Archive for the 'Games' Category

Death (and Typing) in Tokyo

April 25, 2008 in Asia and Games 6 Comments

Eyes squinting, zero light, monsters everywhere, you’re typing for your life. Yeah, you heard me.

The sudden obsessive uptake of a certain competitive typing game called TypeRacer reminded me of a recent visit to Tokyo. You see, it was there that I saw a couple kids playing Sega’s fabulous Typing of the Dead with unusual fervor late one night in Shinjuku.

For those unfamiliar, Typing of the Dead is a refit of the stunningly mediocre shooting game House of the Dead, but where the former provisioned traditional light guns to dispatch monsters, the latter hands you a keyboard. In TOTD, each word you type right blasts a monster, and speed counts — bigtime. That seemingly minor twist makes a boring game brilliant. If you haven’t tried it, you must.

Typing of the Dead has never appeared in arcades outside Japan (it has seen console release stateside). And it was fun to see Japanese players stuck to it like glue when the game really didn’t get much love back home. Good times, particularly since the kids couldn’t stop giggling to themselves as they nonchalantly typed Japanese characters at blinding speed. Competitive typing, cooperative typing. Either way, it’s goofy awesome.

Ah, Japan. And speaking of Japan, where else can you find fresh pastries just outside the door of an arcade?

Holy cow! Has it really been 6 months since I got back from the Asia trip? I’ve got lots of stories to tell. More photos soon!

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That Looks Awesome! Why 3D Immersion Ain’t

April 8, 2008 in Games and Technology 5 Comments

There’s been a lot of talk about the value of immersion in 3D virtual worlds of late. Overheard at VW08: “It’s just like the real world, but you’re able to share it with far flung friends and family. You can see them standing there and all the things you do in the real world happen naturally — presence, gesture, place — they all transfer. That is the power of virtual worlds: to be immersed.” Many of us want to believe; especially considering all the sex appeal currently associated with online worlds. But take this example:

Players in World of Warcraft are in the heat of an epic battle. And they’re losing. Just as the last great warriors are about to fall, a sword powerful enough to vanquish the evil one is discovered. But at the pivotal moment when the sword is being handed over to the valiant party leader, the action comes to a screeching halt — and a sheepish farm boy asks: “Uh… How do you hand something from one player to another?” Response: “Bring up your inventory screen Control-I…”

Hello man behind the curtain! This is a classic scene from South Park, but the reason it’s so funny is that it rings true. Immersion in online worlds is beautiful, but it ain’t perfect. Just because a 3D world looks reasonably close to the real one doesn’t mean it’s perfectly straightforward to interact with. Often the contrary.

People are central to virtual worlds, but it’s instructive that we have so many different ways of representing ourselves. Which is the most immersive representation? Which lends itself most readily to deep social interaction? Avatars in Sony Home might look realistic but that level of detail makes them more complex to customize (plus they’re precariously close to the uncanny valley). Representing people as dots makes them super easy to customize but limits expressiveness. Nintendo’s Miis offer a clever middle ground — where the design of emotive avatars is easy to learn but takes a lifetime to master.

So, avatars are central to immersion, right? I mean, we’re visual creatures, after all. But so many questions remain: Is it easier to socialize in WoW or IRC? Is it easier to stay in touch using Twitter or Second Life? Folks come down hardcore on all sides. Why? Because it depends. One might be better for presence, the other better for focusing on the thread of conversation. One might be better for being in the moment, another for tracking communication over time. Some folks might find a pure text interface engaging in its simple immediacy; others find a graphical world engrossing for its visual detail. All these things can be immersive.

Text adventure innovator Infocom traded on just this issue — making it known that leaving something to the imagination can be more powerful than laying it all out there. And while Infocom ultimately broke its promise to never make a game with graphics (it’s most masterful games remain the text ones), the point still stands. Immersion is contextual: it’s different for everyone. It’s all about getting into that flow state where the medium disappears and the world consumes you. Which is more immersive: spending years in an empathic online forum for breast cancer survivors or playing Call of Duty 4? Just as I can be equally immersed in a book as in a movie, so I can be equally immersed in a text-based world as in a 2D graphical one as a fully 3D surround sound shutter glasses lights out rumble enabled experience. Want an example? Witness the endlessly addictive ascii art of NetHack.

Immersion isn’t about taking over your screen, it’s about taking over your mind. And it never happens the same way twice.

images via comedy central, me, infocom-if

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Impossible Music Manipulation

March 25, 2008 in Games, Music and Technology 5 Comments

Imagine reaching inside your favorite song and transforming it. Not just replacing one track with another (exchanging, say, Eddie Van Halen’s solo for your clearly superior version), but altering it at an atomic level. Misplace a finger on a chord or two in an otherwise once in a lifetime take? Grab the notes and move them after the fact. Hell, reorient the whole thing and build an entirely new refrain in a different key with a completely repurposed drum part. Then build a wholly new song.

