Archive for the 'Gaming' Category
iPod Touch in London
On Thursday it was cold and rainy in London so, for the first time since my arrival, I took a day “off”. I was not wandering the streets nor riding the underground nor hitting a gallery nor adding to the blisters on my left foot. Instead, I stayed indoors reading, listening to British radio–it’s very British–and manually added the artworks to all the albums in my iTunes library. This is a tedious process. I’m up to artists starting with the letters “Bu”.
The reason for such busywork was, more or less, to beautify my iPod Touch. I’ve been using it extensively, on the Underground, in sunlit squares and in bed, and I was growing tired of the grey music note on white graphic that accompanies any and every song without album art assigned to it. It seemed like such a waste of prime screen real estate.
Never did I think that I would devote such labour to this tiny device. I never intended to own it, I was perfectly content with my tiny iPod Shuffle, but jumped on the chance to get one when I discovered that it came “free” with the MacBook Pro. Like any offer too good to be true there was a catch. I still paid for it but could redeem the price with a mail-in rebate. This was acceptable, I thought. Unfortunately, in the move before the bigger move to the UK, I misplaced the iPod box and its required UPC so I could not claim it. The Touch was no longer free.
When word that the firmware update to 2.0, to coincide with the release of the new iPhone, would cost $10 I scoffed. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged $10 for their updates to the XBox 360 dashboard? There’d be riots. Yet here was Apple charging for this most basic of features. It was charging for the privilege to be able to buy from the new App Store. The nerve.
But I’m considering it. I have grown to appreciate this device a great deal over the last week and a half. It goes with me everywhere. Apart from the music that it contains, which is good, all the other features have proven useful. I take notes. I have used the address book to make a phone call. I check my email and post to Twitter, whenever I can find open wifi in London (not so easy), and use Google Maps to find my way through some of the labyrinths in this city. It’s not like Toronto, a city strictly laid out in a grid like manner, where it’s impossible to get lost. Roads go off in all directions here and in my wanderings, on one day, by dumb luck I crossed through the same intersection three times (it was a SEVEN WAY intersection). I didn’t need the Maps then because I was just aimlessly wandering, but they have proven useful in other situations.
Knowing what’s in the App Store I think $10 is a small price to pay for the extra convenience therein. Besides, the app store has one more category of applications useful for the boring minutes spent on the Underground: games. That is the most compelling because, no matter how many thousands of kilometers away from home I find myself, I can’t escape my nerdy passions for digital interactive entertainment. It’s a passion that I was going to work on during this trip, trying to build an idea I’ve had for a while, but so far it’s all been for nought. I’ve been too busy being a flaneur on the streets of London.
Last Weekend In Toronto
Well, that was it. Last weekend (not this current weekend) was the last weekend I spent living in Toronto.
That weekend was also Gay Pride in Toronto and, as was the case last year, I was right in the middle of things. My apartment was in the centre of it all with my front door clogged with revelers, my street closed to traffic and my living room windows giving me a decent view of one of the main concert stages. It was loud, it went late and it gave me headaches. I don’t mind the event as there’s plenty of people watching to be done and roasted corn (made right outside my apartment) to be eaten but, this year, it felt very disconnected. I was disassembling furniture and packing boxes and archiving old CDs and cleaning out old nooks to the sounds of a DJ and thousands and thousands of loud and celebratory people.
I needed an escape so I headed down to the Dundas streetcar stop, rode it through downtown and Chinatown and Little Portugal, walked down Ossington to Queen West and hopped through a few art galleries. Queen West was unusually quiet for a Saturday afternoon. Down there I checked out the Evolution: 30 Years of Computer Games exhibit at Interaccess. Despite the huge party happening outside my door, I chose to spend the afternoon by crossing half the city to go play video games on computers from the 1980s in an art gallery. This is a good summary of my tendencies and interests.
The space was small but it covered a wide range of hardware and software, most of it on systems that I have no familiarity with (I started with the NES so I didn’t have any of those 80s computer systems.) You can see some blurry shots of the items on display in my flickr stream. I played, or merely touched, every machine except for the Microsoft Flight Simulator and the one playing Gears of War: it was a Games For Windows sponsored event. What struck me the most is that, despite the improvements in visual fidelity and processing power, game design hasn’t changed much from what was on display there. The real change was in the hardware and user interface design.
Playing a Space Invaders clone is familiar and easy until you do it on this controller. Everyone knows Tetris and how fun it can be, but they don’t know the pain that comes from playing it on a clunky, unresponsive 80s keyboard with some totally arbitrary key mappings. Rampage is a classic game that hasn’t aged well — it sucks — but it sucks that much more when using this bloody thing. Hell, in a fit of Simpsons-esque lunacy, I couldn’t even get this game to work. Pressing “any” key would bring up another screen asking me to press something else. Hitting that would bring me back to the “press any key” prompt screen. Repeat until capitulation.
