And Then I Bought Me A Walkman

Dogz and Catz Living Together, Mass Hysteria

2009-10-01T14:54:26Z

While changing over the layout of the blog a few weeks ago and updating the bits of it that inevitably broke while doing so, it occurred to me I never said anything about Petz Fashion: Dogz and Catz coming out for the Nintendo DS earlier this summer. Let’s fix that now, shall we?

Petz Fashion: Dogz and Catz (henceforth referred to as just Petz Fashion) is a new installment in Ubisoft’s long-running series of pet sims where you adopt an animal (in this case, a puppy or kitten) and then take care of it, seeing to its needs by feeding, watering, and cleaning up after it, buying it new toys to play with, brushing its fur, and so on. The games have done incredibly well for Ubisoft, as evidenced y the ever-growing amount of shelf space they take up in stores – this is Powerhead’s third Petz title so far, and Ubisoft has an internal team devoted solely to developing even more games starring all sorts of animals, including monkeys, dolphins, and horses (oh my). Some are collections of mini-games, others let you carry pets over from one game to another and even breed them, and some are just straight-forward pet sims in the style of the super popular Nintendogs games. Petz Fashion is the latter, which for my first foray in to the world of artificial animal friends I was happy about, as it keeps things a bit simpler. None of that circle of life business going on here, thank you very much.

Of course, it’s not just a pet sim – as the title suggests, there’s also a fashion component. Petz Fashion follows in the footsteps (paw prints?) of an earlier game by another developer, Petz: Dogz Fashion, which featured (among other things) a narrative about fashion shows starring your canine companion, a bunch of clothes to dress them up in, and a collection of mini-games to play. For Petz Fashion we took a more stripped down approach, culling the narrative and mini-games in favor of having fun with your pet through more free-form play. We also added the ability to adopt a second pet without starting an all new save file, allowing players to switch between the two whenever they wanted from a toolbar on the DS’s Touch Screen. While there are still loads of fashion shows to attend and plenty of encouragement to do so in the form of invitations arriving once your wardrobe is up to snuff, special outfits and other prizes to take home, and more, the player is free to go through them at their own pace. Despite the name of the game putting the spotlight on fashion, it was important to me and the rest of the team that caring for and playing with your pet remain the most important aspect. You can’t attend fashion shows if your pet isn’t healthy and happy, for instance, and taking time during the prep phase of each show to make sure your pet is well-fed, groomed, and in good spirits is a big part of your final score. While Petz Fashion is hardly a how-to guide on how to successfully raise a pet (and was never intended to be), we wanted to enforce good pet owner habits across the board. Nobody wants a real-life version of Parker Posey’s character from Best in Show, after all.

Along with the Fashion Shows and how much fun it remains to just play fetch with your pet or get them to chase a laser pointer, I’m really please with how well performing tricks worked in to the game. It wasn’t something we originally planned for, but as production moved forward and we kept talking about it, we eventually all agreed that it would be fun if your pet could perform tricks – not just as a special animation at the end of a successful walk down the isle at a show, but on command. One of the rewards for acing the game’s fashion shows is your pet building up a collection of tricks it can perform via a menu on the Touch Screen or by speaking in to the DS’s microphone, from the basics of sitting down and rolling over to chasing its tail and break dancing (as the finer breeds of show dogs and cats are known to do on occasion). While I generally don’t like the microphone on the DS (too fickle, too embarrassing to use in crowded places, and often too gimmicky in execution), it was pretty great the first time our lead programmer got his dog to sit by telling it to. It helps that there’s a menu option for tricks as well, allowing you to show off your pet’s moves without causing a subway delay after somebody decides to see something and say something.

It’s a good game, and one I’m proud of, particularly considering the blink-and-you’ll miss it schedule the thing was on. I’m pleased with how much there is for the player to do, from buying new toys for their pet, attending fashion shows armed with a gigantic wardrobe and more clothing customization tools than have ever been in one of these things, or just taking pictures of their pet in mid-air as it leaps from the couch to attack a red dot on the floor. Whenever we came to a crossroads or impasse during production, we tried to stop and ask ourselves “What’s more fun for the player? What would a person playing this game want to do here?” As a designer, I consider one of my main jobs to be an advocate for the player, to constantly keep the wants, needs, and priorities of the people who are eventually going to be playing the game front and center over the course of development. With Petz Fashion, I think we pulled it off nicely.

Originally published at Expertologist. Please leave any comments there.

Talking About Talking About Comics

2009-09-25T19:27:13Z

Long time readers (yes, yes) will recall the heady days of 2008 when I wrote a not entirely regular column about comics called Comics Are Expensive. Each installment featured a handful of reviews of the books I’d bought that week, covering a wide spread of offerings from the likes of Marvel and DC to tiny self-publishers and everything in between. It was mostly fun while it lasted, and while I don’t regret it at all, I think the experience has put to bed the idea of doing a weekly column about anything for a good long while. While I still love the format (the idea of a place for people to show up each week to hear about things they like is hugely appealing), weekly columns are bastard hard things to write, both for the amount of time each piece takes and the challenge of keeping it interesting. No matter how wide the subject matter appears to be at the start (and “comics I bought this week” is a fairly massive expanse), it quickly begins to feel narrow and limiting as fears of repeating yourself begin to creep in around the edges. Rereading the lot of them recently, the lack of truly negative reviews really stood out (at least to me) – there are books I love, books I like, and books I don’t like as much. While it fits with the rather dubious from the start mandate of the column covering books I bought that week, I can’t help but wonder if there were any readers struggling with the idea of there being someone so full of love and and light for comics of all sorts and sizes as to never run across deserving of more than a friendly “not for me, I guess”. If you thought so then or now, let me reassure you that I hate all sorts of comics. I just don’t buy them, is all.

