Back in 2000, if you wanted to create rich media for the internet you had two choices: Macromedia’s Flash and Macromedia’s Director. Director, which produced Shockwave files, was the more powerful of the two: far faster, capable of pixel level manipulation, and with a proper (if weird) scripting language in Lingo. Proper Actionscript, which showed up in Flash 5, was still months away. But Shockwave was a heavy format (broadband wasn’t so widespread back then) that sometimes had problems running properly in-browser. Its roots were in the CD-ROM authoring days of yore and it felt like a relic because of it. Flash was small, quick, and sexy. It soon came installed with browsers. It became ubiquitous. It took over.
While Flash has grown a lot since those early ActionScript 1.0 days, matching what Director could once do, and while it’s still growing in possibility (Doom in Flash; NES emulator in Flash, Nintendo’s going to love that one), it’s also starting to feel old and tired. It’s everywhere and there’s a large pool of designers and developers for it, so it’s not going away any time soon, but when it comes to more specialized high-level content — games — it’s limiting. That’s where Google’s Native Client, EA’s and iDs custom engines, and Unity 3D come into play. These are browser plugins designed, in this decade, from the ground up for speed, 3D, and/or gaming applications. They are quickly filling the niche that Director once held, but Macromedia (now Adobe) abandoned. Especially Unity.
If 2009 is going to see the emergence of high-quality browser-based games, then 2009 is going to be the year of Unity. It has: lots of powerful features; iPhone support (I see the Unity logo in a half of the iPhone games that I’m interested in), which is a space that Adobe has consistently failed to enter (it’s trying though); Wii publishing; a developingcommunity (which was essential in spurring Flash’s early spread); quality developers using it; and an upcoming PC version. In short, it is about to make a major splash. I feel compelled to jump in with it — the indie license is cheaper than the Flash IDE.
It won’t take over Flash, that’s too much of a hurdle to overcome, but it will fill that void that Director’s absence created. If it achieves even that, it will be a success. It will generate a little bit of something that Adobe desperately needs: competition. The whole of the rich-media space will be better off for it. Flash needs an alternative, because Silverlight sure as hell ain’t it.
The most fun that I had in EA’s Skate 2 was when I failed. Maybe it’s because I haven’t played the previous Skate game, or any skating game since the Playstation (Tony Hawk 2 and 3), but I find Skate 2 difficult to get into. The controls are fine, if a bit touchy, but the open world turns what could be a fun, quick play game into a tedious tread.
Skating down a hill into downtown while doing tricks along the way sounds like a lot of fun, but when you get run over by a car, or collide with a pedestrian, or do a faceplant over a curb, for the thirtieth time it starts to grate. Worst of all, there’s little incentive to do this skillfully as stringing together a bunch tricks yields a score that does nothing. You get points, they fade away, you continue. Some could say that putting together a sweet ride, full of flips and grabs and grinds, is reward enough, but I just don’t find the system satisfying. Maybe I miss the physics-defying arcade styled tricks of the old Tony Hawk games (and SSX and its ilk.)
Skate 2 is also punishing in its difficulty. This, again, might be because I hadn’t played the first game, but it’s an uninviting introduction for a newcomer. It’s frustrating to randomly come upon a challenge at the very beginning of the game and fail to complete it after a dozen, two dozen, or more, attempts. Constant faceplants into the concrete when you are trying to accomplish the opposite of that are not fun.
Thankfully, in a stroke of genius, Skate 2 has a separate meta-game that takes place when you do fail (when not in a challenge.) Every crash is awarded points for speed, duration, height, obstacles hit, bones broken, etc. There’s a fairly solid structure to the challenges, which start out with simple tasks that you achieve inadvertently (hit a car) and quickly escalate to balletic set-pieces of pain, as you cannonball, spread-eagle, and flip your way into the most damaging of bails. I’ve earned more money in Skate 2‘s world by falling off my board than I did on it.
Skate reel: Skate 2′s replay system an online service, is amazing. Unfortunately, the embeded player autoplays so I’ve removed it.
