insert credit http://insertcredit.com Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:45:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Copyright © insert credit 2011 brandon@insertcredit.com (insert credit) brandon@insertcredit.com (insert credit) http://insertcredit.dreamhosters.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/powered_by_podpress.jpg insert credit http://insertcredit.com 144 144 insert credit insert credit brandon@insertcredit.com no no Occupy Oakland’s proposed arcade machine http://insertcredit.com/2012/01/23/occupy-oaklands-proposed-arcade-machine/ http://insertcredit.com/2012/01/23/occupy-oaklands-proposed-arcade-machine/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:45:42 +0000 admin http://insertcredit.com/?p=5015 Occupy Oakland is moving into an abandoned building. While I have mixed feelings about being in an enclosed space (out of sight, out of mind), it’s true that people need to not be cold, and it could be an interesting place for discourse about homelessness, cooperatives, and everything the occupy movement is about.

It’s with that in mind that I direct you to this. Anna Anthropy (aka Dessgeega from IC forums/Select Button) proposes adding an arcade machine to the new space, and will make a new game specifically for it. To do so, she needs funds. Unfortunately, the project was rejected from kickstarter, and now has four days left to meet the goal of $2,000. If you felt like it, you could help make an original occupy game happen in a rather interesting moment in a massive movement.

Here are some words from the project organizers that you can read: “Every community center needs a game room to draw in the general public, to give people some respite and lighten spirits, and to give people an excuse to meet others in their community. And every good game room needs an arcade machine.

…if all goes will, the OAK-U-TRON 201X will be an official member part of the Winnitron Indie Game Arcade Network, showcasing the true, independent, DIY spirit of game developers around the globe!”

]]> http://insertcredit.com/2012/01/23/occupy-oaklands-proposed-arcade-machine/feed/ 0 Patrick Miller’s Top 5 Games of 2011 http://insertcredit.com/2011/12/30/patrick-millers-top-5-games-of-2011/ http://insertcredit.com/2011/12/30/patrick-millers-top-5-games-of-2011/#comments Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:01:23 +0000 patrick http://insertcredit.com/?p=4998 I joked to my fellow insert credistas a while back that I wasn’t any good at those weekly “What Are You Playing This Weekend?” staff poll pieces because my answer would be the same practically every week. Dark Souls? Call of Duty? Nope, just StarCraft 2, every week for a good 9 months or so.

Needless to say, I don’t play that many games these days. But I do play good ones, and I do play bad ones, so here we go: Patrick Miller’s Top Games of 2011, starting here. Note that I don’t really give a shit about things like release dates, so if you’re expecting a strict analysis of the 2011 videojuego canon, that’s not what you’ll get here.

5: Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC)

Deus Ex was great, 11 years ago. It holds up reasonably well today, if you can forgive the actual first-person shooter part for not being comparable to our modern-day festival of polished dicks. (If there’s one thing the games industry can look back upon with pride, it’s that over the last two decades of video game development they’ve gotten really good at making games that start with a human hand holding a gun.) But really, that was the least interesting part about the original Deus Ex.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

If I were working at a game dev studio that was in contention to make a new Deus Ex, I imagine that I would (naively) bust my fucking ass to get the contract, because I loved Deus Ex (in fact, I loved it so much that I never played the second one). Then one day, I would find out that we got the assignment, and I would sit down and let it wash over me: We’re making the next Deus Ex!

Which would slowly turn into:

Fuck. We…we’re making the next Deus Ex.

And then we would start the four-year process of trying to find a way to draw compromises between the realities of making a modern big-budget video game, and the noble ideals of the original–which I would characterize as “Thou shalt encourage the player to tear this game apart to the seams, yet never force the player to encounter a limitation, neither in design nor technology, which makes them think ‘oh man, I really wish they’d let me do that“.

Now, you can go back and play Deus Ex with updated texture packs and renders, and you’ll realize that Liberty Island is actually so pointlessly big that it simply magnifies how limited it is by its technology (polygons in the mist don’t do much for atmosphere), but back then it felt, well, magical and splendid and amazing, because every time you tried to break it, it just winked at you and said  ”Dude, that was cool”.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is #5 on my list for a few reasons. A secondary reason is that I didn’t play that many games I liked (but I did play the shit out of this one). The primary reason is that it felt like an Adult Game. When you’re debuting a new IP, you can afford to be a stubborn teenager that does everything its own way because that is the way that makes the most sense to do things to you, and goddamn it even if you end  up producing an ungodly broken mess, at least it’s your mess, built upon uncompromising ideals that have yet to encounter the real world. That shit won’t fly the second time around. Everyone is expecting you to deliver the free-roaming, fully interactive world you promised the first time. Of course, no one can actually do that, because you didn’t promise them that game. They think you did, because they played your game and let their minds fill the carefully-left blanks in with a game far more amazing than anyone could ever make, and now you’re the sucker that has to try and live up to that with a game that is exactly the best game in the world to everyone at once or you’re a fraud.

So Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes  in and says, hey, guy, we grew up, and we think you should, too. And if you play this game the way we made  it, with QTE melee attacks and hacking mini-games and crappy boss fights, it won’t be the game you think you were playing eleven years ago, but it’ll still be a pretty cool game. Because we think you’ve played a game or two since Deus Ex dropped 11 years ago, and you know the time. We can’t make the game you want. But we’ll make you a game that lets you know we understand what you loved about the original, and we’ll do our best to do it justice in what is, essentially, a completely different game wrapped in the skin of the thing you loved.

It’s bittersweet, truly. As it turns out, they took a game where the combat was basically so shitty you _wanted_ to explore the levels (to either avoid enemies, or find tricky ways to kill guys that didn’t involve head-on confrontation), and made a game where the combat is actually the most fun part. The combat is fun enough to break, anyway, which is why I did exactly that and beat the game, on Hard, without dying once. (I wrote a thing about this, which should go up here once someone finds time to edit it.)

And just to pre-empt the commenters: Yeah, the boss fights suck. Fortunately, it’s not hard to  beat each one in a matter of seconds with the right gear and augs, and then happily go on your way and pretend that it never happened.

In short: Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a compromise between the memories of games better than the ones we actually played, and the realities of the modern game industry. It’s not perfect, and it knows it, and it’s a little better for that.

4: Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty (PC)

Yes, the game came out in 2010. But it wasn’t the same game that came in a box in 2010, and that’s the point of including it on this list.

Competitive games are a tricky bunch to evaluate, because your enjoyment of the game is directly related to how good everyone is at playing the game. Street Fighter III: Third Strike is a perfect example, since the game hasn’t changed in any significant material sense since it was released X years ago, but it experienced a competitive revival in the mid-aughts that helped the Street Fighter competitive scene survive the dark ages. Fact is, it’s a more enjoyable game now than it was 10 years ago.

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty

Starcraft 2 has had a long time to mature since its release in late 2010, and it has only gotten better with age, in two major ways: The way the game is actually played is more fun than it was last year, and the community surrounding the game has birthed something incredible that makes the game even more awesome.

Let’s start with the first part: The game is actually more fun to play.