That’s the most obvious improvement in gaming over the last three decades. Games, especially on consoles, just work. Even the bad games. You don’t have to deal with clunky controllers and C64 load prompts and awkward, slow storage devices (one game there was running off of a compact cassette.) You just put it in, grab the ergonomic controller and go. It’s why I’m not entirely sold on the Playstation 3, it seems to be a step backwards in some regards.
Anyway, after that diversion I headed home along old familiar streets. I stopped by at Chippy’s along the way for some Herring and ate it at Trinity Bellwoods. After that I walked along Queen West and down Bathurst to King St and through the downtown core past the Eaton Centre through Yonge-Dundas Square by the old Sam’s sign accross Ryerson University back to the crowds around my apartment on Church St. These are all well-traveled routes but on that day they felt different. Condos were sprouting where there were none. Old favourite restaurants were boarded up with “for lease” signs in their windows. Stores and signs had changed all over. This is normal life-of-the-city change but it all feels sudden and drastic when noticed for what could be the very last time.
I’ll be back in Toronto. I’ll visit. Maybe I’ll work here again. The hope, however, is that I won’t. This is entirely dependent on what I do over the next four months, but it’s the goal. I don’t hate the city, quite the contrary, but I’m done with it. It doesn’t feel the same anymore and it doesn’t feel like it’s for me. Toronto is like one of the controllers for those old videogame systems: nostalgic, full of memories and fun to play with occasionally but I wouldn’t want to be stuck with it. It’s time for something more ergonomic, something that suits my matured tastes. I fly out on Monday.
Touch Three
The iPhone is the Match Three device of the future:
Yeah, match three has been done to death but the first two games, especially Trism, do interesting things with the touch interface (the last few are pretty blatant rip-offs and/or ports; I honestly can’t tell.) More importantly, this is what happens when you let small developers — not just companies — openly and freely develop for your platform. Sure, you get the no talent ass clowns ripping off other people’s games but you also get new ideas, like Trism, into the system. Are you paying attention Nintendo? All of a sudden the biggest threat to your mobile dominance isn’t Sony, it’s Apple and its multitude of independent developers.
Extraordinary Meeples and Ticket to Ride
One of my favourite magazines, Print, has, of all things, an article about German boardgames: Extraordinary Meeples. It follows the rote approach that most similar mainstream articles take — can you believe that some people are still playing boardgames and they aren’t made by Hasbro? Settlers of Catan is one — but it does touch upon the thematic and visual design of these games. Not really surprising since it’s in an issue focused around European design, but it’s a welcome perspective.
Plus it comes with these nice photos of the games.The timing of this is perfect since, this Wednesday, German boardgame Ticket to Ride is released on XBox Live Arcade. If you are new to the whole thing, it’s not a bad place to start. It’s mechanically simpler than the oft recommended Settlers of Catan and it has, compared to some of the more renowned games, less depth (it’s there though, but it’s really subtle) but it’s a decent entry point. It’s accessible, has simple rules, isn’t too confrontational (though, to the joys of some, you can still actively, if indirectly, screw over other players) and the matches rarely feel unbalanced in the end.
I’m not sure what the XBox version adds to the experience but if you were confused by Carcassone and too impatient for Settlers of Catan, check it out. I’d buy it myself, to support such releases, but I’m soon to leave all my consoles behind. My boardgames too. *sigh*
Harmonic 313’s Word Problems
Harmonic 313’s EP1 is an interesting, if brief, excursion into bleepy, old school “Detroit techno.” The record makes heavy use of retro Speak N Spell samples, which is probably one of the most sampled toys ever.
That little reference to the toy game isn’t restricted to the music though, it’s there through the packaging and website. All the track names are obscured behind a simple color coded substitution cipher. The website plays with this and makes a simple little interactive game out of it (with three lives and everything). The reward for completing it? A bonus unreleased track.
It’s all very simple stuff but this game adds a nice little reward and working your way through it is, in my mind, much more engaging and gives me a better sense for the music than any standard discography site with downloadable samples could ever provide. This is how to engage using the interactive medium. (Or, if you prefer more complex games, there’s Year Zero, as reviewed here.)
Inside ‘Puzzle Farter’
It speaks volumes that, in the last month, the only games I have touched are Grand Theft Auto IV and Puzzle Farter. Hell, Puzzle Farter is the only game that I’ve finished since Rez HD in March. Of course, I’ve had other priorities.
