some have likened it to the idea of a camera rig, where pushing upwards is pointing the camera downwards. It's not a control scheme for everyone, but once you're stuck with one, it's very hard to unlearn it. Tons of people also debate about the validity of it, as if it's some sort of crazy holy war where one side is correct: both are valid, stop bitching, and just live with it.

People are usually surprised that I use inverted control (apparently most console gamers don't), I guess my early exposures to PC Flight sims (and an unhealthy amount of Independence Day) have really trained me to think that way (sidenote: I use normal for PC shooters, don't know why, but it makes more sense to me). Yet sometimes this causes issues in games that I want to play.

The recently released Splinter Cell HD caused quit a bit of outrage as the game didn't support inverted controls, and I know I won't even bother giving the game a chance unless it's patched in. In a game where looking and shooting are essential, I know I will be infinitely frustrated by the fact that I will fumble more on the control than the mechanics themselves.

Another example: I was trying out the Yar's Revenge demo, a third person shooter where you control both the aiming reticule and the craft. The game supported an invert aim option, but I was still messing up as I always end up jamming the craft to the bottom of the screen. The lack of invert option for both craft and aiming might seem like pointless whining, but that was the dealbreaker that prevented me from buying the game.

Game designers should be very concerned about this. Sure, you may find the controls acceptable, but offering the option so that other people can play it seems like an obvious no-brainer. I recall a conversation I once had with a designer who will not be named who said "inverted is stupid", and "people who use it are retarded". Huh. Way to think about your potential customer.

On My Mind: Design: Art or Science (Abridged Version)

2011-09-26T11:53:00.002-04:00

It's been a while since this topic was mentioned and I forgot where or why it popped up, but I felt compelled to write something about it. I recall being asked a few times whether design is an art or a science, and I'm sure you've all seen the endless debates on which one is correct or more important. So I might as well throw in my two cents here:

BOTH!

(Thanks Adam.)

On My Mind: Design: Art or Science

2011-09-19T12:18:00.005-04:00

Why does it have to be a binary choice? Design should be both art and science. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn't doing their job properly.

(Note: I'm going to put a few pictures to get my point across: I'm not saying these are bad games, in fact, I actually liked these games a lot...)

Design is Artistic: any designer who tells otherwise are terrible designers who would only make cookie cutter, boiler plate ideas that caters to no one but a spreadsheet.

Sometimes, a game can still get by with just the bare minimum, hitting all the bullet points that people expect to have in a video game: Oh, it has online multiplayer; Oh it has co-op; Oh it has a ranking system, etc... But then is this really a game, or merely another manufactured clone of something else you would have rather played? It's especially worse when you realized this game you're playing has all the parts lifted directly from another game. Sure, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but you have to ask whether the people on the other end really cared about the product they're making.

I liken a game designed on paper as something without a soul: Sure, it may be technically competent and without fault, but it comes off bland and manufactured. Even as the game conveys emotions through it's characters or setting, it feels so contrived that you can already tell that the designers looked at "the demographic of the audience" and planned their game around it.

You may or may not like where EA as a company is right now, but a long time ago, they had put out an ad with the headline "Can a Computer Make You Cry?"

I'm not sure if they had made that question their vision back then, but I think it's a pretty noble goal even today. If a game isn't there to create player emotion, then you might as well be just doing your everyday menial tasks (and grinding out your level caps). Other "entertainment medium" elicit emotions like joy, fear, sadness and anger; if games are about entertainment, then they should strive to do the same, which means staying away from designing strictly from a mechanical standpoint.

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Design is Scientific: any designer who tells you otherwise are terrible designers who wouldn't understand player feedback when someone tell them the game "isn't fun to play".

Until very recently, the more artistic endeavours from the likes of Suda51 (Killer 7, Shadows of the Damned, pictured bottom) and Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Every Extend Extra Extreme, pictured below) were a rarity in gaming. Their games often have flaws, but still receive high praises for their creative look compared other games outside. However, typically, the games always suffer from terrible sales, driving publishers away.

The quick and dirty answer that everyone can understand is that these games are going to be harder to market: People want comfort food, they want games they are familiar with, and huge deviations can scare people away. In some sense, it's why "Scary Movie" is a summer blockbuster: people like the familiarity, even if it's unoriginal, forced and manufactured.

However, another cause I like to point out is getting proper, 'scientific' feedback. A lot of times, you'll see some of these games commit the most obvious mistakes, as if no one actually played through them. Sure, the creative process is sometimes about 'gut feeling', putting in what feels natural and makes sense, but other times, doing proper 'scientific research' can yield much more favourable, more refined experience. It's the difference between "I think this weapon should have 0.5 seconds to reload" vs "Our test shows that 0.5 seconds is too long and players are not choosing the weapon".

Take Limbo (pictured above) for example: while the game is about trying and dying, and the player's journey through the experience, there were a handful of places where the only way players will get by if they've died multiple times to learn what not to do. Sure, it may be the experience that the developers intended to give, but it's sure to alienate players who are frustrated with such mechanic (and goes against the idea of games as a mastery of skill, not mastery of guessing what the developer wants you to do). There were points in the game where you see obvious attempts at placing hints to show players what can happen, and I wonder if those sections were even more difficult before proper testing and feedback.

In fact, if you were to analyze Suda51's last few games, you'll realize that his games have gotten better and better at smoothing out the rough edges yet still retaining some of his absurd ideas. You put Killer7 and Shadows of the Damned next to each other, and you can still tell it's from the same creators, but Shadows clearly have had more refinement in terms of managing and meeting players expectation. In a third person shooter, people expect fluid, direct control (Shadows), not point and click wonky interface (Killer7). Some would argue that Suda's games have gotten more bland as of result, but as a tradeoff for a more playable game that reaches a wider audience? I think it's a decent tradeoff.

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Personally, I know that I tend to favour the scientific side of doing things. If I can get all the info about how people are playing my game, why wouldn't I take it to improve up on it? Yet I understand that design should not be entirely based around player feedback, and sometimes it's worth it to go against what is expected to make a more interesting idea work. I hope other designers would take a look at where they fit in that spectrum, and be mindful of how they look at the other side when they create stuff.

On my Mind: Emergence Gameplay

2011-09-16T10:00:00.002-04:00

One of the most talked about "new" ideas in game design in recent years has been "Emergent Gameplay". In short, it is the idea of gameplay behaviour based on the rules and mechanics established by the game. While emergent gameplay were often unintentional, there is a strong focus today for designers to "plan out" ways to allow emergent gameplay to happen.

Sometimes, these ideas are entirely planned out: take for example, NBA Jam in contrast to traditional basketball games:

The hot spot mechanic changed the way people would focus on scoring: instead of taking open shots, players would risk for the more dangerous and covered 8 or even 20 pointer. Basically, people evaluated the risk/reward factor and decided that it's worth the risk.

Some notable examples of unintentional emergent gameplay include things like Rocket Jump in FPS games, or combos in fighters (first done as an error in Street Fighter).

So, what happens when emergent gameplay creates oddities like this:

Well, let's explain a little of what's going on here first: In Gears 2 (Hence the "emergence" title, HARHARHAR), there's a XP ranking system that allows you to earn extra character skins in Gears 2/3. The XP system is based on points obtained within all the multiplayer modes, giving out different rewards based on how good the players were in the game. To get to level 100, players need to accumulate ~6.8Million points. An average game of Horde nets 200 points, whereas an average game of other games are dependent on your score, but usually no more than 3-4000 points.

Obviously, getting to 100 would take forever, so people started looking at ways to "boost", and what you see above in that video is the end result. If you do a quick search online, you'll find plenty of explanations of how it's done, why it's the optimal one, and what happens in it (like here: link). What's interesting about this is that since it requires players to be playing in a "social match" (no private rooms), interesting player behaviours occur. Let's detail a few here:

1. Since not everyone is going to be on a mic, or refuse to talk on a mic, people have devise a pretty interesting way to signal that they want to boost: prep the grenade, and swing it around. People who are in for boosting stand around the circle and wait till everyone is in (or start shooting at people who aren't in).

2. Games go up to 120 points, so there's often a very gentleman's rule of backing out of the circle to 115 so that the other team gets just as many points. When you see it in action, you'll realized that these people may not know each other, but will cooperate to the same goal (of more XPs)

3. When there's an anti-boosting player in the game, both teams signal each other on where to take them out. They end up leaving in frustration.

4. When both teams get to ~115, then it's suddenly a free for all, almost a John Woo-isk scenario where everyone starts firing away for the win.

Players may not understand the real reason why it happens: but they've internally evaluated the meta-game goals (XPs, Levels) were worth more when they cooperate with each other, and are more than willing to grind through hours and hours of this just to get a higher score. Can they do anything to dissuade people from gaming the system? Probably, by lowering the level reward/score. Should they?

Is this the right way to play the game? Or better yet: What is the right way to play a game? If I never use cover in Gears, am I playing it wrong too, and should I get less score from it? Interesting things to think about.

On My Mind: The price of Freemium

2011-09-06T11:26:00.003-04:00

One of the most prominent discussion about games in the last year or so have all revolved around the viability of the current business model, specifically: Freemium Games. The wiki definition is a pretty solid description:

Freemium is a business model that works by offering a game, product or service free of charge (such as software, web services or other) while charging a premium for advanced features, functionality, or related products and services.

In the video game world though, there's been very strong debates on what constitutes "advance features, functionality, related products and services". By the most basic definition, even basic DLC can be considered "freemium", as it offers new content for a premium fee (other than the base game not being free at all). In fact, some companies have tried approaching this model with traditional retail games (see MX vs. ATV Alive) with less than impressive result.

It's hard to say whether this model actually works or not given there's only been one attempt. Guess it's something we'll never know.

This post isn't about mixing in freemium with traditional retail game model, but rather the strict "free" model. In addition, games that sell "content packs" that isn't repeatedly re-purchasable in a solo play setting (IE, extra modes/levels) don't technically fall into the same discussion. While they are proper "freemium", no game balance issues occur, as players are at worst only locked away from additional content (which technically works like DLC). What I'm after is specifically anything re-purchasable: in game currency/"energy", in game stat boost (both temporary and permanent), and any freemium content that changes the balance of play in a competitive game.

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The concept of in game currency/"energy" is probably the model most familiar to people. You may have seen it in pretty much all of Zynga's games (or practically most Facebook social games), and it's starting to trickle over to iOS games. My latest obsession on iOS, Tiny Towers, uses this model as it's entire revenue scheme (how successful though, is another debate).

Farmville

Tiny Towers

And truth to be told about this model:

Two interesting points arise, especially from a designer standpoint:

a) The games were designed with breaks in mind, and by implementing such a feature to "allow" players to play by paying. This "time for money" model in theory hurts no one, but I often question whether it ends up playing into people's OCD instincts, the need to "complete" rather than the need to "play". I look at Tiny Towers and I often ask myself: "why is it fun and why do I keep coming back"; certainly, there's some management aspect to it, but it's so minuscule it's inconsequential. All I have is the want of "filling up my building with people", which isn't that good of a "gameplay hook" but rather a "addict hook", triggering the compulsive need to collect and complete.

b) While technically there is a competitive aspect (via seeing your friend's progress), there is no direct competition, which softens the blow if and when someone decides to pay up to speed up progress? Your friends paid money to grow faster? Great, you now can feel wonderful knowing that they paid for something virtual, like getting an extra 500 points. (Here, have 500 points, don't you feel wonderful too!)

In this freemium model, games aren't "unbalanced" by someone throwing in a wad of cash; then again, there might not be much of a game to be "unbalanced" to begin with. For a game like Tiny Towers, I've yet to feel the need to pay for more (which should be a concern on the dev's part). I'm indifferent to games using such a model, and I'm sure there's been well done implementations of it. The only concern I would have with this model is when the business side creeps over every design decision. One example would be Let's Golf 3 by Gameloft: I'll let this review do the talking:

While I think that being able to earn cash (and thus, energy) by playing well is a good gameplay mechanic, the fact that you can only passively earn one unit of energy per hour is ridiculous. In other words, if you’re not that good at the game, you’re going to be punished rather harshly by either having to wait a long time for energy or shell out money to play. Meanwhile, someone that’s better at the game might be able to play significantly longer (and level up faster) by earning more cash in-game and converting it to energy. I personally had no problem scoring birdies and earning enough cash and energy to continually play, but I just think that the energy cool down is way too long for most gamers. It’s definitely going to alienate a lot of players who simply don't have any in-game cash and aren't going to pay or wait an hour to play one hole.

==================================

While I had wanted to write something about Freemium for a while, this article about BigPoint is really what triggered me to finish it. In it, Philip Reisberger has some amazing insight on how to charge for in game content, especially in light of game balance:

"In a nutshell, EA doesn't understand it," he adds, referring to EA's insistence that a Battlefield 3 pre-order bonus containing advanced weaponry would not give players a competitive advantage. "It wouldn't ruin the game. If selling an advantage ruins the game, you haven't done the balancing right…EA and Ubisoft, for example, they're both trying, but they're not really there yet.

Note the bolded line: If an advantage ruins the game, then it isn't balanced.

But wait. If it's balanced, how can it be an advantage?

OK, but if there's no advantage, then what the hell am I selling to people to actually give them an advantage?

OK, let's say I do come up with an advantage, but then is it still balanced?

We've reached a paradoxical issue: If you sell freemium content, how does it affect game balance? Can you truly call it balance if someone can buy their way to an advantage? The examples I've seen are truly frightening: "sell more ammo", "carry more items", "faster respawn". If you take a sports analogy, it'd be the Yankees paying the ref to get an extra out for an inning, or everyone getting aluminum bats for their next turn.

I don't want to say that it's impossible, but every time I read someone say "you aren't fully exploiting what can be done with freemium", I would worry about every other gameplay issue they haven't thought about.

Administrative Stuff: I'm still here

2011-09-01T12:10:00.003-04:00

...no, I have not turned into Joaquin Phoenix, yet. The last month has certainly been interesting as I started crunching for content. No, I haven't exactly completed it yet, but it's been interesting to go through the process of slashing content to cut down on dev time and get something usable.

...Yet I still missed my PAXDev/PAXPrime self imposed deadline on shipping something...

...On the other hand, I've got a bunch of new material to write about, so hopefully I'll resume writing starting next week.

See you then.

Administrative Stuff: Crunch Time

2011-07-29T12:07:00.002-04:00

I'm going to be taking a two week break from posting. It's a self imposed crunch as I try to work on my project and hopefully have something by PAX. Yeah, it's a lofty goal, but you gotta start somewhere.

On My Mind: Are we all jumping over to mobile games too?

2011-07-27T10:00:00.000-04:00

Recent Japanese game development trends have been interesting, with a range of notable Japanese developers leaving their current tenure over to mobile games, with the likes of Keiji Inafune(Mega Man), Yuji Naka(Sonic), Suda 51(No More Heroes), Yoshifumi Hashimoto(Harvest Moon) all jumping over to pretty sizeable mobile game announcements with DeNA. To put that into perspective, this is the equivalent of Miami Heat picking up James, Wade and Bosh in the off-season; or like getting Bay, Bruckheimer, Spielberg and Cameron on the same movie; it's gathering the biggest and brightest all under the same roof... for mobile games.

...are we on the cusp of something significant that we don't realize yet?

Mind you, this isn't a trend limited to these stewards of of gaming either, with developers like Bungie and Insomanic Games also setting up new divisions into this market. It honestly seems like everyone and their mother has realized that mobile gaming is here to stay, and they want a slice of the pie.

So, what does this mean for traditional gaming? Is it as bleak what Mike Capps of Epic Games has predicted (ironic for statements coming from him, as Epic stands to gain alot from Unreal on iOS devices). Will the triple A, blockbuster model disappear? Or will it further squeeze out the middle range developers?

Let's Make Up Achievements: Resident Evil 4 (Part 2)

2011-07-25T10:00:00.000-04:00

One of the great things about Resident Evil 4 is the variety of different gameplay features buried within the core game. While most people remember RE4 for it's panic inducing over the shoulder shooter gameplay, the various boss fights and QTE sections actually changes up the ways players attack each section of the game. For me as a designer, highlighting these sections, and perhaps making players first look at those sections, and then suggesting that there are other ways to tackle the same problem would be a fantastic way of setting up achievements. It's interesting to note that outside of of the main game, the developers have ignored all the other modes that are ripe for coming up new achievements. Obviously there is other constraints that limits a developer, such as development time, and the cost of redoing things, but since I'm treating this as a strict design exercise, that isn't an issue.

Also as of note: I'm not going to be super creative with the names. While some of the most creative achievements are based on puns or other inspiration sources, some achievements are rather boiler plate and I rather not come up with them. Deal with it. :P

So how do we setup the categories? Joe had made a very interesting reply/observation in a previous post of mines, which identified 4 major category of achievements: Progression, Completion, Exploration, Skill. In addition to these groups, I also tend to add additional categories like "collection" and "multiplayer" if and when it's applicable. Let's start with those.

Progression

Surprisingly, in terms of progression, Capcom's list holds up pretty well in this regard, with fairly even checkpoints at the major intersections of the game:

It Begins With a Ring - (Complete first village)
Do Not Shoot the Water! - (Defeat the lake monster)
A Rock and a Hard Place - (Defeat El Gigante /or take alternate path)
Secure the Ballistics - (Rescue the president's daughter)
A Bloodline Severed - (Defeat the village chief in battle)
A Terrifying Assassin - (Turn the tables on Verdugo, the right hand of Salazar)
The Castellan Falls - (Defeat Salazar, and make your escape from the castle.)
The Ties That Bind - (Defeat Krauser, your former partner, in battle)
We're Going Home - (Defeat Saddler in battle, complete game)

The only concern about this list is that a)It might be too top heavy (First 5 are is for the village setting of the game, whereas each remaining settings only gets 2) and b)9 achievements maybe too many. We'll deal with that later.

Completion

With completion, we can address a few more things, most notably, the additional modes within the game.

Various mini games within RE4 that weren't covered.

For Assignment Ada and Separate Ways, let's just tack on a the boiler plate achievement for completing it. Since Separate Ways is considerably longer, let's also give a midway checkpoint

Complete Assignment Ada
Get Past El Gigante (which IIRC, right at the end of Ch 2)
Complete Separate Ways

The Mercenaries, on the other hand, offers a few more of potential completion based achievements.