There’s no doubt that, for a newbie, Starcraft 2 is probably the most frustrating experience on the market. That doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon, though it’s worth pointing out that multiplayer Brood War was infinitely more painful to grow up with than SC2. You have to understand the game at a certain fundamental level to succeed online. You have to understand the phases of the game, build orders, fundamental micromanagement skills, and specific map strategies, or else you will not be able to win with any regularity. If you cannot win, you will not enjoy this game. With very rare exceptions, it’s a game that is only fun if you win. Fortunately, a reasonably intelligent adult gamer can learn those basics in a week or two of dedicated study, with the right practice partners and educational materials, at which point the game starts to get fun.

The reason Starcraft 2 has gotten more fun over the past year is that, for the most part, people online have stepped up their game, and Blizzard has meticulously patched the game to be More Fun.

That’s not quite true. Blizzard has the unenviable position of bearing the standard for the world of eSports. Imagine being in charge of the rules to the first televised, organized football game ever, and being told, “Look, this has to be fun to watch as well as play”. People don’t want to see early-game Reaper rushes out of five Barracks every game, so you patch that unit into irrelevance. Very few people want to watch a single SC2 match last longer than 40 minutes at the most, so you design smaller maps and implement an army size limit that effectively encourages most games to last 20 minutes or so. And so on. Is that More Fun? In some cases, yes–though I liked the Reaper a lot. In other cases, not quite.

Still, competitive Starcraft 2 one year ago had a lot of mindless one-base all-in rushes (which were boring to play against and watch), lots of boring matchups (Protoss vs. Protoss and Zerg vs. Zerg come to mind), and a relative dearth of creative strategies. Also, the competitive map pool was fucking terrible (Steppes of War? Blistering Sands? That one god-awful Desert something map?).

One year later, we have a good mix of builds for each race (including the occasional one-base all-in to keep us honest), better maps, less-shitty Protoss vs. Protoss, and generally speaking, a Better Game.

The funny thing is that the balance patches didn’t really do that much, in the grand scheme of things. Hellions became awesome pretty much overnight once BoxeR and the rest of team SlayerS came to an MLG tournament and rolled the entire arena with them. Infestors went from unimpressive to must-kill units just because a few guys started actually building games around them instead of just using them for Neural Parasite (which, as it turns out, is probably their least useful ability). Blizzard deserves all the credit in the world for making a great game, but the reality is that we really didn’t learn how to play it until 2011.

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty (second image)

Now let’s talk about the community.

Raising a SC2 player takes a village. Maybe that village is a thread on a forum you already frequent. Maybe it’s the r/starcraft subreddit, or the Team Liquid strategy forums. In order to play the game at a reasonably skilled level, you need a place to ask questions, swap replays, diagnose bad habits, and otherwise shoot the competitive shit.

It’s no secret that Starcraft 2 has absolutely blown up in the last year. I like to say that this is in spite of, rather than because of, the game itself. As a spectator sport, it’s harder to watch than cricket. As a game, it’s harder to learn how to play than…well, just about anything I can think of, really. (The obvious comparison is Chess, but Chess doesn’t require you to perform 200 actions per minute.) But the game is full of a million borderline-religious zealots who have not only devoted themselves to the craft of playing the game, but of teaching it.

That is to say: It’s a hard game to watch, but the players wanted to watch it. So they started commentating the games to make them easier to watch and more exciting. Now, Starcraft 2 commentators are worlds ahead of any other competitive video game–to the point that good commentators are celebrities as big (if not bigger) than the players themselves, and the presence of certain folks can make or break a big event.

Likewise: It’s a hard game to play, but people wanted to learn how. So they got good at the game, then got good at teaching others how to play. Go watch the Day[9] Daily and you’ll see what I mean–this guy puts on a live-streamed hour-long show 5 days a week (ish) that basically dissects the game to death. There is no other game that has anywhere near this kind of love and attention lavished upon it, and the game is better for it.

So: Why is Starcraft 2 “only” 4th on my list of top 5 games of the year? Lord knows it’s the one I spent the most time and energy on.

Some competitive games have the stamina to last for years, if the players deem it worthy. Brood War was one of those games. So were Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Capcom vs. SNK 2. Tiers and dominant strategies fluctuated over the years. The meta-game changed, and players learned how to do ever-more impressive techniques. New glitches were discovered that changed the competitive landscape and kept things fresh and new.

Some games have this mojo. Others don’t. Third Strike, bless its heart, doesn’t really change from year to year. Ken, Chun, Yun. It’s still fun, but it was somewhat stagnant.

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty has grown so much since last year. Unfortunately, it feels like it’s starting to plateau into a rather predictable rhythm. That rhythm is still fun, and complicated, and a million other great things, but it still feels, to me, like it’s being designed to play in a very specific way, and that intention is keeping it from joining the five-year club (which is probably the point, since a new expansion pack is due out soonish).

For example: I play Terran. Terran is undisputably the most versatile race out of the bunch; we have an incredible diversity of early-game openings that are difficult to scout and prepare for, and if you don’t respond adequately, you’re going to give me a huge advantage going into the mid-game. But no matter the opening strategy, 90% of Terran/Zerg games are going to pit Marines, Medevacs, and Siege Tanks against Zerglings, Banelings, and Mutalisks in the mid-game, with the Terran player adding more Ghosts in the late-game and the Zerg player using Infestors and Brood Lords in the late-game.

This is because the fundamental threat in this matchup is the Terran Marine, which is incredibly cost-effective against both Zerglings and Roaches, the Zerg player’s staple tier 1 and tier 1.5 units. Put simply: If the Terran player builds nothing but Marines, and the Zerg player nothing but Zerglings and Roaches, the Terran player will most likely have an easier time of it. Add upgrades to the mix, and the Marine is deadlier. Add Medevacs–which can heal Marines and carry them behind enemy lines to harass workers and tech buildings–and they become deadlier still.

So a Zerg player needs Banelings to wreck groups of Marines relatively cheaply, and Zerglings to pin down groups of Marines so they don’t run away before the Banelings come. In response, the Terran player will build Siege Tanks, which can demolish groups of Banelings before they make it to the Marines. So the Zerg player adds Mutalisks to the mix, which can pick off stray tanks and Medevac drops, or harass the Terran base so the Terran player is scared to leave their base for fear of losing worker units to Mutalisk raids. However, Mutalisks lose to groups of Marines. So each side has their respective tools, and success or failure in any given game depends on control, economy, and a million other factors. It’s a beautiful thing.

The problem is, that’s really the main way to play Terran vs. Zerg. Roaches aren’t really useful outside of early game rushes because they lose to Marines in the long run, which means the Terran player rarely needs to make Marauders–which means they have more money to spend on Marines and Tanks. Zerg have early-game anti-air covered by the Queen, and mid-game anti-air covered by Mutalisks, so Terrans rarely make Banshees in this matchup, which means they don’t need Tech Labs on their Starports, which means Ravens and Battlecruisers are less likely later on (well that and, let’s face it, they suck).

Outside of the mirror matches, most of Wings of Liberty is like this. There are a dozen ways to get from Point A to Point B to Point C, but the ideal end-state is always the same. Some folks will say that it’s just because we haven’t been playing Starcraft 2 nearly as long as people played Brood War; I disagree. Older games like Brood War and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 were accidentally awesome; there were layers upon layers of competitive gameplay that we had to uncover for ourselves because no one–not even the designers–knew they were there. After all, how do you balance a game for players who are operating at five times the speed of the average player when you’ve never seen people play a game like that in your life? All you can do is give them the tools and hope that when your game finally breaks, it does so in a million glorious sparks.