The other thing that hit upon rereading them all (and, at long last, the point of this post) was how many of them I’m still happy with. Like most people who do anything creative, I hate the vast majority of what I write upon rereading, seeing only typos, overused tics, bungled attempts to be more clever than I am, and a dozen other reasons why I should pack it all in and never lay fingers to keys again. And while there’s plenty of that spread over the dozen or so columns I managed, I’m ultimately pleased with how much I managed to get right. With that in mind, and to keep them from disappearing in to the ether like so many other things I’ve written for web sites over the years, I’ve gathered all of Comics Are Expensive here on my blog-thing. Each are timestamped with the day they first went live, as the Dead Milkman did that once with a tour diary from the eighties and I thought it was clever. You can find them by clicking on the Comics Are Expensive tab in the column on the left, or by clicking on the links I’ve handily included below.

1. Teen Titans #55, Avengers: The Initiative #9, Suburban Glamour #3, Captain America #34, Northlanders #3
2. Umbrella Academy #6, Immortal Iron Fist, Crossing Midnight Vol. 2
3. Rasl #1, Kick Ass #1, Action Philosophers Vol. 3
4. Atomic Robo #4-5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer #12, PS238 #29, Casanova #12
5. Comic Book Comics #1 and Maintenance #9
6. Incredible Hercules #115, Fear Agent #19, The Boy Who Made Silence #1
7. Echo #1-2, Resurrection #1-4, Criminal Vol 2. #1-2
8. Transhuman #1 and Proof #6
9. Echo #1-2, Resurrection #1-4, Criminal Vol 2. #1-2
10. The Damned: Prodigal Sons #1, Scarlet Traces Vol. 1
11. Invincible Iron Man #1
12. Minx Special
13. Superman Beyond #1

Originally published at Expertologist. Please leave any comments there.

Trials HD and Trying Again

2009-09-18T14:59:29Z

I love the simplicity of the controls in Trials HD. One button makes the bike go, one button makes it stop, and slight taps to the left stick makes the little guy lean forward or back on his bike. It’s everything you need to get through the game’s many stunt tracks, from the earliest “this is what a ramp looks like” tutorial stages to the crueler gauntlets of explosions, falling I-beams, and jumps so ridiculous you’ll spend so much time in the air as to wonder why you’re dirt bike doesn’t come with an in-flight meal. With just three inputs mapped to the most natural feeling bits of the Xbox 360’s controller, Trials HD gracefully nails one of the more important aspects of any good game – you feel completely in control of your character, and when you mess up, no matter how much you yell and curse at the broken remains of your driver and bike, more often than not you know it was you who failed, not the design of the game.

And you will mess up. A lot. You’ll hit ramps at the wrong speed to make a jump, or be going fast enough only to realize your position on the bike was all wrong, ending your run (and the structural integrity of your neck) in a messy face plant and sharp crack that echoes through the abandoned warehouse-turned-stunt track-turned abattoir each of the tracks are set in. Or you’ll fly too high, a motocross Icarus for the X-games generation, only to land so hard the shocks in your bike collapse in on themselves and leave you eye level with the underside of your tires. Or you’ll tumble in to a clutch of exploding barrels. Or you won’t be fast enough to get across a bit of collapsing track in time. Or any of a dozen other horrible things will happen, resulting in the always fun sight of driver and bike ragdolling themselves to bits against the environment.
Which brings us around to my favorite part of Trial HD’s controls – the reset buttons. At any time, alive or dead, you can hit one to send you back to the last cleared checkpoint (helpful for avoiding frustrating bits you may have lucked through, but later hurting your final score), or you can hit the other one to start the whole level over. Thanks to the smallish size of the game and the whole thing living on the 360’s hard drive, resetting a level is an instant process, with no loading screen giving you a horrible few seconds to reconsider the merit of beating your head against a stunt track-shaped wall. With the push of a button any disaster is wiped away as though it never happened, nothing left of it by a distant, painful memory from a past life where you leaned forward a bit too much at the wrong time.

Trials HD gets a lot of things right – it’s lovely to look at, its camera, despite being fixed, is fixed just so that you rarely think about it if ever, and it’s challenges, while often utterly bastard hard, escalate in such a way that you almost don’t notice when they turn in to devious Rube Goldberg devices of death and flame. But what I love it for, what I most admire and keep coming back for, is its ability to keep me around for one more go. No matter how frustrating a level might be, no matter how sure I am that I did everything right only to die in a flurry of shouted curse words, I’m always in for one more go. The ability to instantly reload a level, the scores of my friends (and how I’m doing against them) displayed across the top of the screen, the way the track falls apart around me as I stumble towards the finish line, often on fire and seconds from death, it all adds up to one of the most addictive games I’ve played in ages. At it’s best, Trials HD manages real magic, wiping away the urge to throw my controller through my very nice television with a push of a button, replacing my pure rage with the faith that this time, this one time, I’ll do everything just right and stay on the bike and moving forward long enough to cross the checkered line.

When designing games I’m personally not a big fan of traditional binary fail states. I think in a lot of games they break up the flow of play in unnecessary and frustrating ways – being around to deal with the consequences of not doing as well as you’d hoped or needed to and having the chance to make it up is a more interesting design challenge for me than who shot first and fastest. In a game like Trials HD, though, I’m just fine with the Groundhog Day-esque cycle of death and rebirth nameless stunt guy is trapped in, as developer RedLynx have made it just so compelling. Cringing and laughing out loud as your latest botched run sends your little guy in to a physics-upped flurry of broken bones pretty much never gets old, taking the edge off even the most crushing defeats. Between a failure sequence so entertaining it becomes more of a reward for trying in the first place and the ability to instantly start the whole thing over with the push of a button, it becomes clear why it can get away with some of the mind-boggling (on first brush, at least) level designs they throw at you.

