As a side note, as of last week this domain is ten years old which makes it yet another thing making me feel old right now. So to freshen things up I redid the theme. It’s unfinished and had been sitting in alpha for months as I very anally pushed every single pixel and tweaked every alignment, but I figured this was a good a time to get it out as any. It was about time I upgraded this site to HTML5, if not 100%, to match my Tumblr.
I was up on Friday morning and rode out to Gare du Nord to catch an early Eurostar train to London. The trip from Paris to London is about two hours total which, for someone that grew up with the vast distances of Ontario, is mind-boggling. It’s a comfortable, easy ride and really the more civilized way to go. Sure, it’s more expensive than flying and takes twice as long in transit, but the overall experience is quicker since both train stations are located centrally, so you don’t need to go through the extra hassle of going out to the boonies to get to an airport, and you don’t have to deal with all that airport bullshit. The entire check-in process, including passport control and security, took less than five minutes.
My first order of business in London was to make my way to the Pixel-Lab’s Playful event. It was two tube stops from the station, but I decided to stretch my legs and walk it, without a map, and with the faintest of directions. It had been almost exactly a year since I’ve last been in London, when I spent three months there, but it easily could have been two weeks. Everything was instantly recognizable and navigable and despite the unfamiliar destination I managed to find my way without getting lost. Screw Google Maps, Human Brain™ is the real impressive application.
I arrived at Playful during the first break and stayed for all subsequent presentations. It was hit or miss. Some people were clearly not too comfortable in front of a crowd, others were just reading out their script, and others were engaging and entertaining. Russell Davies‘, James Bridle’s, and Rex Box’s, somewhat clunky but amusing overhead projector and transparencies powered, presentations were the standouts.
Russel Davies presents
During the lunch break, after a bit of Twitter-tag, I met up with Alex aka. rotational in what would be a precursor to many internet people first meetings. As they say on that side of the Channel, he was a good chap. We talked about the conference, writing for games, the magazine gaming business, and the internet like all true nerds would.
After the conference I headed towards my London City hotel, again by foot. The streets of London are far more stressful than the streets here in Paris. It was the evening rush-hour, already dark, and the hustle and bustle of the place felt very North American to me. I could feel my blood pressure rising just by being surrounded by it. Maybe I’m projecting, as I’m living a very casual, laissez-faire life over here.
I eventually found my hotel, just around the corner from the Eurogamer expo, and to my pleasant surprise I found that I had been upgraded to a deluxe suite. It was wonderful. A room more than five times larger than my current apartment. A large screen TV, two desks, a sofa, a speaker above the toilet so you could listen to the TV while you took a shit, and a cavernous shower larger than the entirety of my current washroom. I knew I wouldn’t want to leave.
So I didn’t and I skipped the Eurogamer Expo for that day while I relaxed and, later in the evening, headed out to The Crosse Keys pub nearby for the Indie Arcade Show & Yell arcade where I would meet up with more internet people, mostly consisting of those weird and crazy people of the Idle Thumbs forums including one of the organizers of the event, David aka. Nachimir. It could have been a disaster of an event — the plasma screen in the venue, specifically chosen because it had a plasma screen, didn’t work, putting a kibosh on any potential showing — but David’s tireless efforts to salvage it with a crowd of drunken indie devs and a megaphone turned it into a fun, if a bit disorganized, yelling match.
Joe Danger shown at the Indie Show & Yell, held up as some sort of monument to indiedom.
After a wonderful sleep and breakfast in the hotel I met up with Aubrey and we headed for the Eurogamer Expo and, not surprisingly, straight for the Indie Arcade. This tiny room with a bunch of PCs had more creativity and heart than the rest of the expo. There I played Joe Danger, easily one of the best games of the show, and chatted with the nice Hello Games people. Terry Cavanagh and Alex May, other swell chaps with whom I’d play 4 player Super Mario Bros co-op later in the day, were there to show VVVVVV and Euphloria, respectively. There was Time Fcuk and Squid Yes! Not So Octopus! and Super Yum Yum and Shooting Starcade. Leaving this little room and entering the vast spaces where the “mainstream” games were held was shocking in its contrast.