It’s very much like the PSN title Pain, or the Dismount games, except with a full skateboarding game wrapped around it. Unfortunately, when the novelty wears off and all I have left is a $60 skateboarding game, rather than a free or cheap downloadable rag-doll game, I find myself quickly losing interest. When failure is more fun than success, it’s hard to be motivated to succeed.
The latest game worth checking out in the iTunes App store is Nonverbal’s “Monospace.” (iTunes link.) It’s a fairly simple puzzle game to understand, packed with 64 challenges, but one that can get devilishly annoying on the higher difficulties. There’s no music[1], no fancy effects, nothing but a good sized set of logic puzzles that can be solved at your own pace; there are no time limits. Add the intuitive controls and the $1.99 price tag and you have yourself a nice, little diversion that’s hard to resist. It sure beats hitting the daily’s Sudoku.
The “official” video demonstrates the mechanics of the game quite well:
What’s interesting about this is that it has the same kind of “project 3D items onto 2D space” mechanic that’s been used in a number of games recently: Nintendo’s Super Paper Mario, Kuju/Zoe Mode’s awesome (but mind-busting) Crush (play the Crush demake Squish), Sony’s Escher-inspired Echochrome, and the upcoming indie game Fez. Polytron’s Fez (trailer) is easily, indie or otherwise, one of my most anticipated games of this year.
It’s not enough to call it a trend — more of a synchronicity — but it’s something. These mechanics exist as if, after a decade and a half of 3D games, developers have just now started to realize that they’re still being displayed on 2D screens. Why not make use of that?
Though for some idiotic reason it still disables your music when you start the game. Thankfully, a double tap of the home button will resolve that but it’s still annoying.
In doing some, er, “research” I discovered that the Delta Force 10th Anniversary Collection existed. It was recently released. I was surprised by its existence: it’s a series that hasn’t blazed through the charts and hasn’t garnered massive critical acclaim. I was surprised that its publisher, Novalogic, was still in business. Mostly, though, I was surprised that it’s been ten years since I first played it. The original Delta Force remains one of my favourite games of all time.
The first game of the series falls into this weird historic spot between the frantic deathmatch tunnel-shooters of the mid to late 90s and the more open, squad-based tactical shooters of the 2000s. It predates Counter Strike and Irrational’s SWAT 4, and is a mere three months older than the original Rainbox Six. Delta Force was right smack in the middle of that genre defining pack, but is largely forgotten today. It had a lot of flaws and came from a developer with zero shooter experience, so maybe it’s understandable, but Delta Force had a few distinguishing features that were novel and unique at the time (and for years after) and it deserves some recognition for it.
I would like to write an objective analysis of Delta Force‘s game design, one day, but first I need to rein in my nostalgia. My sentimentality for that game is massive. I played it online, incessantly, for a year and half. It was my first contact with organized multiplayer gaming. I was in a couple of “squads.” We used voice chat, via the Roger Wilco application, to stay coordinated back in 1999. It was the most high-level multiplayer gaming that I’ve ever been involved with. We played tournaments. We won tournaments.
I was good at the game and I was good at documenting my history with it. I have (had?) an extensive collection of in-game screenshots from the earliest, noob days to the final months before life took over. I wish I could find most of those. It’s the gaming equivalent of a high school photo album. I did, however, find a small stash from the late period.
February 2000. DFWorld.com Team King of the Hill tournament. Tournament final match. DD vs le. Third round of a best of three, tied 1-1. The final moment:
It’s hard to separate these memories, from a highly competitive player, from the hassles and annoyances of the actual game experience. Maybe one day I will.
Here are twotheories about why the SEGA Dreamcast failed. The first of which is wholly inaccurate. Yes, the Dreamcast’s GD-ROM format (basically CDs with custom headers) was prone to piracy, but so is the Nintendo DS (more so, thanks to a combination of today’s easy file dissemination, broadband penetration, and the DS’s relative small files sizes, none of which really applied to the Dreamcast back in the early 2000s) and it’s the biggest success of this generation.