Not so any more. The world of competitive game design has lost its innocence. That’s why we have X-Factor, that’s why we have Revenge Meters, that’s why our SC2 games are supposed to go on for 15 minutes. We have begun to make these games intentional, not accidental, and we’re still figuring out how to do that. Perhaps one day we’ll play a competitive game that feels instantly timeless, a game that makes Starcraft 2 and Street Fighter IV feel overwrought and crude, a game that is an eSport the way soccer is a sport. Until then, Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty will have to settle for fourth place. It’s a good fourth, though.

3: Marvel vs. Capcom 3 / Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3

Few games this year persuaded me to put down Starcraft 2. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (and, 8 months later, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3) managed to.

They’re on this list partially for reasons similar to Deus Ex: Human Revolution–namely, the element of compromise. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was a beautiful accident. By all accounts, it was basically a copy-paste of a game released to satisfy some kind of contractual obligation, and somehow it just turned out to be an amazing game that was a hell of a lot of fun to play (and watch). Marvel vs. Capcom 2 — better known as MAHVEL BAYBEE — coined the term “Get Hype“, and the current incarnation of the fighting game community owes a lot to MAHVEL’s indelible imprint. There really was no way for Marvel vs. Capcom 3 to live up to that legacy.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3

Do you idly choreograph fight scenes while waiting for your sandwich to come up at the deli? Do you find yourself pondering which people in any given room you could take on in hand-to-hand combat? I do. I don’t think it’s that unusual, either, though I might be wrong. That is Street Fighter.

Marvel vs. Capcom is hanging out with friends and doing the same thing–and realizing that if you and your bros are going to get into a scrap, you’re going to have to think tactically. How can you arrange your bros into generally favorable matchups? Do you try to choose a weaker enemy-bro for yourself so you can overwhelm them quickly and come to an aid of one of your own weaker bros? And so on.

The beauty of Marvel vs. Capcom is the simultaneous potential for utter blowouts and nail-biting comebacks. It’s a setup so confusing you couldn’t possibly block it–so confusing you’re not sure even the person doing the setup knows what’s going on–and then seeing someone block it. It’s the combination of a game that rewards both disciplined skill in execution, smart decision-making, and a willingness to gamble, all at once. It is Poker, Starcraft, and Street Fighter in varying proportions, and because of that it’s pretty fucking amazing.

In their infinite wisdom, Capcom probably realized that their odds of successfully re-creating the magic of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 with the same lack-of-a-design-philosophy was astronomically low. Honestly, MVC2 is only really playable with four characters plus a handful of assists, and they got lucky that the game you play with those characters happens to be really, really fun. So they tried to isolate the game’s central appeals–the blowouts and comebacks, the decisions and the gambles, the tactical approach to team-building, etc.–and tried to build the next game with those elements in mind.

That’s why we have X-Factor, a one-time-use mode which can regenerate your health, eliminate chip damage, increase your damage and speed and prolong your combos–and gets more powerful as you lose teammates, meaning you can use it early to make sure you kill a particularly annoying character, or save it for the end of the game and potentially run through the entire enemy team with one character or one lucky combo. It feels contrived and unnatural–an extra layer of abstraction we didn’t really need–but it allows for comebacks, and blowouts, and it’s one more decision to make, so it’s MAHVEL, BAYBEE.

That’s also why the characters are, generally speaking, as fun to play (if not more so) as the top tier of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. See, the big four in MVC2 (Storm, Magneto, Sentinel, Cable) were fun because they played a completely different game than the other characters. Most of the MVC2 cast played a game not unlike earlier Vs. installments–lots of dashing back and forth trying to land a lucky low short, or shooting out a lot of projectile attacks while mashing on your assist buttons, or big, long, floaty super jumps.

Cable, on the other hand, could chip you to death from the other side of the screen without blinking an eye–and if you so much as flinched, your character (and any onscreen assists) would die. Storm’s projectile attacks and Hailstorm super let her control space, and her 8-way air dash and floating abilities let her rush down or run away at will, meaning she could basically do anything you didn’t want her to do. Magneto’s blinding speed and 8-way air-dash let him mix you up in ways you didn’t know existed. And Sentinel could be every bit as dangerous as a distance as Cable or up close and personal as Magneto, if you knew exactly what you were doing. It’s not just that these guys are good–they’re a physical joy to play once you start to figure out how to wave dash, triangle jump, and a million other physical nuances that get your hands going CLACKCLACKCLACK on the buttons.

I've never seen a Jill/Jill mirror match before.

Almost everyone in MVC3 is like this, in different ways. Playing Zero makes you feel like a ninja the way Chipp Zanuff never did. Hawkeye captures the essence of Cable without the mindless domination that Cable had over 90% of the cast. Dr. Strange’s loop combos, Spencer’s unstoppable Bionic Arm, dear god, Haggar’s breathtaking air Pipe attack–they’re all simply glorious to behold. Earlier, I described Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty as “overwrought”–Marvel vs. Capcom 3 can feel like that, at its worst, but it usually just feels “lovingly crafted”. It feels like some scientists in a lab discovered the essence of MAHVEL BAYBEE, isolated the proper elements, and handed them off to a 70-year-old craftsman who had been trying to build the Platonic ideal of MAHVEL, BAYBEE out of love alone.

It’s not perfect–hence #3 for the year (#freegene). But it’s a total fucking blast, and it makes me feel that MAHVEL is in good hands, and Capcom will not drop the soap on this one.

2: Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery EP

I’m late to the critical party on this one, seeing as how I just finished it two days ago. I’ll be brief: There are two things I like about this game, and as it turns out, I like them enough to call this my Second Favorite Game of 2011.

First off, it is short. It is also not afraid to be short. It is a true EP–longer than a single, but not by much.

Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery EP

Games are not, I think, an easy medium to do “short”. You’re building a world from scratch, after all–putting a few more things in that world should be the easy part. Comparatively easy, anyway. So maybe you make yourself an “episodic” game, and sell it in standalone bite-sized chunks. Or you remake Asteroids. Whatever.

S&S EP is short, and that is good–because each moment of the game is packed with love, just pouring through your eyes and ears. It is truly an adventure, with almost no “game mechanics” to get in the way of that.

Fallout 3 is about adventure. It has to be, because the combat sucks, and it’s about “plot” but not about storytelling, if that makes sense. There are many people you can go around and talk to and treat well or poorly. So you mostly walk around, see lots of crazy things happen to lots of crazy people, and intervene in those crazy things to ensure that things go well or poorly as you see fit. It’s like, if you had a time machine, you’d probably first go to all the important times mentioned in your history book and stop by to push Lincoln out of the way. You’re photobombing history. The fact that each square mile of the world looks more or less like the one next to it isn’t the point–the point is that there is that much sameness to walk through.