The developer of Puzzle Farter is also a member of a secret cabal internet community that I’m in and it was there that the alpha and final builds were posted. I linked to it, giving a fellow member a plug, and it somehow ended up on Kotaku. The link there was regurgitation (hi McWhertor!) so I felt I should follow it up with some real content1. Here’s a small email interview with the developer of Puzzle Farter, Pet Tomato’s Austin “astro” Haas.
About Pet Tomato:
We are a two person company. It’s just me and my wife. I do all the
game design, programming, and sound fx, and my wife, Yoko Imanishi,
does all of the art. The little music tags were done by Ben Jastatt of
Afire Music.
On the origins of Pet Tomato and Puzzle Farter:
My partner and I met at Cartoon Network. We were both employed there,
as part of their internal game development team. We left 3 years ago
to start our own company. Since leaving, we’ve done a lot of work for
them.
Our motivation for creating Puzzle Farter was part of a larger strategy and direction for our company. Ultimately, we’d love to be
doing nothing but our own independent games, but in the meantime we
are doing work for hire. We designed Puzzle Farter to be a game that
we could put out on our own, use to attract new clients, and also to
build off of when we get client work. We believe this type of
character based platform game supports the widest array of scenarios
and mechanics.
Normally, with client work, we need to pitch a complete idea from the
start. Since we weren’t under any pressure for this project, I wanted
to start with some simple mechanics that we knew would be fun and then
just see where it goes. I really just wanted to make a game that I
would want to play.
On how they created the character designs:
We go to the bar. In all seriousness, this is a new approach for us
and it works really well. We determine what we need to figure out,
then we go to the bar and we don’t leave until we’ve got it figured
out. I don’t think that would work for most developers, but we’ve had
a lot of success with it. The main advantage is that we aren’t in a
hurry to wrap it up.
Features scrapped or never fulfilled:
We added in the duck from the very beginning, but we never had a use
for it. The hero is too short for it to be significant. We left it in
just because it felt nice.
We also had the hero throwing these large berry things around. He
could run past a bush and then it would be in his hand and you could
throw it with the spacebar. We had several ideas for it, but nothing
that merited the extra complexity.
In the alpha discussion, it was often suggested that you should have a UI gauge to show your fart “fuel.” Can you elaborate on why you chose not to implement this?
Simplicity. I’m still not sure about it, though. Lately, I’ve
considered the idea of having him fade-in/out and sweat a little to
indicate when you are really tapped and shouldn’t try to fart so soon.
I was also thinking about adding a “Tips” page to the menu to describe
some of the nuances, like “you can jump higher by holding UP longer”
and “you can jump higher if you take a few steps first.” I really hate
when Flash games have instructions that require reading more than a
few words, though, but maybe burying it under “Tips” would be a good
compromise.
There is a lot of variety in the fart noises, I think it’s safe to say that you enjoyed recording these. How were these recorded and how easy was it to channel your inner nine year old?
It was pretty fun. It took me a few hours. They needed to be about a
second and a half long and I wanted them to get higher toward the end,
like he was really squeezing it out. It took a bit of rehearsing.
Coming soon?
We tried to release this one as soon as we had something complete, but
the next version will also allow people to create and submit
levels. We have that working now, but we need to clean it up. We also
created another enemy. It’s a vase-shaped plant guy that launches the
balls up in the air. He’s a little more musical than the others, which
is something that I really wanted to expand on.
I want to thank Austin Haas for the short interview. Go play Puzzle Farter but don’t be disappointed with the no-reward NES era “You Win” screen at the end. He promises me he’s working on it!
Lastly, I was curious about how this Flash game was built since this is something relevant to my interests. His response to my curiosity follows. It might be useful to some people. It certainly is for me.
One Quote That Summarizes The Majority of The Mainstream Videogame Industry
And it comes by way of The Telegraph:
We are working on a fix for this and your breasts should be back to normal soon.
Funcom, in reference to a patch that reduced the size of the gigantic breasts on the female character models in Age of Conan.
Quatchi’s Shootout Shutout
One of the things that has kept me super busy over the last month has just launched: Quatchi’s Shootout Shutout. A small flash game for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics’ “Meet the Mascots” page. I’ve liked the Meomi designed characters ever since they were revealed last winter, so it was a joy and privilege to be able to work with them.
The game was produced by zinc Roe Design, who recently launched their own weblog. All Flash coding by me. PS. try to break 3000 points.
Games to Discard
The arrival of June marks my last month of living in Toronto before my extended escape to Europe. The month will be full of decisions regarding what I do with all my stuff. I have to choose what to sell, what to store, what to lend and what to discard. One of the goals of this process is to detach myself of as many material possessions as I can; I’ve certainly accumulated my share of crap over the years. Amongst all that junk is a well-sized game library.