Indie Arcade
The problem with shows like this, where a lot of different games are placed within view of each other, is that they reveal just how same-y most of them actually are. No where was this more evident than in the 18+ basement where God of War 3 sat next to Dante’s Inferno. As I watched Aubrey fight some enemies by aimlessly swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus menaced in the background, I looked behind me to see, in a completely different game, someone fight a bunch of enemies by swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus was pissed off in the background. Then I played Bayonetta and I fought a bunch… stone colossus. It was all very depressing.
There was a Street Fighter IV machine — actually, a Playstation 3 inside a Taito arcade cabinet (?) — that was drawing crowds and, in the basement, a the Wii fighter Capcom vs Tatsunoko. Some dude was hogging the game, taking on all comers. I grabbed the second player Wii arcade stick (didn’t know there were any) and picked my characters and then that dude proceeded to unleash multiple ten billion point of damage, literally, combos on me before I could even figure out how to do anything. I managed to get about two punches in the match and quickly left in disgust. This one moron did more to dissuade me from ever looking at this game than anything in the actual game itself. Way to go!
Street Fighter IV: moment of defeat.
Heavy Rain was in the basement, which was too good for it. It should have been under the basement, dismantled, buried in concrete to be forgotten for a thousand years.
The game of the show, as far as I’m concerned, was the one that didn’t involve shooting, stabbing, or racing: New Super Mario Bros. Wii. If you were to judge all games at the expo by the amount of laughter and camaraderie from its players, as opposed to the typical, solitary dead stares most had, Super Mario Bros was the clear winner (Left 4 Dead 2 was second.) The simultaneous four-player co-op was a fun, competitive and cooperative, tour de joy. Much like the indie stuff, it stood out amongst the crowd as a sole beacon of colour. I just wish they didn’t use two Toads for players three and four.
3D videogames: making you look like even more of a nerd.
Afterwards, there was another pub session. The joys (and hats) of Hook Champ were often cited.
Sunday afternoon was lazy and rainy, spent mostly on a sofa with Street Fighter IV, Geometry Wars 2, and Channel4’s Peep Show. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the Lady of Shalott while I was in London, but I was tired and this was the most suitable end to the weekend before the evening train ride home.
Unfortunately, the entire trip made me miss my game consoles even more. Once a gamer…
Excuse the journaly nature of this entry.
Heavy Rain really was complete shit. I’ll probably elaborate on this later.
I stayed at the Apex London, which I recommend for obvious reasons. But I’d probably still recommend it if I wasn’t upgraded to a larger suite since the staff there was friendly and helpful.
That might seem like a loaded statement when you consider that the entirety of the piece has no dialog, two lines of text, and features a protagonist that is three pixels tall. It’s mechanically simplistic too, only allowing you to move left and right and awkwardly jump. But that’s enough. Through your own explorations it slowly reveals the world and leaves it to the player to infer what happened and what is happening, building on all of that towards an effective ending. A simple story, but one well told within the confines of the system. And one that is told by the players’ own actions.
When I talk about narrative via gameplay, amongst the likes of Super Metroid and Left 4 Dead and others, this is exactly what I mean. It’s an extreme example, stripped down to the barest of elements, but a persuasive one.
Fans of the Toronto independent videogame scene should immediately be directed to the Playstation store. Capybara’s Critter Crunch is now available for download and purchase. I can’t vouch for the game itself, being Playstation-less over here, but I can vouch for the company so give them your hard earned money.
As Andy Baio has announced, Kickstarter has launched. It’s a cool little venture. Basically, it lets a creator set a funding goal for a potential project and crowd-sources the investment for it by offering rewards to backers that pledge certain amounts. In a way, it’s kind of like PBS pledge drives, mixed with Dropcash, mixed with Threadless. The concept is rock solid, but fuzzy enough to allow for a lot of creative leeway in how Kickstarter is used. It will be interesting to see what people come up with.
Since I always think about videogames, I thought about how Kickstarter could be a useful tool for the indie videogame community. Say you have a cool game that you made in Unity and you want to get it onto the iPhone, but you don’t have the $200 you need to license Unity’s iPhone support. You can create a project in Kickstarter, announce it, offer free copies of your future game to anyone that pledges $5, offer custom postcards to those that offer $10, or whatever, and wait to see if there’s any interest for it. If there is, you have that initial cash you need to get started; if not, you lose nothing, all your backers lose nothing, and you move on. It didn’t hurt to try.
It’s really early (one day old, really), but if a good enough community forms around it there’s a lot of potential there. I was going to create a project over the weekend and thought that this could be a good way to not only cover hosting costs but to incentivize its actual creation. Seeing that people are interested in your project and seeing them pledge cold, hard cash to get it done would be, I imagine, a strong motivator.