Yes, it can be an intensely hard game at times, and yes, there have definitely been moments where all I’ve wanted in the world was to see my TV explode in a shower of sparks and broken dreams as my controller flew through the screen. That I never do, instead stabbing the Back button with all the rage I can while growling “One more” at the hapless rider on his bike as he reappears at the start of the track before gassing the engine, is where it becomes clear just what sort of game Trials HD is. It’s not about getting everything exactly right the first time, it’s about learning from each and every mistake, finding the perfect degree to lean at for a jump, positioning your bike just right for landing, ad slowly discovering the correct blend of insane risk and precision needed to get from one end of the track to the other as fast as possible while remaining in one piece. It’s one of the best “just one more go” games I’ve played in ages, and looking at the ways it quickly funnels you back to the starting line, siphoning off just enough anger to keep you from quitting in a rage (or at least postponing it), it’s not hard to see why. Trials HD is a master class in balancing fun and frustration, giving players all the tools they need to become good enough at the game to perform incredible feats of dirt bike derring-do. Making the most useful tools the subtlest is something I’m very much trying to learn from.

Originally published at Expertologist. Please leave any comments there.

Of Sleds and Status

2009-09-11T23:57:29Z

So a few months ago I wrote a post weighing in on the whole “are games art?” thing. It wasn’t exactly a new topic at the time, and several (often smarter) people and articles appearing in industry magazines and sites have gone on to beat the point even further in to the ground, but it was nice to get out of my head and written down, and it prompted some nice discussion with friends, so it was worth it. One of those discussions* was a comment-turned-full-post in response from friend Jones that I totally meant to reply to at the time, but then totally neglected to do. I get distracted easily. Things come up. You know how it is. At any rate, I’m linking to it now, and suggest you go read it before continuing as I’m probably going to talk about it a bit. Go on. I’ll wait.

When Jones’ post first appeared I scrawled some notes in a little notebook towards an intended response, but the me of now is having trouble working out what the me of June was going for at the time, so I’m mostly going to wing it. For a bit of context, Jones very much comes from an art background, having been involved with pretty much everything considered (or at least argued) to be art, from acting, music, writing, painting, comics, a stint in videogames, and a few others I’m probably forgetting. He also ran a small art gallery for a few years, which on top of all the rest means a few things: he drinks a lot, is prone to cynicism, and usually knows what he’s talking about. As such, I feel confident he’ll correct anything I might get wrong below, probably while demanding I buy him a drink and making fun of my shoes.

The essence of Jones’ take on the much-sought after bade of being considered proper Art (pronounced “Awt”, for those reading aloud at home) is it’s a lot of crap, a popularity contest each new medium is forced to enter in turn. He argues that as videogame creators (or television people, or comics people, or purveyors of any of the “new” media) we should take the stance of not wanting to join any club that would have us as a member, focusing instead of producing the best work we can and placing craftsmanship over the approval of old men in universities with embarrassing beards.

I agree except where I don’t, really. His points on Craft and Craftsmanship strike a chord with me, particularly as I discover more and more that as much as I love discussing design theories and practice, I’d much rather just do the job. As for not needing to be art… I don’t know. On one hand, I’m a big fan of not depending on someone else saying I’m something to consider myself that something, but on the other, I’m not on the front lines of (or even involved with) game academia like Brenda Brathwaite, Ian Schreiber, or Tracy Fullerton. I’ve never been in a position where my work and passions might be professionally marginalized because they weren’t considered a valid art form by the powers that be, never had to fight to prove that what I was doing mattered. It’d be nice if games didn’t need status to prove they were worth the sort of in-depth exploration those mentioned and others like them are committed to, but if a label is what it takes, then yeah, I think we need the label. At least for now. There’s also the part of me that doesn’t want to be told my medium and I can’t sit at the Adult’s Table, but that’s harder to back up with links to smart people, so.

At any rate, read Jones’ piece if you haven’t already. Aside from any arguments over artistic validity, his points on the importance of good craftsmanship above all else are well worth it.

*Friend James claims he chimed in as well, but as I can’t find his comments anywhere, let’s just assume he’s lying.

Originally published at Expertologist. Please leave any comments there.

Looking For Sleds In All The Wrong Places

2009-06-01T16:05:06Z

The question of when videogames will have their own Citizen Kane – that is, one that provides the great leap forward from embarrassing hobby to legitimate art form so desperately craved by so many – seems to crop up more and more with each passing month. It’s the bad penny of games journalism, the go-to question whenever a developer talks up their current title as providing a new, deeper experience for players or someone from another medium mentions games in a positive light. Across magazines and websites dedicated to talking about videogames, there’s a sense of anxious anticipation for the One True Game, a title of such messianic portent that it will immediately make the rest of the world stand up and take notice. No longer will videogames and the people who make and play them be ghettoized as boring virgins or the safe nerdy friend with the unrequited crush in sitcoms and movies. In the wake of this unknown game, videogames will be take their rightful place as the tenth art form, placed high on a pedestal along side art, music, theater, film, comics and all the rest to be respected and admired for having something to say worth listening to.

Unfortunately for those waiting and watching for such a game to appear, it’s not going to. There will be no Citizen Kane of videogames, no one game that suddenly vindicates gaming as an art form in the same way as Orson Wells’ masterpiece purportedly did, because that’s not the way the world works any more, assuming it ever did in the first place. Legitimacy doesn’t come from one person in a field doing one thing right; it comes from movements, from consistency, from progress across the board creating a new standard for future work to be held against. We’re spending all our time looking for one very special tree, when we should be paying attention to the overall picture of what’s going on with the forest.