S&S EP, by comparison, is like exploring a small forest in a park. I grew up across the street of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The park itself has all kinds of stuff in it–several playgrounds, a botanical garden, some places to grill, long winding trails that don’t really go anywhere, and so on. It’s pretty big–1,017 acres, Wikipedia says. If you enter the park from around 7th ave. and Fulton, walk to the main drag, turn right, and walk a few more blocks, you’ll find  a small forest on the right-hand side. It’s not big–if you look down the street, you can easily see where it starts and stops. But once you walk in, it feels like you’re somewhere else. There’s a big stone monument in a little clearing a few hundred feet down the main trail, another clearing in a ravine where wild blackberries grow. You know that if you walk far enough in one direction you’ll be out of the forest and back in the park, but you probably don’t want to because, well, there’s a path over there that looks like it could lead somewhere cool, and a really big tree that a homeless guy might be taking a nap on in the other way. It’s really a remarkably well-designed level. I can close my eyes and mentally walk through that forest and populate it with my memories; the numerous times I’ve tried to run up the monument, the occasional game of laser tag near the trees on the southern side, berry-picking excursions.

S&S EP feels to me like someone took that feeling and made a game out of it, except they happened to like games as combinations of music and video and interaction rather than a game that is about shooting things or punching people. Most games are about a set of very basic verbs. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 would probably just be “Attack”. Starcraft 2 would be “Build” and “Attack”. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is “Go here”.

I don’t think that S&S EP could be reduced to a similar set of verbs without losing something in the process. The combat sequences (which are kind of like a two-button Space Channel 5) would work just as well to me if I weren’t actually playing them, I think, and the only thing I do get out of it is the depleting-health vignette, which is sad and sweet.

Instead, you explore a small forest, haunted by rock and art. It tells you a short story, and then you are done.

Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery EP

(You can choose to tweet the dialogue, you can wait for the phases of the moon, you can call the number at the end–all fun, playful little things–but you don’t have to. I like that.)

The second thing about S&S EP: It is a game meant to be played on the iPad. I can appreciate that because there are not many games that are meant to be played on the iPad. I just played some Sonic CD, which I bought for two bucks, on my iPad. It can be played on the iPad, but it is not meant to be played on the iPad. Then I played Sonic & All Stars Racing on the iPad with the default tilt controls (apparently you can turn them off and just use an on-screen d-pad or something? I have no idea, I just Googled it.) and it is a game that has to be played on the iPad but in reality was never actually meantto be played by anyone, at all. S&S EP is meant to be played with lots of pinching and zooming and tilting and poking and strumming, which is exactly something that an iPad can do that nothing else can, and all of that is served exceptionally well by having a big screen to play with (honestly, the game just isn’t the same on an iPhone).

I don’t play a whole lot of “experimental” games, and when I do, I rarely play anything for more than a few minutes (which is usually about the length of the game). But I came back to S&S EP each time because it’s the poking and prodding that was fun. It was almost fun in spite of itself–it’s not an easy game to pick up and play for just a few minutes because there’s nothing to remind you exactly what the fuck you were doing or where you were going or that you’re supposed to be singing the Song of Sworcery and then poking the trees to summon the woodland nymph. Nevertheless, whenever I could find 30 minutes to sit down and pay attention to the game, it was lots of multi-touch gesture fun.

S&S EP is the game I want to give my #1 spot. I wish I could. A better man would.

1: Words With Friends (Android, iOS, Facebook, etc.)

For a while, I thought social games would have Made It when someone came up with a social game that could make you lose friends from playing it (and not just from spamming our News Feed with requests for help). Months later, I realized that I had religiously played a game that would do just that–Words With Friends.

Words With Friends: Patrick Miller's #1 Game of the Year. Reluctantly.

Yes, it’s Scrabble. It’s Scrabble, with a few major rule tweaks–there is no penalty for guessing incorrect words, 7-letter “bingo” plays aren’t rewarded as highly, and the board layout leads to very high payoffs (it’s possible to hit two triple word scores, or a triple word and a triple letter score, with the same word, which isn’t really doable in the normal Scrabble layout, if I remember correctly).

Most folks either don’t notice the difference, or don’t care. Some intermediate-level Scrabble folks dislike the changes, but really, once you get to a certain level it’s not about knowing the words you can or can’t play–that’s taken for granted. I maintain that these rules are genius–and they add a frustrating-but-fascinating metagame that actually makes WWF truly social.

I started playing Words With Friends semi-seriously once I got my iPad. I had played a bit of Scrabulous on Facebook way back when, and I had seen a handful of dedicated Scrabble players play just enough to know what a good game should look like. I like words (hence all this writing) and I like games, so it seemed like a good fit.

I was consumed.

Consumed doesn’t even begin to describe it, really. I was consumed by Starcraft 2, but the game is so emotionally draining that I had to set aside a specific time to play it and focus only on it, and I needed to be at a gaming PC to play it, which further limited my time. Words With Friends could be played for 30 seconds or 30 minutes, I could juggle as many concurrent games as I liked, and it would kindly notify me whenever it was my turn. I played it before bed. I played it when I woke up. I played it during the commute, during work, after work. I would harass people in real life when they didn’t make their plays. I pissed off my girlfriend on multiple occasions because I’d be playing WWF instead of paying attention to her when she was talking to me, and then I would try to switch apps when she realized what I was doing, so WWF wouldn’t take the blame for it. It never worked.

Eventually, I noticed that my games would shake out in one of three different ways: They’d either be one-sided ass beatings in my favor, one-sided ass beatings of my ass, or close, competitive games that were neck-and-neck the whole way. If I was winning heavily, the game would slow down–I’d be quick to make my plays, but they’d be slow to make theirs. If it was close, it’d go pretty quickly. If I was losing, I’d be dragging my feet to make my next play.

The psychology behind that is pretty easy to understand, I think. Words With Friends is meant to be played in bite-sized chunks–on the bus, the toilet, a lunch break, whenever. You check your list of games,  and pick the one you want to play the most. If you’re winning by a huge margin, you don’t need to spend much time thinking about your next play (and as it turns out, Words With Friends is a game where it can be very easy to preserve a lead–more on this later), so you make a quick play and move on. You could open up the game which you’re losing by a huge margin, but you’d just see a board full of failure with no real winning moves, so you think “Well, I’m going to set this one aside for later”, and focus on the close game. Everyone does that with the losing games, so they take forever–and eventually a lot of them just forfeit due to inactivity. The games that play out the fastest are the competitive games, since they’re the ones you want to spend most of your allotted WWF time on (on both sides).

Here’s where the genius social metagame bit comes in: Words With Friends is a “word game” in only the loosest sense of the word. It’s not a word game like Text Twist or Boggle, which are more like “structured celebrations of the English language”. Veteran Scrabble players know this, which is why they religiously recite lists of two- and three-letter words before bed every night. Normal people don’t. Generally speaking, normal people believe that Words With Friends is a game that rewards English literacy, and they play it because it is a reasonably smart game that they can play with their friends and (theoretically) have fun.

It isn’t, really. It’s a turn-based strategy game designed to look like a word game. That’s how it sucks people in, and that’s how it can ruin friendships. Normal people playing a word game naively assume that Longer Words Are Better. Slightly more experienced players think Higher-Scoring Words Are Better. Experienced competitive gamers know that the game is mostly about board control, and if you play your tiles right, the score will sort itself out in the end.

Let’s start with the first play. You start out playing on the center star, which nets you a double word score. Naturally, you play the highest-scoring word you have available. Let’s say it’s “Theme”. Five letters, probably gets you 20 points after the multiplier is applied. Not bad.