Unfortunately, it uses Amazon Payments and as a non-US citizen it seems as though I’m shit out of luck (unless there’s some hidden Canadian version with Canadian bank support somewhere.) I have to find that motivation the old fashioned way, but if this is something that can work for you I have a bunch of creator invites to give out if you want any.
It’s not in our nature to think backwards in time[1]. There are so many different permutations to playing through a Mario stage that it would be highly difficult, without aimless trial and error, for a player to figure how it was properly played through the first time over. It’d be great to see this more fleshed-out, but I imagine that some of the time-paradox logic problems would be a nightmare to properly implement. Or something. Like Retrograde, it happens entirely in reverse and the player is left with making the present happen as it already did. Jump On Mushrooms will draw the inevitable comparison to Braid, in that it’s a time bending platformer, but it’s more akin to another backwards-in-time indie game, Retrograde. As the TIGSource thread points out, it’s kinda buggy with many logic issues — other seemingly normal situations do get counted as fails — but it’s a short experience and it’s worth the trouble.
It takes a while for it to click and for you to realize why you are being fast-forwaded (press ESC to skip) in seemingly normal situations, but once it does it’s pretty awesome. It’s hard to describe, since we’re not tuned to thinking this way, so just go and try it yourself (if you have a PC.) In this sense, you can’t die (because Mario already succeded) but you do “fail” by creating, essentially, time paradoxes — impossible situations that couldn’t have happened. Mario has succeeded and reached his goal without dieing, and now it’s up to the player to recreate that backwards. Excuse me for pointing to another indie platformer game, but the concept was too good to not mention: a Super Mario Bros. game that you play in reverse.
Jesse Venbrux’s latest, “You Probably Won’t Make It,” almost lives up to the title. It would be more appropriate if it was called “You Definitely Won’t Make It.” In this ultra-hard platformer, I managed to reach level 14 of 20 before I called it quits.
What I like the most about You Probably Won’t Make It is the way it visualizes your failures. After every failure, the game shows a trail of your movement. It’s a kind of track that can help you through some tricky, double-jump situations, but it resets after every failure so its usefulness is diminished. It would be ideal if it saved your “best” run.
Games that have you running through the same level or track benefit from visualizations like this since they provide a simple to understand measure of your progress. Racing games are the most frequent users of such a technique, often showing you a “ghost” version of your best run to compare how you’re doing, but there’s no reason that they should be the only genre to do this. Mirror’s Edge does the same (but, really, it too is a racing game) and the ghosts left a temporary trail, in the form of glowing footprints, that fade away far too quick.
There is, however, a permanence to the red splatters of death in You Probably Won’t Make It. They persist not just for the session, but for every and all subsequent play-throughs (though there’s little reason to do so.) Each tricky section in the game, every choke point, gets thoroughly painted red. This design concept shares a lot in common with Jesse Venbrux’s earlier game Deaths, but in this case it’s solely single-player and not limited to the last fifty.
It’s a simple thing, but it gives the game an interesting aesthetic and a very personal feel: no single player’s game will end up looking like any other’s. The little red splatters distract you, if only for a while, from the realization that this is a very simple and very difficult game. It’s this nuance that makes the game better than it is and a fun little distraction for a few minutes (and a test of your patience.)
Oh, and supposedly level 18 is impossible. Spoilers! So, in that sense, it does mess with expectations and falls firmly into the “masocore” canon.
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.
Speaking of podcasts, this week’s episode of GameSpot’s HotSpot features, as special guest, my friend JP. He does his best to not say anything about Bioshock 2. Since that was recorded the teaser video for Bioshock 2 has made it online and, well, not much else has been said. All that needs to be said is that the game is in fine hands.
This is also a good opportunity to plug JP’s in-development indie abstract shooter, purity. There are builds available for download, if you can figure out where to search for them, but look forward to it in the IGF. I’ve played it and while it’s still early and rough–the man has a dayjob after all–it is quite good with a lot of potential. And I say this as someone who’s foundation in the genre is based on slooow console FPS and not the super-quick, high-skilled precision movement that some PC shooters required, which is the direct lineage for purity. Look for potential updates at vectorpoem.
The list of friends that have appeared on (semi-)renowned podcasts is now: two.
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.