As someone who works in games, I find the idea of waiting around for one wonderful game to solve the industry’s concerns with being taken seriously to be particularly grating for a number of reasons, the biggest being that it smacks of wanting someone to come along and do it for me. I’ve seen the question of when videogames’ Citizen Kane will come along put to the likes of Peter Molyneux, Ken Levine, Warren Spector, and a dozen others, and I can’t help but wonder if any of them ever felt a bit insulted at being relegated to John the Baptist status, forever doomed to be remembered best for paving someone else’s way. To ask the question implies not only that such a game or event hasn’t already happened yet, waiting for some future huddle of thoughtful types to point it out as the turning point, but that when it does appear it’ll do so with bells on and a note around its neck declaring its importance. It is, really, a stupid thing to ask of anyone, so loaded down with assumptions and deep misunderstandings on the nature of games and art as a whole that asking it should make you feel a bit ashamed of yourself. Why should games evolve the same way film did, and why should we expect them to? Why would you assume there aren’t already games deserving to be called art, with all the good and bad that carries with it? Why are we waiting for one great turning point, when games make so many small and important ones each year? And more important than any of those questions, why oh why do we as a medium need any one else to tell us how smart and pretty we are?

For all the tremendous leaps and bounds videogames have made since first appearing, our medium’s story is ultimately one of evolution, not revolution. The incredible strides made towards more and more meaningful and engrossing experiences are the results of countless iterations big and small to discover what works and cast aside what doesn’t. Videogames are a medium unlike anything the world has ever seen, with greater potential and challenges than nearly any other art form can muster. Instead of waiting to be taken seriously by the world at large like a child squirming for permission to sit at the adult’s table, we should claim the art form status that’s rightfully ours, even if we aren’t entirely convinced we deserve it yet. The first step to being a grown up is calling yourself one – sooner or later, the rest of the world will come around.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Me & 411mania.com Sitting In A Tree, T-A-L-K-I-N-G

2009-05-28T17:00:45Z

Alexandra Pusateri, games reviewer and columnist (and apparently a force to be reckoned with as the Sniper in Team Fortress) does a regular column at pop culture catch-all 411Mania called Reality Check, in which she explores the lesser known corners and real world ramifications of videogames. For her latest column, for reasons that may never be known or understood, she opted to talk to me about what it’s like in game design. Here’s a snippet:

For those wanting to have a career in game design, Lamb has some suggestions. “Learning to work with others and make concessions for the good of the game is one of the best things that can happen to you,” he says. While this may sound like a no-brainer, being creatively attached to your work may leave you a bit hurt.
“There will be times when the design you’re so very sure of will have to be changed in some way due to the say-so of someone else, be it a person on your team, your producer, your boss, a publisher, the licensor, or some other involved body,” he says. “It’s a very hard lesson to learn, and can be immensely frustrating, particularly when the change they’ve asked for ends up being for the better.”

That’s me in the quote marks, sounding remarkably like I know what I’m talking about. You can find the rest of the piece here. Thanks very much to Alexandra for giving me the opportunity to ramble incessantly at her about something I love, and for bravely soldiering through in the face of my answering each of her questions with the equivalent of a final term paper.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Fallout 3: The Third Way

2008-12-05T18:34:54Z

It’s very easy in Fallout 3 to stumble in to situations you just aren’t ready for. What’s left of the world has had a good long while to get used to the kill-or-be-killed side of post-apocalyptic living, meaning by the time you arrive on the scene they’ve all formed little gangs to handle gun toting loners like, well, you. Raiders and slavers travel or camp out in groups, wild dogs and mole rats with the size and temperament of boars roam the land in packs, and super mutants have turned the buddy system in to the stuff of nightmares. For the times you find yourself out-gunned and out-classed (something that happens quite often early in the game), there are a few options available for attempting to stave off death.

1. Run. This is the least likely to work. If wild animals are after you, you can bet on them being faster than you. If it’s raiders or mutants, they’ll chase you down for sport. You’ll just die tired.

2. Fight. The VATS system helps even things out, but until you’ve leveled up a bit nearly every fight is going to leave you cut to little ribbons. If you opt to stand your ground, make sure you have plenty of stimpaks and keep a safe place you can recover at within limping distance.

3. Improvise. There are all kinds of things you can use against enemies to take them by surprise. Wrecked cars will explode with just a few bullets put in to their engine, and the various residents of the Wasteland tend hate each other as much as they hate you and will happily tear each other apart upon meeting. There’s every chance you’ll die in the process, but hey, at least it’ll look cool.

Evergreen Mills is in the Midwestern part of the map - make your way north from Tennpenny Tower and you almost can’t help but find it. In a past life it was a quarry of some sort, but now it’s crawling with Raiders, each armed to the teeth and considerably better fighters than the rabble scraping out a life in the Wastes. When I find the camp, I’m at the point skill-wise where I have a choice: I can try to kill them all and loot the place, but it’ll cost me in stimpaks, ammo, and wear on my weapons that I can’t necessarily afford, or I can try to make my way around the camp, hopefully not tip off any of the guards, and come away with nothing. Not trusting my skill with a rifle to be high enough to pick them off from a distance, I’m making my way through the rocks above camp when I notice the solution to all my problems: in the middle of the quarry is an electrified pen, and inside the pen is a Behemoth, a twenty-foot tall super mutant that can kill with a punch and soaks up damage like a sponge.

I hide in the rocks till night settles, watching the guards through the scope of my sniper rifle in opes of a gap in their patrols big enough to squeeze through. At midnight I turn on a Stealth Boy to max out my sneaking ability, put two rounds in to the pen’s generator to blow it up, and skid down the rocks in to the camp proper. Despite my added sneakiness, one of the Raiders spots me just as I make it to the Behemoth’s cage, but by then it’s too late. With the gate open, the Behemoth is free, and he’s angry.

The fighting lasts till sun up, but only because some of the squirrelier Raiders were smart enough to stay out of arm’s reach for as long as they could. Their friends aren’t so lucky - the ground is littered with bodies that were decapitated by a single punch. After a long night of sustained gunfire, the Behemoth still has over half his health left and shows no signs of slowing down. I’ve been watching the whole thing from a safe distance, taking shots every one in a while at the Raiders he can’t get to. After a while the quarry is quiet again with all of its residents dead, leaving the place ripe for looting. Over the course of the fight, I’ve only been hit two or three times and used up maybe a clip of precious rifle ammo. Not bad for a night’s work.