Survive one round of Mercenries
Survive as all characters at least once
Survive all combinations of characters and stages

Additionally, one thing not included within the Progression set is some sort of marker for a hard difficulty run:

Complete game in Professional mode

Collection

Collection is a catch all for things that aren't exactly about completing a game, but other smaller features that helps give player feedback. While some people may think that this "type" of achievements are a bit self serving and over-obsessive, I personally don't think they're any different than games that hands out other rewards for completion of tasks. Let's go through a rundown of ideas that can better explain this:

With items:

Fully upgrade a gun
Purchased all guns - Owned all guns at least once
Upgrade the Attache Case (1/2/3 times)
Catch a Large Black Bass
Own all chicken egg at the same time (Brown/Normal/Gold/Rotten)
Medicine Man - Own all combinations of herb mixes at the same time

Treasure:

Own all Treasure Map (Main Campaign only)
Own a completed Elegant Mask
Own a Beerstein with the Cateyes
Own the Butterfly Map with Eyes
Own the Royal Insignia and Crown Jewel with Corwn
Own a Golden Lynx with 3 stones attached.
Have collected one of each treasure items
Collected 5 Ruby - By defeating the Dr. Salvador (Cainsaw guy)

Others:

Collect all memos
Collect all Yellow Herbs in the game
Fully upgrade Ashley's Health
Fully upgrade Leon's Health
Visit all Merchant locations

With all the boiler plate stuff out of the way, let's get to the fun ones: Exploration and Skill.

Exploration

Since it's such a large game, lets go through it from start and sample some interesting ideas from each section. I'll add comments to them if they need explaining/or have cleverly worded description text.

Chapter 1.1

A Sign of things to come - Jump out of the first house's second floor window
Temporary relief - Lock yourself in both "safehouse" by boarding up the door and windows. It'll buy some time.
Camper's Refuge - Climb up the bell tower. You can be a pansy, we won't blame you.
Disarm Specialist - Disarm all dynamite within the Village

Chapter 1.2 - Nothing memorable

Chapter 1.3

Fully Complete the Blue Medallion challenge - Earn the gun by shooting all 15 medals

Chapter 2.1

Have the Dog assist you in fighting the first El Gigante

Chapter 2.2

Defend the Cabin with outthe villagers reaching into the second floor

Chapter 2.3

Pick your Poison 1: Choose the Left Route and get to the end (Village Route)
Pick your Poison 2: Choose the Right Route and get to the end (El Gigante Route)
Complete the Left route without sending Ashley hiding
Defeat the El Gigante before it reaches the end of the route.
Take out a village who are trying to jump onto the cable car mid-jump

Chapter 3.1

Defeat El Garrador with both bells destroyed

Chapter 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 - Can't remember if there was anything really memorable

Chapter 4.1

Clear the Lava Hall without getting burned.
Sheet Shooting - Take out at least three Novistador in the Novistador Dome

Chapter 4.2

Take out one El Gigante with the trap door

Chapter 4.3 - Nothing too memorable.

...(I've sort of run out of steam at this point, so I'm going to call it quits for now)

Skill

In regards to "skill" based rewards, there's quite a lot of examples in terms of item usage crossed with the environments, here's a few examples:

Boom goes the dynamite - Shoot a village who's holding a dynamite, taking out two other villagers

Off you go - shoot a village off a plank falling to their death

GET OFF MY ROOF - kick a ladder off with a village onboard.

Bait and switch - Lure a villager into a bomb trap

Take down the El Gigante by stabbing it

Flashbang three Plagas at the same time

Defeat El Garrador with both bells intact

Defeat Verdugo without the Magnum or Rocket Launcher

Defeat both El Gigante in the Molten Room without firing a single shot

...

A staple of Resident Evil fans had be "special runs" - basically gameplay restrictions for the game. These would make very difficult challenges (not impossible) that would make these achievements a badge of merit, such as:

Knife Run - Knife only (except for when a knife is unavailable)
Pistol Run - Only Pistol type weapons can be used
No Health Upgrade Run - Cannot upgrade health for either characters
No death run - No deaths allowed
No Health Kit Run - Cannot heal either character for the entire game
All in a day's work - Finish the game within 8 hours (the timespan of the other game)

As you can see, there's plenty of room to be creative with such achievements, and there's definitely plenty of new ways to create additional replay interest in the game.

Others

A few games have featured two other minor categories of "achievements": Viral - a type of achievement that relies on players "infecting" others by communicating/competing against each other; and "Mark of Shame" - an achievement for something that players did that deserves shaming.

Fortunately in Resident Evil 4, we do have a perfect "Mark of Shame":

At the lake, shoot into it and have to lake monster eat you before the fight even begin.

------------------------------------------

Well that about wraps it up on this long post. I believe this list barely scratches the surface of what can be achieved (I had realized I haven't played the game in a long time, and the last third of the game has been completely lost on me now), but I think this goes to show that a) Capcom really didn't try that hard at all with this, b) some achievements come fairly naturally from just playing the game, and c) being creative with the achievement process can potentially increase player's incentive try out and replay the game.

On My Mind: Why game designers are both the most and least important piece of the puzzle

2011-07-22T17:00:00.000-04:00

Sorry, still not the second part of "Let's Make Up Achievements: Resident Evil 4", it's definitely taking up more time than I had wanted. So instead, let's extend my last post a little but more.

Some people would say "don't shit on where you eat", and I'm about to do that in the following post. As a game designer myself, I would say that game designers are pretty much an unnecessary part of development. This fact finally dawned on me as I continue plugging away at working on an iOS game.

Let's look at small, indie development. Let's say a 1 man team. What would you want? An artists? It's going to be difficult, but you can probably find really really basic coding tools. A programmer? You may suffer from "programmer art", but nothing that prevents from shipping a project. A Designer? Well, you're boned. Even when you scale up to a two man team, the dynamic of programmer/artist/designer still doesn't change. You're still probably better off with a duo of programmer/artist, programmer X2 or even artist X2 than any team that has a designer. In fact, even as you slowly scale up to bigger teams, as long as you have programmers and/or artists who has enough common sense, then you're still going to be fine.

...

...doesn't paint a pretty picture for my career of choice, does it? Well, yes and no. For the sake of argument, I'm strictly speaking about designer from a creative (and not management, scheduling perspective) standpoint, and there are still definitely points why designers are pretty damn important. While a project is on it's way to completion, you're artists and programmers will be fully immersed into their own field; your dedicated designer will be your best bet at catching issues, coming up with ideas and solutions, etc. Ideally, your designer should be someone good enough to see things and advise on direction before sinking resources into features.

...

Sorry, I've rambled on as I'm pretty frustrated at the tremendous amount of work as a designer in a one man team. I'll go back to being a half-baked artist and a half-assed programmer now. See you monday, hopefully the actual Resident Evil 4 article you're looking for.

On My Mind: Why game designers end up buying so many games?

2011-07-20T16:30:00.001-04:00

Thought you were going to get the second part of "Let's Make Up Achievements: Resident Evil 4", didn't you? Sorry, not today, let's shoot for friday, shall we? It's taking a bit longer, and something, much more relevent to me came up.

One of the things over the last 10+ years that's been really interesting observation study at my house. Specifically, the number of new systems and games that mysteriously show up...

Exhibit A: This is only the 360/PS3 shelf, there's also a Wii shelf, and DS case

I've bought an unhealthy share of games and new systems, and I often have justified this fact by saying that as a game designer, it's important for me to know as much and have played as much of everything out there. I've often told people that frankly, I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I don't know every quark and feature of new games, and even tech that's coming out. This is partially a lie, and a surprisingly good excuse for me to just buy and buy games. I did believe that knowing what others are doing is important, but, how important is debatable.

My recent dive into iOS has been interesting and relevant, because it does show that it matters. While messing around with iOS 4 "multitasking" support, one thing I started realizing was some games implementing some sort of background task event, giving the illusion that the game is still running (noticed it on Tiny Towers). Since I don't have one of these fancy new phones (still on a 3G), I had almost forgotten this idea as a gameplay mechanic that I could include.

Now this is interesting because I've always preached about why it is important to own and know the device you're working on. It's pretty damn hard to be innovative and relevant if you aren't in the loop of what others are doing on it, especially for a device like the iPhone, an always on, all in one device. I would say it's impossible to truly understand how people will interact with the game if you don't happen to actually use the device to in your daily cycle. Sometimes, design is entirely based around the platform you're targeting, and knowing the ins and outs of that platform would make a more relevant design that not knowing. It could be something like "oh, using a stylus interface while with the shoulder button and D-Pad on the DS/3DS may be too complex for most players" or "using WiFi access points to trade data like Peace Walker or TWEWY": an idea and rational explanation to a) what things can be done/are being done by developers, b) finding out ideas that people have reacted well to and c) understand the tech that can be inspiration to new ideas.

Pretty good reason to keep on spending money huh? :P Now excuse me, I gotta go buy more games...

Let's Make Up Achievements: Resident Evil 4 (Part 1)

2011-07-18T10:00:00.005-04:00

As I've mentioned before on my Top Ten List, Resident Evil 4 ranks highly as one of those pivotal games for me as a designer. The execution and polish on the game still hold up extremely well 7 years after it's initial release. The variety of content in the game also makes it a great game to think about how to adapt such a game for the achievement generation; the fact that it's also getting a HD Remake, with it's own Achievement List also makes a great way to compare and contrast what can be done.

Resident Evil 4 (Initial Release on GameCube, subsequent re-releases on PS2, Wii, PC, Mobile Phones, PS3, XBox 360)

Features: Single Player Campaign (~8-10 hours first play through), Competitive High Score mode (Merceneries Mode), New Game+ (retains items for additional replay)

Let's get the first thing out of the way: The announced remake's achievement list is bland and completely uninteresting:

*It Begins With a Ring - 50G

Ring the mysterious bell. What happens after that, is up to you.

*Do Not Shoot the Water! - 50G

Summon the master of the lake. Don't rock the boat.

A Rock and a Hard Place - 50G

Outmaneuver the rampaging beast, El Gigante.

*Secure the Ballistics - 50G

Rescue the president's daughter, Ashley. Afterwards, the real fun begins.

*A Bloodline Severed - 50G

Defeat the village chief in battle.

*A Terrifying Assassin - 150G

Turn the tables on Verdugo, the right hand of Salazar.

*The Castellan Falls - 50G

Defeat Salazar, and make your escape from the castle.

*The Ties That Bind - 50G

Defeat Krauser, your former partner, in battle.

*We're Going Home - 100G

Defeat Saddler in battle, and escape from the nightmare.

A Heart of Steel - 150G

Clear the game on the highest difficulty.

What Are They Worth? - 150G

Acquire all of the bottle caps in the game.

The S Stands for Stylish!! - 100G

Acquire all of the costumes in the game.

I've marked the (*) on the achievements that are progression based and unmissible in one runthrough of the game. Let's ignore the fact that this game only has 12 achievements (My quick guess, this game first started out as a XBLA port, which limited it to only 12 achievements), it's disappointing to see that there's absolutely no care when it comes to giving players incentive to play the game differently. 550G/8 achievements are definitely obtainable within the first run (Depending on how they count "Outmaneuver the rampaging beast, El Gigante.", this could potentially also be a progression based achievement), with the remaining 3 devoted to replaying the game to grind out remaining achievements. What's more disappointing is that no attention is paid to the Mercenaries mode, Separate Ways, the countless mini-games within the campaign mode, or any other potentially grinding or skill based achievements.

With that out of the way, let's come up with some interesting ways to make the game more interesting. In the next post, I'll post a brainstorm session of possible achievements based on different categories; and in the following post after that, I'll take all the created ideas and reduce the list to the limit requirements set by Microsoft and Sony.

Post Play Analysis: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (XBox 360)

2011-07-14T13:00:00.000-04:00

When most people think of IO Interactive, the obvious franchise that comes to mind is the Hitman series. I haven't played much of the Hitman games (the most I know of their games is Freedom Fighters, a squad based shooter), but I was onboard with the idea of Kane & Lynch from the start as a grimier, more darker take on shooters with slight squad based gameplay. After the review incident at Gamespot and average to mediocre reviews, I hesitated to get the game until a much later date. It took a while, but I did end up finishing the game recently.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (Played on XBox 360, Single Player Only, ~8 hours)

Cover Based Mechanics

When people think about the creative process, they always think of great people coming up with absolutely original ideas that have never been seen before.

...

That is absolutely not true at all. There's a pretty good vidoc on this called Everything is a Remix (I highly recommend watching it) which points to media and creativity as a reinvention of what has come before it, and while it focuses mainly on other, more "mainstream" mediums such as movies, it also apply to games.

Shooting out of cover from Kane & Lynch

While Kane & Lynch never bills itself as a cover based shooter, because of it's release date, players will always associate the gameplay with Gears of War, released over a year earlier.

Cover in Gears of War

...which, of course, is predated by WinBack or Kill.Switch, depending on how you interpret "cover system as core gameplay mechanic".

WinBack and Kill.Switch, with their early cover system ideas.

The fun part of the history lesson is that a) No, Gears wasn't entirely original, even Cliff Bleszinski have acknowledged that he was inspired the earlier games and b) If someone's done it before it, steal it, improve it, and make it yours.

More importantly, for Kane & Lynch, having such well known predecessors means that their cover system will be judged in comparison even if that was never the original intention. Kane and Lynch utilized a contextual "auto-snap" mechanic that automatically places players to a cover if they are in proximity. In theory, this streamlined process would make the action simpler, allowing players to focus on other tasks; in practice, it became a frustrating exercise in trying to figure out why certain things that look like cover isn't cover, and took players' attention away from focusing on attacking the enemy.

In both Gears of War and Kane & Lynch, cover is a vital part of the mechanic, as players are strongly encouraged to stay in cover (no damage while in cover) and only attacking at certain opportunities. The problem with Kane and Lynch is that Gears of War came first (yes, this is a valid complain), which puts player expectation on how a cover system is suppose to work; when it doesn't work the way players expect, then it feels broken and unfinished. Too often I found myself wishing the cover worked better or not work at all, as the seemingly randomness of it made the game difficult to play. Context sensitive actions are great in theory in reducing the number of actions that players have to manage, but if it becomes a critical point of gameplay, it's probably a safe bet to hand it over to the player to control.

It's interesting to note that Kane & Lynch 2 greatly improved upon this by COPYING Gears of War's cover system down to the icon prompts.

Squad Based Gameplay

What was most disappointing about Kane & Lynch was it's rather bland squad based gameplay. This issue was the most apparent late in the game when you gain control of your own army (of sorts)...

So many guys in your command...

...only to have them die right away. The biggest sin of any squad based game is having useless squad AIs, where players are pretty much required to babysit the AI for long durations of the game. While making the AI too powerful means players don't end up worrying about the life and death of their AI partner, making them too weak or too unintelligent decisions (in this case here, not taking cover) makes the experience a chore. Other sections of the game seems just as inconsistent, where the AI is powerful enough that you never really have to do any work (there's even an achievement for it). Ultimately, the problems with squad based gameplay is that it's always going to be difficult to strike the perfect balance between tedium and excitement. Too much autonomy leaves little room for players interaction and decision making; too little, then it becomes an escort-like gameplay where it becomes tedious and possibly frustrating.

One counter-intuitive way to make squad based gameplay more playable, however, is actually making the AI units even dumber. A good example of this is Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, where units do not make any decisions unless you explicitly instruct them. While unrealistic from a realism standpoint (if an area is clear, they don't get out of cover and catch up to your position), it makes for a much simpler, more clear gameplay mechanic that players can identify and work with. While the units feel dumber and less realistic, they give the player a greater sense of being in command, which is ideally what controlling a squad should feel like.

Also interesting note: squad based gameplay was essentially removed/minimized in the sequel.

Game Atmosphere

For all the average and mediocre gameplay issues, one of the standout points of Kane & Lynch was it's atmosphere, and it's most evident in the nightclub section.

While the game does it's best in delivering a diverse range of environments and settings (warehouse, another warehouse, a bank, office building, jail, jungle, etc.), the Nightclub stands out as one of the most memorable because of how much it actually changed the gameplay. Shooting enemies in the dark with just the strobe lights illuminating the environment was a pretty unique experience, and really worked in emphasizing the character's motivation and the situation they're in. For the first half of the game, you may enjoy the shooting mechanic, but the game does a very good job of reminding you that you aren't the good guys here.

Die, Die and Die again

Before I go, I must present this:

I HATE THIS TRUCK

One mechanic that Kane & Lynch relies on is the tried and true mechanic of "a boss fight", and it runs into the same issues that most "realistic games" run into: it doesn't make any sense, and it's absolutely frustrating. In the above case, you have around 2 minutes to defeat the dump truck (by precisely shooting out the driver) before it runs over your daughter. Why it's frustrating? a) You'll never figure it out unless you die a few times, b) It happens after a large firefight, and you may not have the right guns/enough ammo to do it, c) It's completely different to all the gameplay mechanics prior and d) Did I mention you'll die a lot trying to figure this out?

The checkpoint before this section is a welcomed decision, but it still doesn't guarantee the player has enough ammo, and after repeated tries, players are more than likely to give up on the game entirely.

Sequels do make things better!

While Kane & Lynch was mediocre at best, the sequel managed to improve up on all the issues of the first significantly. I'm sure the issues I've pointed to above were probably raised during their development cycle, but hindsight is always 20/20, and it probably took public feedback for them to really look at how to make things better.

On My Mind: iOS Game Development

2011-07-13T10:00:00.000-04:00

It's no secret I've been working on iOS stuff. For the last little while, I've been pumping out apps as a way for me to get my bearings straight after years of not programming (get them here: Slow Clap Initiative, Friend Code Organizer, Who's Who & Game Budget)(think of them as practice). As of yesterday I've officially started working on a game (or at least pretending to be). You may have noticed that I've started occasionally tweeting messages with #SometimesYouJustCantWin, I'll leave it at that, you'll see more soon.

Realistically, this game I'm working on is a personal project rather than something that can be a commercial product. However, the more I think about what's after this, the more it worries me. A while ago Tycho (you may also know him as Jerry from Penny-Arcade) tweeted this:

Releasing a game on iOS is exactly like going to Vegas, except you ante with your lifeblood.

As interesting as it sounds to be in the iOS space right now, and be independent, that statement really rings true, and it scares the crap out of me. Ignoring the big publishers who can push with advertising and lowball price tactics, there's also great startups with established brands out there. Even if you have a fantastic product, where do you go to get people to notice you or even pay money for your product?

I'm also constantly reminded of Matt Rix's story on Trainyard's development, and I really wonder a)how many games fly under the radar and b)can you actually go all in on iOS development without any other secondary income. The more I think about it, the more I question how long I can go before I throw in the towel.

Not exactly the best way to start a new project, eh?

On My Mind: Radical Directions (again)

2011-07-08T12:10:00.008-04:00

So around two months ago I had a post about "Radical Directions", basically questioning drastic changes for any specific franchises. Interestingly, I actually got a reply from someone who's working on the Ridge Racer game, suggesting that I should be more open to what's being done. Personally, I'm pretty open to major changes to game franchises (it's not like I'm that heavily invested in any of them), but when I blogged about those games, it was with the mindset of "what would the general public think". This is important, as most people aren't going to be as forgiving and as lenient in trying something new...

Then we got Burnout CRASH.

...so wait, what the hell happened here? My initial reaction was one of "what the hell", and "wait, what the hell is this". This isn't the Burnout, or the various crash modes that I remember:

...or the Showtime mode which was found in Paradise:

...let's back this up a bit, and actually explain the old crash mode, and play a bit of devil's advocate in explaining why it's actually like the new game.