What I take the most umbrage with, however, is both of their claims that the Playstation 2 was “leaps and bounds” more “advanced” than the Dreamcast. This is a dubious statement worth contesting. The Playstation 2 did have the benefit of using the DVD format giving it higher capacity, but when arguments about which is more advanced occur about videogame systems they always revolve around graphical processing. Hertz and flops and poly counts are often referenced. Those number-based pissing matches miss the point. They reduce complicated pieces of architecture, the developer talent that utilizes them, the quality of the dev tools, familiarity with the system, etc, into non-factors. There’s more to making content than the number of transistors.
Gran Turismo 4 is a suitably impressive looking Playstation 2 game, often trumped as a show-piece example of the system’s graphical prowess. The important thing to remember in its case is that its release came four years after the Dreamcast’s demise. The Dreamcast never survived into that late-generation mature period, when a system is best utilized. We will never know what the Dreamcast was truly capable of. So why did it fail?
It’s hard to say. Any number of factors can be cited: SEGA’s reputation; the lack of EA support; finances; timing; marketing; DVD adoption; piracy; the stars. Ultimately, as simple as it is, it failed because it lost money.
Anything is a good excuse as long as it’s not the question of “who was more advanced?” If you look at the history of videogame consoles — and this generation proves it as much as others — the most “advanced” system was often not the most successful. In fact, it tends to be the opposite. So can we please, in 2009, finally abandon this trope and focus on good design and content and stop thinking of videogame consoles as mindless brute force muscle?
I bought the chess app Deep Green for the iPod last week. It’s a very good, well designed chess application but I’m having a hard time saying anything beyond that: I’m not very good at chess.
As a child, I never played much of it. Sure, we had a chessboard but by the time I was old enough to grasp the intricacies of chess and graduate from “checkers”, I was already enraptured by Mario’s adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom. In my mind, chess was an archaic distraction from the days before the invention of TV games. The closest that I came to a chessboard, in those years, was Archon.
In my preteens I received one of those birthday videogames from someone that didn’t know better (we’ve all had those) that had me smiling in appreciation while, under my breath, I muttered “this isn’t Axelay, damnit”: The Chessmaster. I played it a handful of times, mostly lost, learned about castling, and never touched the cartridge again. The Super Nintendo controller wasn’t the ideal interface for chess. It was clunky and slow, though back then few people minded.
On the iPod, Deep Green‘s input is perfect. You can either drag a piece, with a highlight showing where you are about to place it and if you can place it there, or press it to select it and then press on a tile to move it there. Any errors, quite possible on such a small screen, can be instantly fixed by hitting the ever present undo button. It mitigates the fat finger factor. The only problem that I’ve ran into is with the pieces on the far right of the board which sometimes don’t register my annoyed taps on the screen, but I don’t know if this is a problem with the app or my iPod.
My chess life, after The Chessmaster, consisted of pirated copies of Battle Chess, and its variants, and the built-in Chess.app in OSX many, many years later (last year, actually.) I think Battle Chess was the one game everyone with a floppy drive had and nobody played it for the actual chess. I remember being enthralled by the animations in that game and the chess was nothing more than a means to get those animations. The novelty wore thing since battle sequences that take longer than the actual decision making of chess are about as much fun as waiting for a bus in the winter. Once I managed to see all of them, including having the king take the queen, I was done with it.
Deep Green has none of that. It’s bare bones except where it counts: stability, usability, speed, and a good computer opponent. The stability is particularly welcome. My evenings at home in London over the summer, alone and internetless, were often accompanied by Chess.app. Unfortunately, when it wasn’t kicking my ass, it had a tendency to brainfreeze during the computer’s turn. The first time it happened I thought: “damn, my last move was so smart it completely blew the computer’s fucking mind;” the second time, I was a little less self-congratulatory: “damn, my last move must have been so stupid that it completely dumbfounded the computer;” by the third time it happened, I had given up.
With Deep Green, it’s nice to play a game of chess that doesn’t crash, has an intuitive interface, is speedy, and is portable. This makes it the best chess game I’ve ever had.