Of course, around now is when the flaw in my master plan becomes apparent. If I leave my hiding place to have a go at all the lovely bodies loaded down with all the ammo, weapons, and bottle caps I’ll need for a while, the Behemoth will turn me in to jelly. I can hit him from range with my rifle, but I don’t have nearly enough ammunition to put him down. The strongest weapon I have is a combat shotgun and forty-nine shells to put in it, meaning my only choice is to get as close as I can while avoiding his reach. I take a shot at his head, causing one of his health notches to fade a bit. He roars back, stomping the ground and kicking a corpse a good dozen feet or so in frustration.

It’s going to be a very long day.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Also This:

2008-12-02T21:09:33Z

I just saw Adult Swim has a new game up on their website, and hey, it’s one I had a (very small) hand in. It’s Dungeons And Dungeons, a side-scrolling leather-em-up through an S&M dungeon gone horribly, horribly wrong. Don’t worry, it won’t bite. Unless you ask nicely, of course.

It’s the latest game from flash auteurs and former employers This Is Pop, and serves as a nice addition to their streak of bizarre and original diversions made for AdultSwim.com. I wrote the proposal for the game and did some meager early design work for it ages ago, and then chipped in a bit of play testing a few months back when it was closer to done. I’m happy to see the thing out in the real world, though I doubt that compares to the feelings of the people who put in the time to actually make the thing. Well done, you bunch of hideous perverts. I hope it makes you all so famous that everybody knows your faces, if only to save you the trouble of telling every parent you meet how many yards you have to keep away from their children.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Imagine Movie Star Is So Totally In Stores Now

2008-12-02T19:56:23Z

Completely forgot to mention this last week, between work being busy and gearing up for four days of doing as little as humanly possible, but hey, lookit: my most recent game is now a real thing you can put your hands on and exchange currency for.

I worked as both producer and lead designer on this one, a combination of duties that, while incredibly rewarding (particularly for the OCD part of me), took up more bandwidth than I consistently had to offer. That said, I’m happy to have had the opportunity, as the lessons learned over the project’s remarkably short schedule have proven to be incredibly valuable. Design is where my heart’s at, but having that skillset tempered with the experience of shepherding the game from start to finish and working firsthand with the publisher is the sort of thing I think anybody wanting to be a game designer should go through. Work-wise, I’m currently moving out of production, working as lead designer on two new projects, and having the importance of clean, realistic design that fits within the time and resources provided drilled in to my by a ticking clock hanging overhead has already paid off. In the long run, not having a day off in June seems like less of a big deal.

Imagine Movie Star is part of Ubisoft’s crazy-successful line of Nintendo DS games aimed at young girls. It’s a rhythm game where players live the life of a movie star they create, going to auditions, attending movie premieres, and generally living the high life while earning new fans for keeping the beat through each challenge. The game also comes with a wide range of customization options, giving the player more freedom to create characters and clothing that’s all their own than any other DS game I can remember seeing. I’m particularly proud of this aspect of the game, as it’s provided us with a wide range of new features to work in to our games at Powerhead.

I understand Ubisoft expects Imagine Movie Star to be something of a Big Deal, and I’ve already seen commercials and a full-page add in Cosmo Girl proclaiming its arrival to the masses. If you’re interested in fulfilling your secret fantasy of becoming a super famous actress with gobs of fans and your own clothing line (or, y’know, need a Christmas present for someone who might be), you can find it at pretty much any place that sells videogame entertainments, including Amazon.</em>

And now, back to work.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Fallout 3: Voices In The Dark

2008-12-01T18:33:52Z

Vault 101, a bomb shelter the size of a small town built inside of a mountain to protect the last of humanity from the threat of nuclear devastation (assuming they could afford a spot, of course), is hardly the only one of it’s kind in Fallout 3. According to my map, there’s a little over half a dozen of the things dotting the wasteland, each presumably waiting quietly for the day when the world is livable enough for them to reopen. While not the most exciting life, it’s hard not to envy them a little - Vault 101 may have been a dull place to grow up, but nobody there ever tried to shoot and/or eat me. For the most part.

Of course, one of the major themes of the Fallout games is that things rarely go the way they’re supposed to. Each Vault I’ve found so far has been more of a tomb, a disaster area brought on by whatever social experiment Vault-Tech was running there or from outside influences. Sometimes there are survivors, like the people in Vault 106, driven mad from some sort of experimental gas, or the Gary’s of Vault 108. Sometimes there’s no one left, like Vault 92, an artist’s community where the residents swapped their instruments for laser pistols and tore each other apart. Whatever their story, the Vaults offer some of the most haunting and atmospheric locales in the game, creating a sense of dread that’s impossible to get away from. From the moment you step in to a Vault you can’t help but feel watched, and the feeling sticks with you even after you’ve killed every living thing just to be on the safe side.

While the original inhabitants of Vault 87 are all dead, the results of their experiments are still wandering the halls. the place is absolutely rotten with super mutants, hulking green-skinned monsters that used to be human and now stalk the Wasteland looking for people to kill and eat (if they’re very lucky) or to kidnap and turn in to more super mutants. They’re bad enough outdoors, where you at least have the option of running away, but underground it’s just you and them in a tight hallway, and they tend to be carrying a mini-gun. Lucky, I’ve poured a lot of skill points and perks in to the fine arts of sneaking around and shooting people in the head, so I’m able to take out most of them before they even know I’m there.