Burnout's Crash Mode (and Showtime) in a paragraph

One of Burnout's main attraction as a racing game was the incredible crash physics/particle effects when it first launched on the PS2. Crash Mode was probably an offshoot gameplay idea to take advantage of this visual effect. Players are given a certain setup to crash into, creating a chain reaction of crashes: the more cars are involved, the more damage inflicted, the higher the score. Modifiers such as item pickups were scattered around the stages, and so were specific patterns of vehicles, making it a very strategic puzzle experience. Takedown and Revenge followed up with other additions such as crashbreakers and traffic checking. Even Paradise' Showtime follows a similar formula of having pre-determined traffic patterns at certain road sections, forcing players to strategically plan out their path of crashing.

Why Burnout CRASH is exactly what we've been getting all along

If you analyze what's the core mechanic, the "strategically placed" crashes into patterns of traffic, then you realize that all the crash modes are exactly the same. Paradise' Showtime mode works the same in principle, even though it does not have pre-determined crash junctions, and in theory can last forever. The core mechanic of crash mode is still "a puzzle game where you find the optimal point to crash into", with sequels adding "and find additional points to get even higher score". If you're willing to distill the game to that, then yes, all the Crash mode (even Showtime) is that same game.

So why are people upset?

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's the first two results for "Burnout Crash" on google:

Now compare that to Burnout CRASH:

... can you identify what's different?

Perception is reality, and that really holds true here. Never mind the fact that this isn't the full on Burnout game that people've been waiting for, the fact that this "crash mode", at first glance, seems to be nothing like the games of the old will disappoint people. Sure, the core principles of the game is the same, but how many people who played the game was able to truly appreciate that over "IT'S THE CAR PORN OF CRASHING"? When a brand is established, to be of a certain type of game, it's very hard to get away from it. Imagine the next Call of Duty being announced as a side scroller or Halo as a racing game, and you'd get the same responses here. Even if the game is based on the same idea and plays fantastic, there will be a backlash from fans asking, "well what the hell happened"?

Is there a remedy to this?

...outside of not doing something as drastic? I believe so, and in fact, I think Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light was the perfect example of how to do it.

One of the first things the developers did here was name the game differently. People will still recognize it as part of the franchise, but it was apparent that they were trying to disassociate the game to the core franchises. The other (and much more important) thing was to be upfront about the fact that this is a spin-off game, it is intended to be different, and it's not about delivering the same experience as before. While branding is important, it also creates expectation that any drastic changes as a negative move.

Like my other post, I honestly do hope that this new Burnout won't disappoint. I just hope they have a better plan to market this game to people who were expecting more of the same.

On My Mind: Exposing the flaw

2011-07-08T09:00:00.000-04:00

Recently I've been on a XBLA binge, beating a bunch of games like Age of Booty, A Kingdom of Keflings/World of Keflings, Dead Rising: Case West, and Zombie Apocalypse. While most of it was enjoyable, one thing really struck me was the unlockable mode in Zombie Apocalypse: 7 days of hell.

Let's first explain what Zombie Apocalypse is: basically, another twin-stick shooter in the vein on Robotron 2084 or Geometry Wars, but with a zombie themed settings. Players face insurmountable odds mowing down waves of zombies with limited weapons and powerups randomly scattered on the stage. For what it's worth, the basic gameplay is sound, with enough hooks that seems like a good fit for a smaller scaled game (going for high score, some unique ideas such as environmental kills, etc).

The issue arises halfway in the game (and especially in the 7 days of hell mode), where the game essentially runs out of new ideas or elements to present to the player, and decided to increase the game length/difficulty by increasing the number of enemies (wave length) and their health. While a typical early stage game would give players ~50+ zombies to kill, the first day in "7 days of hell" is ~2500.

Increasing the number of enemies, reducing player's weapon power and increasing the amount of hit points isn't new within games (many still rely on such tried-and-true mechanics for harder difficulties), the problem is that this doesn't necessary create a more intense and interesting experience. In some games, increasing the enemy health or adding more enemies just artificially increases the length of each section of the game; in the worst case, it creates unnecessary repetition, and hence, boredom, which is exactly what happens in Zombie Apocalypse. Worst off, since dying isn't an issue (imaging an arcade machine with unlimited plays), getting to the end of 7 days is a test of patience, not of skill.

What's worrying about including such a mode is that it exposes the flaw of the game design in the first place. Zombie Apocalypse's twin stick shooter mechanics were sound, and tolerable in small doses, but extended play quickly shows that a) the game lacks variety (only 5 main types of enemy), b) lacks strategy (weapon upgrades are temporary, so the core game is still crowd control and player movement) and c) lacks difficulty (end game boils down to spawning more enemies to the point of just overwhelming the player. Once a player realize these points, they're going start establishing play patterns, which makes the gameplay routine and a chore, hence, boring.

Sometimes, creating a mode/play based on certain characteristics of the game can increase the playtime and variety, but it can also point out frustrating issues within the underlying game. Be careful when thinking about adding a mode and think about why it's fun before adding it in.

On My Mind: The Top Ten Lists

2011-07-06T10:00:00.002-04:00

Recently I had an interesting conversation with someone after they found out I made games: they wanted to know "What is my perfect game?" It's interesting because I then spiralled out of control giving a non-sensical 10 minute answer about why it's not possible. Yet within the answer I told him one of the processes I had really liked when talking to people about games: A Top Ten List.

Most gamers have an attention span of a fly, and if you ask them on a game they really like, they're most likely to gravitate to something they've played recently, only because they remember it more. Phrasing a question "What is your 10 most favourite games of all time?" paints a much better picture of that person, more importantly, for me as a designer, it gives me a much clearer idea of what this person sees in games, and what kind of things they look for in the entertainment they enjoy. Let's try a few examples (some of you may know where this came from :P) :

Person A:

Gran Turismo 3
Need for Speed: High Stakes
F1 2002
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Team Fortress 2
NHL 07
Burnout Paradise
Project Gotham Racing 4
Carmageddon
Twisted Metal Black

A very heavy sense of driving/racing games right? I think that's the most obvious thing out of this list. Wolfenstein, TF2 and Twisted Metal Black can sort of be lumped together, and one can assume this person would be interested in team based combat games.

Person B:

Mega Man 2
Super Mario Bros 3
Mike Tyson's Punch Out
Super Mario Kart
Mega Man X
Sonic 3 & Knuckles
New Mario Bros DS
Rock Band
Team Fortress 2
Street Fighter 4

This one is also pretty obvious with platforming dominating the bulk of the list.

Person C:

Phantasy Star (1, 2, 3 and 4)
Lunar (Silver Star and Eternal Blue)
Shining Force (1 and 2)
Chrono Trigger
Megaman X
Virtua Fighter
Street Fighter (2 and 4)
Warcraft 2
Starcraft (1 and 2)
Diablo (1 and 2)

Quite a few old school JRPGs, two highly revered fighting game franchises, and a bunch of Blizzard gams.

What's really interesting with these lists, is that no two person will ever come up with the same one, and more importantly, each will paint a very interesting picture of what they are into. Someone who's list is made up of games entirely before 1995 will have much different taste compared to someone who would name all their favourite games as released within the last two years.

For me though, this kind of list would be interesting when judging the person as a game designer. While this isn't the be all, end all way of judging who/what makes a good designer, these lists could be potential warning signs for someone who's too focused on a specific niche and may not work well in certain roles/projects. For example, if I was making a racing game, and I found a designer who lists nothing but racing games, then they'd be a tremendous asset. However, the same person probably won't be a great fit if I were to make something else completely different.

An extension that I've started appending is a second list, of "10 favourite games of the last 5 years". When people think about their favourite games, they tend to gravitate to really old games, or something really recent; by placing a 5 year limitation, it forces people to really think about what they've enjoyed recently. If I were to ask a designer this question, I would expect a wide range of answers, from really popular AAA titles, to really niche/indie titles that no one has heard of. Even more interesting, is to compared the two lists, and see if the person's tastes have changed over the years, and what has changed.

Obviously, this whole discussion is sort of pointless without example, and specifically, from me, so here's my list:

Top 10 games of all time, sorted by release (including the platform and genre):

Uniracers - SNES/ Racing
Donkey Kong Country 2 - SNES/ Platforming
Zelda Ocarina of Time - N64/ Action Adenture
SSX3 - GC/ Racing/Sports
Ikaruga - GC/ SHMUP
F-Zero GX - GC/ Racing
Resident Evil 4 - GC/ Third Person Shooter
Peggle/Peggle Nights - PC/ Puzzle
Ouendan 1/2/Elite Beat Agents - DS/ Rhythm
Burnout Paradise - 360/ Racing

Top 10 games of last 5 years, sorted by release (including the platform and genre):

Burnout Paradise - 360/ Racing
Portal /2 - PC/ Puzzle
Peggle/Peggle Nights - PC/ Puzzle
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 - XBLA/ SHMUP
WipEout HD - PSN/ Racing
Mirror's Edge - 360 FPS/Platforming
DJ Hero - 360/ Rhythm
Rhythm Heaven - DS/ Rhythm
Art Style: light trax - WiiWare/ Racing
Space Invaders Infinity Gene - iPhone/XBLA / SHMUP

I think the most consistent things from both list is how heavy racing games dominate it (and probably not a surprise to most people who know me), I make no concessions about my love for racing games, and would definitely work on one if I had a chance. However, outside of that, it's pretty hard to draw any more conclusions. You can observe general trends: In the last 5 years, I've favoured smaller, download titles over full game releases; games that have a minimal visual design and interesting audio have also rated highly (Geometry Wars 2, Rhythm Heaven, Art Style: light trax).

Can you spot what's common between these three games?

I'm sure there's way more you can extract out of such a list, and I'm sure that expanding such to 10 games can be even more helpful, but I think this is usually a good enough starting point between any two gamers to start talking about commonalities they see in games.

So, what are your top 10 games?

Administrative Stuff: App #4

2011-07-01T09:00:00.002-04:00

Hello again for yet another special interruption:

Here's number 4:

Game Budget

My design process for apps often revolve around something I do on a daily basis. When I first showed an almost final product to Jon last week, he was like "so it's the same sticky note you have on the computer, basically". The idea is that this allows me to keep track of what game is coming out when and how much. Pretty useful stuff when November rolls around and you realized you have 50 games to buy.

Normal game talk post will resume soon. See you then!

Administrative Stuff: Taking A Break

2011-06-24T09:00:00.002-04:00

My approach to this blog has been write post as they come into mind, and it's worked well for a while. Before the E3 posts, I actually had a few backlog of posts that I can hold back and time their release, which lifts the pressure of coming up with something to talk about right away.

I'm kind of in a lull right now, so it's been hard to come up with something right away. I've also been kinda busy with other stuff, so I'm going to declare a "one week break" and hopefully come back with some new material. Some of the other articles (post play, specifically) seem to take a bit longer for me to write, so I'm wondering if I should reduce from 3 post a week to two posts a week.

Post your feedback, and I'll see you next week.

Let's Talk Achievements: Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved (XBLA)

2011-06-22T10:00:00.002-04:00

As the first official post for "Let's Talk Achievements", I think it's appropriate to talk about what I feel was the first game that really "gets it": Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved. It's also interesting to note that while GeoWars 2 "gets it", it also breaks quite a few conventions and rules that I believe most game have followed, with mixed results.

Since this is the first post, I'm basically trying out some structure of formatting, please send feedback if you think I can fix any part of this post.

Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved (XBLA)

Achievements for Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved, in Alphabetical Order

Game Over (15)
Reach the end of sequence.
Magpie (15)
Collect 500 geoms in a single game.

Millionaire (15)
Score at least 1,000,000 points in all single player modes.
Phobia (15)
Score 1,000 points in Waves without collecting any geoms.
Rebound (15)
Destroy 75 enemies in a game of Deadline using bullets bounced off of gates.
Slalom (15)
Chain together 5 gates in 5 seconds. Crossing at least one gate every second.
Smile (25)
2, 4, 11, 15, 17, 18 and 19.

Surf (15)
Dodge 8 lines of enemies in Waves without firing a shot, or destroying any enemies.
Treaty (15)
Activate 30 zones in King without firing a shot, or destroying any enemies.
Unlocked All Modes (25)
Unlock all game modes.
Wax On (15)
Rub your ship along all four arena walls in Pacifism.
Wax Off (15)
Perform the Wax On achievement twice in a single game, don't forget to breathe.

Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved is a basic twin stick shooter released initially on XBox Live Arcade (it's since then made the jump to other platforms), new to this game is the 6 different "remix" modes, each featuring unique rules that make the game feel significantly different from each other. You can find more details here.

One of the first things you will notice with this achievement list is that if a typical player does not look at the list, a typical first playthrough (I'd define it in this game as "seeing all the modes") will yield only 1-3 achievements:

Unlocked All Modes (25)

Unlock all game modes.

Magpie (15)
Collect 500 geoms in a single game.
Millionaire (15)
Score at least 1,000,000 points in all single player modes.

The latter two based on player skill (both seemed to be set low enough that most competent players should be able to get it within the first time, if not within 5 or 6 repeated replays of the same stage).

I consider this group of achievement "completion based", and GeoWars 2 is fairly typical of most games in the final score range (~25% of all achievements). It is interesting to note that players are highly unlikely to earn anything within their first initial play (within the first 10 minutes), which is something many games have strived for (some going as far as a freebie at the start of the first opening cinematic).

Where Geometry Wars 2 shines is the remainder of the achievements, where instead of the traditional sets of "multiplayer", "challenges", "grind" based achievements, the developers decided to add a whole new set of challenges based on the rules of the game, targeting specifically the new modes within the game. These challenges are different from typical "challenge achievements" in that they aren't based on the high score/difficult section of the game (which most games, even Geometry Wars 1 did), but rather new "goals" based on the rules of each mode. Let's look at each mode and the accompanying achievements:

Deadline:
Rebound (15)
Destroy 75 enemies in a game of Deadline using bullets bounced off of gates.

Deadline's achievement is an interesting mix of "tutorial" and "challenge". It's highly unlikely players will obtain this achievement (in fact, the ways to obtain the achievement are more likely to result in a lower score), and what's brilliant about it is that they teach about some of the new rules in this game (rebound shows of reflective bullets).

King:
Treaty (15)

Activate 30 zones in King without firing a shot, or destroying any enemies.

King's only achievement is an interesting twist on the original Pacifism by adding it with the new restriction of capturing the zones. It's a brilliant way to force players to rethink their play strategy in this mode, and potential give players new ideas how to build a higher score in their normal play.

Evolved:
No specific achievement were in Evolved, which I guess is fitting as they want to highlight the different modes.

Pacifism:
Slalom (15)
Chain together 5 gates in 5 seconds. Crossing at least one gate every second.
Wax On (15)
Rub your ship along all four arena walls in Pacifism.
Wax Off (15)
Perform the Wax On achievement twice in a single game, don't forget to breathe.

Pacifism's three
achievements shows a great deal of insight into how to make memorable and interesting achievements.

1) Take the existing rules of the game, and challenge the players with a slightly different way of playing the game using said mechanic. In Slalom, your goal is to run through the gates as fast as possible (in contrast to the normal gameplay progression of saving them for high score); In Wax On/Off, it's placing an additional constraint in addition to just avoiding ships (notice it's similar to Treaty.

2)(In the case of Wax On/Off) It's got a catch-y name based on popular sayings (Cliff B
leszinski, creator of Gears of War have said that during their design process, finding cool sounding and joke worthy achievement name is the start of their process). The pun-y name also explains the objective and the end result of the goal, which is always a plus.

Waves:

Phobia (15)
Score 1,000 points in Waves without collecting any geoms.
Surf (15)
Dodge 8 lines of enemies in Waves without firing a shot, or destroying any enemies.

Waves first debuted in Project Gothem Racing 4 as a minigame bonus, where the gameplay was entirely based around a new type of enemy that form and move in a "wave" pattern. The two achievements, like all the other ones before, are minor tweaks on the rules that greatly changes the play mechanices: Surf is obvious, dodge the waves without shooting (which is extremely hard as each additional wave adds more obstacles); Phobia is partially related to Waves, as most players would relate "collecting geoms" to shooting enemies, and again, it's an achievement that says "here's a mechanic we have in this game, instead of using it, the new gameplay is to avoid it".

Sequence:
Game Over (15)
Reach the end of sequence.
Smile (25)
2, 4, 11, 15, 17, 18 and 19.

Sequence, the last remix mode, is by far the hardest mode in the game, and the achievements show it. Reaching the end of sequence's 20 stages is no small feat, and it feels right to have an achievement attached to it. Smile, on the other hand, is an even more interesting twist on Game Over, as the numbers indicate the specific stages that the player has to do... something.

Players who've played enough of sequence will eventually notice that there are three states for each stage of sequence: Pass (Checkmark), Fail (X) and Timeout (o), and then it became obvious that players need to pass, fail and timeout specific stages in the specific order. This, unlike Game Over, is even more difficult to achieve, and is a brilliant cap-off as the last achievement of the game.

A few things to note in general about all the achievements:

a) All of them are based on interesting variants based on the original mechanics of the game. The goal of the achievement was to make players play differently from the "normal" and forcing them to rethink their strategy.
a) Interesting to note that all the achievements have the same value except for Game Over and Unlock All Modes, which acts as goalposts for "completion".
b) By having no "grind" and "multiplayer" focused achievements, the challenges retain the same feeling of panic inducing anxiety that is consistent throughout the whole game. While all the achievements are based on variants, they aren't so removed from the core experience that you end up feeling like you're playing something else.

On My Mind: Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake's little details

2011-06-20T09:00:00.001-04:00

Over the weekend Nintendo released the the Zelda Ocarina of Time on the 3DS. As mentioned before, I've been pretty disappointed with the trend of ports and remakes in recent years, but I feel that this game may be the proper exception to the rule:

1) The original N64 game is now is now approaching 14 years old. To put that into perspective, Duke Nukem was in production for that entire time! Kids born then might have never experienced such a game, so it make sense to bring it back. More specifically, consider how dated the game looks back then:

Never mind the 3D effects, the fact that the 3DS is a more powerful hardware finally gives the game a proper tribute that stands up to today's visual expectations. Transparency textures, depth of field effect, distance fog, high polygon count and texture detail give this game some life before it's forgotten by time.

2) The 3D feels right. Unlike most of the launch 3DS titles, the 3D effects actually do feel like they enhance the experience. One of the often mentioned issues with "3D games" (games where characters moves in a 3D space) is that players would typically have issues judging with the depth of characters and enemies in the world. Games making the jump to 3D often created other design solutions to avoid such issues (and in Zelda, the Z-Targetting lock-on and Auto-jump). The 3D effect here makes judging attack distance more manageable, and makes the game feel "right".

3) The most important thing about this remake is the incredible attention to detail that's been applied. With the increase in texture detail, Grezzo, the developer of this iteration has been able to fill in details that makes sense within the world. Issues such as item swapping that were in the original game have been smoothed out, and camera control feels so natural that it feels the game was designed for the system from the start.

