We All Fall Down

Altered Beast (**)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

By no means is Altered Beast a highbrow game; by neither means is that important. The game’s problem is that no one finished putting it together.
The premise: one or two players, formerly living Roman centurions, are reanimated to interfere with Greek mythology. They do this by punching and kicking zombies, and a touch of randomized lycanthropy. Today you’d call the game a “walk-and-punch”. Not a brawler like Double Dragon; think Bad Dudes. Punch, kick, jump. Press up and jump to jump to a higher platform. Duck and kick to attack upwards. It’s clumsy and stupid, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

( Continue reading at ActionButton.net )

This = American Life

  • Reading time:3 mins read

There’s a certain irony to This American Life transmogrifying into a TV show, all the more fun for being left unstated. It’s still produced by Ira Glass, who it turns out looks like the son of Jarvis Cocker and Elvis Costello. It’s shorter than the radio show, by far — only about half an hour. The format suits the visual approach, though.

Really, I think it’s a swell adaptation. As great as the radio show is, I’m maybe more intrigued by this version. In place of the intimacy there’s a certain objective distance that puts a neat spin on the stories. The surreal narrative framework and editing adds to the effect, almost coming out the other side and making the stories more intimate.

He was on Fresh Air today, talking about his approach to adapting the show and the changes he had to make; I’d forgotten it was happening, and it sent me running to Demonoid. Two episodes so far; it seems to air on Saturdays, on Showtime.

It’s curious that this was produced for a pay channel rather than PBS. That certainly should explain how expensive and tight it looks. It also ties into some observations a while ago that what HBO and Showtime have been doing with original programming — The Sopranos, that cowboy thing — is pretty similar to what the BBC has been up to. Similar style; similar kind of expressive freedom.

Free of the limitations of commercial sponsorship and ratings — since the channel is paid for directly, in one way or another — the producers are allowed freedom to make whatever they want, so long as it’s a good product in the end. A nice perk and reason for people to subscribe, and something that maybe the channel can turn into a retail product down the road, as DVD sets. Thus there’s a certain maturity, a security to the approach. They can assume a certain level of understanding and interest without necessarily catering.

So, I mean. I was thinking about that already, making those parallels, and thinking how interesting it would be if PBS were to get the same kind of funding. Then a few days ago HBO annoucned it was cooperating with the BBC (oh?) to produce a show about Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity (oho!), starring Andy Serkis (huh) and David Tennant (huh!). And… what the hell, I thought, is HBO turning into the new WGBH?

And now there’s this, an NPR staple turned into a quirky Showtime experiment. So it seems there’s… at least something to this analogy. I wonder.

Donkey Kong 3 (*)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

It’s been said that each of us only has one tune to play; all we ever do is change the way we play it. It’s also been said that Donkey Kong and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s tune originates in his personal hobbies, filtered through a love of Japanese and Western fairy tales. The Legend of Zelda has its roots in the fields and caves behind Miyamoto’s childhood home. Pikmin comes from Miyamoto’s garden. And Donkey Kong 3 is based on the premise that it is fun to spray DDT up a gorilla’s asshole. While being attacked by bees.

( Continue reading at ActionButton.net )

Serialization

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I’m getting my cable disconnected because I don’t really watch it. The few shows I do watch, I can just torrent or whatever. That’s… Lost and BSG, really. And BSG is going to be off-air until 2008, so.

Bittorrent is the future of television, I swear. Between that and DVD… The thing about BT is that it’s global. I mean. Doctor Who’s starting up again in a few days, in the UK. Though it’s being picked up sooner than before, it still won’t show on Sci-Fi for months. Doesn’t matter if you’ve DSL!

There was a recent survey I read that said that the average person in the US has something like 130 TV channels available to him — and yet the average person only ever watches something like 6% of those channels. That’s foolish. Were I given the option to choose, say, a dozen channels that I actually felt were interesting (plus all of the local stuff — PBS is important), that’d be fine. Maybe a buck a channel, per month?
Plus a ten dollar flat fee, including all the local stuff?

You can’t even get Comedy Central here unless you pay thirty-something dollars a month — and to hell with that. The Daily Show isn’t worth that much to my life. They need a system where you pay for what you actually watch. Or intend to watch.