Everything you need to know about your opponent, you’ll find out in the next move.

A normal player will probably play a three- or four-letter word off the H or the M. Maybe they play “House”–seven points before any bonus squares are applied. Or “Mouse” for an extra point.

If they have an S, they might go one step further and grab 11 points from adding it to the end of your word for “Themes” plus whatever word they decide to tack on–”Stem”, perhaps. If they managed to grab a good double-letter or double-word score on top of that, they might even be in the lead.

A real Scrabble player would probably play something short. Something like “ewe”, if they had the letters. Like so:

[T][H][E][M][E]
[ ][E][W][E][ ]

EWE = 6 points.
ME = 5 points.
EW = 5 points.
HE = 4 points.

This does three things. First, it ties the score. Second, it only uses one high-scoring letter from their rack (the W, for four points). Third, it makes it much harder for you to play next. Not impossible, certainly. Maybe you could play “Asp”:

[A][S][P]
[T][H][E][M][E]
[ ][E][W][E]

And score a handy 22 points or so. But more often than not, you won’t have ASP, and so you’ll be forced to play some shitty five-letter word sticking straight out of their other word, and so on, and they’ll double your last play with three letters in the right place.

The trick is to understand that longer words are a liability, because they’re rarely your best-scoring option, and they open up scoring opportunities for your opponent. This isn’t Boggle; if your opponent wins, they did so on a game board that you helped build for them. So build them a shitty game board.

This is why Words With Friends makes it really easy to hold on to a lead. It’s like playing Starcraft 2 with a lead; all you have to do is make sure that you’re not losing more army value than your opponent in any given engagement, and not making any mistakes in scouting (no missed tech switches, hidden expansions etc), and you will win. You will win because your opponent needs to do something in order to not lose, and it will be easier for you to defend it and let him make a mistake than it will be for him to come back from behind. In Words With Friends, the only opportunities your opponent has is the opportunities you give them.

Once you play WWF to win, not to build the biggest, longest words possible, you can beat 90% of your friends. And they will resent you and hate you for it, because you will make them feel dumb, because they are losing to dumb words, not big smart words, and they will stop playing. So you have to string them along. You have to give them just enough rope so they will hang themselves, but enjoy it enough to finish the damn game. You have to choose plays which make sure you win the game, but make sure it’s close enough to keep their interest. And eventually, you find the players who play like you do, and you engage in a long, drawn-out struggle to make each other as miserable as possible.

I spent the first month of my WWF addiction playing across the gamut of my Facebook friends list. Each week I’d win some and lose some, and each week the Wins would go up a little more and the Loses would go down a bit. Then I got sick of stringing my friends along and went for the big fish: Steve Fox, editor-in-chief of PCWorld (the boss of my boss’s boss).

Steve is not a gamer. He doesn’t really understand the appeal, and he gets motion sickness. But he grew up playing Scrabble, and he plays a mean game of Words With Friends.

The first time I played him, I thought I had it pretty good with a 60-point word in the second or third play. He responded with 40-pointer that set me up for another big play, maybe 50 or so. 110 to 40 or so? Maybe you’re not all you’re cracked up to be, old man.

Then he got another 40.

Then he got another 40.

Then he got another 40.

He ended up trouncing me by a solid 100 points, at least.

By now, I was playing only one game–Words With Steve Fox. He would casually drop by my desk and mention the bigger whammies he laid down–usually only when they were over 80 points or so. I wasn’t spending any less time playing than I was when I was juggling 8 games at once, either. Every morning, every evening. On occasion, I’d be in a meeting taking notes on my iPad and see the “It’s Your Move!” notification pop up–and then I’d look up and see Steve innocently toying with his phone during the meeting that he was running.

He got another 40. I’d drop by his office and talk strategy with him, after some of the closer games. I learned that he was good enough to keep up a good 20-30-point-per-play average while looking three or four moves down the line to set up potential bingo plays. He could be every bit as good at denying me opportunities while saving up for big scores that left me far, far behind.

For the most part. Sometimes, his big scores didn’t happen. A few times, I even managed to take a game from him. I screenshotted those games.

Words With Friends

It came to be too much. I got my iPad for more than just games. I wanted to read more, stay up on the news, watch movies, do all that stuff–not just play Words With Steve Fox. But that’s what I was doing whenever I opened up my iPad. I had to quit. So I finished my last game, didn’t offer a rematch, and explained to Steve that I had to retire. He nodded his head, told me he understood. Then he went back to the game–games he had started with people 20 years ago.

Starcraft 2 is the game I had to quit this year because it completely prevented me from playing (or enjoying) other games. It hogged all my gaming time, and each moment I spent playing not-Starcraft 2 games was a moment I was spending Not Getting Better at Starcraft 2. But it’s only #4 on my list.

Words With Friends is a game I had to quit for my own good. It is my first–and hopefully my only–true game addiction. With Words With Friends, I played a game with people in real life–and real life consequences. That, I think, is a social game.

That’s why it’s my game of the 2011.

–patrick miller doesn’t care what you say, he’s not falling off the wagon

]]> http://insertcredit.com/2011/12/30/patrick-millers-top-5-games-of-2011/feed/ 0 Disaster Report: real world events and the language of video games http://insertcredit.com/2011/10/22/disaster-report-real-world-events-and-the-language-of-video-games/ http://insertcredit.com/2011/10/22/disaster-report-real-world-events-and-the-language-of-video-games/#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2011 02:59:37 +0000 Hamish http://insertcredit.com/?p=4990 In the chaos of the Great East Japan earthquake, there was a story that understandably drew little attention. It’s a story about a small game development team within its publisher, Irem. The team makes a series called Disaster Report – video games about surviving natural disasters. Just after the quake, the most recent game, Disaster Report 4, was cancelled, and all the previous Disaster Report games were removed from Japanese shelves, almost without comment.

But despite the garish way they’re marketed in the west, the Disaster Report titles were really quite slow and respectful games. Their subtlety is immediately visible in the trailers and Japanese boxart, which is soft and innocent. They don’t promise the thrills or graphical punch of some games. They only promise that they will try and show you what it is like to be a person escaping from a beautiful and welcoming environment that has suddenly become hostile.

In the games, you try to help people, but sometimes they die. There may be something you can do about it, something difficult and frightening. But often there isn’t. Coming to terms with this is evocative – it is not great art, but it is sincere.

There is an early sequence in the first Disaster Report. You meet an old couple in a collapsing building – a wounded man and his wife, who refuses to leave his side. Your character talks to them, you hear they have a son. You find a photo in the rubble. You give them the photo. It shows them with their son, whom they tell you is going to university. You hear a helicopter land outside, so you go to meet it. But as you begin to leave the building, it collapses. With some effort you manage to evacuate a friend, but the couple is killed. In the crashes and grinds of breaking concrete, the photo is blown clear and flutters to the ground.

Here we see the use of every convention in the toolbox of the action-adventure game designer. You have to make sacrifices as regards your inventory in order to pick up an item. You then give the item to someone by taking it out of your inventory, which is the only way that the player (rather than the “character”) can communicate with them, and you see that the item means a lot to them. You separate from them to meet the helicopter, emphasising your role as the one who must push onward. And then when the building collapses you have to navigate treacherous surroundings in a short space of time, trying to acquire something (your friend) while also under the obligation to leave some things behind (the couple).