The only thing that I can’t comment on is the most important part of any chess software: the AI. I’m not qualified to judge it. I might know some chess tactics, but I don’t have any strategy to what I do. It shows: Deep Green beats me consistently on all but the very easiest of difficulties. How can I possibly comment on how well it plays when I’m so poor? (SEE: Edge Online: The Implications of the Skill Gap.)
I’m not very good at chess but it’s a very good chess app.
The great thing about Kloonigames‘ Crayon Physics Deluxe is that it’s very non-authoritarian in its design. What I mean by this is that it offers you the tools you need to solve a problem (move the red ball to the gold star,) and it nudges you in the right direction, but it never forces you to do exactly what the game designer wanted you to do. A lot of puzzle games (and especially some adventure games) tend to focus on a single, correct answer. They play-test themselves to their limit, setting up road-blocks to prevent any outside-the-box thinking. In some cases, the solution to whatever you’re presented with is figured out not by logic but by telepathy: by reading the designer’s mind to deduce what they wanted.
But there are too many variables to consider in a physics based playground in which the user can draw anything they need to reach their goal. Crayon Physics Deluxe is quite libertarian in this way. It gives you some hints early on to help you figure out how the system works, but after that it throws you into stages armed with your wits and a crayon. While there is certainly an ideal way to collect the little golden stars in each level, you never feel as though it’s the only way. Any solution is equally valid. This is especially so since the game never grades your performance.
Though sometimes I wonder, when I create the most asinine kluge, what the designer had in mind when he created this level. How much have I deviated from its elegant solution? Did he consider this stupid method? I almost feel bad when I manipulate the game’s physics, creating all sorts of awkward contraptions, just so I can reach those little golden stars in the least brain-bending manner.
Then I realize that what I do with the game is more of a measure of my creativity rather than the designer’s. In embracing this, Crayon Physics Deluxe is less a series of objectives (a game), and more like a set of unique, if somewhat guided, playgrounds (a toy.) With this in mind, I stopped trying to quickly get through the game and started to take my time to create the most elaborate and pointless solutions to the simplest of obstacles. It’s more amusing this way. Otherwise, Crayon Physics Deluxe would be too boring.
Without hesitation, I have to say that Mobigames’ “Edge” (iTunes link) is my favourite iPod/iPhone game yet. It: looks great, with a very minimalist aesthetic; sounds terrific[1]; has lots of original music; has good controls; is altogether well designed; has a novel mechanic and is perfectly suited to the device it’s on.
When I first heard of the game I thought it was one of those spatial puzzles, like new PSN game Cuboid, that’s been done many times over since the 80s. Turns out that, though it has some of those spatial elements, it’s really more of an isometric platformer like Snake Rattle ‘n Roll or, more obviously, Marble Madness, but without any of the imposed challenge that enemies (haven’t encountered any so far) or time-limits add.
It’s a forgiving game, with many (invisible) checkpoints and without any limited attempts. This is perfect for a mobile game on a platform with a still unfamiliar interface and it makes it instantly accessible. That’s not to say that there isn’t any challenge at all, parts of it can get tricky, but a lot of it is left as an optional aside for the user: collecting all the little cubes in a level, getting record speed runs, not falling off, and maximizing your rating. So while casually flipping through a level might be fun and (mostly) stress-free, trying to do so in the fastest time possible without error will frustrate you. But, like I said, that’s only there if you want it to be. Clearly, judging by the few things visible in my prototype yesterday, this is a design decision that hits all the right nerves with me.
There’s also a tricky balancing act that can be done with the cube when it’s precariously dangling from an edge. The longer it’s maintained — and it is skillful because it requires precise input — the more time bonuses are netted. Again, it’s an optional (as far as I’ve seen so far) aside but it adds a great deal to the game’s overall depth. Now that I’ve played it more I can see that it becomes a necessary mechanic in the second half of the game. It doesn’t change anything I’ve said since it can be used, optionally, in other places to access shortcuts and improve your time. It just means the game is a bit trickier than first impressions led to believe. Especially that one fucking part in level 20.