Do I mind more remakes if they paid as much attention to detail? Probably, for now.

Bonus: Another note for how much attention they paid to this project, see this original N64 commercial:

and compare this to the new 3DS commercial:

It's an awesome shot-by-shot commercial remake.

On My Mind: Let's face it, We Are Doomed.

2011-06-17T10:00:00.004-04:00

I often read Cracked like I read The Onion: Merely edited and slightly refined version of bad forum-posts and fan-fiction. These sites thrive on the idea of being absurd, and that they parody real life in impossible ways.

Then there was this article:

The 6 Most Ominous Trends in Video Games

Just in time for E3, the author's intent was probably to satirize what's going on, yet I get the feeling that by the end of the article it's become apparent:

The Video Game Industry as it is, is fucking doomed.

The first five points: Going backwards with technology, DRM, Turning games into a service, Sequel-itis, Lack of vision for the future, I totally agree with. It's pretty obvious that in general, companies have become more risk adverse with new IPs, dumbing down the experience to chase down a casual audience, and trying to squeeze as much money out of as little work as possible. While I appreciate some of the fan favourite sequels, the total lack of innovation from all parties, the bombardment of "HD Remakes", and the new coat of paint over well-worn ideas is doing one hell of a job in pushing me away from caring.

On My Mind: Asynchronous Gameplay (More thoughts on Wii U, from 2003)

2011-06-15T11:00:00.008-04:00

Nintendo is a a very interesting company, no matter how bad an idea seemed in the past, they always find a way to revive it, with variating degrees of successes:

(Image source courtesy of Ivan)

It's not just their consoles or technology either, it's also in their games (ok, I don't mean rehashing franchises). Case and point, the Chase Mii demo for the Wii U:

Nintendo calls it "Asynchronous Gameplay", which is a pretty good description of what it really is: there are two classes of players, one type that gets different information from the other, and the game is not just interacting within the game world, but rather with the different classes of players.

In Chase Mii, players with the normal Wii Remotes have a much more limited over the shoulder view, and they need to chase down the player with the Wii U controller, who can see the entire playfield in their personal screen. Players who are playing with the Wii Remotes needs to work together by relaying information about what they see to be successful. Sounds ingenious, right? Something that's brand new, and completely original...

... or is it?

In E3 2003, Shigeru Miyamoto unveiled a new twist on a classic game. The presentation itself was a disaster (You can watch the trainwreak here), and there's a specific reason for that (and Nintendo has managed to avoid it in the Wii U presentation). That game in question: Pac Man Vs:

Just by the title screen, can you guess what's the similarity?

In Pac Man Vs, players with the Gamecube controllers have a much more limited over the top view, and they need to chase down the player with the Game Boy Advance Controller, who can see the entire playfield in their personal screen. Players who are playing with the Gamecube controllers needs to work together by relaying information about what they see to be successful.

You see what I did there? I replaced 4 phrases (in italics), and managed to describe Pac Man Vs in a nutshell!

Sure, the game is more defined in mechanics (ghosts chase Pac Man; Pac Man needs to find the power pill, and the chase is reversed; the fruit is a powerup for everyone, etc), but essentially, this was Chase Mii, from 2003.

Recently I had fired up the game again with a few friends (HI!!!), and the game still holds up well (as far as gameplay is concerned). The game is still all about outsmarting the other "group" of player(s), and it was entertaining for all of us, until the physical boundaries of wires came into play. Unfortunately, the lack of wireless controllers meant that within 10 minutes, the cables were all in a tangled mess, and we had secondary meta game of untangling wires.

I think my point of this post wasn't to show that Nintendo isn't original (well, it's debatable), but rather I think the general public might have brushed off the potential of asynchronous gameplay much too early without trying it out. Off the top of my head, I can come up with quite a few variation of new gameplay with this setup (especially within the online realm):

In a team based online sports game, two teams of four play on the field, with normal movement (think baseketball or soccer), whereas the players with the Wii U controller can be the coach, drawing and highlighting sections of the playfield to the players (think of TV broadcast tele-prompts)
Team based capture the flag FPS, where the player with the Wii U controller is in charge of base management (perhaps a tower defense like resource gathering), and can communicate with their team
In a racing game where cars and helicopters are involve (Split/Second's air raid mode comes to mind), the Wii U controller is the helicopter player, shooting at the opposing team's cars. Cars can fire back at the helicopter.

It's not hard to see that there's quite a bit of potential in just this one usage case of the controller. If you can hunt down a copy of Pac Man Vs, and the necessary hardware, I would wholeheartedly recommend experiencing the future for yourself.

On My Mind: Price Discrimination

2011-06-13T09:00:00.002-04:00

(Note: This was writing a while ago... E3 sorta delayed all this... :P)

Speaking of Digital Distribution, one thing that is really weird to see is the public assumption that digital releases should be under X amount of dollars. I do agree with the general consensus that they should be somewhat cheaper because the cost of manufacturing, packaging and delivery is gone, but that doesn't mean that everything released on services like PSN or XBL should be under $20. I blame Nintendo, MS and Sony for not able to "separate" retail releases to "tiers" of pricing levels: not all games are made equal, and not all of them should be priced the same at the start.

Price Discrimination is a practice that most industries employ on their products, but games have largely stayed away from this for some odd reason. Platform holders had perceived this flexible pricing as "signs of weakness" to the games on the platform, but I'd argue that charging full price on a shorter game is more damaging to the brand and platform. For example, the recent release of Steel Diver on the 3DS was often argued to be lacking in substance, so why release at the same price as all other retail games? By putting it at a slightly lower price, it could have be better received. While most reviews (and reviewers) claim that they don't judge a product based on price, this factor still comes into play for most consumers: evaluating the dollar value of any given product. Hopefully companies will soon realize that not all games are made equally, and shouldn't be priced as such.

In The News/On My Mind: E3 2011 Part 4 (Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U)

2011-06-10T10:00:00.003-04:00

Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U.

OK, I got that out of my system.

So, yeah. Nintendo. First thing first, let me clarify two things that weren't too obvious from their press conference.

a) The Wii is dead.

b) The DS/DSi is dead.

For the Wii, there are only a handful of interesting titles left: Sure, Zelda: Skyward Swords is going to be all sorts of awesome, but outside of the hardcore, will anyone even know what Rhythm Heaven, Kirby Wii or even more obscure titles like Fortune Street (I highly recommend Rhythm Heaven if it comes remotely close to it's handheld counterparts). With no new big titles announced (Kirby is a old project from 2005, and Fortune Street is an existing Japanese localization title), it's safe to say that the Wii is done as far as new titles are concerned. The DS is in a similar boat, with few new titles left to be released. While this doesn't mean these systems aren't worth keeping (still tons of great games out there), if you're looking for something new, it's time to look elsewhere.

The 3DS is now in a very interesting place, given PS Vita's price announcement. The system hasn't sold the way people expected it to sell, and the lack of compelling or breakout software should be cause for concern right about now. What is the 3DS's Nintendogs (and Nintendogs + Cats didn't do the trick either)? Nintendo's finally shown more of Mario Kart 3DS and new Super Mario, yet there's still no sign of Pokemon either. While Nintendo's been able to show some more new third party games on the system, it seems like they still can't answer for whether the system will be as successful as the Nintendo DS. It also seems infinitely harder to gauge whether that DS audience have left for the iOS platform already. (Hey, maybe they need angry birds 3D! :P)

Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U Wii U.

So yeah, Wii U. Let's get a few things straight:

This is the new system, and the new screen controller. Yes, there is actually a new system.

While the actual hardware is interesting, I honestly think this was the worst thing I saw this entire E3 because of how Nintendo unveiled it. I understand that the controller is the focal point of the package, but when I had to second guess myself on whether it's a new system halfway through your presentation, then it's gone terribly. Having your system support older controllers and accessories is a great point, but when the video shows all the older accessories in use, with existing game images, it makes people question what's new. In fact, the only hint of it being a new, powerful system was when a Twilight Princess-esque Zelda HD demo was shown on screen. The lack of any other concrete info, like online infrastructure, actual game demos, etc, also puts a damper into what could have been an interesting hardware.

Putting aside the absolutely terrible showing of an announcement, the actual hardware can bring some interesting possibilities (I won't get into the whole hardware specs thing, I think that's irrelevant to me as a designer outside of it being comparable to today's standards). The Chase Mii demo is a fantastic showing of what's possible with this controller setup (in ways similar to the old Pac Man Vs game). Having the second screen being capable of showing alternative views, in a way, is another form of the "augmented reality" experience, and I can see pretty new and interesting ways that could change how we see games. Some have mentioned how games like Batman Arkham City could take advantage of the tablet screen as a detective mode filter, and with at least another year before launch, I can't wait to see what other people can come up with.

But yes, the name is terrible. Just like "Wii", but we'll get over it. I hope.

In The News/On My Mind: E3 2011 Part 3 (3D and Vita)

2011-06-09T13:00:00.000-04:00

If the Microsoft Press conference was "Get A Kinect", then the Sony Press conference can be summed up with "Get a 3DTV and a Move Bundle". Well, I'm selling the PS Vita short (and definitely the highlight of their show), but it makes for a nice intro.

The Playstation 3's software showing, while impressive (Uncharted 3 looks jaw-dropping from start to finish), is just as mediocre as the Microsoft showing: filled with sequels, HD remakes (God of War PSP and Ico/Shadow of Colossus), and, oddly enough, Infamous 2, a game that was released this week. The only real surprise was CCP's Dust 514, and even then, the FPS fatigue has set in so much that I'm not sure if I can bring myself to care. However, Bioshock Infinite looks just as interesting as before, and Sly Cooper Thieves in Time do look fresh and interesting. The heavy emphasis on 3D was so central to the presentation that at one point, Sony unveiled a 24" Playstation branded 3DTV for this. Frankly, the way Sony has behaved in the last year or so has made me feel very uncomfortable about not having a 3DTV, and not in a good way that makes me want to get one, but rather feeling like a second class citizen (which I guess is about the same for any XBox owners without a Kinect).

Playstation Move seems to be getting a big push, but I think even Sony realize they aren't too sure what to do with it. Shooters are obvious, and creating a bundle for Resistance 3 is a smart move (haha, get it), but telling us it's simple to play by dragging out Kobe Bryant (and having it fail on him) wasn't the best showcase of it. Medieval Moves: Deadmund’s Quest looks just as awkward as Fable: The Journey on Kinect, and it's becoming painfully obvious that despite both Sony and Microsoft saying that their technical solution is better (and on paper, they should be), their attempts of motion controls still leaves lots to be desired.

The NGP, or now known as the PS Vita, is the true star of the show. The price ($249/$299) is absolutely fantastic, and should make Nintendo worry about the 3DS's future right about now. Uncharted, Little Big Planet and Wipeout looks fantastic on it, as with the surprise announcement with Street Fighter X Tekken on the system. What's more interesting is the cross compatibility that seems to be a heavy component of all Vita games, essentially letter people take their PS3 games on the go (and vice versa).

For me though, one of the issues I think the Vita will face is still the same problem that the PSP had: Does this matter to your core audience? Is your Playstation home console fan likely to buy a portable system for the same game experience? It was a solid "no" on the PSP, and I have a hard time seeing it happen with the Vita. Sure, Uncharted Golden Abyss is a new title and comes with new story and gameplay, but outside of almost gimmicky touch based controls, is it any different than the home experience? One of the strong points of portable games have always been about pick up and play, and the best handheld titles are always designed with that in mind. While some have been betting on transferring the home console experience over, I'm not sure the market has wanted or needed such types of games.

Handheld systems have always been defined by a breakout title that highlights the system and it's difference to other platforms: the DS has Nintendogs; and the iOS devices have Angry Birds. I hope Sony can find something quickly before this system turns into another "downport machine".

Administrative Stuff: iOS App, Round 3

2011-06-09T09:00:00.001-04:00

Hello again for yet another special interruption:

As with last time's special interruption, I have a new iOS app out, so please check it out.

Who's Who?

For me, this was the next logical step in the learning process of making stuff, it's adding a bunch of stuff I will need to learn, so here it is.

From a usability standpoint, it's a tool that I thought seemed obvious yet missing. Too often I find myself forgetting who's screen-name is who on different platforms, and I'd randomly guess who I'm talking to. I'm sure there's lots of improvements to be made, and if you can think of anything, please do contact me so that I can integrate/add it in to make the tool work for you.

Normal game talk post will resume soon. See you then!

In The News/On My Mind: E3 2011 Part 2 (The Kinect Experience)

2011-06-08T15:00:00.001-04:00

(Note: A slight delay in posting, I'm pretty tired and beat up from watching everything over the last two days, apologies for the wasted time)

So, E3 Conferences, always fun and entertaining, right? Well, sort of. In the recent years, it's been more about watching and reading reactions of others, because as the gaming market expands to a more mainstream audience, it's become obvious that these press conferences aren't targeted strictly for the core audience anymore, and Microsoft's conference is a very good example of this. Let's get this out of the way, unlike most of the internets and game analysis, I'm still pretty excited about some of the possibilities of Kinect. Emphasis on SOME.

To start, yes, core games were there, and they serve the existing fanbase just fine. Call of Duty MW3, Tomb Raider, Gears of War 3, Halo remake and Halo 4 IS what the core audience would have asked for anyways. It is definitely disappointing to see that investment of new IP for core games seems to be nowhere to be found, but this doesn't, and shouldn'tmatter for that core audience anyways. (Halo 1 remake, as I had sort of predicted, is disappointing and lazy, but will sell)

The Kinect integration into core games is where it gets interesting (and where my feelings diverge from the mainstream): While Mass Effect 3 employ Kinect for voice command controls, and Forza 4 using it for Head Tracking display, it's also safe to say that these games are still very much for the core audience. They're completely optional experiences, and in the case for Forza 4, the added function can actually help the in-car experience.

Ghost Recon Gunsmith with Kinect support is the most interesting case, as the UI manipulation seems to be the most stable, and the most satisfying interaction that evokes memories scenes in Minority Report.

Sure, I'm going gaga over a interface for a game, but I think that's the most solid demo of what a well done and potentially well tested interface can work in a game, it gives me hope that there are ways to make kinect work for games...

...then there's the actual shooting section, which looked imprecise, choppy, and terrible to control. Sure, the reloading looks cool, along with zooming, but the "open palm to fire"? This is the same thing everyone was concerned about with motion based gaming, pretending to fire a gun. I want no part of it, and thankfully, it's optional.

Now to the bad stuff, the Kinect based games: Disney Adventure looks terrible; Kinect Star Wars looks sluggish and not in the way anyone picture how Jedi's should move; Fable The Journey seems impractical as a rail shooter; even Ryse seemed like a "been there, done that" experience from the Wii (even if it's done better here). Kinect Fun Labs is interesting, but no more than a minor 5 minute diversion that finally completes their vision statement from the Project Natal days. Dance Central makes a nice return, but it's not going to find a new audience outside of people who liked the first one.

I can go on and on about why some of the Kinect stuff didn't seem to work, but does it really matter? To Microsoft, this press conference is about showing stuff to the mainstream. Youtube channel and UFC channel is a huge win to the general public (according to MS, 40% of time on the XBox is spent on non-game application), and Kinect Disney Adventure and Kinect Star Wars will be big hit with kids whether they work or not (Just like Just Dance, which is now on their third iteration).

It is interesting to note that slowly but surely, Microsoft is making it clear that the XBox experience will be "get a Kinect or get left behind". I honestly thought Microsoft played the conference as well as they could: Emphasize that core games are still there, show that core games can have good Kinect usage, show that they have lots of Kinect games for the new audience that just got it for the Kinect (Fruit Ninja Kinect will sell boatloads). Sure, it's disappointing that not much new is coming out for the core audience (except for Halo 4), but does it matter? The same core audience will get the third party games shown by other devs on the system anyways, it didn't hurt them last year when they showed nothing but Kinect, and it won't hurt them this year when the core fans snap up games like Arkham City and Skyrim over the Kinect titles.

In The News/On My Mind: E3 2011 Part 1 (Remade in HD)

2011-06-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

While the real E3 conference hasn't started yet, we got a taste of things to come on Thursday with Konami's pre-recorded conference. Highlights: Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, Zone of Enders HD Collection, Silent Hill HD Collection. I'm sure there were new and exciting stuff that was said (I believe someone mentioned Contra, but nope, didn't see anything), but who cares, we're getting this:

!!!

However, as much as I'm excited to play MGS:PW with people online, and revisiting MGS3, I'm somewhat disappointed by this new trend of "HD Remakes", especially coming from Japanese developers and publishers as a whole. Remakes and upgrades of "classic"/"cult" titles is nothing new, especially to this generation, with games like the God of War Collection and The Sly Collection, and the much anticipated Ico and Shadow of the Colossus Collection, but this new recent batch of announced remakes should make anyone who enjoy games worry about what's going on.

Sure, other companies like Eidos and Ubisoft has done similar HD Remakes (Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia), but with the recently announced Resident Evil 4/Code Veronica remakes, the Monster Hunter 3rd "PSP Remaster", and now with Konami announcing Metal Gear, Zone of Enders and Silent Hill HD Remakes, one has to wonder where original game development is heading. If companies are devoting resources and budget to these remakes, then we're going to see less new/original content. It feels like a short-sighted way of padding your bottom end, which completely sacrificing the long term success. If this is a sign of things to come for the next few days, I truly worry about where games will be heading soon.

On My Mind: Visibility Affordance in an Open World Game

2011-06-03T09:00:00.000-04:00

I've just finished the main story in LA Noire. I'm not about to call it over just yet (probably wait for some of the DLC, and maybe redo some of the cases and see how it holds up). However, playing through the game, I now have an axe to grind:

The God Damn Fences.

In computer terms, specifically in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), affordance is usually defined how people interact with software/hardware, and the experience and expectation within that interaction. In games and interactive media, affordance would boil down to a much more simpler explanation: "Do things behave like how I expect them to". Notice I stayed away from saying "Do things behave like I expect in the real world": a game can be consistent with itself while still be completely abstract and away from reality. For example, in Gears of War, the commonly joked "chest high walls" is an absolutely fantastic object: you can always attach to it for cover, it's always a solid cover that can't be shot through, and the game is littered with them that is always going to behave the same. This isn't an accurate portrayal of how the real world works, but players can rely on their knowledge that every piece of cover is always the same.

So why is affordance important? People like consistency, or more specifically, people like it when their world views are consistent. In the real world, gravity works exactly the same, everyday, and that's very comforting for everyday routines. You know that if you jump, you know exactly where you should land. Games are interesting because it allows for an entirely new/different wold view to be constructed without violating real life, and that becomes an interesting mechanic/puzzle for players to solve: Do Portal's portals make sense in real life? No, but the way velocity is conserved is consistent throughout the game that it makes sense. Do "chest high walls" make sense? Definitely not, but since everything in the world behaves with the same rules, then it's correct, within that game context.

So, what does this have to do with fences?