The whole channel system is a bit screwed-up anyway. Outdated. In the future, the ideal way this would work would be subscriptions to particular shows. Which would be delivered at certain intervals. And you could watch them whenever you wanted. And it would be worldwide. So if I wanted to subscribe to an obscure Indian show that was starting to gain popularity, I could do so.

Maybe the way it would work is you’d have a certain number of points to allocate in a given month. You could buy more, if you wanted. I guess it’s kind of like Netflix — pay more to get more DVD rentals at once.

If you found a show you liked, you could have the option of starting from the current episode or starting from the beginning. Likewise, you could splurge a bunch of points to watch the whole thing at once, or you could just go one episode at a time, a normal subscription, starting from the start.

This is the way television will work, eventually. DVD sets would still exist as compilations, the way they sell episodic games in boxes.

The tide is turning; people are starting to realize that the shows are more important than the networks. DVD is helping a lot in this. And actually-good TV being made.

How to Make the DS Better

  • Reading time:6 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

That the DS is a sensation is both indisputable and deserved. That it has helped to change the industry should by now be reasonably obvious. All the more shame, then, that the system is not really built for success.

The DS was an experiment – a cautious stab in the dark, introduced almost with an apology in Nintendo’s early assurance that it was not replacing the Game Boy. Instead, Nintendo insisted, the DS was meant as a “third rung” in the company’s strategy in addition to its traditional handheld and console systems. Judging by how long it took the industry and its followers to “get” the system and its improved follow-up, the Wii, Nintendo’s caution was probably well-advised.

To Nintendo’s credit, it wasted little time.

Rainbow Six’s Upton Talks Landscaping Game Worlds

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

The final session of the final day of last week’s GDC 2007 was a cross-disciplinary take on level design. Brian Upton, a senior designer for SCEA and the lead designer for Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, called on theme park design, landscaping, and city planning as parallels for level design, explaining that they all work under the same principles.

The main concern with all of these disciplines is human psychology – an understanding of how people orient themselves within, organize, and think about the space around them. Since theme park designers, landscapists, and city planners have been doing their job a heck of a lot longer than game designers, Upton suggested looking to these older fields not only for technique but for terminology with which we might describe and define level design.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Aonuma’s Reflections On Zelda

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by [name redacted]

Check out the comments section on the original article. Seriously.

On Thursday Aonuma candidly, and with self-effacing humor, spoke of his period of aimlessness and mistakes that began with the release of The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker, the way in which they reflected the Japanese industry as a whole, and how they led to Nintendo’s shift of focus over the last few years.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Randy Smith Doesn’t Save the Day

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Though on the one hand it is comforting to be able to save and load at will, continually loading – thereby undoing events, and making consequences irrelevant – tends to diminish a player’s belief in the game world, making it all the harder for the game to affect the player in a meaningful capacity.

The situation is kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, in that allowing free saving tends to lead to abuse yet disallowing it leads to player complaints.

EALA game designer Randy Smith gave a brief speech on the psychological factors that tend to result in save abuse, and how potentially to avoid or undermine those triggers, such that players are tempted to save and load far less often, thereby allowed to take their in-game experiences at face value.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Ubisoft’s Hocking Talks The Power Of Self-Exploration

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Video games are all about exploration – about living in someone else’s world for a while, learning the rules, learning the territory, and maybe taking something home with you. Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking has his ideas about what that means for the medium and anyone who might set out to explore it.

Although the virtual space of a game world is perhaps most obvious, the most fundamental aspect of a game is its underlying systems – the physical laws and properties that govern that space. Exploring those systems is in a sense the scientific method in fast forward, a series of experiments in cause and effect that forms the substance of game play.

The more immediate and tangible the results to the player’s experiments, the more readily the player feels progress, so the more rewarding the system feels. “It’s supposed to be beautiful,” Hocking said. “If you get this part wrong, the rest doesn’t even matter.”

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Industry Vets Never Metagame They Didn’t Like

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by [name redacted]

Two teams, split up amongst Eric Zimmerman of Gamelab, Warren Spector, Mark Leblanc of Mind Control, video game theorist Jesper Juul, Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking, Jonathan Blow, and USC Professor Tracey Fullerton, moved their virtual quarters around the board to make thematic comparisons between often highly-contrasting games.