The game isn’t just an action-adventure though; the team was willing to step outside the conventions of video games. They had to, to avoid being gratuitous.

How would you or I go about making a game about death? Bearing in mind that in almost every game ever made there is an awful lot of “dying.” In video games we drown, we have our bones crushed, we are burned into paralysis. What usually happens then is that the screen fades out, fades in, and there we are again, standing where we were a minute or so ago, right as rain.

There are good reasons for other games doing this, and good reasons to expect it to be done – resurrection allows players to engage with tense and interesting challenges. But this approach treats death with irreverence, which is problematic if you’re addressing real world events (as many noble game developers attempt to do nowadays).

The Disaster Report games make some effort to imbue their “dying” with the horror that a conscientious artist would want to. There is a mechanic in the original game centered around becoming “thirsty” (and “cold” and “stressed” in the sequels), and it can move the player to panic. Just like in the aftermath of a real earthquake, you are required to scavenge and scrimp resources. If you fail to do so, you may become so dehydrated that you collapse – this risks the loss of hours of progress. So you worry immensely about what you’ll find around you.

“Losing hours of progress” is a trite reflection of what is at stake for the real people who survive real hardship, but it is the most powerful punch a game developer can pack. It feels highly unfair. It makes you hate the environment. If you (understandably) don’t appreciate the symbolism, then you may even hate the game.

I should add that the games also contain quite conventional platforming challenges. These parts regress to the standard approach players “dying,” so there is almost nothing at stake. Perhaps here the developers had no other viable choice. But I maintain that the original sentiment was commendable, even if it turned out that its implementation was not in tune with the language of video games.

At the core of it, the Disaster Report games just have a simple and quite affecting premise, in stark comparison to other high budget titles. They do not involve hurting anyone. They do not involve feeling powerful or especially beautiful. They do not involve saving the world. They just involve saving yourself and the friends you make. With its limited technology, the first game was a subdued affair – no epic score, few dynamic environments, few human beings beyond what was necessary for the next setpiece. It felt desolate and cruel, which is exactly how it should have felt. We see this in the other games too.

Admittedly, the first games made a lot of mistakes, although at least they’re honest mistakes. The feel of the challenges is similar to Uncharted, with all the manipulative stupidity that that entails. The creators were interested in presenting the images and narratives that come out of a natural disaster – they weren’t all that interested in providing interesting or fair gameplay.

For example, when debris falls around you, the harm that is done to you feels random. You are able to defend yourself by crouching; the way your avatar cowers is theoretically compelling, almost educational. But it adds up to a blockheaded game mechanic. The philosophy at work here is “if they audience is pressing buttons while watching this, then they will feel involved.” The same as Uncharted, or any Adventure game – although at least it’s not as bad as Enslaved or Heavy Rain. Disaster Report contains moments of great friction, like when you’re trying to walk up a precariously tilted surface or pushing an object – you don’t get that in adventure games.

My point is that the makers of these games treat their subject matter with reverence. They are aware that they have an artistic responsibility, something most game designers will go out of their way to avoid.

“The Kobe disaster of 1995 was in [the designers’] minds during the making of Disaster Report” a spokesperson for Irem told me. I believe that Irem could have continued backing the design team – in an ideal world at least. They have already proven they can use the conventions of games to effectively talk about this subject, and the recent catastrophe could have moved the team to even greater dedication. I know the people who carried out the cancellation of Disaster Report 4 believed that they were being compassionate. But in their fear of offending a wounded post Fukushima disaster Japan, they have missed an opportunity for great relevance.

-Hamish Todd had to import Disaster Report 2 from France

]]> http://insertcredit.com/2011/10/22/disaster-report-real-world-events-and-the-language-of-video-games/feed/ 0 The Anatomy of Hype (Or, Why You’re Going To Evolution 2012) http://insertcredit.com/2011/10/20/the-anatomy-of-hype-or-why-you%e2%80%99re-going-to-evolution-2012/ http://insertcredit.com/2011/10/20/the-anatomy-of-hype-or-why-you%e2%80%99re-going-to-evolution-2012/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 04:50:11 +0000 patrick http://insertcredit.com/?p=4983 I was a particularly nerdy kid, growing up. I was raised by a single Dad who was plenty nerdy himself, and I usually opted out of sports-related activities in favor of playing as many video games as I could get away with. I have this excellent picture from my 8th grade Little League baseball team. On the day where everyone got action shots, I asked to have my picture taken on the bench, math binder in hand, since most of my game time was spent there doing homework. (I’m pretty bad at math, too.)Never in a million years did I think that I would be the kind of guy to watch other people play video games, cheer wildly, and yell “OH MY SHIT DID HE JUST DO THAT”. In other words, I never thought I’d be into sports. Until I went to Evolution 2004. That mass of roaring people cheering Daigo on? I’m in there, somewhere.

I imagine that attending Evo is, for a few brief days, a taste of what it’s like to be any average guy with a beer belly, some gym shorts, and a profound devotion to ESPN. A basketball fan can walk into any sports bar in the world and mouth off about how terrible the Warriors are and start a conversation. They can watch The Big Game with a crowd of people and not feel self-conscious about spending their time watching big guys play with big basketballs. And when they’re at work, they can say “So, how about them Knicks?” and everyone else is obligated to reply with “Hell of a team, gonna go all the way this year” whether they pay attention to basketball or not. Well, fuck the Knicks. Here at Evo, the name of the game is MAHVEL, BAYBEE.

Basically, it’s a brief trip into a world where taking games seriously is totally fucking normal.

So! You’re going to Evo next year.

—————–

I’ve been hosting a few video game viewing parties lately. They’ve been fairly well attended, too–usually about 10 people or so piling into my living room watching young men in blazers commentate the Major League Gaming finals on my TV. Beer and snacks flow as freely as the shit-talking and act-like-we-know side chatter. I used to host UFC viewing parties, before. The atmosphere is more or less the same no matter what we’re watching.

Only about half of the people in attendance actually actively play Starcraft 2, or Street Fighter, or whatever we’re watching. The others just liked to watch. Funny, isn’t it? We’re entering an age where people just really like to watch other people play video games. And frankly, I don’t think half the people that came to my last viewing party actually cared that much about the game. They just wanted to see what it was like to treat a video game like most people treat football.

Starcraft 2 commentators Day[9] and DJWheat. Photo by Xensin.
Starcraft 2 commentators Day9 and DJWheat.

I had originally written this up as a simple ode to Evolution 2011, which I went to about 2-3 months ago. After running it by the rest of the insert credit crowd, I learned that I’d have to do more than that. My job is to convince you that professional gaming, or competitive gaming, or “eSports”, or whatever you want to call it, is worth your time and attention. Actually, my job is to convince you to come to Evolution 2012.

Even if you don’t particularly like fighting games.

So I’m going to start by telling you about why I give a shit about eSports. I don’t think that the skeptics out there will all of a sudden become crazy fanatics or anything. I do hope to plant the seed of interest that will eventually blossom into an “Aw, hell, I guess I’ll watch this stream for a little bit”.