The music in Edge is surprisingly good too, but unlike some other games (SimCity) it doesn’t force it on you. “Edge” never forgets that the device it’s on was a music player before it became a game player: right after the initial boot, you are given the option of in-game sound or whatever tune you’re listening to at the moment. It’s a little thing, but it shows consideration for the user and the platform. I wish some of the “bigger” games (SimCity) treated it as fairly.
Adobe Flash is like the mafia to me: just when I think I’m out, it pulls me back in. This is the “problem” with doing something for so long (eight years this month[1],) you get good at it and then you get known for it. Well, it’s a “problem” for me because I like to diversify. For years I was the “flash guy” and it’s a title that’s become hard to avoid, especially when there are bills to pay. Or airline tickets to buy.
I have a love/hate relationship with that tool, though I’ve realized that most of that hate is purely by association. It’s the web production equivalent to it’s not the band I hate, it’s the fans. The Flash plug-in is mostly unobtrusive, Actionscript is a great little language that is useful to know (especially with recent javascript developments,) and the Flash IDE is more than competent when it’s not crashing. The issue is that in its ubiquity it is, and has been, highly exploitable. Flash has seen its excessive share of security and privacy violations, dubious “content”, unwanted noise, pointless animations, complete disrespect for basic web usage, et cetera, et cetera. I know, because I’ve had to build some of those things. That’s why I burned out on it and why I’ve been avoiding it, with great success, since the spring.
Despite all my negativity, Flash is very good for things like video, visualizations, and games. It is particularly great for one little subtle aspect of game making: prototyping. It’s one part scripting language and one part — its original foundation — animation tool, and these things combined make it perfect for creating quick, working versions of ideas without any of the complicated rendering and display issues of other pure scripting languages[2].
These factors kept me on top of what was going on in the Flash world even when I wasn’t using it, and my increasing desire to pay bills has brought me, this week, back into its fold. The quick prototyping that Flash allows was one of the motivating reasons for this, even if it was a convenient excuse for getting some of the rust off in hopeful anticipation of upcoming contract work. As I’ve subtly alluded to in previous postings, I’m attempting to take a more active “do or do not” approach this year to the things that I’m interested in[2]. This is one of them. Inspired by numerous sources, and an interest in participating in the global game jam at the end of the month, I wanted to see if I could prototype a working game in one day.
Turns out: I can!
I sat down a little after noon on Sunday with nothing more than an idea and by 2am I had a sent out a working link. It was tiring and exhausting and I don’t want to look at Flash again for another week, but it was great to feel that creative instinct flow through me for a day.
Here’s the playable version. Guide the red squares to the green goals using left and right arrow keys to move, and up and down arrow keys to activate teleporters. Use the yellowish teleporter to kill any square you can’t save. Try to get an A+ rating.
It doesn’t look like much, but the core functionality that I wanted is there and that, in itself, is the most useful part of a prototype. A working example can tell you more in a minute than a design document can in a hundred pages. Whether it works or not, or where I can take it, I don’t know yet. But I do know that having made it, I am now one day, and one game, more experienced than I was last week. Ideas are good to have, and I have had plenty, but they’re useless braincrack unless executed.
So yes: executed, learned from, new ideas gained, new code for for future executions[4]. Huge success. Well, the action; maybe not so much the game.
Whoops: I posted the wrong link initially. Here’s the prototype. This here’s an updated version made on Monday where I was trying various things, including ugly pixel art. It has two level sets; the second one emerged out of various ideas I was trying out.
Christ, has it been eight years already? If I wasn’t so aloof with the industry I’d probably have a senior position somewhere by now.
It helps that I know my way around it, so I can spend less time figuring out the tool and language and more time implementing ideas. And in their defense, there are useful libraries for other languages that do simplify visual tasks.
No resolution was made. Void where prohibited.
Another reason to do this frequently. Eventually, you might be out of ideas but you’ll have a massive code base to draw from and maybe some diamond in the rough ready to be polished.