Of course, there’s no way I’m getting rid of all of the stuff there. Not even half. I might be going away but I shall remain a gamer nerd. Hell, I’m certain that the PSP and/or DS will come along with me. However, there are numerous games that I don’t touch anymore and don’t really care for and many more still unopened sitting there. If I haven’t touched them in years, I’m never going to touch them. These are the titles I can get rid of.
Anybody want them?
(No, they aren’t all crap. There are some gems in there, like Gitaroo Man, a few Nippon Ichi games and even current-gen Wii and XBox 360 titles. Yes, I am serious with the offer. I’ll give them away, for free, to a loving home. Some conditions might apply!)
Judgy Gaming
Here’s a Metafilter thread about how WiiFit is calling kids “fat.” I am of no opinion on the matter. I can not speak for the balance board’s accuracy–I do not have one–and I can not comment on the emotional trauma a kid would experience when a videogame calls him or her fat, no matter whether the kid is or isn’t fat. All I know is that if I were to get a balance board I would expect it to call me fat because I am fat. I’m also an adult; I can handle it.
Anyway, what stood out in that thread was this specific comment and the parts about the failure response in such games:
The thing is, though, nearly all of the Wii games are a bit judgy — it’s not like when you lose at tennis or golf or something it says, “Try again next time!” in a cheery font. It says YOU LOSE!!!, and your poor little Mii looks all dejected and defeated. That has been something we’ve had to manage with the kids from the beginning, especially because they are right at that sweet-spot for elementary-school age-based competitiveness and the-world-revolves-around-me sensitivity.
Judgy? I’m of two minds on this. From one perspective, I wonder if the mainstreaming of videogames warrants a re-evaluation of the failure responses they generate. Should games with a broad appeal scale the response to the user upon failure? Many titles already scale the difficulty based on how the user plays and adjust the end appropriately (eg. you get congratulations when you finish Guitar Hero on a low difficulty but you also get pushed to do the next, higher difficulty.) but very few adjust how they communicate with the player based on how skilled they are.
The likes of Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden will “reward” constant failure with the option to switch to a lower difficulty. However, considering the obvious meant for established gamers design those titles have it comes across as nothing more than a taunt. A spurious hand out to a weak gamer. I’m thinking of something more broad: adjusting the UI and messaging to the player just as much as enemy health and AI and patterns are changed with differing difficulty levels.
I’m thinking of games like Ikaruga. For a high end player, the most important part of that game is keeping the combo going and building a high score. Emphasize that. But for a casual player, one not used to that level of sadism, just surviving the first stage is a goal. The score and combo is irrelevant to them. Why show it? Start things of simple and friendly but as the player improves start placing more focus on the combos and the score.
Not many, if any, games do this. I think there’s something there. An idea that could be fleshed out some more.
On the other hand, I’m thinking:
They have to be managed so that they can handle losing at a videogame? The words over-protected and over-coddled come to mind. Failure, as a kid, is the whole point of growing up. It’s how we learn. Videogames might be a minuscule portion of the whole childhood experience but protecting your kids from them shows signs of a larger pattern.The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids and The Secret to Raising Smart Kids come to mind.
In my day, the games were designed to make us fail. That’s how they made their money. We persevered through them, we mastered them and we entered “ASS” and “FUK” on their leaderboards. We turned out fine. Mostly.
Revisionist Gaming History
I like this illustration showing the (incomplete) history of videogame console controllers. It’s part of MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit and it does a decent job of documenting console user input evolution. There are some understandable gaps in the history (where’s the TurboGrafx-16, with its two buttons and totally useless turbo switches? Or that Atari Jaguar monstrosity?) and some odd errors (the analog nub on the PSP is omitted) but the thing that stands out for me is how he’s holding the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Master System controllers. From a historical context, he’s doing it wrong.
From personal experience, and I have corroboration, no one held the controller that way. In those days of square controllers it wasn’t ergonomic to place the index fingers on the top. There was no reason for it; shoulder buttons were a generation away. They were held with the thumbs over the d-pad and buttons and the index fingers behind the controller for support (as he holds the Gameboy.) This was standard.
It was only after the introduction of shoulder buttons did the fingers start venturing up there. For some people it was an awkward adjustment but most of us were young and we adapted easily. After that it felt weird to hold a controller any other way. I remember the time when I ventured back to the NES after months and months of SNES familiarity. Having been comfortable with the shoulder buttons, I grabbed the old NES square, placed my index fingers on top and was momentarily confused: I don’t remember these being this awkward to hold. In those 8-bit days we didn’t know better.
So while it’s a nice illustration of the evolution of the controller, the illustrator, Damien Lopez, clearly shows that he’s not of the NES era. In my day we didn’t care about ergonomics. We had our Nintendo thumb and we liked it.