I'm using LA Noire as a recent and prime example, but this issue with visibility affordance applies to almost all open world sandbox games like GTA and Saints Row. In fact, the only game I can think of that dodged this issue successfully is Red Faction: Guerrilla (which I'll explain later on). Affordance in an open world sandbox game usually much simpler to define, but hard to replicate: Do what real life does. In all of these games, running into people, and you'll knock them down; hit them hard enough, and they'll ragdoll "realistically"; drive into a wall, and you'll crash (or worse, the car blows up) The problem then arises when something feels off: like driving into fences.

In LA Noire, there are certain sequences where you're taught to drive through gated fence. This is then carried over in other sequences where you have to chase suspects down. However, this "crash-able fence" is only on the gated ones, whereas others are completely solid, affordance halting your progress. Visually when driving, both types of fences look identical, hence, the affordance problem. This problem extends to other objects in the game too: benches, newspaper box are perfectly destructible, but fences that are even shorter than such objects in areas like parks aren't; some lightposts are destructible, unless they had a police phone attached to it, then it's not. The worst offender was during one sequence where the player is chasing the suspect, where they crash through a light post right next to a temporary metal tent: if you happen to drive slightly off and hit the tent, you crash. Visually the light post is 4-5 times thicker, and you know for a fact that a light post is bolted to the ground, and a temporary metal tent isn't. Other open world sandbox games like GTA and Saints Row suffers from similar issues too: trees that are indestructible, compared to street lights; bigger vehicles at higher speeds not translating to real momentum/cause bigger impact.

Why it happens? Laziness? Unwilling to work design around gameplay? Technical issues? These are all very possible causes, but the players won't care, because once it goes wrong, it will forever feel wrong for them. Instead of offering a solution (without knowing why it happens in other games), I point to Red Faction Guerrilla as a game that did it right and avoiding these affordance issues.

Red Faction's first key design key point that allows it to avoid affordance pitfalls was it's setting: by placing the setting on Mars, it allowed the physics to be different. This is important, as it allows all sorts of logical design changes, such as the way characters move around, how vehicles handle and react to physics and crashes, and even cosmetic things like how players are fenced and blocked off in the world. Players who look at games like LA Noire or GTA always ask: well why am I on this island/why do all the roads wrap into themselves. Having the game set on a distant planet, you can easily explain via the environment. The setting also lets them explain behaviours that players would find odd in other games: Floaty jumping? Low Gravity!

The other major design/tech factor that really helps sell the affordance in the world? Their destruction tech. Since everything "man made" is destroyable, it avoid the issue of wonky, unexplained physics that most other games suffer: get a bigger car would allow you to smash further into a building. It basically eliminates the "here's a tree/fence that cannot be smashed through" issue, replaced with "everything can be destroyed, just as long as you're fast enough". While it's not the most realistic model, it's ironically more familiar to everyone who understands how physics works in real life.

In the end, affordance isn't about realism. The casual observer may think that it is, and would say "just copy how things work in real life", but in reality, it's far more accurate to do what people "think" might happen than to do what is real. What is perceived as real is far more accurate and convincing than any simulation, and game designers should understand and work with this in all their games.

On My Mind: Journey through Debug land

2011-05-31T18:39:00.003-04:00

This post is one that hits very close, and it won't seem that interesting or relevant, but it's a fun story, at least I think it is. At the very least, you get a peek into how I do debug (or basically how designers and testers would do debugging for a game).

One of the new things I get to do with my new state of employed-ness is to actually finish games. It's not really a "plus", but I'll take whatever I can get. My next victim, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. Well, it was, until a game breaking glitch early in the game has rendered the game unplayable on my profile now. So, where do I start.

The issue point:

At a fairly early part of the game (within first hour of play), you unlock the rewind magic. Right after, as you walk, you will fall, and trigger an in-game cutscene, where you are taught how to use rewind.

What happened:

When rewind happened, the game and system became unresponsive, for over half a minute, you can still hear sound, and pressing the XBox guide brought up the sound too. Then it got weird. I then suddenly unlocked "Ding! Level Up!" (For purchasing an item), followed by "Not how it Happened" (use rewind 20 times). Well, this was interesting. The game, by this point, has locked up, and wasn't going anywhere, so time for me to restart.

The next time (and every time since then if I get this far), the game resumes with the previous checkpoint, plays cutscenes, and either a) locks up right away or b) insta-kill me as if the rewind didn't count.

This is what it looks like when it locks up (99%) of the time, it's right after he finishes talking and the game is about to resume.

The Test Cases:

So, at this point, the possible causes are:

a) Hardware/System issues

b) Disk

c) Save Data

d) Game Bug

So, to test the easy things first, I did the following:

1) Test the game on a different 360 (nope)

2) Test the game without using HDD install data (nope)

3) Test the game with my profile and save data in different locations (HDD, USB, MU) (nope)

4) Test the game with bout title update and no-update (nope)

5) Recovered my gamertag from MS.

This pretty much ruled out Hardware issues (and the fact that it still play other games kinda proves it)

Next worry is the disk being scratched/damaged. However, since I have no way of getting a second disk, I had to assume it's not the disk, and try something else to get to that part. The idea is, if a different save data gets me past there, then it's not a disk issue right?

Since I didn't want to delete my current save, I got a new profile, and a new save data, and ran the game. Played for almost an hour and got to the offending point, and...

...it got past it.

Well, this removes the whole disk damaged theory. So, let's delete my save game on my profile, and start over (it's only an hour, right).

Wrong.

In starting a new game using my profile and no saved game, the game crashed at the first loading screen.

Well, this is bad.

Interestingly, my intuition suggested to try a cleaver trick: Load a new profile and start a new game; while the game is running, sign in to my own profile, and see if it works. (Why I did this? Pure intuition. Signing in/out seems to be one of those edge cases that programmers should test for, right?)...

... and it did work. And I managed to start a new game on my own profile, only to be halted back at the same point again. One interesting thing to note, at this point, was that I was still earning new "cumulative achievements", such as break 100 pots. This tipped me off to something...

I started looking around for things that are saved other than game progress, and guess what, it seems that options aren't tied to saves either. I had disabled tutorial one time, removed the save data, and started again, tutorial stayed disabled. Most troubling find, was this screen and how I stumbled upon it:

This screen was accessed at the start of new game with no save data on my profile, it's the upgrade menu. This menu (confirmed by Ivan, a friend) isn't accessible via back button at the start of the game. So a) why can I access this, and b) why is it filled with stuff? Testing with my new profile and new save, this screen becomes unlocked after where my old game has crashed, and is an empty grid.

And this is where my search ends, and most likely me playing this game.

The Theory

In my mind, given all the facts and what I know about how the save system works, I have a few ideas of what the issue is.

1) The "unearned achievements" is a simple one to explain: when the game was unresponsive, it was incrementing something internal, and blew up some data storage/variables as it was looping. This would explain how I got "Not how it happened (rewind 20 times" even though I've done 1 rewind.

2) If that was being incremented, and as the magic screen as indicated along with the achievement, who knows what other values that were stored blew up. (Since these save data is suppose to be small, it's entirely possible that the game wasn't careful and saved it as a NaN, a large negative number, or other corrupted data.

3) Deleting the save file and starting new causing the game to lock up at the start screen, combined with loading the game with that magic screen, points to three things:

a) The game is saving achievements and other data within the profile, and is retrieving them for use. (This can be verified with other games, some games don't even have a save data, and it's saved within the profile) It's the only explaination for how the magic window is still open.

b) When game does a check at the start of the new game and , it checks for this data in the profile (since my profile already has some of the potentially bad data saved in, it fails a check, crashes)

c) My fun cleaver trick to bypass it and starting a new game on my profile? Someone was lazy, and didn't check for profile data if I sign in in-between the game. I think this would have been a pretty major bug.

How would this be fixed? Well, at this point, I don't know if Ubisoft would be willing to issue a patch for a game this old, the patch would be pretty simple: it's entirely around the whole magic system being unlocked, and when unlocking it, set to 0. All the issues seems to point to values not be checked for out of bounds cases.

The other, probably easier one, is letting me removed PoP from my profile (and in theory, remove all internal data stored with that game in the profile), which would let me start anew and hope not to run into the same bug.

The Fixes:

Throughout today I've been in contact with XBox Support on twitter and Ubisoft Technical Support. The XBox team was pretty helpful, and actually went through pretty much all the test cases I went for. In the end, they've said to contact the publisher's side as it seems to be a game thing. I've asked whether it's possible to delete game titles off the profile (which they did allow a few years ago with 0 achievement games), but they've stopped short of suggesting that.

Ubisoft's side, as of this writing, was less than hopeful. I had written a brief summary of the issue (noting the crash, where it happened, etc.), and their generic reply was that it was a gameplay issues, and I should look up a guide to get past that section of the game.

I guess this means it's the end of my Prince of Persia Playthrough.

On My Mind: The Chinese Dim Sum/Yum Cha Barometer

2011-05-30T11:59:00.000-04:00

Someone had mentioned this to me earlier (hi Brian, if you're reading this), and it's a fascinating observation about Dim Sum (Yum Cha) and video games.

I'm going to assume you're lazy and didn't click on the link above, so a quick description of what Yum Cha is: basically it's a chinese meal that's the equivalent of anywhere from a brunch to a late lunch. Usually it's a decent size of family/friends gathering where families bring their kids along, where the adults would talk, and the kids would entertain themselves with whatever way they like, which usually means video games.

When I was growing up, it always had my Game Boy along with me, and it's definitely not an uncommon sight to see kids everywhere do that. As systems got more advance, the kids all upgraded with them. It's interesting to observe that this was probably a really good barometer on where the market is in the portable space. It's not perfect (it's probably a lagging indicator, and targeted more towards kids), but in hindsight, fairly accurate.

There are two general observations I want to share: one as a retrospective, and another as a current trend:

1. Back in 2004/2005, when no one was exactly sure how the DS/PSP race was going to fold, the Dim Sum vote was: PSP. While the younger kids were still on their DSes' with Pokemon, the slightly older kids all upgraded to PSPs. However, within a year's time, all the kids did upgrade, to DS. It's not hard to see a restaurant where every table has at least one kid that is on the DS.

2. If you go to a weekend Dim Sum lunch, you'll still find plenty of DS. But more interesting is seeing kids with their own (or their parent's) iPhone/iPods. PSPs are definitely nowhere to be found anymore, but also interesting to observe is that the 3DS hasn't quite taken hold yet. Maybe it's too early to make a gut call on this, but somewhere deep at Nintendo HQ, they should be worried.

Administrative Stuff: Another iOS app

2011-05-27T02:14:00.001-04:00

Hello again for another special interruption:

Like most things in life, you don't get from point A to point B without a few in-between stops. This is especially true with learning new things. As some of you may know, I've started learning about the iOS, and have been trying out writing some apps, before moving onto games. My second app just got published (so go download it):

Friend Code Organizer

It's a simple menu driven app that allows you to store Nintendo Friends Codes for the Wii, 3DS and DS games. And the key point, it's FREE.

Now I know that

a) The app probably is a bit late to the whole DS craze

b) Limited appeal in usage

c) Doesn't quite hook up anywhere (like a website) to be useful

but I figured since I was going to use it, it'd be nice to make (yes, for an app who's sales target is me, I figured Free is the way to go), and I'm sure someone out there might look into things like this.

More importantly, this is merely a step for me to learn about the iOS dev environment process. It's a pretty interesting study case to see how core data is used, and how to append to it and such.

Normal game talk post will resume Monday. See you then!

On My Mind: Digital Distribution for import games

2011-05-25T10:00:00.000-04:00

Import games have always been a grey area that game companies don't want you to know about. It's a way for them to resolve licensing issues (songs, in game content), price discriminate (release at full price when game is at budget price elsewhere), delayed or even cancelled releases. Sometimes, it makes sense for certain games to not be released outside of particular regions (text heavy japanese dating sims, for example, would have 0 marketability outside of Japan), but other's have much less excuse.

Importing from other regions is usually an expensive preposition: Import sites like Play-Asia and YesAsia often charges double the price of the game to cover the cost of transportation and commission; eBay can be cheaper, but the quality of the seller may be questionable. I've had bought my share of import games, such as the Ouendan series, the DJ Max Portable series, the Donkey Konga series (music license/taste issue), Jump SuperStar series (license in North America split amount numerous companies), and the bit Generation series (experimental games, GBA was dead in NA, sidenote: the Wikipedia photo is from me :P ). With the advent of digital distribution, I was hoping this expensive habit could come to an end. Both Nintendo and Sony have been dabbling with releasing previously Japanese only releases for "older games" (games like Cho Aniki on the PSN, and Sin and Punishment on the Wii Virtual Console) but it's not the same.

Well Microsoft finally threw their hat in the ring, bringing DeathSmiles IIX to North America (after some delay for Canada and Mexico), IIRC, this marks the first current gen release of an "import" game. Cave has thrown most of it's support on the 360 in Japan, but have always had an issue with bringing their games to North America because of it's relatively niche titles and smaller sales base. A digital-only release for such titles is possibly the best outcome for Cave, but only until recently Microsoft required all "Games on Demand" (their digital distribution banner for retail games) requires a disk release. With this restriction out of the way, everyone benefits: Gamers are happy they can get the game without jumping absurd import loopholes; Cave can sell directly to the userbase with minimal distribution cost; Microsoft gets some extra money that they wouldn't have; Import compa... oh, right, they don't gain from this.

Long post short:

Go get DeathSmiles IIX!
Fans of niche companies and niche games? Go convince them to bring their titles over through digital distribution!

Quick Impressions: LA Noire (PS3)

2011-05-23T09:15:00.002-04:00

LA Noire has been a long time coming. First announced around 2007 as a PS3 exclusive title, this groundbreaking game has very little in common with most games from Rockstar or popular blockbuster titles. Thematically and gameplay-wise, LA Noire has much more in common with a cult favourite, Capcom's Ace Attorney series. With it's impressive facial motion capture tech and Rockstar's track record, how does the game stand up?

Spoiler alert - As a detective mystery game, there might be some spoilers. I've only covered the first few cases. However, I'll also touch briefly on Phoenix Wright, Heavy Rain and GTA4 (not in major spoiler sense, but you should be aware of these games and what they're about.

L.A. Noire (Played on Playstation 3, ~4 hours with 5 solved cases)

One of the big features of LA Noire has been their motion capturing technology, and it only partially succeed. True to their claim, facial expressions are absolutely fantastic, capturing every minuet detail. However, the game also suffers because of this feature: Other animations such as body movements don't match up to facial expressions, often leaving a feeling of heads pasted on body effect; hair doesn't animate (which is probably why everyone wears hats); camera angle and focus isn't done in a way to suggest depth, often leaving the game feel like it's green-screened badly; texture details on faces also feel lacking, giving all characters a "cel-shaded" look that doesn't quite feel right. The game occasionally jumps across the uncanny valley, especially with concentrated close up shots of character faces, but more often than not, scenes falls back into a creepy, weird, animatronic feel. LA Noire is probably the best attempt yet, and while it falls short, you have to feel impressed by the tech. (Yes, there are drawbacks, but I guess that's not that important, especially in this game)

Perhaps more interesting with LA Noire's game design is it's take on gameplay. Let's start with the con: Team Bondi and Rockstar probably knew that no matter how they try, there will be fans of games like GTA and Red Dead that will come over and expect another open world romp, so it wasn't a surprise to see that the open world in LA Noire, nor was it a surprise to see the side missions feel directly lifted from a GTA game. However, the open world feels somewhat tacked on and pointless, and more importantly, the side missions has a "been there, done that" feel. While the open world is huge, the fact that you're playing a cop immediately translates to a minimal sandbox experience: any negative interactions with the world, and you're immediately punished; even thought this is realistic, it's not necessary the same type of fun people would have expected in an open world. The side missions, on the other hand, suffers from the clunky controls (running and shooting is mapped to the same button? MADNESS) that gets the job done most of the time. While it's merely competent, I was often asking myself, "why aren't I playing GTA instead if I wanted this gameplay?"

However, the investigative/detective part of LA Noire makes up for all it's shortcomings. While the puzzles and item searches will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played any Phoenix Wright or older adventure games, it's the interrogation that sets the game apart. Observing the witness/suspect's reaction, facial animation and tone of voice goes a long way in selling the drama (and a much better, more feasible way than Phoenix Wright's text based word hunt) The decisions and choices seems to be much more deliberate here too, unlike Heavy Rain, where you can possibly sit there and agonize for the right answer forever, flip flopping back and forth between two choices. You'll feel like you messed up because of reflex in Heavy Rain, you'll feel like an idiot who wasn't thinking when you mess up in LA Noire.

One interesting observation about the game though, is that on paper, there is no "fail". (I'm going to ignore the side missions where you die, or chase scenes where you mess upon). In this sense, this game plays very much like most adventure games, but even then most still have a failure condition once you mess up too many times. (In Phoenix Wright, raising the wrong objection too many times in a trial would be fail) In here, it seems that you can be the worse detective and still proceed in the story: the only meaningful result is your case score. Maybe in later chapters I won't get promoted, but that isn't the case just yet.

I'll probably check in later once I'm "done" with the game.

In The News/On My Mind: Modern Warfare 3

2011-05-20T09:00:00.002-04:00

By now I assume you've all seen parts of Kotaku's story on Modern Warfare 3(Don't click if you don't want it spoiled), so what's there to talk about with Modern Warfare 3? Lots, of course, anywhere from the Infinity Ward's implosion, to the way games are marketed, over saturation of yearly sequels, or even the holiday glut of title releases.

For me though, one key design item stands out: where do you go, thematically and scale wise? Modern Warfare was notable for it's over the top set pieces, and Modern Warfare 2 raises the bar by further cranking up the scale of action and complexity. Most have complemented Modern Warfare as a "Michael Bay" like experience, with over the top action that borderlines believability. However, is relying on this increase in set pieces viable in the long run? From the escalation of threats (MW1), to actual invasion and attack on the US (MW2), it's hard to see how to ramp up the excitement without becoming absurd in the next game. It's interesting to note that even though Black Ops wasn't a direct sequel to Modern Warfare 2, it still inherited the almost absurd game sequences to drive the narrative forward.

More importantly, the reliance on set pieces can be engaging and special at first, but if the entire game is made of a series of set pieces, then it robs the power of any particular set piece. A roller coaster is only exciting with the right pacing of intensity with areas of calmness, and the same can be said about game pacing. In addition, the cost of building such complex series of set pieces cannot be cost effective, can it?

I do hope they can surprise people with something, and I hope it's not just "bigger, badder, bolder".

Let's Talk Achievements: Average Single Play Through Expectations

2011-05-19T09:30:00.001-04:00

One of the interesting and self indulgent topics about achievements is the question of "How much/many rewards should the average player encounter in a single playthrough?" For most players, this isn't an important factor, but since optimizing this isn't going to affect their experience negatively, why not study and analyze it?

(For simplicity sake, and having a wider base of games to compare to, I'm only going to look at retail games, and I'm also going to ignore add-ons. Similarly, since Microsoft does have a numeric system I can manipulate and better demonstrate my point, I'll use that as my basis.)