No, I never did go to the DigiPen Institute of Technology, but I had considered it. I remember reading an article about the school back in the mid 1990s, not long after it opened, in either Nintendo Power or EGM. It was mind-blowing for me at the time: I can do post-secondary education at a school specifically doing game design on Nintendo hardware? Best of all, the school was located in Canada? Sign me up.
I had thought about trying to break into the games industry in those youthful days, but up to that point it was this weird, nebulous goal that I had no idea how to get to. After reading that article, though, it felt tangible and close. I was a junior in high school and for the first time I was considering what to do after graduation.
It was around this time when I started fiddling around with my family’s old Tandy 286, an old shitbox that was already obsolete by about four years. The technology didn’t matter. My interests weren’t with the advanced PC games of the day, Doom or Quake but were focused on QBasic. I spent a summer hacking the language (my first) with only its built in documentation and two examples, Gorillas and Nibbles, as reference.
It was a slow and tedious process but within a few months I managed to make a sort of text-only adventure game (I had never played interactive fiction at the time; I was mostly emulating Shadowgate and Deja Vu.) It wasn’t very good but it was a start. A short while later I learned how to do graphics — all of it via code, there were no external editors — and made a, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Metroidvania“-esque side-scrolling platformer (the “Metroidvania” label was still years away from being penned.) They weren’t very good but they were the first videogames I ever made and they hold a nostalgic place in my heart. I just wish I still had the floppies holding them (and a floppy drive to access them.) sigh.
As I approached my final year in high school I sent for an information package from Digipen and that’s when I learned the disappointing news: Digipen had, that same year, relocated from Vancouver to Redmond, Washington. They were now international and, because they weren’t accredited at the time, they weren’t accepting international students. I might not have been able to afford it either way, but not having the option at all gutted me. The next year I went to the University of Toronto for Computer Science, got bored of the “discrete math” and the theoretical shit, and eventually, in my second year, quit. It’s been a long and convoluted road since then.
Anyway, I realized that I have a ton of old EGMs and Nintendo Powers stashed around here so I made an attempt to find this one article. I found a lot of great content from those days — ads, news, previews, reviews: the mid-90s were weird as it had reviews for SNES and Genesis games right next to 3DO, CD-i, and Amiga CD32 titles. Man, I completely forgot about that one — but not the article in question. Google seems to suggest that it might be in Nintendo Power #75, but I can only find Virtual Boy related scans from that issue.
This has very much been a year of cities for me, so it’s fitting that my numerous explorations of urban streets were bookended by my visits to Liberty City and Paradise City. These two locations have seen enough carnage and destruction to fill a war, but they continue to stand, undisturbed, ready for more. As far as games go, I’ve had more fun in those places than any other virtual environment.
It is one of the emerging threads in videogames: “the city as character.” Cities, from Shadowrun‘s Seattle 2050 to Midgar to Yokosuka, have been settings for a long time, but new technology has allowed them to be fleshed out more than ever. These new cities don’t exist as backdrops with a few main roads and alleyways that you are tunneled through but, rather, as living, breathing places. There are landmarks and neighbourhoods, all are naturally connected to each other, and activity throughout.
Sure, these cities consist of mostly superficial facades and randomly generated cars and pedestrians, which aren’t often noticed when barreling past at a hundred miles per hour, but when each road is different and each view distinct it extends the life of a game. Unnecessary travel times are forgivable when every city block yields new sights and new things to do; and when every side-road contains surprises, exploration is rewarding rather than tedious.
The problem, of course, is that cities of this scope require a massive creative undertaking to realize. These resources are only within reach of a handful of well-off game developers which is why this year’s best game cities were within already established million-selling series: Grand Theft Auto and Burnout. But the future is promising. Advances in procedural generation might make full scale cities possible for even the smallest of developers.
Downloadable Games
This year is notable for the simple fact that I purchased more downloadable games than retail games. Whether it was on the XBox 360, Playstation 3, the PC, and even the Wii, there was wealth of quality releases throughout the year. With a day left in 2008, I might not even be done: sales on Good Old Games (Fallout 1+2 for $10) and Steam (I’ve already purchased four games this week) are tempting me. A few weeks ago, Impulse‘s sale netted me two new games. After having complained about the dearth of sales by online retailers, I am happily eating my words. I hope more of this continues into 2009.