(Why do I care whether you care? Mostly because I plan to write a whole bunch of neat stuff about eSports in the months to come, and if you don’t like it, well, we’re just kind of stuck with each other, I guess.)

———

Let’s start with a basic question: What does it mean to take video games seriously?

I took video games pretty darn seriously when I was 5. I didn’t own a console of my own, but you bet your ass I was better at video games than anyone else in my kindergarten class. All video games. Mario, Mega Man, Sonic the Hedgehog, you name it. I was the guy who got invited to the birthday sleepovers because you knew you’d need someone to get past whatever level you were stuck on. Serious business.

Other things I took seriously when I was 5: Candy. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. General avoidance of girls. Crayons.

I’m (something of an) adult now. I still take video games seriously. But not in quite the same way I did when I was 5.

I’ve had it in my head for a while now that the grown-ass men and women who grew up playing video games have stuck to the medium because they found something in the games they play that scratch a mature adult itch. The true connoisseurs–you folks who read insert credit are a good example–wouldn’t continue to play video games for the first few decades of their lives if it felt like they were watching Looney Tunes cartoons for a few hours every day.

So when I first discovered games writing that didn’t suck–The Gamer’s Quarter, The Escapist (back when it was on PDF, duh), the original insert credit, etc., I was hooked. I wasn’t hooked because of the games they were writing about, though. I was hooked because of the way people were writing about them.

See, I knew that video games were an integral part of who I was, by then, but I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to grow into them. What was I supposed to do when I took a girl back to my dorm room for the first time and she saw my MAS Systems arcade stick sitting in the middle of the floor? How could I feel confident about the fact that I spent at least an hour in training mode for Guilty Gear XX when no one in my zip code knew what the damn game was?

I'm getting all misty-eyed just looking at it.

I suppose I could have tried to break into the video game industry proper, but I knew by then that I didn’t really have the creative talent or discipline to try to make it. (Writing is my main marketable skill, and I gather there’s not tremendous amount of demand for writers in the games biz compared to coding/production/art/music/testing etc. Unless you want me in your Custom Content Division, I guess.)

And really, that wouldn’t address the issue. It’d be like a kid being so into crayons that he decides to, well, make crayons for a living, and be the best damn crayon engineer he could possibly be. That isn’t mature. That’s obsessive-bordering-on-weird. See, the parallel should be between “kid likes crayons” to “kid decides he wants to be an artist that does amazing things with crayons”, but it wasn’t, because I wasn’t used to thinking of video games as a potential medium for a performance.

But that’s what it is. Video games are many things, but one thing they can be is a venue for performance. For spectacle. And we can watch them, and enjoy them, because they can provide us just one more way to see just how amazing people can be when they dedicate themselves to a goal. When they push themselves to their absolute limits. Just watch the Daigo Parry (“Evo Moment #37”) if you don’t believe me.

Which segues nicely into the topic of the day–Evolution.

——–

You’re going to feel embarrassed walking into the Rio for the first time with your gigantic MadCatz FightStick TE in hand, wishing desperately that you could just blend in. Then you’re going to realize that the guys in front of you in the check-in line are talking about this totally sweet Zero/Wesker/Haggar setup, the guys behind you are placing bets on Justin Wong making top 8 in every game he enters, and the girls standing by the roulette table practically swooned when they saw Daigo walk by.

You’re going to tell stupid Street Fighter jokes in the elevator to your friends, and you’re going to hear the strangers riding with you laugh with you. Because when you say shit like “I’mma Balrog that chick, all yelling ‘FINAL!’ “, well, they’ve gotten hit by that punch too.

And when Latif hits that oh-so-pretty 60% C.Viper combo to knock Poongko out and meet Fuudo in the finals, you’re going to get out of your seat and cheer and jump and make a goddamn fool out of yourself like the other 2000 people in the ballroom who are just losing their shit over a video game.

Enter the tournament. Don’t bellyache about the $60 or so. It’s a small price to pay to say you played in Evo 2012, and it makes the whole experience much more intense. You’ll probably spend a few weeks practicing your heart out, agonizing over who you’ll use, dreading the thought of going two and out (it’s okay, it happens to everyone), and secretly imagining yourself taking on Daigo in the finals to defend the stars and stripes (this also happens to everyone). Do it. You get a T-shirt.

Or maybe you don’t like to play fighting games that much. That’s cool too. You’ll find some of the best fighting gamers in the world putting on a show for your entertainment, and you won’t even have to pay a dime to watch.

The action doesn’t stop when the doors close, either. You’re in Vegas, of course, so plenty of folks are off to hit the bars, clubs (gentlemen’s or otherwise), or blackjack tables–no problem with a little vice. If you decide to stick around the Rio, though, you’re in for a treat. I spent Friday night playing a few solid hours of Marvel in a hotel room with some good friends of mine when who should walk in but Alex Valle. Bet that doesn’t happen to you every day. Man, I haven’t played that guy since Evolution 2004.

And if you’re really lucky, you’ll stumble across the Salty Suite. It’s not easy to find, and even if you do locate it, you’ll have to get past the doorman–this year it was Mr. SNK, in a blazer that made him look like he should have been standing in front of the Tao instead of room 6019. I got in by looking like I was part of Poongko’s posse. But once you’re in, you’ll get to watch the after-hours money matches between the best of the best. Did your favorite player get peaced out in the qualifying pools? He’s probably in the Salty Suite playing $100 money matches with Ryan Hart or GamerBee. If you’re feeling flush, look for a side bet–or if you’re a little crazy, put up a few twenties and try taking on your heroes yourself. Win or lose, you’ll get to put your name out there, in the suite and on the stream.

All that is really just the prelude to hype, though. You might get a few flashes of hype here and there in the first few days, but the real fun starts on Sunday. That’s because the whole day is devoted to the top 8 players from each game, starting with the less-popular games like BlazBlue and working up to the main event: Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. You can feel the hype build up gradually over the course of the day.

You’ll get there a little early, maybe during Mortal Kombat 9. You probably aren’t paying much attention at this point. In fact, you’re just there to get good seats for the main event. Maybe eat some lunch, or start getting good and drunk, or catch up on sleep. Then you look up at the screen and you see a close match. Even though you don’t really know what’s going on, you keep watching. And all it takes is one close match to get everyone standing in their seats. Most of them probably don’t know what’s going on, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re going crazy with everyone else.

That right there? That’s the beginning of hype. Then the next match starts, and you’re sitting down feeling a little bit more awake. And as the day goes on, these moments get more and more frequent until every round has an OH SHIT DID HE JUST DO THAT moment, and you’re losing your voice from the yelling and screaming (and possibly the drinking and the smoking), and before you know it you’re chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” even though you’re not really the kind of person who would ever do that.

I’ll tell you a secret: I don’t really like Street Fighter IV all that much. Compared to the games of the past, it feels a little bit too easy, a little bit dumbed-down, and I generally don’t play it. But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t yelling louder than any of my friends when Poongko beat down Daigo, and even louder when Latif beat Poongko.

Photo by Kara Leung.

Photo by Kara Leung.

Because for a few precious hours, I was in a 55,000 square-foot ballroom full of people who were looking at the exact same screen I was. There. Watching Street Fighter, the game we all played with as kids and now again as adults. It’s like going to watch the NBA Finals in person, except so much more delicious because you’ve been teased and eyebrow-raised and shit on and ever-so-secretly embarrassed about the fact that you’ve spent so much time playing Street Fighter.