While researching and categorizing my own experiences with games, I've noticed four general patterns, which was backed up by the now defunct MyGamerCard.net(I wish I have a better site to show some of the observed statistics), they are as follows:

Low end (~100-150 achievement points, ~10 achievements): Examples include Lost Planet 2, Ninety Nine Nights, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Perfect Dark Zero
Middle ground (~200-350 achievement points, ~15-20 achievements): Lots of examples including Halo Reach, Bioshock (1 & 2), Call of Duty (all of them post Modern Warfare), DJ Hero (1&2) and Resident Evil 5
High end (~400-600 achievement points, ~30-35 achievements): Examples including Gears of War (1&2), Assassin's Creed (All), Forza Motorsports 3, Halo 3 and Halo ODST.
Maximum (1000 achievement points, all achievements): Examples include King Kong, Terminator Salvation, and the infamous Avatar: The last airbender

For me, these were general observations, and I don't think there's any specific reasons for or against fitting into any of those categories. I have noticed though that the extremes are usually not well received, where people complain that the game was stingy/the game was too generous, but even thing this still highly depends the context of the achievement and the game. However, two interesting observations:

In general, games have started moving away from the extremes, and in general, have been rewarding players more in recent titles. In the list above, the bulk of the games at the extremes were released relatively early in this generation, where developers were trying to figure out what best to do with achievements. Recent games have mostly stayed away from such extremes, and also started giving more away for general playthrough. Rock Band, as a franchise, is perhaps the greatest example: Rock Band 1, for completely the Band World Tour, is approximately 150 points without any specific challenges; Rock Band 2 increased the number of normal challenges that the players will encounter on a typical playthrough, to approximately 250 points. Rock Band 3 goes even further and rewards players more for even less playtime.
In multiplayer games, there's a great divide on whether the multiplayer warrants any rewards as part of an "average playthrough": Most games devote anywhere from 30-50% for online components, such as trying out a mode, to ranking up and fully play them. However, there are a few games, such as the Call of Duty series, and games like Dead Space 2, where online does not have any achievements. There's been an argument that sometimes you need to bait people into trying things by achievements, but Call of Duty's online popularity negates that argument easily.

If I had a larger pool of data, I can probably draw more interesting facts out of them, but I found this stuff fascinating and thought it would be interesting for people to take a look at.

Administrative Stuff: Now I'm officially an iOS developer

2011-05-18T09:00:00.001-04:00

It's been a solid month since my new "in between job" state, and outside of catching up on old games, updating this blog, I've also started learning about iOS stuff. I'm not sure if this is a step for me to look into indie games, or making iOS games, but I figured I might as well learn something (and yes, my coding skills are rusty as hell).

As a joke (and a "basic learning app"), I've created a "Single Serving App", the Slow Clap Initiative (Download it now). As the app implies, it does nothing but clap, slowly (Yes, it's a bad Portal 2 joke, turned into an app). Basically when I started working on the iPhone, I realized that this was a pretty funny joke, for like 20 minutes. Then it became agonizing as I was finishing it.

...yeah, it's not much of an app, I know, I promise I'll do something more useful later. My plan is to slowly build up a series of apps that builds upon the tools that I'm learning. It'll get there, someday...

...with this out of the way, I've pushed the normally scheduled Wednesday post to tomorrow. See you tomorrow!

On My Mind: Radical Directions

2011-05-16T11:00:00.006-04:00

Over the recent months, two publishers announced and showcased two sequels to successful franchises that have garnered less than favourable reception: SSX (EA) and Ridge Racer (Namco). In both cases, the franchises are well established with a core group of fans, but the game may have fallen into obscurity for numerous reasons: lack of release (SSX) and shrinking market (Ridge Racer). So why are the fans up in arms? Should they matter?

This isn't a rant post with a series of donotwant.gif pics, but let's get out of the way.

Let's look at each game individually.

===============

With SSX, the easiest way to explain it is visually. This is a screenshot of SSX Tricky on the PS2.

And this is a screenshot of SSX Deadly Descent that was announced coming January 2012

In the first released trailer, SSX Deadly Descents has dark and gritty visual look, with the unknown snowboarding jumping out of a military like helicopter, sliding away at a dangerous mountain, losing control, pulling out a pickaxe to regain control, then falling off the cliff and opening the squirrel suit.

You know what games recently also had a pickaxe in an icy area, jumping off a cliff, and squirrel suits? Call of Duty.

So why make this change? EA knows that the franchise is still good, but how big is that market? When the first SSX came out, it ushered in a new era of extreme sports games. In 2011, these extreme sports games are dead: Tony Hawk is irrelevant, Shaun White didn't sell on PS3/360, the market has moved on. EA needs a new audience to pitch this game to, so the "dudebro" segment it is. In later interviews and discussions, the developers claim that they are still sticking to the core of what the SSX franchise means, I guess in this case, maybe the developers and fans don't agree with what the franchise is to begin with.

Is it a good change? Don't know. Will this new audience find this interesting? Maybe. Will it piss off the existing fans? Yes. Will those fans come back to the game anyways? Maybe. It's interesting to note that recent dev diaries have not mentioned the dark and gritty feel, and has pointed the direction of the game closer to something between SSX3 and Tricky. Maybe the developer did listen.

===============

Ridge Racer Unbounded, on the other hand, should be shown via video:

and compare that to this

Many have gone and compared this new Ridge Racer to the likes of Burnout, Split Second, or even BugBear (the new developer)'s previous title FlatOut, and I don't blame them. At the surface, this game seems to take nothing from Ridge Racer franchise, instead it chooses to be closer to what the market has been getting. The worry here is why be a "me-too" product? Why fight against Split Second, Burnout, or even Motorstorm, which are all doing destructible environments and races? Bringing your design closer to the competition means you need to work that much harder to differentiate yourself and sell to your audience.

The more interesting observation here is "why not?" I believe Ridge Racer is one of those franchises that can actually withstand flops because of it's development and sales target/cycle. Consider that every Ridge Racer game since Ridge Racer Type 4 (save for a few exception, like RR64 and Ridge Racers 2 PSP) have been launch titles, it's obvious that Namco uses this franchises as a testing ground for a platform. Even if Unbounded does bad in sales, when the next generation system comes, we'll see another Ridge Racer back in it's old form anyways. In the best case, this Ridge Racer title could become what happened to the Need For Speed series. "Ridge Racer" becomes the nameholder for Namco's racing games, and racing titles within the same universe sits under it, even if they don't relate to each other.

===============

Understand that I'm advocating for no change. Looking at both games, I understand what the thought process and the reasoning was. Sometimes, franchises do get stale, and needs a refreshing kick in the face for things to get better (I can name a few, but I won't do it here). Some franchises have made that jump: Metroid Prime was a great example of changing both gameplay and even genre. However, developers, publishers, and even the game audience needs to understand and expect that changes may not be well received by everyone, and sometimes to gain a new audience, you need to be ready to lose all your existing fans.

Post Play Analysis: Dead Rising: Case Zero/Case West (XBox 360)

2011-05-13T11:00:00.001-04:00

When Dead Rising was first announced, there was a strong sense of deja vu. Capcom and a zombie games again? By the time the game was released, those comparisons were gone: people loved the simplicity of hacking at brain dead zombies, but absolutely hated the cumbersome save system. Four years and a new developer later, Dead Rising 2 fixed up most of the problems and received much better praises. More interestingly was Capcom's decision to spin-off a short story prequel/sequel with Dead Rising: Case Zero/West. Many have claimed that the bite size format of releasing Case Zero as a "paid demo" was a brilliant financial move at the expense of community goodwill. While these games serves as great bookends and creates a richer story, I believe they may have done more harm than good to the franchise by showing how much better Dead Rising is as a bite-size game experience.

Dead Rising: Case Zero / Dead Rising: Case West (Played on XBox 360, single player completed for both games, ~ 12 hours)

When the original Dead Rising launched in 2006, it was hailed as the true arrival of the hack and slash genre: finally, a game that isn't limited by the number of opponents drawn on screen, and the variety and customizable gameplay allows for players to beat up mindless zombies to their hearts content (best of all, brain dead zombies is the best explanation of the hack and slash genre's issue of bad AI). However, the dreaded continuous timer and cumbersome save system held the game back in my mind. It's one of those games that I'd argue was great for it's experience, not necessary by it's story (I would argue that you'll get what the game is without finishing it, like my previous blog post on "completionists"), and the achievement rate backs me up on this (TrueAchievement pegs this game's completion rate at a mere 3%, with the bulk of players not past 20% of the game).

Dead Rising's core mechanics of resource management (health and weapons in same slots), weapon management (degrading weapons, merging weapons), mission driving events (escort, reach point X, photography) were all pretty sound. In fact, most of it were carried over to the Dead Rising 2 Suite (Core game, Case Zero and Case West) without major changes. Sure, photography was no longer the core of the game, but I don't think anyone will miss it much. What did change though, was the mission structure: In all three games, key missions were no longer dependent on the timer (Dead Rising 1 was on a 72 hour clock, when you miss out on a certain hour, the event disappears). Instead, many events became the main triggers for the actual time change. Players have less chance to be stuck on one mission which forces them to miss out on other missions that are happening co-currently. AI allies being competent characters also help out.

As mentioned before, Case Zero/West are bite size Downloadable games that serves as bookends to Dead Rising 2. Both games were much shorter in length and play area (no larger than any given wing of the mall). In addition to being a shorter game, both Zero/West takes a significant departure into changing the mission structure, but each in their own direction, so let's talk about them separately.

With the prequel Case Zero, players are given one clear mission: find 5 motorcycle parts, and get out. Outside of the introductionary mission(s), there were no other "required" objectives. In my first run, I was able to find all the parts within 2 hours, ~1/5 of the allotted time before the entire game ends. While this serves to remove the sense of urgency in the mission, it does allow for players to freely explore and toy with the environments: Rescuing survivors were completely optional, along with finding key combination of weapons and exploring abandoned locales. By the second playthrough, it was obvious that I had exhausted all actual game events, and was just wandering aimlessly around to see how many zombies I can mow down with weapon combinations (which was just as satisfying). Even thought the AI escorts couldn't defend themselves, they were significantly better than the first game at avoiding getting caught by zombies in general.

Case West, on the other hand, takes a much different approach to handling mission structure by guiding the player constantly from one key event to the other with ample time in between for players to explore. As an example, one key mission is takes the player to the processing room, normally an event that only takes 5 minutes, but players are given almost 2+ hours (a full day in-game time) to get there. Players are encouraged to wander off and look for other things to do (like rescuing survivors), and triggering the key mission events actually shorten the game length. In one instance, players were told to "keep busy" while the next key mission is in waiting ("the informant is looking for stuff, come back later" is a pretty good trick that worked). Another tweak is that AI survivors don't need to be escorted anymore, as all of them are capable of defending for themselves. This change further removes the tedium that many have complained about Dead Rising's AI.

So, why are these changes good, yet damaging to the core Dead Rising brand? By creating a smaller, bite size experience game, it shows that not much is lost when it comes to the "feel" of the game. Players can still enjoy hacking away and brainless zombies with absurd weapon combinations without being bogged down by a story, time limits, bothersome requirements and structure. Players have always described most hack and slash games (like Koei's Dynasty Warriors) as a cathartic experience, and cutting out the "unnecessary" content allows players to get the "experience" most people are looking for in the first place. In my experience, I felt so tied down by critical points in Dead Rising 1/2's story that I can't further my progress without restarting; with Zero/West, I got a small, digestible game that I was able to start and finish in a day, and I was compelled to come back and play again because it was so satisfying. At this point, I don't know if I can ever go back to 1/2, or play any sequel that doesn't address the issues of story missions as it relates to gameplay.

Let's Talk Achievements: Some Basic Guidelines

2011-05-11T09:00:00.002-04:00

As mentioned before, the entirety of this category was inspired by the countless thought experiments (similar to this one) that asks: What if old games had achievements? How would they work, what would they look like? OK, that topic may borderline on weird game fandom. Let's take a step back and look at how we got here.

At the launch of the XBox 360, Microsoft ushered in a new "feature", achievements, which were meta game tokens that "reward" players for certain goals and completion. However, the concept of achievements though go much much further back with simple tokens of rewards such as unlockable rewards such as videos, concept art and other bonus content that were popular with the advent of CD based media systems. With the XBox, MS has placed an interesting meta-game on top of all it's games, by drawing a level playing field for all titles regarding "goals", and basically telling players that competition and goals within each game contribute to the greater identity of the player (I'm not going to talk about the ramification of this idea, but it's interesting to think about it).

Within this group I think I'll have two separate themes of discussion:

Let's analyze games with existing achievements.
Let's give new achievements to games that didn't have any.

The former is relatively simple to explain: For games that have existing achievements, let's look at what works and what doesn't work, and figure out who things were designed in particular way.

The latter is more interesting: For games that didn't have achievements, let's make up new ones.

So, let's talk details (I've seen more via confidential documentation, but I'm going to dig up publicly available articles to show that I'm using publicly known facts). On the XBox, according to MS's own website explaining achievements and XBox360Achievements's own explanation, each retail game can have 5 - 50 achievements, totalling 1000 points; any additional DLC can total upto an additional 750 points, with 30 more achievements. Arcade titles feature a similar structure: 12 achievements, totalling 200 points; additional DLC adds another 3 achievements with 50 points. On the Playstation 3, Sony has been much less forthcoming with facts, with GiantBomb's article and AVForums agreeing on a few basic facts (Bronze = 15 points, Silver = 30, Gold = 90, Platinum = 180; retail games = max of 1230 points, downloads = max of 315 points), but details are scarce at best. Looking at cross platform games, most titles have similar if not identical achievements (sans Platinum trophy). For simplicity sake, I'll use the XBox one as the basis of creating new achievements in future articles. Outside of these hard rules, a few other obvious ones:

Achievements needs to be obtainable (without absurd rules, like wiping out save data)
No making up new features for the game (can't add an online component for a SNES game)
For simplicity, let's assume all games are full games, and not categorize what's a "full title" and a "arcade size" title

So, why the interest in achievements, especially in light of counter-arguments that achievements are not that good of an idea? I'm hooked (probably not a good reasoning)? More legitimately, I point to games like Geometry Wars 2 on why achievements can be a way to create new play experiences for the player. Rather than merely becoming just checkpoints or absurd goals, achievements can become something that suggest new play mechanics or ideas for players to play around.

Administrative Stuff: New Section - Let's Talk Achievements

2011-05-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

One of the things I've really enjoyed with this generation of games is the arrival of trophies and achievements. Yes, there's definitely strong debates on whether achievements are a good idea at all (Chris Hecker makes a very strong point on "achievements considered harmful?"), but since they're here, and they won't go away, why not embrace it and make them better?

I'm going to start up a new section: Let's Talk Achievements, which I guess will do two things; a) Look at games out there with achievements and talk about it, and b) Make up new achievements for games that didn't have any (sort of inspired by this and countless other sources).

We'll see how that goes...

In The News: PSN issues

2011-05-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

I'm sure by now the whole Sony PSN/Privacy issue has been beaten to death. I'm not here to talk about that. Yes, private info went missing, you can rage all you want about it. Go blame Sony, blame Anon, or anyone else that's not you. Sadly, it's the new reality that this kind of stuff will happen. Life goes on.

More interestingly, was the amount of people who were bitching and whining about where PSN was when it's down. My stance on PSN has always been "sure it's there, but what's the point". It was a half-assed implementation (which makes Nintendo's a "full-ass" implementation), with incomplete features that just doesn't match up with MS' XBox Live. Sure, there's a friends list, but it's awkward to use; yes, Trophies are nice, but nowhere as standardized as Achievements; Online gaming works, but it's per game and matchmaking is inconsistent.

Interestingly, the week that PSN went down came with the arrival of the two significant multi platform games with PS3 the better value choice: Portal 2's inclusion of Steam integration/Cross Platform Play/Free Portal 2 on PC and Mortal Kombat's exclusive Kratos. Many others and I all jumped on to the PS3, expecting things to go great...

Well then. I guess the PS3's online service does have some merit. People do miss the feature, no matter how lacklustre they were. Sure, they weren't the best, but then again, MS has been working on XBox Live since the early days of XBox 1. Network infrastructure doesn't happen overnight; and good, user friendly infrastructure is even harder to come by.

On My Mind: (Non)Completionist Syndrome

2011-05-04T09:05:00.000-04:00

A Kotaku's Article last week about Portal 2's completion got me thinking about completing games. It reminded of a topic I've always want to talk about: "The (Non) Completionist Syndrome".

The short version of the article goes like this: From the Portal 2 Completion Page, apparently 10% of players miss out on the first achievement in the single player game (which is obtained within 10 minutes of starting the game) and 50% have gotten the first achievement in the co-op game. The completion number drops to 50% and 25% for the end game achievements, respectively. Let's suppose that single player and co-op play is mutually exclusive (which they aren't), this still means that at least 25% of players gave up on finishing the game. (For the record, I've finished single player; haven't started multiplayer).

If you know me, you know that I've been terrible with completing games. If you check my Backloggery, you'll noticed that at best I've finished 15% of my games. My TrueAchievement listing shows a much worse pattern: I rarely get the game started (and this pattern holds true for all other platforms as well). Sure, I'm a terrible person, but maybe I'm not the only one?

I've attended and read a few GDC talks that says otherwise: Bruce Phillips' of Microsoft Research and Jesse Divnich of EEDAR both arrived at a similar conclusion: Most people don't finish their games. Bigger, shorter, and more popular AAA titles have a slightly better chance of being finished, but an overwhelming majority don't. Obviously there's no clear answer why this is the case, but knowing this fact should give designers ways to re-examine what they do: Are people abandoning the games because the difficulty spikes are too high? Is the game getting too repetitive? Maybe the game became uninteresting? Or perhaps the player has "already experienced it all" and feels no desire to play anymore? Whatever the symptom is, it's an interesting fact, and it's something I hope designers and developers take a hard look at and try to address.

Or perhaps there's a simpler, easier explanation: we've becoming a society with ultra-short attention spans, and frankly, something as well done as Portal 2 still isn't good enough to hold our attention span to the end.

Oh well, their loss...

In The News: Wii 2/HD/Stream/Cafe

2011-05-03T09:00:00.000-04:00

I don't have anything spectacularly meaningful to say about the recently announced new Nintendo Wii successor, but I think it's always an interesting thing to talk about new hardware. There's quite a bit of "well why would they need that, it sounds like a stupid gimmick" vibe going on with the rumoured features, just as there was with the Wii and the DS. Think of it as the hopes and dreams of unrealized hardware, and what better way to think about it by looking at what happened with the Wii and DS.

Honestly, I can probably be labeled as a closet Nintendo fanboy. I try to keep bias opinions out of most things, but I probably give more leeway to Nintendo when they announce completely insane ideas. (No, I wasn't on board with the Virtual Boy, everyone saw that as a train wreck from a mile away) I was there day 1 for both the Wii and the DS, not necessary because of the launch games, but rather the prospect of the new devices can bring. Both devices have had successes and failures when it comes to living up to promises of the new features, but it's undeniable that there was some really interesting experiments for them. The idea of these "ideas" exist always gets me excited about new hardware.