I’m deep in Vault 87 when I hear someone crying for help. It’s muffled and a little odd sounding, but given the circumstances that’s pretty easy to understand. I round the corner at a jog, figuring any one who’s still alive in here will need to be gotten out in a hurry, which means I don’t see them till they’ve already opened fire: two super mutants, both carrying assault rifles, both laughing maniacally as they cut me to ribbons. I get a few shots off before retreating, ducking in to a side room and activating a Stealth Boy cloaking device to keep them from finding me. After a bit of healing up and a lot of cursing, I creep back up to the corner. I hear the cry for help again, only this time it’s followed by a guttural laugh. One of the super mutants congratulates the other on his hummie impression, and wonders if they can trick more meat in to coming down here.

I pop around the corner and shoot them both in the head before they can react. Once the hallway is quiet and relatively safe again, I pick my way past their bodies to find there’s nothing else to see. There’s nobody else here, no survivor of Vault 87, no kidnappee about to be experimented on, nothing. Just me and the super mutants, laughing in the dark.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Fallout 3: On Walkabout

2008-11-19T07:15:48Z

Travel in Fallout 3 is a bit different than in other games. Like most open worlds, a lot of your time in the ruins of the Washington, D.C. area is spent getting from one place to another. You know how it goes: somebody at Point A wants you to do something for them at Point B, after which they’ll tell you all they know about what’s going down at Point C. It’s a time-honored method of gradually introducing players to the vast world around them by carefully expanding the boundaries of their comfort zone one landmark at a time, and is found in everything from Grand Theft Auto IV to Fable 2. Unlike those games, however, there’s no taxi cabs to take you anywhere you like for a price or system of carriages waiting to haul you between major towns - there’s just you and your feet. Sure, there’s a fast travel option that lets you jump from one place to another via the map screen, but it only works for places you’ve physically been to before, meaning you’re still going to spend a lot of time out walking the Wastes.

To fully appreciate the weight of how it feels to step out in to the wilderness from the safety of, say, a town like Megaton, you need to be familiar with the idea of random encounters. A major part of the first two games as well (and a big part of why they’re so fondly remembered), random encounters are just what they say on the tin - when out in the wide world between plot points or major landmoarks, you’ll run in to all manner of oddities ranging from seemingly pointless meetings to vital clues pointing the way to some great secret. The blip on your compass could be caravan with stock to sell, a sun-stroked scavenger who’ll talk to you just long enough to mention seeing the light and drinking the water with some religious types before falling dead at your feet, or a couple of Raiders passing the time while waiting for their next victim to pass along by telling ghost stories about the monsters out East that attack the unwary in a flurry of claws and death.

There are funny moments, like finding a group of Raiders taking turns whacking a naked comrade with bats while shouting “Feel the pain! Love the pain!”, and some that are more bittersweet, like meeting Uncle Leo, a Super Mutant who remembers something of his life as a normal human and is on the run from his monstrous brethren for suggesting there’s more to life than killing and eating people. While fast traveling certainly has its uses, just like GTA IV’s taxis or Fable 2’s network of carriages between major towns, it also comes with a price in the form of all the random wonders you might be missing. After all the work Bethesda have put in to sprinkling these strange sights across the landscape, it seems more than a little wrong to not take the time to pick your way through the rocks and rubble or walk down one of the lovely ruined roads still criss-crossing the area (which, according to my post-apocalyptic expertise, should be the best best way to get ambushed by Raiders, a theory that I’m always delighted to see the game prove true). The Capitol Wasteland is a living, breathing world like few others seen in games, a place that I’ve easily spent nearly three solid days in and still don’t think I’ll ever see all of. But man, do I certainly intend to try.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Jade Fountain

2008-10-20T05:21:35Z

Which hills? WHICH HILLS?

Nosfertu'betcha

2008-10-20T04:17:40Z

Hockey moms come out at night, ya'll.

The Bioshock 2 Teaser

2008-10-16T18:00:59Z

Two fantastic surprises to report:

1) The PS3 is good for something.

2) A teaser trailer for Bioshock 2: The Sea of Dreams is an unlockable tucked away on the version of the game recently released for the thing.

Obviously, this is the best news of the day. After watching, I would swear the air smelled a bit sweeter, the sun seemed to break through the clouds outside just a bit more, and the dulcet tones of something like birdsong wafted through the room. Here, for your all your day-improving needs, is the video:

First thought? It looks like they’re going for a proper sequel rather than the original idea of telling the story of how Rapture went from glittering utopia to the smashed and leaking wreck you explored in the original game. It’s a good idea - thanks to the audio diaries scattered throughout the city, we already know how things fell apart, and while a prequel game could be done well, it couldn’t possibly live up to the escalating tensions and eventual war at the bottom of the sea that exists in my head. As interesting as it would be to see what came before, I find the idea of what comes next for Rapture far more interesting, if only to see which ending to the game they continue on from. As the thing is most likely at least a year away, there’s plenty of time for speculation before the inevitable drip feed of information building towards the game’s release starts up.

Also: squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

The Galactic Civilization 2 Diaries

2008-10-08T18:51:44Z

UK-based games journalist Tom Francis is easily one of my favorite people who make their living talking up electronic entertainment simulations. His dairy of an epic playthrough of GalCiv 2 spread out over twenty days was one of the most well-written and entertaining pieces on games I read last year. A lovely balance of personal experience and easy explanation for the uninitiated, Francis’ journal managed to completely absorb, making me care far more than I thought possible about game I knew nothing about played by a person I’ve never met. It’s a technique I’d love to see ripped off by more games journalists (and one I’ve toyed with stealing on a number of occasions), particularly when applied to long-form turn-based games that I love in theory but rarely have the patience to play myself.

Happily, Rock Paper Shotgun informs us today that he’s just wrapped up a second such diary of the game, only this time playing with the intent to conquer a massive, sprawling galaxy through peace, hugs, and conquering other races by winning them over with his superior culture. It all starts off well enough, with peaceful trading relations between different species and planets named after warm feelings, but sooner or later, push and shove meet, only to discover they don’t quite get along:

Rationally, his offer was not unattractive. The world he was asking for, Solidarity, was actually costing me money to run, and I badly needed to postpone a war. However vicious the race, they won’t declare war just after you give in to their extortion: it would ruin their credibility when bullying other races in the future. And I could always take Solidarity back - it was deep in my territory, easy to culture-hug.