Flashbang
Flashbang Studios’ Blurst website is the best thing to happen to free, in-browser games this year. Jetpack Brontosaurus and Minotaur China Shop are games worth paying for, offered free of charge. The amazing mix of good production, strong attention to detail, considered game design (especially in Minotaur China Shop,) and complete off-the-wall goofiness is unlike anything else produced this year. And it’s all free.
I got in on this about four months after the fact. By then, my friends’ leaderboards were well entrenched, with the usual suspects taking up the 1,2, and 3 spots. The weeks I spent chipping away at the scores was an ego-crazed adrenaline rush. Claiming number one on Deadline mode was a zen-like experience. I was one with the controller, merged with the pixels on the screen, reacting with a kind of precision I didn’t think possible when I first played this game. That one game was the most gratuitously intense three minutes of gaming this year.
There’s a strong push for more accessible and friendlier games, focusing on experience rather than challenge, and I’m all for that. But it’s not an either/or question. Being accessible does not necessarily mean that you can’t encourage that strong competitive urge. Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2, with its tight integration of leaderboards, perfectly channeled that energy. There’s nothing wrong with a little friendly competition: I challenge anyone to beat my 20 million in deadline.
As I mentioned in my two reports (part one, part two), Essen Spiel had more than just boardgames and LARP gear: it had some videogame content too. These came in the form of retailers selling their games or the occasional licensed products based on boardgames. There was one exception: an entire, new videogame console! The YurakuYur-Gaming V-MAX32.
There’s not much to say about products like this. Like the ePhone, these kinds of clones exist not to compete against the products they are mimicking, but to confuse befuddled consumers who don’t know any better.
I even took a (crappy) video of it in action. WATCH! As a clueless mom gets the sales pitch. SEE! Players haplessly swing their arms as if expecting their motions to be properly captured by the device. They aren’t. I tried to make sense of it and I think it has an accelerometer, maybe, but I couldn’t really get it do what I wanted so I don’t know. It was registering something, but it wasn’t mapping my movements spatially like the Wii does.
Click for larger
There isn’t much to say about this system except to acknowledge that when you’re being so blatantly (and poorly) copied, like the above mentioned ePhone, then you must be doing well. The Wii is doing well.
The topics that I write about tend to be, more often than not, game centric. There was no overt decision to focus on this topic on this here weblog[1], it is simply what I know best. Hell, when I started this by creating an account on Blogger I wasn’t even that much of a gamer. Back then, fresh out of high school and in my first (and only complete) year of university, I was a mere dabbler. I had no time or money for games, save for the occasional moments on my then-already outdated PC and the rare bout on my even more dated Playstation.
That was during the start of a new generation. The ill fated SEGA Dreamcast was already three months old and the Playstation 2 loomed over the horizon, four months away. Those were exciting times for videogamers, but I was having none of it. My interests were focused on school and, more so, the internet[2], this whole new “weblog” thing, Napster, design, HTML, Flash 4, and the development and slow acceptance of the many standards that are now common on the web. These were heady one-point-oh days, full of homepages, no syndicated feeds, and teenagers younger than I getting millions of dollars to prop up internet businesses without any business.
It was the most doomed of all these ventures, Napster, that opened my eyes and ears to new things. My relationship with music throughout the 90s, in those pre-filesharing days, was a distant one. I became aware of things going on in the music world around 92 when I was watching Saturday Night Live and its live performances, when grunge was taking over the world. The confluence of these two things, in one set-destroying performance, is one of my earliest musical memories. I watched a lot of TV in those days and my limited contact with the music world came from that; I wasn’t an active music listener. It was around, for sure, but back then I was more intrigued by the sounds of F-Zero and Final Fantasy II and Actraiser.