Let's start with the DS: Yes, the microphone was almost a waste of a time (save Nintendog's use), but the stylus touch screen gameplay has lead to some of the fresher, more original ideas in the last 10 years (Trauma Center's use of pointer for "Operation" like gameplay; Ouendan/Elite Beat Agent's button tapping music mechanic; Brain Training via the "natural input" method, just to name a few). More importantly, over time, developers who have these devices came up with more original uses that was never designed in the first place (Book like holding position for countless games; Tag mode for wi-fi data transmission while system is in sleep mode in games like The World Ends With You). It's fascinating what happens when you have a mature hardware and allow developers and designers to come up with new ideas.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Wii: filled with just as many, if not more potential ideas, but completely squandered because the lack of investment and focus on the platform. The initial rush of content was only followed up by countless cash-ins, party games, and other wasted titles with weak usage of the system's potentials. WiiConnect24 was barely used, motion control was dumped usually in favour of pointless waggle, other accessories were relegated to single game usage with no follow up support. As we reach the end of the Wii's life cycle, we can only say that the hardware never got a proper chance with developers. What happened to using the Balance board in games, or the Wii wheel? Anyone who remember Lucky n Wild should realize that the Wii already has all the parts (light gun, foot pedal, steering via wheel), so why not? What about a dual handed light gun shooter? How about something that uses 4 wiimotes as speakers?

In both cases, the possibilities were there. I'm glad that these rumours of this new Nintendo system is as crazy as they seem, as it gets people thinking about what's possible with new hardware. The Nintendo 3DS, in some ways, was too safe of a system, and I feel that developers just aren't creative with new ideas for it. I hope whatever crazy ideas this new system comes with will inspire people to come up with new and exciting ways to think about the games that we play.

Administrative Stuff: Pages!

2011-05-02T12:40:00.002-04:00

New feature: Pages.

Some pages don't quite fit in the blog, so I've created some pages on the right side so that you can read them. Think of them as tabs, or something.

...oh, and some of them may be re-posts of other "admin stuff", like the about me pages, skip them if you find it boring.

On My Mind: Pre-Ordering, Sales, and You

2011-04-20T22:00:00.004-04:00

One of the things I hear often, from both gamers and non-gamers alike, is the complete hatred for "pre-ordering" games. The complaints often stem from the following points:

1. "Why bother, it's not like they'll run out."

2. "Pre-Order bonus are scams, they're just taking my money."

3. "I don't want to give my money to X and Y."

There's quite a bit of misunderstanding on the purpose and reason why pre-orders exists, so I'm going to clarify some of it based on what I know (feel free to correct me if I've gotten it wrong anywhere).

Let's get a few things out of the way: Yes, when you do a pre-order for a game, it does mean Company X is basically keeping your money for free and earning interest off of it. Yes, employees are encouraged to push pre-orders because they need to meet a quota. Yes, pre-ordering doesn't necessary mean you'll get the game either. However, there are reasons why pre-orders do matter:

1. Yes, games can run out - It doesn't happen often, but it's all about supply and demand. If a store orders 100 copies, and you are customer 101, guess what happens? You aren't getting one. This isn't about stores badly calculating demand, because for a store to keep excess stock would be bad business. If you did want a game badly on the first day, maybe you should have ordered it then.

2. It's an actual gauge for the publisher - Stores are usually allotted a X number of copies, either including or on-top of the pre-orders. Let's suppose a niche game (pick your favourite small developer/publisher, let's say Atlus or NIS, or even Majesco), and let's suppose their upcoming niche game was so under the radar that the store only ordered 1 copy. If you go pre-order it, suddenly the volume just doubled. If this is expanded over all stores, people will quickly realize that a) yes there is demand for this game, and b) they should really order more. Pre-orders, in effect, gauges the actual demand for a title.

One thing that I jumped ahead is "How company arrives at an ordering number", so here's my understanding of how the system works:

1) Large chains have buyers which appropriately gauges the actual demand of titles. These people work directly with the publishers, and looks at factors such as the "buzz" of the game, how the media is responding to it, the company's previous sales track record, etc. This is the basis of the number of copies stores will order.

2) When these titles are listed in the seller's database, they start taking pre-orders. If the number of pre-orders exceeds the number of copies the chain ordered, copies will be shifted around from different stores.

3) However, if the number of pre-orders GREATLY exceeds the number of copies the chain ordered, they may re-up the number of purchases from the publisher.

With this in mind, I think you can see how and why pre-orders greatly affect how publishers have been acting in recent years:

1) The number and the variety of incentives for pre-ordering isn't a way for these retail chains to "screw the player over", it's actually a method for the publishers to push for pre-order sales, which in-tern, hopefully translates to the chains ordering more copies from publishers.

2) Smaller publishers pushing heavily on pre-ordering, such as day 1 DLC (Vanquish's three bonus guns), offering limited (Deathsmiles Faceplate or Record of Agarest War's LE) items for the normal price, going as far as announcing the rarity of copies (DJ MAX Portable 3), in hopes of securing more copies for the game to sell. With AAA games going towards bigger budgets, the smaller niche publishers such as Atlus, Ignition, NIS and others have started embracing guerilla marketing tactics that hopefully help them get their games into more audience's hands. It's interesting to note that of the examples above, Deathsmiles received a second print run without the faceplate, and Record of Agarest War's sales did well enough to warrant a sequel for North America.

I guess my main point is this: Do whatever you like when it comes to pre-ordering big budget titles, but definitely help out the small guys if you're looking for those games.

Quick Impressions: Portal 2 (PS3)

2011-04-19T17:30:00.020-04:00

Note: If you are reading this and haven't played Portal 1. Stop. Go to a PC/Mac/PS3/360, get Portal, and play it. Do not return until you are done. Don't read on until you are familiar with Portal 1.

I am not responsible for spoiling Portal 1 for you from this point onwards.

Portal 2 (Played on PS3, single player completed, ~7-8 hours?)

When Portal first came out in 2007, it was one of those groundbreaking landmarks that caught everyone by surprise: A FPS where you avoid combat? Puzzle Solving? No Multiplayer? Portal was one of those games that, despite being unconventional and boxed in between two excellent titles, stood out as a jaw-droppingly memorable every step of the way.

Fast-forward to 2011. Portal 2, as a "full game", feels just as jaw dropping as the first game. While it loses some originality, it gains a healthy dose of even wittier writing, fantastic pacing, and a much more even learning curve. After finishing the game for the first time, I'm itching to get right back into it for both the Dev Commentary (Just started it and it's already fascinating), and the Co-op multiplayer (interesting that they added multiplayer, but from all accounts, seems like a natural fit, I'll try it later). In my mind, Portal 2 comes dangerously close to matching Dead Space 2 as the current front-runner for game of the year (and the similarities don't end there either).

One of the brilliant things that Dead Space 2 did was recalling player's past experience in the first game (I should write about Dead Space 2 too, that game has a lot of interesting talking points), Portal 2, interestingly, pulls a similar trick at the start of this game, taking the player for a ride through areas they have experienced in the first game. New players to the series should find the first few stages sufficient in teaching them the basics of Portal's gameplay; Veterans of the series will find the first few stages interesting too, as the new visuals tell a great story of the time between the first and the second game, and some minor tweaks to the early puzzles makes the experience even more memorable. I like to think that this technique of recalling previous games help players strengthen their experience and their connection to the game world: it's like seeing an old friend, trying to catch up to what happen, and see what's changed. In both Portal 2 and Dead Space 2, this "mechanic" was used to build anticipation and create surprises that a new player may not notice. While these sections may seem trivial and well designed to new players, they felt extra special to players who've seen the first. I've caught myself walking through different areas wondering what "twists" they will apply here.

The first Portal suffers from the same issues that typically plagues puzzle games: designers can try to iron out as many spikes in difficulty for a general audience, but all it takes is one stumbling block to throw a player off. While Portal 1 was fantastic, there were parts in the end game scenario that would have been potentially game breaking. To me, it seems like Portal 2 did a much better job of guiding the player to the key points they needed to see. Even though I was new to all the stages, I was able to pinpoint the exit, and the possible steps that I needed to take to reach the goal; the clever level design, layout, and organization made me feel smart about solving the problem (whether any intelligence was involved was debatable). One can say that some this new focus have made the game too streamlined (instead of a full wall, there's only a small section where you can put portals), but it really feels like there's been actual play session tests to make sure the game will feel challenging for players yet not to alienate people and discourage further play.

(As an offshoot, there's two specific points in the end game scenario where I was able to do things with lightening quick-reflex. I highly doubt it's voodoo magic, but there were enough psychological hints and telltale signs that motivated me to react properly on pure gut instinct. When you get there, you'll do it too, and we can talk afterwards.)

One of the key design elements mentioned in the first game's developer commentary was the "second act", where players walk through the "hidden underbelly" of the test chambers. While this was an enticing story arc, I've wondered how many players gave up on Portal before getting that far (some of the puzzles were brutal, requiring both reflex and mental capacity). I do think that Portal 2's story allowed much greater freedom for Valve to weave players through both "Real" tests and the "behind the scenes" sections. Fairly early on, players would be tossed between both the real and fake sections of the labs, giving a greater sense of decay in the environment, and the connection between what is real and what isn't. In the first game, you were essentially a lab rat until the world was revealed; here, you are shown right away that the labs, the tests, and the setting was part of something bigger. Every time a transition between the lab and the real world takes place, I would start looking around for other cracks within the facade, possible for things that give me a greater glimpse of the world. It's a beautiful done mechanic, and would-be designers should take note.

Perhaps the best part of Portal 2 for me was the writing. Portal's GLaDOS was fantastic, but here, both GLaDOS, Wheatly and the other characters are so well written that I often stop and wait to listen for more dialog. GLaDOS' snaky remarks, Wheatly's crazy incoherent banter and Cave Johnson's seemingly insane statements are delivered so pitch perfect, it brings life to the entire game (even though you are the only living person in the entire game). Without the dialog and chatter, Portal 2 would not be half the game it is right now.

Oh, and there's the ending, but let's not talk about that. It's absolutely Lunacy!

I've probably written way too much for a "first impression", but I think the parts I mentioned seems important enough to write about. There's a lot of good design substance here that any designers or would-be designers should take a hard look at how things work and why people enjoy them when they work.

On My Mind/Post Play: Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy (Facebook)

2011-04-18T23:43:00.010-04:00

For all the hype Facebook games have been getting in the press recently, especially the Zynga "ville" games, I've stayed cleared of many of them. I considered sampling some of them before, but they just don't seem to grab me enough for me to care. A lot of them seem to go for the cheap route of appealing to people's hoarding sensibilities: give people enough carrots at the start, and dangle it in front of them and make them beg fore more. Then I started playing Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy.

Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy (On Facebook, played for a duration of ~2 months, mostly during weekdays)

So, why Assassins Creed? For one, it's tie-in to the console game Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (AC:B); it's also not a true Facebook game, lacking in both monetizing and socializing features that exists in most Facebook games. But let's start from the beginning...

...during a play session of AC:B, I noticed one of the uPlay points (UbiSoft's own internal award system, clever, I must add) references an event that needs to be unlocked via the Facebook game. Being the completion-ist that I am (or try to be), I decided to check it out. At the very least, I'd get an extra mission or two, I hoped.

Like most Facebook games, it starts out slow and simple, with relatively quick progression and "high rewards" to start. At first I wrote it off as a simple Mafia Wars knockoff, with a relatively menu driven gameplay based on clicking through events. It was interesting to notice that even with a different skin, it doesn't stray too far from the formula of capping Action Points to slow down play progression, with a simple XP and leveling system encouraging players to move forward. The idea of earning items outside of currency isn't new either, but the secondary and tertiary economy systems work well enough and support different ways of tackling progression. While the game itself wasn't terribly interesting, I as still relatively far away from unlocking the two things I wanted into AC:B, so I kept on coming back daily, almost being trained by the game in a pavlovian way.

I think I really started taking interest in the game right before the "content" unlocked. I started messing around with the other timelines, and I realized that the game actually extends the side stories revolving around the world of AC1, AC:B and to a certain extent AC2. My desire to play was no longer driven by the need for leveling up (nor was it by the unlocks or loot, while that's cool to unlock things in AC:B), but rather to find out more with the story, the characters, and how they impact the main game. In this sense, AC: Project Legacy has succeeded in adding to the overall experience of the franchise.

It's interesting to note that while this game exists on Facebook, it lacks the hallmarks of a Facebook game: monetization and socialization. There was nowhere in the game to exchange real money for ingame XP, AP, currency or items; there was also no interactions between friends who are playing the game save the potential recruit links. Maybe the lack of these things were what appealed me to the game.

Outside of habit or boredom, I'm done with the game now until new missions are added. I've exhausted all playable events now, seen all the story has to offer for now, and hit a game breaking glitch that gave me 400 billion dollars. Overall, it's was pretty interesting, and at least from a story perspective, added quite a bit of "substance" to the AC universe.

I have to say I like what UbiSoft has done here in trying to tie in a Facebook game with a "core" franchise. It's a slow rising trend, and I really do believe that companies who are willing to experiment with such integration in the near future will come out ahead. I don't want to sound too pompous, but I saw this trend coming for a long time, and there are plenty of games that stands to benefit from this sort of integration. In the past few years, we've seen web leaderboards (Need For Speed), Twitter integration (Uncharted 2), Facebook integration (DSi, Blur), Youtube integration (PixelJunk Eden), but I look at this AC Facebook game, and have to say this maybe the most realized version yet, and I can't wait to see what's next.

Administrative Stuff: Oh, the important stuff...

2011-04-13T22:05:00.005-04:00

You know what, I almost forgot...

...I don't think I've ever formally introduced myself on this blog. Might as well, right?

If you look on the right, you'll see my name, Harold Li. I'm not going to give my life story here (it's not all that interesting or important), so here's the shorthand, interesting, and relevant version. I've been gaming since I was 6 or 7, Game Boy, Famicom, the usual suspects. I'm primarily a console gamer, and have kept up with consoles games (mostly Nintendo stuff). Games to me had always been fun toys or a hobby, until late in high school when I realized that programming could lead me into games.

Five years and a University degree in CS later, I ended up working at a games company called Koei Canada, working initially as a programmer and eventually a designer. On the side I ended up buying a lot of games and played a lot (I always say it's for research, but sometimes it really isn't).

Let's say right now that I'm "in between jobs", so what better way to exercise my design skills with writing stuff about design? OK, maybe making something is better, but, oh well...

...other administrative stuff: It'd be great if I get some feedback on posts and stuff. I'll try to get a quick sample of each column, so I can get some feedback to work with and improve (iterative design process doesn't just end with games!). Also, it would help that I know people are reading, so use the follow button on the right side, thanks. :P

Administrative Stuff: Relaunch 2.0

2011-04-13T21:25:00.006-04:00

I know I haven't been updating this blog for a while, and with all this new-found free time I have, I really should. I think one of the major things that bogged me down (besides lack of time), was my insistence on writing out my gaming history in a linear fashion. I still believe that knowing where I came from, and what games I gravitate to do matter in how I analyze things, but it's also made writing this EXCESSIVELY SLOW.

So, I'm going to try to harness the power of Tags, and writing out different "sections" of updates instead. Assuming that the "Cloud Tag" widget works the way it should, you'll start seeing it to the right of this blog. The few categories I'm thinking of using include: "Gaming Past" (What I've been writing), "Post Play Analysis", "Quick Impressions", "In The News", "On My Mind" and "Design Teardown". I'll probably add more as I see fit. This way, I can quickly jump from one topic to the next, and still be coherent. (ADD wins again!)

I'm not going to remove the old posts, it seems like a big waste of time re-writing them. Think of them as "the prototype".

Gaming Past: SNES In depth (Part 2) - Super Mario Kart

2010-07-19T23:50:00.004-04:00

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My top 3 SNES gems (cont.)

Back in 1995, I traveled back to Hong Kong for vacation. While in Hong Kong, I managed to bargin my way to get one game on the SNES. At that point, I really had no idea what I wanted to get, so as I browsed the windows at stores wondering what I would get. I stumbled upon a copy of Super Mario Kart at one shop and bought it on the spot, I figured that since I liked Mario games, this game can't be that bad (Thank God I didn't get Mario is Missing, that would have been just weird). Fortunately, it's probably one of the best games then, and a genre defining title.

At first I was quite underwhelmed: Donkey Kong Country was such a visual tour-de-force that it shames every games before. Sure, it had Mode 7 tech, which was something I hadn't seen before (We'll get to F-Zero :P), but just how plain the visuals looked compared to DKC was a setback for me. The Pseudo 3D effects were nice, but it was no SGI GRAPHIXLOLOLOL (I still can't believe I bought into that, but then again, people bought into "Blast Processing"). While the flat shaded artstyle fit with the designs of Super Mario World, the fact that lacks the look of "depth" sort of pushed me away. The fact that the game only displayed half the screen never really bothered me though. I thought that using it as a full map displaying where everyone was was a nice touch, never knowing that it was a "technical limitation".

The gameplay, however, was anything but disappointing. Even at the most basic level, the game creates many player decisions: Heavy or Light driver (My go to guy? Yoshi, followed by Mario, then Toad); Max coin on first lap or stick to the racing line (Always max coin); hold back and wait for better item in the first item area, or jockey for position (Always wait for items). Every track and "world theme" has their own unique trick to learn (like boosting through the gap in Donut Plains 1), and it was always entertaining (and sometimes frustrating, in a good way) to play through each cup. Learning the timing for the hop/slide was a long process, but I eventually got the hang of it (after countless trial and errors on Mario Circuit 1).

At the time, I never understood how heavy rubberbanded the AI was, but it created intense exciting races. Sure, this badly rubberbanded AI would run into frustrating situations of overtaking first place just at the last corner, but it also taught me to be ruthless in hoarding items, racing a sub optimal line to block, and holding a banana/green shell back for protection. Sometimes the AI would end up costing me the entire series because of one cheap lap, but it was merely another chance for me to replay the series again (Yes, my cart does have all tracks completed, with a 40/40 for all series).

Looking back, I'm surprised how well I took in the attempt at re purposing all the items: coins gave speed increase; mushrooms were speedboost; lightening to shrink, the list goes on. Yet the most interesting use was the Feather. Except for a few shortcuts, the Feather was pretty useless in the main mode. For the longest time, I though someone had to have screwed up somewhere, then I discovered Battle mode. During one game, I got a feather and managed to jump into a closed off pool.

A GLITCH! - I said.

Nope...

I never found a good strategy to properly use that trick. I know that in all those pools, there are jump pads or item pads that will allow you to get out with ease. To this day I wonder whether this feather design was by design, or just another happy accident that turned into a feature. It is interesting to see Battle Mode to be considered now as the beginning of the "car combat" genre. To think, all the multiplayer missile shooting owes it's origins to a game where people lay down banana peels...