On the other hand, fuck you in your stupid beardy face you crinkle-browed alien twat.

While this new piece is somehow, some way better than the first, both are well worth reading, if only to make sure you get all the jokes. Check it out if you have the slightest interest in strategy games, adventures in space, or smart, witty writing. Hell, even if you don’t care about any of that and bungled in here looking for this poor guy, take some time to read through.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Adding Another Zero

2008-10-07T17:27:55Z

For you, a (somewhat off center) video:

The feeling of living inside a gigantic, beautifully complex machine of interlocking parts and the dizzy sense of scale that comes with it is pretty much how I feel every time I try to wrap my head around the thinking behind the level design in, say, Mario Galaxy.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, pt. 2

2008-09-30T16:44:14Z

In which the councilor’s cabin is struck with a mysterious case of the mumps, threatening to cancel the camp’s big End of Season musical, until I rally the other campers for an all-singing, all-dancing lesson about how lying really hurts that we’d never forget. Or maybe I just talk about games some more.

Sid Meir’s Civilization Revolution (DS)
I thought I was safe. The plan was simple enough: without a PC to play it on, there was no way the next installment of the venerable Civilzation series could get its insidious hooks inside me. I had dodged the fourth game this way, and I suppose I was feeling cocky. When it was annoounced the game would be coming to the 360? Well, sure, I might have sweated a bit. When early previews described it as an ideal streamlining of mechanics, handing over as much of the micromanaging as possible to the computer so you could focus on the business at hand of ruling the world, I felt my resolve crumbling. By the time I heard it was coming to the Nintendo DS, I’d pretty much accepted my doom.

Civ Rev is perhaps the ideal version of Meir’s classic game of ruling the world, eschewing the fancy graphics of its console brethren for simple, charming visuals that get the job done first and worry about everything else later. With enough difficulty levels and countries to choose from to ensure things are always interesting (just a word to the wise - watch out for the bastard Zulu no matter where you start), it’s pretty much the perfect solution to long train rides or killing time before brunch. While the ability to play through a game in record time is supposed to be one of its selling points, trust me when I say it’s worth sticking it out long enough to launch your first nuke.

Castle Crashers (360)
Confession time: I never played River City Ransom. I did play a whole bunch of games that ripped it off, though, including spending god knows how much of my life with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time for the SNES, so when Castle Crashers arrived on Xbox Live after months of anticipation, there was a part of my brain already screaming out for it. Easily one of the prettiest games on Microsoft’s downloadable service, its also one of the most immensely satisfying, with every slash, thwack, or thud of your weapons vibrating through the controller. It’s a sensation you’ll get used to in a hurry, as the game never hesitates to fill the screen with thieves, demons, undead nights, aliens, and dozens of other creatures all looking to bash in your head. Best of all, the entire experience is co-op, allowing you and up to three others to hack you way through the game together. Thanks, Behemoth, it was completely worth the wait.

N+ (DS)
The red dots are mines. If you touch them, you’ll die. If the wandering spheres touch you, you’ll die. If the hunter drones touch you, you’ll die. If you stay in one place too long, the crosshairs will find you, and you’ll die from lasers. If the heat-seeking missiles catch up with you, you’ll die. If you fall too far, too fast, you’ll die. If you don’t make it to the exit before the bar at the top of the screen runs out, you’ll die. Based on the crazy popular downloadable flash game, N+ is a vicious, nerve-racking obstacle course where everything can be categorized as This Kills You or This Helps You. The only three things in the latter column are switches, doors, and gold pieces, leaving a hostile world full of narrow escapes and even leaner lifespans. Never mind being impressed over the feat of getting rag doll physics working on the DS - for twenty bucks, the convenience of portability, and no load times between dying, there’s precious little else that scratches the instant gratification itch quite like this.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, pt. 1

2008-09-29T21:29:29Z

So summer was fun. In amidst the rather extreme life changes, super busy work schedules (how was your June? Mine was a whirlwind of milestones, client meetings, script writing, no days off, and a trip to Canada to sit in a dark room and watch little girls play my game through a two-way mirror), moving from Brooklyn back to Manhattan and the resulting moderate homelessness, there was also somehow time for games. I would have talked about them here, but, y’know, see above. But now, as things are sort of calming down (fingers crossed to have an actual apartment to call my own next week), I feel that it’s lost past due for a look at the games that managed to squeeze themselves in around the edges. Apologies for the long time in I left you - here, now, is your dope beat to step to.

Grand Theft Auto 4 (360)
Because I’m not sure I could describe it better, and because I am lazy, I’m just going to lift a bit I wrote about the little murder simulator that could from an email to Jones:

Grand Theft Auto IV is good, but not the game it could be. The first chunk of it is excellent, taking time to introduce you to the world, characters, and how you interact with them. The social aspects are well implemented and rewarding. Sometime after you’re able to access Manhattan, though, the game remembers it’s a GTA title, drops the more meaningful bits of the story and a large portion of the character work it had taken so many pains to establish, and decides it’s more fun to get involved with would-be Sopranos types in New Jersey, of all places. It recovers somewhat at the end, but by then you’re not really interested in the character of Niko Bellic any more, so the last few emotional punches feel pulled, just one more thing to get through before the end.

The best part of the game is easily the time you spend with the Irish family and their storylines, to the point that they should have made up the main plot of the game with all the rest serving as dressing. That their story ends abruptly and with no real consequence is just another reminder that, for all the Houser bros. strengths at world building, their real knack seems to be in missing the point. Still, it fixed many of my problems with GTA series, and I’m glad to have played it. Whether I come back for any of the downloadable content supposedly due out before the end of the year remains to be seen.