High school was when I started to listen to the radio and watch MuchMusic, back when they still played music videos. It might be nostalgia, but those post-grunge years produced a massive amount of great music. It was hard not to get into something. While my listening was restricted to what was on the radio, and almost exclusively the mainstream and semi-mainstream new rock content of 102.1 The Edge, I’d occasionally get glimpses of material outside of that insular world. I remember the rare moments when MuchMusic would play Download’s Glassblower, Orbital’s The Box, and I recall absolutely loving and being amazed by FSOL’s My Kingdom.
My Kingdom
Those three examples filtered through to me because they were relatively popular for their time, but anything beyond the fringes remained invisible to me. If it didn’t have a single and a music video, it didn’t exist. I owned a handful of CDs, but most of my money went into games. That was something I was informed about, reading front to back every month’s issue of EGM, the Official Playstation Magazine, and, sometimes, Next Generation. I felt comfortable, as a consumer, that I would make the right decisions with my money. I knew what I liked. I rented games, I bought games, I played games, and I listened to games. Music, in contrast, was a risky venture. It’s funny, then, to consider that my biggest encounter with the electronic music of the day came from a game, WipeOut XL. I remember really digging Fluke’s Atom Bomb video at the time, for obvious reasons.
Atom Bomb
That’s why Napster (and, partly, the streaming online radio of the time) was so important. It allowed me to explore those weird, underground segments of music on my own terms. That made me into a massive consumer of music and instilled in me a fresh passion for it. This has grown over the decade through to today. During my four months in London and Paris earlier in the year, music was often the only company I had and, in that time, I filled my suitcase with a thirty new CDs. 2008 was a breakthrough. This is the first time that I feel genuinely qualified to rant and rave, in thorough detail, about the albums of the year.
Yet, I find it more difficult than ever to express that. As my tastes get more eccentric and I become aware of more history and lineage, I realize how much I have missed and how much catching up I have left to do.
Unlike music, games had a prominent role in my life — bonding with friends, leading me on my career path — since I was six. That little pre-millennial break during my late teens was a mere footnote in my personal gaming history. A two year hiatus in a twenty-three year story. It didn’t last: I bought a Playstation 2 several months after its 2001 launch, after I had my first steady income, further adding to the Dreamcast’s demise. In the years that followed I acquired a further twenty game machines, including all the current systems, a post-death Dreamcast, the Genesis I never had, the SEGA CD I never wanted except for Snatcher, Snatcher, and a pair of Neo Geo Pockets (nice little systems, those.) This is beyond prominent now. It’s a lifestyle.
When it comes to writing about media, five years of passion, and only one of a fervent nature, can not compare to a lifetime’s worth. I might not be the best writer — I’m still learning — but my twenty-five year gaming life gives me enough perspective and cultural history to, I hope, give me a unique voice. It might take me another ten years before I feel as comfortable expressing my opinion about music as I do about games.
So, basically, I just wanted to say that my album of the year is:
Portishead’s “Third.”
I actually get a little miffed when I get labeled a “games blog,” but I’m used to it.
We were some of the lucky few to have cable internet at the time and I was making the most of it.
Idle Thumbs is currently taking nominations for Gamse [sic] of the Year at the not-so-subtle GOTY.cx (the little wedding ring on the flourish, however, is quite subtle.) I emailed my nomination last week but it wasn’t entirely lucid so I won’t be quoting it here. Maybe I can look forward to them reading it out loud on the podcast next week! Hopefully not.
My pick was: Civilization Revolutions for the DS.
My impressions of the game from September are part of the reason why. In the months that followed, my enthusiasm for the game has cooled thanks to further run ins with the DS version’s limitations. It has plenty of flaws, but for each fault there’s a countering brilliant design decision. I love how streamlined everything is. It takes a complex PC game that can take a dozen hours to play through and turns it into a portable game that can be completed in a single sitting. All that without losing the essence of the original. That is commendable.
Besides, I haven’t been seeing Civilization Revolutions (DS or otherwise) on any “best of” lists and figured it at least deserved some mention lest it be forgotten. I’m contrarian like that.
About
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