Once thought impossible, Direct Note Access lets you edit individual notes within flat audio tracks. All of a sudden, any audio source becomes an endless palette. Mindblowing.

Back when Guitar Hero creators Harmonix were a tiny shop struggling to pay the bills, they made a genre-defining game called Frequency. And getting the music for it was tough. That’s because, in order to tell the instruments from one another in their licensed tracks, they had to secure master recordings from the original artists. No small feat, especially on a razor thin budget. That just changed.

But there’s so much more. Imagine the kinds of new music games that could be built, making use of music the original developers never heard or even imagined — building from software that finally understands sound as intimately as the player does. Beyond that, being able to restructure music at a note level opens up tons of fascinating new avenues for electronic and traditional musicians alike. I can’t wait to see where this takes the samplers of tomorrow.

Find more Direct Note Access at celemony.com

thanks to jesse kriss

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No More 8-bit Heroes

January 30, 2008 in Games Comments

It figures. No sooner do I admit to being a closet Xbox 360 addict than a title truly worthy of Wii appears. No More Heroes is in the same instant a glitched out celebration of gaming past and a cleverly different vision for its future. It takes big pixeled icons and cell shaded characters and an 8-bit soundtrack and a deceptively deep wiimote control scheme and somehow emerges with genius. It’s a genius that makes all those disparate elements into a cohesive whole and uses them to blow knowing kisses to those of us who’ve grown up loving videogames. What could fit Wii better? (As champion for what gaming once was and should be again.)

NMH evokes many of the same past perfect memories as Super Paper Mario but, where SPM comes off shiny and polished, NMH continually flies out of left field with its pants around its pixelated ankles, building up macho archetype after macho archetype only to hilariously pull the rug out from under every last one of them (just try recharging your sword). And ultimately it’s walking that fine line between self mockery and serious challenge that gives the game a charm that’s truly special. Well, that and the fact that its lo-fi/hi-fi presentation makes nearly any glitch, accidental or not, seem winkingly intentional.

A friend put it this way: “No More Heroes is a videogame love letter to Jason Ellis.” That pretty much says it. I was in love the moment I got my first phone call. See if you aren’t.

The game is sold out all over Manhattan (I know, I hunted mine down). Clearly, Ubisoft didn’t expect demand for such an offbeat title to be so big. But that’s the hunger of a massive installed base that’s been trudging through shovelware for months. Time will tell how successful NMH is, but its early sales serve as a reminder to developers that Wii is where it’s at. Strawberry on a shortcake!

Visit the No More Heroes website and developer Grasshopper Manufacture. Don’t miss the Edge review.

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Xbox

January 22, 2008 in Games 2 Comments

It’s like a disease. In the game industry, everyone starts off the new year listing their favorite games from last (we’re guilty). This year is different — because, when I stopped to think about it, there were so many games I just wasn’t able to play. How did that happen? It starts with three words:

I dislike Microsoft. Okay, that’s an understatement. Growing up at a time when the only way to survive as a young company was to hope Microsoft bought you (because the alternative was to be put out of business by their anticompetitive practices), they didn’t exactly engender much love. Stifle innovation much? Oh yeah.

So when the original Xbox hit, it was nauseating. Another embrace and extend from the master of idea theft, only this time they were moving off the desktop and into the living room. It was bad enough to see Microsoft own the office but attempting the same for the rest of our lives (using the trojan videogame console to monopolize online content distribution) was too much to bear. And paying a monthly fee to play online? No thanks. It didn’t help that they joined the fight with testosterone aplenty, either. I mean black and green on every imaginable surface? (And remember when Bill Gates bizarrely gave away signed keychains to bewildered Japanese Xboxers?) Wrong on all counts, then. Thankfully, Sony won that round of the console wars going away.

But this round? PS3 fell down out of the gate, Xbox 360 stole the hardcore (except for Japan), and Wii? We all knew it would take some time for it to get traction; that much was clear once it was left for dead at E3 2005. When the Wiimote startled us at E3 2006, it was too late. Plans had long solidified to spend the big dev dollars elsewhere and turning the boat would take time. After all, making a AAA title takes a minimum of 2 years — 3 if you like weekends.