Viking (360)
While there’s a longer piece to be written on the harm done to games with no greater purpose in life than to be fun by the game industry/press/fandom and their seemingly constant demand that each new title be innovative or life changing in some way, it’s worth dipping in to long enough to talk about its poster child for ‘08, Viking. A big, dumb brutalize-em-up of not quite epic proportions, Viking mixes elements of up close and personal melee combat (complete with flying orc limbs), stealth gameplay, and massive bouts of army vs. army with you stuck in the middle to often very satisfying effect. While it’s jack of all trades, master of none approach to gameplay keeps it a solid 7/10 and probably confused more potential players than it enticed, the twin stumbling blocks of overblown expectations for anything arriving on a next-gen system and a $60 price tag right out the gate (I picked up mine for $30, thankyewverymuch) guaranteed it was pretty much dead on arrival. Viking is by no means a $60 game, but it is a rather pretty game that’s consistently fun, and offers some of the better (not to mention subtle and easy to use) sneaking around gameplay I’ve seen in a good long while.

Fable (Xbox)
Years after the hype (and disappointment) have faded, I finally get around to Molyneaux’s darling. There’s another post in the works about Fable that I need to get back to, so in the meantime let’s just say that if this is the result of reaching beyond your grasp, then more power to Lionhead and their wild promises of grass blades staying cut and other opportunities to leave your fingerprints all over the game world. Frustrating when it fumbles (the lack of explanation on how to use expressions, the targeting system failing to differentiate between friend or foe during escort missions for the sake of preserving every possible player choice) and almost invisibly elegant when it succeeds (the wonderful combat system, the beautiful environments, my frankly incredible wardrobe), this is the title that washed the bad taste of RPGs left by one too many Final Fantasy games and reminded me what it can mean to role play. Now roll on Fable 2 next month.

The World Ends With You (DS)
Speaking of Final Fantasy, an interesting change has taken place over the last year since series creator left Square-Enix to make the exact same games under different names for the 360: they’ve started trying new things. Possibly the greatest break from the tried-and-true formulas that turned them into the Japan-owning powerhouse of today is The World Ends With You, a bizarre RPG for the DS that refuses to settle down long enough to be sorted in to a particular genre. Set in Tokyo’s uber-trendy Shibuya district, you take control of Neku, the typical mopey boy with a grudge against happy people, sad people, and people in general that has pouted his way through countless JRPG games before learning a very important lesson about friendship, love, believing in yourself, or some other Hallmark sentiment in the end. This is where the comparisons stop, thankfully, as you’re thrown in to a game of life and death (or rather, death and life) in a dark, mirror version of the city full of roaming misery-causing monsters and their masters, the Reapers. With the mandate to keep yourself and your partner alive for seven days, your time is spent criscrossing the city to complete tasks assigned by the malevolent gamemaster and taking in the latest fashion trends in the form of clothes, badges, CDs, and food.

I’ve already gone on longer than intended, and there’s still so much to talk about: the way badges work as the source of your powers, and grow stronger when you aren’t playing, the incredibly innovative combat system, where you can fight on both screens at once or let the computer handle your partner, the difficulty level you set on your own, with more rewards earned as you make things harder for yourself… it’s a triumph of design and innovation, bringing together so many new ideas and somehow, some way making them all fit together. To then take it all and have it fit in my pocket to play on the train is just mind-boggling.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Comics Are Expensive: Girls, Girls, Girls

2008-09-28T18:23:45Z

Not quite what I intended for a return to updating, but hey, any port in storm, yeah? There’s a new Comics Are Expensive up at Occasional Superheroine’s comics-specific sister-site Comic Book Junction.

The plan, I think, is for Comics Are Expensive to resume it’s regular schedule of appearing in your tubes for the reading every Friday. And because I don’t think this post has quite enough linkage in it yet, you can check out past installments of the column here.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Pictures Ahoy

2008-09-19T04:45:08Z

Ugly Betty was filming around the corner from work this evening, so I figured it was as good a time as to start taking pictures with my proper camera again. It made sense at the time, at least.

Any way, new things are floating around at the top of my Flickr, including the one below. It's probably my favorite shot I've taken in a good long while.

HBO's True Blood - A Review

2008-09-17T15:35:07Z

TRUE BLOOD: Hey! Hey! Listen to me! I have something super important to say, and you absolutely have to pay attention right now!

AUDIENCE: Okay, okay! We're listening! So what's up? Is it something awesome?

TRUE BLOOD: ...

AUDIENCE: Well?

TRUE BLOOD: ...Here's two people doin' it.

AUDIENCE: Aha.

Be Polite. Be Professional. Have A Plan To Kill Everyone You Meet.

2008-08-14T23:53:55Z

Hey, look. It’s a blog.

Regular service (ha!) should resume shortly, as work and life are both returning to something like normal speeds. In the meantime, a treat that appeared in the long months between then and now for the maybe two of you who haven’t seen it yet. From Valve with love, meet TF2’s Sniper.

Boom. Head shot.

Originally published at Expertologist. You can comment here or there.

Random observation #649,302

2008-06-16T22:04:45Z

"Wishing to be the friction in your jeans" is one of the coldly upfront, utterly-clear-about-its-reptile-brain-intentions-while-still-being-clever-about-it lines I've heard since Costello's "It's not your heart I want to break" was found hidden in the chorus of 'B-Movie'. Bravo, guy.

Speed Racer No Longer In Theaters

2008-06-13T23:58:21Z

Good night, you prince of speed. You king of Thunderhead.

It's Formal Friday

2008-06-13T16:51:21Z

Conversation with lady on the train:

LADY: "Why are you all dressed up? You look too young to be all dressed up."

ME: "It's a thing for work."

LADY: "What's your work?"

ME: "I make videogames."

LADY: "They make you wear a suit to make videogames?"

ME: "Only if you're really good at it."