Oh, and before I wrap this up: Worst Rainbow Road ever. Even though I hate the new ones, this one takes the cake for having no barriers whatsoever. Who thought that was a good idea?

...to be continued...

Gaming Past: SNES In depth (Part 1) - Donkey Kong Country

2010-07-13T01:00:00.004-04:00

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My top 3 SNES gems

As mentioned last time, there were three SNES games that I would consider "pinnacle" of the SNES. Obviously, this is a list of what I actually owned back then (pretty small list), and what I've played (which weren't much). Donkey Kong Country 1 was an eye-opening experience on how much visual and graphical fidelity can affect immersion and gameplay; Donkey Kong Country 2 built upon that with even more imaginative world and level design; Super Mario Kart entertained me for countless hours with it's fantastic balance of weapons and racing; and finally, Uniracers, an accidental purchase that I stumbled upon. I've technically cheated a bit here, as I'm wrapping "DKC 1/2" as the same game (I'll get to why DKC3 isn't in there :P). So with the intro out of the way, here goes nothing.

I no longer remember why or where I've heard of Donkey Kong Country, but I NEEDED it (chalk it to magical marketing hype, I guess). So much so, I remembered putting that, and only that game on my Christmas List, over and over. As you can guess by now, yes, I did get the game for Christmas, and I played nothing but that for months on end. Comparing this to Mario World at that time was an unfair comparison, and to a 11 year old, it was a visual feast that made me forget everything that has come before it. Donkey Kong Country, at the time, used this magical "SGI rendering" to create these incredible color and detail in the world that I haven't seen before, and it felt more "fun". The two areas I remembered the most was the underwater swimming stages and the snowy mountain stages; both which were richly detailed and full of character and life. Additional, the music created an unforgettable atmosphere that was a joy to listen and play through (the visuals showing blizzard in Ice Age Alley, combined with the tension inducing soundtrack and the echo effect has been burned into my memory - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ3wMiPV7DM).

By the time Donkey Kong Country 2 was released, I had made sure I got it as soon as possible (which happened to coincide with my birthday). Visually, the game dramatically improved from it's precursor, with far more detailed characters, enemies and environments. I was so immersed with it's detailed worlds, I ended up playing this fairly quickly just to see everything that the game had to offer. Like the first game, it had memorable environments (the volcano levels, and the marshlands were the most impressive) and suspenseful stages (Screech's Sprint - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6hq-CS3pwA, to me was the most memorable one, especially because a) the awesome music, b) how stupid hard it was, which meant I played that stage way too many times to count, and c) that roll -> jump gap at the start of the stage, which blew my mind when I figured out how to do it).

However, even though I've actually completed the game with 102% (in contrast to DKC1's 87%), I came out somewhat more disappointed at it. So much so that I never did end up buying or ever playing DKC3 (even to this day). Both these games were great, but I've had enough of the platforming by that point to not want to care about the new one. Looking back, I think it's easy to see why:

1) Donkey Kong Country 2 were slowly showing hints of Rare's trademark obsessive collect-a-thons. Each stage had the KONG letters (carried over from the first one); the DK Coin; and numerous banana coins and kremkoins, which were currency for opening up even more content in the game. This drive to collect things were great in forcing replay, but by the end I was sick of trying different tricks to reach for hidden areas to collect things.

2) While Miyamoto might not have actually said that the gameplay was mediocre because of the graphics, I do agree that because of it's awesome graphics, people have dismissed it's somewhat derivative gameplay as a trivial issue (I am also guilty of this). Looking back, while DKC1 had "new" mechanics like barrel blasts, mine kart jumping, they weren't hugely innovative and refreshing. DKC2 suffered even more, as it was merely gameplay refinement and polish over the first. However, in both cases, since the graphics were such standout features, most people were more than willing to forgive it being less than refreshing.

...huh. Didn't realize that I've written way too much for just one game. Looking at the last few post, it seems like it's a bit too much to digest, so I'll try to cut down the length, and maybe switch up to more frequent posting instead. How's that?

...to be continued...

Gaming Past: 16 Bit Gaming

2010-07-07T00:50:00.003-04:00

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My real foray of console gaming

It's been a week since I wrote the last entry, and looking back, this title seems a little too much. It's not that I didn't consider the Famicom that I had a system, but instead, it's the first time where I would be stuck picking and choosing a much more limited choice of what I can play. The end result, for me, is a much deeper appreciation for what each games did and didn't do.

I got my SNES at Woolco (yeah, remember those, yeah, they don't exist anymore) soon after moving to Canada. It was the crazy bundle that came with Super Mario World, Mario Paint, and Mario All-Stars for some ridiculous low price (I recall it being around $130, it's the good old days when consoles can be bought with games for sub-$200, good times). Those games lasted me for a good year, and with very good reason.

Let's get the surprise out of the way first: Mario Paint. Mario Paint, for me, opened up a interesting view into what entertainment can be. Like most people, I gravitated to the only thing resembling a game in the package: "Coffee Break". Using the mouse to wack flies was infinitely entertaining, and even though it was obvious that most of the game was pure chance (enemy position is random). Difficulty ramped up as the stages started to repeat, but that didn't matter to me back then as the high score was the only thing that mattered.

While that game never got too tiring, I did eventually discover the joy of creating both art and music with the "game". I never really had the patience to properly paint a full screen of something, but creating the small pixelart icons and music tracks was a blast. The MIDI music creator baffled me in the details of creating a full music track, but I never got tired of replacing the mario theme with just dog and cat barking sounds. I also never really considered myself to be awesome at creating those small icon pixelart, but I remembered having fun creating alternative colours of the 1Up mushrooms (changing colours was the easiest thing to do, and I made an awesome yellow/red one that Nintendo went on to steal with the Mega Mushroom.

The second pack-in was Super Mario All-Stars, a collection of Mario Bros 1,2,3 and Mario Lost Levels. This became the first opportunity where I completed Mario Bros 1 from start to finish (with improved graphics!), and my first exposure to both Mario Bros Lost Levels, 2 and 3. Lost Levels was a baffling experience, clearly created to spite my 10 year old brain. A mushroom that shrinks you/kills you? EVIL! To this day I still haven't gone back to play through the entire game (which I should someday). Mario Bros 2 and 3were also eye-opening experiences, breaking down my conception of what a platforming game is (which was mostly formed around Mario Bros anyways).

Mario Bros. 2 was an interesting game because it was just so weird. Floating enemies that chases you when you take a key? Pots that shrinks in size? Potions that create doors and alternate paths? Birdo? BIRDO! Timing that stupid egg was annoying! However, the idea of having 4 playable characters, each with slightly different jumping and running mechanics was very very appealing. In hindsight, the Princess' floating mechanics (Yes, it's Princess, not Peach, what the hell is going on there?) was a brilliant move in making me (and probably many people) feel like they're cheating the game and making them feel awesome. I've probably abused every single jump in that game with the floating move.

Mario Bros. 3 was even more interesting, with the frog suit and all, but unfortunately for me, I finished Mario World first, which made 3 feel like an awkward time warp of a game that I didn't really enjoy. A lot of the mechanics were wonderful in hindsight, and I really wish I had learned to appreciate it more back then. The bonus item for clearing each world was empowering; the new abilities were fun to use; the end level bonus reward cards reinforced stage grinding; the silver blocks where you can crouch down and find a secret path was brilliant; the idea of equipping an item into any stage was the best thing ever created since slice bread. Similar to the Princess' floating jump, the idea that you can bring an item into a difficult stage is an empowering cheat that makes players feel like they've gamed the system, even though clearly this was a planned possibility.

However, all the above games are overshadowed by Super Mario World, which was a fantastic experience from start to finish. The first time finding Yoshi; finding out chaining 8 hits in a row earns an extra life; finding out how to get the feather, and mastering flying; finding the ! switches; discovering about multiple branching exits on the red stages... everything about it was carefully paced to deliver a new discovery at every level.

More importantly, the jump from the Famicom to the SNES created a new sense of atmosphere. The SNES, like all my game systems, was placed in the basement with the main TV. Playing games often makes for a chilling experience, where the temperature drops to around 15 degrees on average. This fact greatly contributed to what I remembered in Mario World: The Ghost House was haunting and scary; the mines was cold and echo-y; the Butter Bridge was breezy (hmm... apparently all of the game was just cold, which I guess, doesn't work as well at the Valley of Bowser). The Forest of Illusion, by far, was the most memorable set piece, a haunted forest with no clear exit.

The most mind blowing fact of Super Mario World was when I found out about Star World, and eventually, Special World. Branching multiple paths was cool in other stages, but this "broken glitch" created this illusion of awesomeness about my gaming skills (which, of course, most people did stumble upon anyways). In hindsight, what I appreciated most about it is how all of this was put together: Star World represented "bonus stages", but were also special places to have unique mechanics that were not placed together (Like Star World 3's Football guys, Lakitu, and Grab Blocks); Special World were even more extreme applications of awkward mechanics, like Gnarly's extreme use of vertical space, or Awesome's slippery floor.

To wrap up SMW: Yes, I do have a 95* save; All the turtles are now walking heads; I have opened up every stage, including the Cheese Bridge exit to Soda Lake; Tubular was designed by the devil; Yes I exploit Star World 2 for Blue Yoshi; Yes, I have cleared Bowser's castle once as regular Mario; Forest of Illusion 3 still has it's mid-checkpoint, as it's the fastest ways to rack up 1Ups.

One of the goals for these introductory posts for me was to do a fairly detailed chronicle of the types of games I sunk deep into. I hoped that by looking into the past, it gives better insight into who I am as a gamer and a "designer". At this rate, I'll end up covering way too much detail about too many minor things, without getting on the eventual goal of "actual design topics on my mind". I guess I'll map it out now (at least for maybe the next 2 posts), for both my sake and yours...

Even though I only have 10 SNES games, they have made such a huge impact on how I see games are be played and what made games fun and magical. In the next post, I'll cover what I considered the 3 greatest games of that generation (and miraculously, some of them are also well regarded too! :P ) : Donkey Kong Country 1/2, Super Mario Kart, and Uniracers. After that, I'll cover the rest, for example: Super Mario RPG.

Up Next Time: My top 3 SNES gems.

Gaming Past: The Gameboy Era

2010-06-30T01:00:00.003-04:00

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The Gameboy Era

I could have sworn that I had received the Game Boy right around the same time I got the Famicom, but in hindsight, I'm not even sure anymore. Like most people, the first thing they remembered about the GameBoy was Tetris. Even though I swore by Tengen's version (which I didn't know was any different at the time), I still played the GameBoy version more than anything else at the time. There was something very very satisfying about clearing lines, optimizing and planning out for blocks ahead. However, I was quickly distracted by the glut of other games due to the easy access of pirated carts available back then.

Unlike the Famicom pirated carts, GameBoy carts consisted of these stupid rubber nubs at the top of the cartridge, which toggled to the next game in the list. Given the amount of games that were on these (one of them billed as 58 in 1), the horrendous packaging (I had a picture of a cover, instead of even the title), and almost an infinite amount of time to figure stuff out, I pretty much tried all of the games on these carts 1 by 1. Emphasis on TRY, as the Japanese language and other obscure games would have put me off completely before the menus started.

One of the games I remembered the most was Motocross Maniacs, a 2D side scrolling "motorcross" game. At the time, I had strongly contrasted it against Excitebike as this weird racing hybrid game. On one hand, there was a "racing component" to the game, where you had to get a certain time to advance; but you never ever see any other racers on screen at the same time. What was fascinating to me were the loop-de-loop jumps, requiring the right amount of nitro boosts, item pickups, skill, and luck. Eventually, random ledges and rocks started appearing in the stages (which I later found out, needed me to pop a wheelie), which frustrated me to rage quit. However, since the carts never saved, I've always gone back to play the first 7+ stages, before quitting all over again.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Babs' Big Break was in hindsight, the most fully realized game on the GameBoy I've played at the time. Every stage was playable by at all three characters, and they would all play slightly different. It had some basic gameplay elements that reminded me of Mario (item boxes, etc), but it also had interesting quirks that was interesting to play with (everyone had a weird weapon throw angle). Stupid pirated carts don't have any save data (and I'm not even sure if you can actually save in the actual game), so I've never really finished it.

Like Gradius and LifeForce, Volley Fire was another SHMUP like game that kick started my lifelong obsession with things shooting other things while dodging between things. Volley Fire, however, was done more like a fighting game in attempts to outsmart the AI. Shooting between the floating asteroids moving in a given direction never made any sense, nor did the reflective mirrors in the middle, but it was great fun nevertheless.

Solomon's Key, along with Flipull and Dr. Mario, were a few of many interesting GameBoy puzzle games that I had first discovered on the Game Boy before finding them on the Famicom. Solomon's Key was fantastic in the world and the rules it creates, but I absolutely hated some of the timing puzzles when it came to creating/destroying blocks (and since it's pre-youtube days, I'm still left wondering how some of them are done). Flipull is reminiscent of Yoshi's Cookie of today, and it had a maddeningly addictive "step" mode, where you are limited in the number of moves and blocks that can be used. Dr. Mario needs no introduction, and I've blown way too many hours on setting the difficulty at max, filling the play area, and seeing how long it takes to clear it back down to nothing.

And just like the Famicom list, I've now gone on far too long, and still nowhere close to covering everything that's worth covering...so, here goes a (shorter list) of stuff: Adventure Island (I eventually discovered it to be much much better on the Famicom, but yes, I associate it with the GameBoy first), Hudson Hawk (I've never seen the movie, but the game was interesting and weird with the baseball throwing, the wire grabbing and platform dodging), Klax (in hindsight, I have no idea why this was even fun, but the match 3+ risk reward system was interesting, and that stupid sound effect is still goofy today), Pitman (looking back, OH GOD, IT'S FURRIES, but again, another weird platformer/puzzle game that was fascinating), Tennis (Mario is a terrible ref, but I have a killer ace serve), Yoshi (hmm, another puzzle game, do I really need to explain anymore?)

...I think this is a natural point to stop this post and moved on. The GameBoy for most people sorta fell into the background in a few years as the industry transitioned. For me, I moved from Hong Kong to Canada, and it's a pretty good point to start my next post.

Up Next Time: My real foray of console gaming.

Gaming Past: Intro, and the Famicom System

2010-06-22T04:03:00.004-04:00

Intro

Video games, by it's interactive nature, is highly personal and highly subjective. What I find fascinating in a game maybe completely inconsequential to 99% of the gaming population, so I think it might be best for me to give you the reader some grounding about myself before I dive into other topics. I personally believe that it is important for game developers and designers to not just observe and ask about what people see, but also understand the reasoning behind what people experience. For me to start a blog about my observation of what I see in games, without going through the types of games I've played, knowing what my background and focus is would be a disservice to you all.

So, where do I begin...

In the early days

My first gaming memory is definitely hazy, now that I think about it. I'm pretty sure I had gotten a Famicom first (before the GameBoy), but even that I'm not sure anymore. Let's assume it was the Famicom.

As many people can tell you, Hong Kong was a haven when it comes to piracy. I should make no excuses in terms of buying pirated game, but hey, I didn't know any better back then, and buying legitimate single cart game was downright impossible. As you can guess, all I have are these crazy 300 in 1 carts, mostly filled with different hacks of the same game. There are many pros and cons to this, in hindsight. I have probably sampled more games at that points than most people ever will, but it also means that I've never really beaten anything at any depth.

The fondest memory of any game I had on that system, like most people, was Super Mario Bros. I don't think I've actually ever cleared the game, or even advanced to the third world back then, but I've always find something endearing about how different it looked and played. (Having the ROM save state allowing you to switch to any level without trying also helped) I've either never had the patience, or the time, to fully figure out how to get to the start of the fourth world, but everytime I started playing again at 1-1, it always felt comforting, and it always felt fun.

Contra came in at a close second. Like Mario before it, it's one of those games I've never really good at for a long time. As far as I remembered, I had spent most of my time within the first 3 areas, the hillside(?), the underground lab, and the waterfall. Only much later did I ever see the snow level, and the factory (GOD DAMN SPIKES, ON THE CART :@ ). Looking back, if it wasn't for the pirated rom cart (the version of the game starts with 30 lives without the code + the Spray bullets by default), I would have never even tried the game more than once. It was one of those games that gave me an appreciation of difficult games (even if I have no skill to keep up with it), and showed a large amount of variety and imagination in what was possible.

Little did I know that playing Gradius/LifeForce, along with the aforementioned Contra, kicked off a lifelong obsession of ultra hard scrolling shooters. In all of them, there was the obvious obsession with shooting things (what kid at that age isn't), but more interestingly, as I look back, was that all of them obviously took place in these fantastical world not bounded by reality, and have their own interprtations of rules and logic. Spamming the laser in all three games create this stupid beam that goes nowhere; the upgraded bombs drop to the ground, but travel along it and hits the next enemy. They didn't make sense when it was placed in any other game, but it made playing and learning each game unique and interesting.

Speaking of rules that don't make any sense: Road Fighter. This was recently re-released on XBLA Game Room, and within the first 30 seconds, I wondered how I had actually tolerated this game back then. Cars go from 0-400KM/H; B is a turbo boost accelerator, but caps out at 280 and burns more fuel; running into a rainbow car gives you more fuel; red cars stay in place, blues turn away from you, and other red sports car turn into you. It's absolutely stupid, it's absolutely punishing (any wall grind = instant explosion!), but I've spent countless hours replaying the stages over and over, memorizing patterns of car movements and and timing the proper slide distance.

Then there's Lunarball, which is some absurd version of pool, played in space, with random number of balls, and random tables shapes. Ever wonder how pool plays like if it was a checkerboard? Apparently not that fun. How about a pool table in the shape of the letter A? In a way, this game reminded me of mini-golf, but, also pool. What was fascinating about this game was watching how "physics" would react here. 90% of the time, I would estimate an angle hoping to bank a ball in and miss; but that 10% chance of success would always feel awesome.

...and by now I realized I've gone way too long on mentioning a list of games that don't represent what I've enjoyed, but writing any longer would turn this into a book, so let's just list some of the more notable ones that I remembered. (And if you find any of them interesting, maybe I'll expand upon them later). In no particular (alphanumeric) order:

1942
Baseball (that wicked knuckleball that spins in reverse, I still have no idea if that's intentional)
Battle City
Bomberman(those balloons are God Damn EVIL)
Elevator Action (I had way too much fun shooting out the lights)
Excitebike
Ice Climber
Lode Runner
Mappy(that stupid music is always stuck in my head)
Might Bomb Jack
Tengen's Tetris (Yes, I've played Nintendo's Tetris, I stand by Tengen's as the correct, and superior version)
Track and Field

...you may have noticed that even though this introductory post is primarily Famicom/NES, there were no mention of any RPGs of sort: Final Fantasy and Zelda are all absent. Given the nature of those 190 in 1 carts, it's no wonder why I never saw them. But me and RPGs are a discussion for another time...

Up Next Time: The Gameboy era.