The shadow of those early decisions still looms over the industry today, from stories of Wii ports added to the docket at the last minute and outsourced to second rate contractors, to stories of PS3 being the de-facto dev platform because porting to it is such a nightmare (see Burnout Paradise). All signs point to the boat being more fully turned come Christmas 2008, but it’s likely to be slim pickings on Wii for some time to come, even as it sells through the roof.

Gamewise, then, 360 is the biggest beneficiary of the current way of things. This year saw BioShock (talk about environment design), Crackdown (mmm…agility supplements!), Portal (most with the least), Halo 3 (well, co-op, anyway), Rock Band, E4, Forza 2, PGR4, COD4. (They’re a lot of shooters and racers but, for better or worse, they’re also some of the best videogames available.) That’s why many of the Wii faithful I know — the deepest of the deep purple Nintendo fans — did the unthinkable this holiday and bought into the Microsoft agenda, accepting the golden handcuffs of Xbox Live. More surprisingly, it wasn’t even like they struggled with the decision; no, after all the talk, they acted as if buying an Xbox was the natural way of things. And, well, I suppose they might be right. Gamers follow great games plain and simple. As much as we want to believe in the Wii dream, most of the heavyweight developers are still trying to figure out what building games for it means (some are coming). They already understand 360 because it’s an evolution, not a Revolution. I finally bit.

The last time we made this kind of painful choice, we were giving up Dreamcast for PS2. This time is easier because we know Wii won’t die like Sega’s final console, but it’s harder because we’re buying in to an ugly history that we swore not to. Okay, full disclosure: playing great games helps dull the pain a bit.

with apologies to stanley

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Sega I Love You, But…

December 7, 2007 in Games Comments

The conversation was short. It went like this:

Me: Is Sega looking to get back into the hardware business?
He: Sega should get out of the software business.

Harsh. But what else is there to say really? For Sega, the early 2000s was a breathtaking time that found them overflowing with ideas (sometimes half baked, sometimes brilliant). Think of it: we saw Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Chu Chu Rocket, Phantasy Star Online, Samba De Amigo, Rez, and Super Monkey Ball within just 2 years. Stunning. Then it all fell apart.

Five years later, it’s hard to remember a time when Sega didn’t just churn out half-assed Sonic retreads and, oh yeah, ads like this. (If that mess is supposed to be a comment on male/female relationships, they’d do far better to follow Capcom’s lead.) But, then, maybe the backwards helmets is an analogy for Sega’s current business strategy: driving with the blast shield down.

That’s tough to take because Sega still shows periodic flashes of genius; typically courtesy of one Toshihiro Nagoshi (Daytona, SMB, F-Zero GX, Yakuza). But the spark really seems to be gone in most ways that matter. Was it the failure of Dreamcast? The awkward merger with Sammy? The death of long time benefactor Isao Okawa? It’s hard to say.

Regardless, I still have a warm place in my heart for the once American company called Service Games. To paraphrase James Murphy: Sega, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.

Find more Sega at Wikipedia.

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Mario and the New Golden Age of Gaming

November 28, 2007 in Games 6 Comments

Man is the opening of Super Mario Galaxy awful. I’d heard the front-end cutscene was obnoxious, but the playable bits ain’t much better. Well, I suppose that’s one way to set expectations. In this case, though, it’s pretty unnecessary because what follows is jaw droppingly great.

I mean I’ll be damned if that isn’t the wickedest virtual playground I’ve seen, complete with gravity effects that largely inhibit my well documented falling allergy. In Galaxy, all the vertigo-inducing fun of Descent comes rushing back; this time alongside the whimsy of The Little Prince’s tiny planets, each one different. A friend put it this way:

One of the best things is that nothing lasts too long. They have ideas in the game that could be their own full fledged title. Then they just throw it away. Creatively, it’s an embarrassment of riches.

While I’m still not the biggest fan of lives as a game mechanic, it’s hard to worry much about it when you’re rushing headlong through clever idea after clever idea. It’s startling.

Speaking of embarrassment of riches, the industry as a whole has found itself in something of a new golden age, too. How’s that? Here’s a proof point: before this year, Edge magazine (known for its notoriously tough reviews) had only given a top score to 4 games in its 14 year history: Mario 64, Gran Turismo, Halo, and Half-Life 2. This year, though, we’ve already had two more (Halo 3, The Orange Box). Assuming Mario Galaxy also gets a 10 (seems likely), that’s 3 in just one year.

And what I find fascinating is that each of the new 10s leads in its own way. Halo 3’s Forge pushes the envelope in game-based collaborative end user content creation, The Orange Box overwhelms us with volume and variety (single and multi-player, old and new, episodic and self contained). And Mario, well, Mario goes old school by comparison — relying on bite sized chunks of breathtaking single-player gameplay (plus nostalgia) to find its future. Diversity is the future of gaming. Greatness don’t hurt either.

While some (myself included) often long for the good old days of the 80’s arcade scene and others lambaste the new school as utter garbage, it’s pretty clear we’ve found ourselves alive at a pretty special time. And I’ll be damned if a certain well traveled plumber isn’t leading the way again. Evergreen indeed.

For more on the design of Mario’s new world, see Gamasutra’s Garden To Galaxy.

Update: It’s official — the Christmas Edge gave Mario Galaxy a 10.

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Where Now Samus?: Metroid’s Next Revolution

October 23, 2007 in Games 1 Comment

You’d think I’d know how to feel about Metroid Prime by now. As one of the few first person shooter heroines that’s more brains than bustline, Samus Aran is certainly to be applauded. And the triumphant transition of the Metroid franchise from 2D to 3D is still unsurpassed. Couple that with Metroid Prime 3’s tight armchair FPS controls and a world that’s full of beautiful, tactile touches that use the Wiimote just right and it’s paradise, no?

Well, kinda. And that’s where I always get stuck. Because in Metroid, you’re playing detective — exploring burned out space hulks and abandoned planets — a kind of future archeologist trying to piece together what happened after the fact. When Metroid is at its best, you feel the elation of an outer space Indiana Jones dusting off the Lost Ark (like in steampunk Skytown). When it doesn’t, you just feel lost — in a maze of beautifully different but functionally identical rooms, tracking and back tracking ad nauseam (find the energy cells, Indy!).

That’s when the ugly questions come out: Just how many times can Samus lose all her powers before she gives up getting them back again? And it’s in those moments that you have to worry; worry about whether all the rust coming off Metroid Prime 3 means that the series really doesn’t have another go-round in it — at least not a very interesting one.

I suppose it’s most telling that, even though I finished Metroid Prime 3 only a few weeks back, I remember very little of it. I recall the elation of using the grapple to rip shields from enemies. I remember surprisingly entertaining buddy action with the ship, blowing up ground targets and assembling the Theronian bomb. I remember morph ball physics every bit as fun as they were the first time back on Tallon IV. And that’s…it?

But in some ways that defines Metroid Prime. It’s about twisty little passages all alike, it’s about shooting the weak spot, it’s about some seriously fine control mechanics, it’s about getting that one new power that will push you over the top and then wanting the next one. For all those reasons, I’ve loved Metroid Prime. But for many of the same reasons I wonder if Samus hasn’t become a prisoner of expectations. A perfect example is fan reaction to the biggest departure in MP3: the not-so-solitary G.F.S. Olympus segments. “That’s not Metroid!” they screamed, and they were right.

And that’s the challenge for the next Metroid title — to do precisely what Metroid did when it went jumped from 2D (Super) to 3D (Prime). It has to take all those expectations and treat them not as a burden but as a stepping stone to the next level. I can’t imagine how difficult that is, but I would trust nobody more than Nintendo to pull it off. After all, they look poised to do the same with Mario Galaxy.

It’s funny that after this Wii flagship title shipped with all the fanfare of the second coming, and doing so many things just right, that we suddenly find ourselves back where we started: expecting another Metroid revolution. But I suppose that’s the nature of trilogies, and the burden of renewing a franchise that has such a long and well loved history.

We last wrote about Metroid in Past Perfect and women in games in Black Women Got Game. Find more Metroid history at Wikipedia.

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The Sounds of Great Game Places

August 21, 2007 in Games and Music Comments

What’s your favorite game soundtrack? Games transport us, be it to sprawling floating kingdoms or a backyard barbecue. And music plays an important role in making those places feel whole, from the symphonic deep space expanses of Homeworld to the rocked out city streets of Jet Set Radio to Katamari Damacy’s giddy j-pop. The best of them stick with you, reminding of places you never wanted to leave.

Digging through my music collection (kicking the Windows habit will do that to you), I noticed that just three of the many game soundtracks I’ve collected over the years have hung around in a meaningful way — creating unique places that I still regularly return to in sound.

When you hear the opening bars of Hyllian Suite, for example, you know you’re in for something special. Jade’s lighthouse home is a warm, hopeful place, and the world beyond is at once more amazing, amusing, and threatening. The Beyond Good & Evil soundtrack captures that world deeply, along with the fantastic characters that inhabit it. Who can forget the high tech rasta rhinos from Mammago’s Garage or the secret passage discovered to tune of Slaughterhouse Scramble’s butt rock or Double H’s quietly insistent message in Enfants Disparus? (Download it here.)

Where BG&E provides places where we can sit still and soak up the atmosphere, Wipeout 2097 (aka XL) never stops, giving only tiny flashes of a future landscape through the windows of anti-gravity craft moving at mind numbing speeds. That doesn’t stop us from imagining the world, though. And music plays an essential role in making that happen, with an electronic soundtrack that provides the perfect glitched-out counterpoint to the highly finessed, Red Bull reflexed racing at hand. Even when you can’t see the city for the demonically winding track in front of you, that world is taking shape in your mind’s eye, guided by sound. Until Wipeout, Playstation only promised the future. Wipeout finally delivered it — and the soundtrack played a triumphant role in making that future feel real. (Grab a used copy of the game cheap and rip the soundtrack right off the disc. Ah how we long for the free music love of PS1.)

Ever wonder what orange sounds like? Rez has the answer. No game ties music and visual so tightly together. After all, the game world in Rez is the music, synaesthetically speaking of course. That’s because every interaction with the world magically happens in time with the music and vice-versa — one intimately informs the other. It’s a stunning accomplishment and one that gives every area its own diverse flavor. From Egyptian fireflies emerging from the blackness alongside Buggy Running Beeps to the steps of a pixelated giant in a Chinese-inspired labyrinth, fittingly set to Rock is Sponge. But none of them can top Adam Freeland’s enigmatic Fear accompanying the mindblowing inside-out final stage. (Import the soundtrack via Amazon.)

Rez is a case study in trigger theory gone right — the idea that a few well placed hints (musical in this case) can trigger a wholly new reality inside the player’s head, far beyond what exists on-screen. But the other games here use music to similar effect. The experience happens within you; as a deep connection between what the game provides and your own memories. Triggers let you escape into your own dreams, instead of those of the game designer. It’s genius when done right. And my favorite soundtracks trigger memories of places I long to visit again and again.

We last talked about the intersection of music and place in Colma: Slacker Awesome in Deadsville, USA.

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Finding Frequency: Beats Beyond Rock Band

August 9, 2007 in Games and Music 2 Comments

Imagine a game where you play music with your friends. You each play different instruments, and you can jam with them online. It’s Rock Band, the much anticipated follow-up to Guitar Hero, right? Well, yes. But it’s also a game that arrived half a decade earlier.

That game is called Frequency and it’s important because it added a fantastic new idea to the beat genre: choice. No game has done it since.

With other beat games (Parappa, Band Brothers, Ouendan), you either play the notes in the single track in front of you or you lose. It can be fun, but it can also turn quickly into monotony. (How much can you really feel like you’re playing an instrument when you have to stick so close to a script?) Where others have one track, Frequency gives a choice of eight — each a different instrument. Think that drum part is no fun? Switch to vocals, guitar, synth, or another percussion track for the next phrase. You choose what to play each and every measure, and that makes the difference between feeling like you repeated the music and feeling like you created the music.

But here’s what really makes Freq special: As you master each track, it continues to play in background. You spin one track, then the next and the next, building to a crescendo when the whole song is finally thumping and you can freestyle on top of it. The feeling is sublime because the connection between performance and musical reward has never been so supremely well crafted. And that same track-based motif translates flawlessly when you jam online with your friends, either competitively or laying down tracks for an original song (yep, there’s a composition mode, too). It was the very first online game for Playstation 2 and the first online music game ever.

All this speaks to how stunningly innovative Frequency was when it came out in 2001. That only becomes clearer when we look at games like Rock Band (made by the same folks), which are only now starting to add back the features Frequency had then — different playable instruments, play online with your friends (but still no “choice”). And Freq was a special kind of addictive, too. In March 2005, Edge put it this way:

Though Amplitude marked a step up in terms of MTV-friendly spit and polish, it’s the pared down strobes and breaks of the original [Frequency] that stand the test of time.

Why didn’t it take off? Well, Frequency wasn’t all that approachable. And that’s perhaps the most important innovation of Guitar Hero; making the music game immediately accessible to the most game phobic among us (that’s no small thing). The abstract visuals probably didn’t help, either, though retronauts among us might appreciate those slotted tunnels as loving nod to the arcade classic Tempest.

As much as PS2 was built on big brash titles like GTA and Gran Turismo, the platform deserves just as much credit for cultivating smaller gems: Ico, Rez, Katamari. Soulful, clever stuff that sometimes sold and, well, sometimes didn’t. Frequency’s a didn’t, but it should still be remembered alongside the better known PS2 boundary pushers, as a truly special small game the world still hasn’t quite caught up to.

Find more music game futures at DDR Can’t Flow and more Frequency at harmonixmusic.com

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