Has World of Warcraft created a more intense subculture than Asteroids? Is Guitar Hero more culturally sophisticated than Parappa the Rapper? Is Wipeout more realistic than Nethack? Is Oregon Trail more emotionally rich than Virtua Fighter? (See below for answers.)

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Sound and Perspective in Experimental Games

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Whereas last year’s Experimental Gameplay Sessions were crammed into a standing-room-only meeting room, resulting in a nightmare for the fire marshal yet a powerful experience for the audience, this year’s sessions were moved to a huge, dark presentation hall.

Although the audience turnout was larger than ever, and host Jon Blow had more participants to introduce, the meeting somehow felt less intimate and more low-key than last year’s.

As before, the event sprawled over two and a half hours with a short break in the middle. Where last year’s sessions had a general theme of interpreting complex emotions and ideas through familiar game models – evidenced in games like flOw, Cloud, Braid, and Everyday Shooter – this year’s entries tended toward novel uses of sound and perspective. Perhaps half of the event was devoted to various game festivals, while several of the remaining presentations were of high-profile commercial games.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Fable is Love; Love is Puppies

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

This article had a strict deadline; I rushed to finish it so it could go live before the whole Internet had reported on the demonstration. And then… I guess it slipped through the cracks. Oh well! Here it is.

As another note, I think this was the meeting where Molyneux creepily offered his audience cookies. I was the only one to perk up. Hey, cookies.

Peter Molyneux was in loopy spirits, discussing his new game. Who knows how many times he had been over the same territory that day, though he seemed to enjoy spinning his tale, finding the right notes to highlight, the right places to pause for dramatic tension.

“Sequels are tricky things,” Molyneux started off. “Not my specialty. The sensible approach is to give you more things you like, better.” More weapons, new monsters, twenty times the land, guns! When Molyneux was asked to provide a sequel, he set off doing demographical research to see just what people wanted of him anyway. Then he opened “the doors of hell” – the online communities – only to quickly, in his words, slam them shut again. There were so many demands, so shrilly phrased – “so many people mortally offended by the design choices in Fable 1” – that the best Molyneux could do was sift out the most common complaints.

Mobile Session Itself Goes Massively Multiplayer

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Going by the online schedule, Gamevil, Inc. general manager Kyu C. Lee was to spend an hour chatting about mobile MMO games and communities, by way of his mobile MMO game, Path of a Warrior – in North Hall room 124, at 2:00.

In practice, the session was held in a completely different building and Mr. Lee was absent. With the blessing of the sound and technical staff, however, the small turnout soon took command, converting the session into an informal comparison of notes.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Ubisoft’s Adam Thiery Talks Camera Theory

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

Adam Thiery, a designer for Ubisoft Montreal, gave a short talk today on interactive cinematography. His basic point was that game cinematography is player-driven. Simple it may sound; real application is always trickier. One of the big sticking points is that camerawork, being player-driven, is limited by current understanding of game design and player psychology.

A modern camera knows when to change state, explained Thiery. In Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, when the player is pressed against a wall, the standard tracking camera shifts from a behind-the-character perspective to show the player character left-of-center, and focus the player’s attention to the right, around the given barrier.

Thiery said that a good game camera is a matter of functionality, rather than cinematography – yet given that, it pays to consider the visual composition within each camera state. The reason is that any action a player takes is generally guided by what he has been shown to do.

The original Half-Life takes places in a disorienting sci-fi setting; to drive the player forward, it uses huge stripes painted on the walls, like a trail of breadcrumbs or an arrow. Though this is an artificial and somewhat clumsy application, that same principle applies to any 2D screen composition.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Evan Skolnick Asks Game Writers To ‘Make It Snappier’

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Writing is one of the less discussed bits of game development; Vicarious Visions producer Evan Skolnick has been doing his best to redress the balance. Whereas last year’s session dealt with dialogue, this year Skolnick chose to discuss general structure.

Skolnick’s background is in comic books, and indeed much of his game industry work has been on comic book movie licenses; his methods are generally simple, direct, and accessible to an entry-level audience.

Up front Skolnick cautioned that the session was not for professional writers, but neither was it a debate on the essence of video game narrative, or a tutorial on “how to make players cry”. Rather, it was a by-the-book overview was for game industry veterans – programmers, producers – with little experience in the mechanics of storytelling.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )