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"in the meantime, I decided to do an absolutely crucial bit of game science. Something that I am entirely sure is mulled over constantly, but never properly investigated. The question is but stated thusly: how long would it take the Little Prince to roll up an entire room based on a random path algorithm?" Julian is having fun.
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"Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?"
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"For all the talk of immersion and realism it seems gamers still want games that provide for them, that make them the centre of the action, the pivotal agent in the events of the world, the nexus around which everything is focused." And this is one of the big conflicts within games: you have to make the player feel wanted whilst they're playing the game, make them feel the centre of attention, because without them the game is nothing. But at the same time: can you still tell stories that aren't about them? I expand a little in the comment on the blogpost proper.
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"Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations… Since we know we’ll be doing more of this, we created our own Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable." Could be useful.
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"That is, the activity of making kleos, as a bard or as a player, is about forming an affinity group—people who think the game is a cool game, who want to talk about it, who would go to the mat for it. It’s about making fanboys. Odysseus is going to turn the Phaeacians into Odysseus fanboys, just as the bard of Odyssey 9 is going to turn his audience into fanboys of the Odyssey, just as he the bard is already such a fanboy."
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"Either way, I love reading these cables. The language is crafted so perfectly, despite the constraints. They’re caught between poetry and machinery." Yes. And what a different game it was then; lots to like in this taut post from Dan Hill.
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"Welcome to House of Bendie – a UK clothing line that takes classic, British suiting fabrics and creates unsuit-like clothes for men and women. We specialise in bespoke hoodies: hand-made, made-to-measure, hooded jackets crafted from exquisite suit materials." Oh, lovely.
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"Generated" certainly is the wrong word.
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Jaw-droppling good. More on this soon, but in a nutshell: you have about a week, and it's incredible. Do not ignore the queues inside it, either: they are all for excellent things.
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"My crystal ball tells me you will hear music – great classic rock tunes – and you will believe, truly believe, that you are playing that music on your toy guitar. And you will feel, truly feel, that you are cool. A hero of the guitar." Lovely.
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"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."
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"XP is adapted to a context where motivation is expensive and change is cheap. Interaction design (at least how Cooper explains it) is adapted to a context where motivation is cheap and change is expensive. It should be obvious that contexts of both kinds can exist in the world: there are situations where it's easy to return to previous decisions and modify them (software, for one), and there are other situations where it's not (e.g. buildings, dams)."
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Kotaku picked up on the L4D Twitterbots I wrote. Needless to say, the discussion thread descended into general Valve-baiting.
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"So why don’t we aim for a new tier – something that takes a chunk out of the 90, to lead it closer to the 9 and the 1? Why not give users a chance to enter something personal and creative, but let the system mediate, moderate and filter it into something useful?" Yes. The 90-9-1 pyramid is actually a very unhelpful metaphor, IMHO, and trying to explore and encourage creativity along a sliding scale rather than an absolute is important.
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Lots of good stuff in here, and, indeed, most of the blogs I started following this year. Somewhat flattered to have snuck in myself. It's a great starting point if you're interested in the games-crit-o-sphere, and nice that representative posts have been pulled out from each blog.
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"These sketches should make Arduino-based web-controlled home automation, and remote-responsive spaces a lot easier. The advantage of working with an ethernet shield is that you no longer need to tether the Arduino to a computer in order to access Pachube and other network services!" Some useful examples, to be returned to.
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"In one moment the game had broken the tacit agreement between us. It had failed to respect my character decisions, it had made a pretense of allowing me to define whether Faith violent or not only to pull the rug away at the vital moment and strip all control from me. It lied. Any actions I might have taken to avoid combat up to then were for nothing. It had failed to show me respect so had lost mine." Breaking the unwritten contract with the player is definitely a bad thing, and I didn't notice this – but only because I'd not been aiming for the "no kills" achievement.
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Japanese Bioshock commercial. Nifty: no in-game footage, but there's something that feels like it overlaps right.
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Freddie25 plays the Wind Waker theme, on a selection of instruments, as a Christmas treat for you. It's delightful, and the bit when the nine-part vocals come in is lovely. Proper good, this.
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"..some tweets were destined for fail." – or, at least, not for public consumption. Oh dear.
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For each of the 25 days leading to Christmas, Paul and Storm have done one of their Randy Newman theme-songs. Twenty-five pastiches of Short People, for your pleasure. Die Hard, The Godfather, and the Big Lebowski are stand-outs.
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"I'm not sure if I have made it clear about how much I want a Sega Genesis for Christmas. I have developed a way that the gift of a Sega Genesis for me will not only benefit me with many hours of enjoyment, but it will also benefit you with many clean bathrooms, clean rooms, and meaningful hugs." Chris Baker finds the evidence of how (he thinks) he managed to get a Sega Genesis for Christmas in 1992. At least they'd stopped shipping Altered Beast with it by then.
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"Here's the most important thing to understand about the mass market for videogames: these players – the ones who aren't even remotely interested in the kind of videogames the hobbyists want to play – have very specific tastes, and when something takes off with them it continues to sell, and sell, and sell. But these players don't buy many titles – when they find the game they want, they generally just keep playing that."
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"But in a game – or, at any rate, in the kind of game you used to get for Christmas – you’re literally the only person in the universe, and literally the only person with the power to fix things. No-one’s going to come and help, no-one’s going to come and tell you off or second-guess your choices: there’s just you and a world that will stay broken unless you fix it. What’s in the box isn’t a frog power fantasy – it’s a vibrant, momentary taster of the glorious pressure of being a grown-up." Margaret, being brilliant (again) on games, Christmas, childhood, and what it means to be meaningfully alone.
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"Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen. The fundamentals were so dizzyingly strong, it could be tough to keep them all straight." Good selection, though, both political and non.
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"Waveform Series is the laser-cut shapes of the waveform of the sound in sound editing software environment. I used some human sound such as yawn, atchoum, giggle, wow, and the sound of church bell." Utterly, utterly gorgeous.
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"A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages." Oh, that could come in handy.
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Lovely way to generate pages for your github projects – and to do so as a branch of said project. Clever.
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"CCP Games has uncovered an exploit in Eve Online that survived in the game for 4 years and may have had a massive impact on the game and game economy." Read the links for more details; suffice to say, EVE is going through a major economic upheaval right now; exploits that have lasted for four years are no longer viable, and everything's getting very expensive. Sound familiar?
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"Semi-jestfully I would talk with my friends about how stupid it would be to get an I <3 Helvetica tattoo… an even stupider idea would be to get it as a tramp stamp. Well, I got good reviews from my posse and impulsively I got it last night…" Oh boy.
Favourite Games of 2008
24 December 2008
It’s the end of the year, and that means time for lists. My books and albums lists are forthcoming – hopefully tonight or tomorrow – but in the meantime, I thought I’d kick off with ten of my favourite games of the past year.
There’s lots missing here, mainly owing to the fact I haven’t finished a lot of recent titles or given them the time they’ve deserved. What this is, though, is a good summary of what the gaming year felt like to me; ten games I enjoyed a great deal, and that I would recommend in a heartbeat to anyone not sure where to begin with 2008.
And so, in no particular order:
Far Cry 2
(Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
I have written enough about this already, but suffice to say: it sunk its teeth into me, after the initial hump I couldn’t play anything else, and at the end, it left me unable to play anything else for a while. Spectacularly beautiful, too.
Trism
(iPhone)
Trism began as an app for the jailbroken iPhone; it quickly made the transition to the official App Store platform when that opened up, and it has sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of copies since then, giving Demiforce a fantastic start to their company. And with good reason: it’s a great piece of game design, easy to learn, and hard to master. It also makes brilliant use of not only the iPhone’s capacitive touch screen, but also its tilt sensor. It’s a very pure puzzling experience, and I’ve already sunk many hours into it; it suits the pick-up/put-down rhythm of travel and play on-the-move idaelly. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, this really is a no-brainer.
Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2
(Xbox 360)
It’s still one of the best games on Live Arcade. It’s also still one of the best asynchronous multiplayer games you can play. Making your friends high scores the default high score table gives it a great competitive streak and really contextualises your performance: nothing’s more frustrating than having emailed a friend to say “hah, beat your high score” only to receive an response five minutes later informing you that the ball is firmly back in your court.
Adding variety to the original formula are the six game modes, slowly unlocked over time. They may all be variants on a theme, but they all still demand unique skills and become games in their own right: turning the Pacifism achievement from the first game into a mode in its own right was a great move.
Beautiful in high-def, easily explained to anyone who’s played a videogame in their life, it’s by turns accessible and challenging, and an essential purchase for new 360 players. Also, its social scoreboards give it great longevity, and prove what I already know: I’m nearly, but not quite, at the bottom of the pack when it comes to motor control. As long as I’m not last…
Braid
(Xbox 360)
If there’s a measures of Braid’s success, it’s not to be found in its sales or metacritic scores, but in the sheer volume of verbiage devoted to it in the blogs, forums, and magazines of the gaming world. Thousands of words, all expended on the game, on the hype, and on what the hell it all means.
It wouldn’t have got that discussion if it wasn’t in some way good, and it really is: beautiful, challenging, and proof of the things that only games can do. It embraces game-native storytelling, wrapping its meaning tightly around its mechanics, and tells its tale through challenging, timeless puzzles and David Hellman‘s incredible artwork.
Perhaps it is a little pretentious; perhaps the writing is weak. Regardless of those facts, it’s exciting to see a game like this getting such a major launch on a mainstream, living-room platform, and as an artefact to push forward the casual – as well as professional – criticism of games, it’s a great starting point.
GRID
(Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
I always forget how much I like racing games. GRID is a very, very fine take on the racer. It’s beautiful, it’s fast, and it’s totally stripped down. GRID demonstrated that Codemasters really understood what making a game “cinematic” might look like: you condense it down into tight, exciting drama. So races take place over two-to-five laps, and in that time the AI will give you as good a catfight as any “realistic” simulator might over an hour. The rewind-time mechanic, as well as being wonderful to watch, removes the traditional racing-game reliance on the “restart” option; giving the game a pre-credits race, not to mention an ongoing narrative of running a team only helps with the Days of Thunder feel. Mapping Le Mans to a twenty-four minute endurance race makes it both exciting and endurable.
And, of course, it’s very pretty and fast as hell. The open-wheel racing is some of the most exciting driving games have to offer, in particular. The drift tournaments are weak, but stick to the touring cars, touge and open-wheel and you’ve got a hell of a game. The icing on the cake is the beautiful, free-floating typography. Solid, and surprisingly good.
Grand Theft Auto IV
(Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
It’s on everybody else’s list, and I can’t really deny it: it’s a wonderful environment, and a staggering achievement. It’s not as smart as it likes, and it occasionally misfires but it delivers moments by the dozen. Shame the pacing of the islands feels wrong – after the majesty of Three Leaf Clover, being dumped in the New Jersey analogue is a bit underwhelming.
Also: multiplayer, with the right gang of people, is a total hoot. Whilst not the runaway online success that might have been hoped for, if you can get eight to sixteen friends online together, Cops and Crooks or Turf War will bring the fun pretty fast.
God of War: Chains of Olympus
(PSP)
Well, it came out this year in the UK. I played this sitting by a roaring log fire, having spent my days clambering around the Lake District. It is not the greatest game of the year by a long stretch. It is, however, a wonderfully crafted experience: short it may be, but it’s put together almost perfectly: fantastic environments that barely repeat, thrilling combat that’s not too difficult, and one of the most striking in-game sequences I’ve played this year. It helps that the lack of direct camera control translates perfectly to the single-stick PSP. On top of all that, it looks almost as good as the PS2 versions – it’s a remarkable feat of engineering. I had a lot of fun with this, and if you own Sony’s much-unloved portable, you owe yourself to play this.
Left 4 Dead
(Xbox 360, PC)
Gerard Way asked if it was any good, and the answer is yes, Gerard, it is. It’s bloody brilliant, although with the obvious caveat that it gets better with friends. Co-op gaming has slowly seen a slew of support and innovation in the past two to three years, and Left 4 Dead represents one particular pinnacle of that: an experience designed ground-up to be played not only co-operatively, but with real friends.
It’s not about team-mates, it’s about mates; how far would you go to save your friends from a Smoker? Quite far, as it turns out; I’ve noticed that in various pick-up groups, if I have to pick between someone I know in real life and someone I don’t, I’ll go with my friends first. To see such an unashamedly co-op experience – and one that could be described as reasonably hardcore if you hadn’t tried it – achieve such a level of mainstream success is very heartening. I put it down to the fact that Valve are such a talented gang of people, and so fastidious in their process. If you’ve not played through the director’s commentary, you owe it to yourself to do so, if only to understand that nothing in the final product is the result of chance.
Also: it’s great to see a game that puts the mechanic, indeed, the core technology, that really makes it – the AI – so far front-and-center. Personifying it as the AI Director was the stroke of genius that not only made players aware of it, but gave them someone to blame when they all died. Again.
World of Goo
(Mac, PC, Wii)
There are two reasons, I think, that World of Goo has captured a lot of people’s hearts this year. One is the game itself: the wonderful art; the delightful soundtrack; the just-one-more-go gameplay that carefully teaches you everything to know whilst keeping the challenge just high enough. But the other is the game’s mythology: 2D Boy, two guys working out of coffee shops for a year, giving up on the traditional industry to make the game they really wanted to. It’s the story we all wanted to believe in. The fact that both elements are so great is the real magic of World of Goo: risking it all, living the indie dream, really did lead to a wonderful game.
Gravitation
(Mac, PC, Linux)
I like this more than Rohrer’s previous Passage. It’s a small, simple game, available for most home desktop platforms (Windows/OSX/Linux), about “mania, melancholia, and the creative process”. To say any more is to rob it of its impact. Once I worked out what you have to do to progress, I played on with a huge lump in my throat. To be heartbroken by a game this slight, this simple, in its 100 square pixel area, is quite something, and Rohrer makes games like no-one else.