But there, you’re just one of many people watching The Big Game. You don’t have to feel bad about knowing what can punish Ryu’s sweep on block, and you don’t have to feel silly for slamming your drink on the floor because you just got hype. And you can feel it linger in your system after the finals are over and everyone is going back to their real lives, where every day is not about Street Fighter. Until it’s gone, and you’ll just have to go again next year.

So go. Go to the next Evolution. Go for the games, for the money matches, for the friends and camaraderie, but most importantly, for the hype.

I’ll see you there.

]]> http://insertcredit.com/2011/10/20/the-anatomy-of-hype-or-why-you%e2%80%99re-going-to-evolution-2012/feed/ 0 Grasshopper’s Evangelion / 山岡晃の新たな終わる世界 http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/29/grasshoppers-evangelion-%e5%b1%b1%e5%b2%a1%e6%99%83%e3%81%ae%e6%96%b0%e3%81%9f%e3%81%aa%e7%b5%82%e3%82%8f%e3%82%8b%e4%b8%96%e7%95%8c/ http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/29/grasshoppers-evangelion-%e5%b1%b1%e5%b2%a1%e6%99%83%e3%81%ae%e6%96%b0%e3%81%9f%e3%81%aa%e7%b5%82%e3%82%8f%e3%82%8b%e4%b8%96%e7%95%8c/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:23:37 +0000 christian http://insertcredit.com/?p=4976 Grasshopper Manufacture once did a lot of work for hire — the Shining Soul games on GBA, Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked for PS2 — but in its post-No More Heroes rebirth as an iconoclastic and very independent studio, it seemed likely those days were behind it. Huge publishers like EA (Shadows of the Damned) and Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment (Lollipop Chainsaw) have engaged the studio to create big-budget original IP. Why go back to making anime games?

Anime games like Evangelion 3nd Impact, released this week for the PSP in Japan by Bandai Namco Games. (“3nd“, by the way, is a play on the word “sound” — “san” being Japanese for “three” and, of course, the Third Impact being a big event in the Evangelion universe.)

Is it the stewardship of Akira Yamaoka, who has recently taken the title of chief creative officer? Is it just the way the Japanese market works, where studios rarely turn down paying work that in the west would seem undignified? It’s not clear, and unfortunately, I didn’t think to pose these questions to Yamaoka when I spoke to him at the Tokyo Game Show.

I was very curious about Evangelion 3nd Impact itself, however. It’s a music game based on the popular series’ recent Rebuild of Evangelion film series, which includes Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone, and Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance, and it came out this week in Japan. The Q&A, conducted at TGS, follows.

Can you tell me how the idea for Evangelion: 3nd Impact came up? Like, how you started making it?

Akira Yamaoka: So how it all started is that Namco Bandai, they just threw out: “Evangelion — is there anything that we think we can work on together?” And so Grasshopper actually came up with a few other concepts, including the one that now is 3nd Impact. “So an action RPG, and what about this music-based, rhythm-based game?” And from there on, everything just kind of moved forward.

Are you a fan of the original show, or the new movies, or anything?

AY: I don’t think I’d say that I’m a huge, huge fan. Not crazy about it. I just like it normally.


It was a big cultural phenomenon in Japan in the ’90s, right?

AY: It was a movement.

Do you have a lot of memories from back then? Have any of your memories of the phenomenon, or the show, informed the way you know you approached the game?

AY: Well, rather than going back in time and thinking about if I have any memories, or are there any elements from back in the day that sort of influenced or affected the way that we approach this game, it was more like, we already know that it already is an established IP, an established brand, and there is a huge fan base that has been following it. And it was probably another chance for attracting new users. So it was more like, we have to treat this with the utmost respect, so as to not take it away from the fans who are expecting what they would expect from another Evangelion installation, in the form of a digital entertainment.

You did the remixes for the music, right?

AY: It was me and a few other members at Grasshopper. And we also came up with some original tracks too.

Shiro Sagisu’s soundtrack is super, super distinctive. It’s very well known. When you hear the Eva music it triggers your feelings very quickly. What did you think about working with something so well known? 

AY: Similar to how we approach the game, we knew that we had to treat it with a lot of respect. Basically, like you just said, it’s easily, instantly recognizable to people who know the music. And so we wanted to treat it with respect.

However, it’s not like we’re just remaking a new soundtrack, or a modern version of what was available back then. We need to implement this into an actual music game, and so the music part of it is more of a component that we need to take a careful look at, and dissect it, so that we know which part would really mesh well as a game system.

And so, therefore, we had to kind of break it down — and make sure that we don’t break it down too much, to where it’s not Eva music. And try to retain the memorable moments, or the melody, or whatever it may be. We had to retain that, but make sure that it was enjoyable as a game.

You said you had come up with a few concepts. And you settled with Bandai Namco on a music game. But why did you come up with the music game concept in the first place? It’s unexpected.

AY: How we came up with this idea is that we were looking at this — even though it fits within the music game genre, the idea of it, and how the user plays this game, is not your typical sort of rhythm-tapping, button-mashing game, where prompts show up on screen, and you tap, and you make music. It’s quite different.

What we wanted to do was, we wanted to make sure that your priority — and the primary goal, the user experience and what’s going on on screen — is to have them see a more of a visual storytelling of the series of Evangelion.

So it’s not your typical button-tapping game. Rather, depending on what you tap, the action interactively changes, and therefore it’s the user interacting with the actual visual storytelling, and then progressing in the game — so that idea was probably pretty fresh to Namco Bandai, and they took that, and ran with it.

That’s unusual, because it seems developers find it hard to break out of that button-tapping mold.

AY: Yeah, I agree. I mean, if we were to just use the sort of standard music game button-tapping mechanic, then it would just be as easy as adding a skin, right? Using Evangelion, the IP. But that’s not what we were aiming to do, and so we’re really having the user interact, by choosing their action, and then seeing that actually play out in game.

Anime games usually suck. Now that you’ve made one, do you have any insight into why?

AY: There is probably a slight disconnect in how we and fans of anime appreciate anime in its form, and why that’s entertaining to them. And then you have this slew of titles that are based on anime IP, and the component that really sells that game is not the same sort of value or appreciation that they have when they view anime.

So if there’s a way that we can translate the entertainment value, and the appreciation for anime into a game, and it’s integrated well, then maybe there’s a tighter connection. And as a result, there may be anime games that could sell well, or that may be more favorable over some of the ones that we’ve seen.

But I think the game is just a basic sort of engine, and system, that is allowing for anime IP to be just kind of layered on top of an existing action game, or RPG game, or whatever it is. It’s basically a label that’s being added to a game system, and therefore the connection is lost, and not everyone who appreciates this type of anime will then move over and say. “I’ll purchase that game, just because it’s based on this anime that I like.” So there’s still a disconnect between the two.

So you’re trying to bridge that gap with the game design that the team arrived at?

AY: Yeah, you’re exactly right. We didn’t want to just take that IP and put it on as a skin to any kind of more standard existing play mechanic, and so we’re hoping that there’s a sort of a common denominator of appreciation for the music game that we created based on the IP, and that there are elements in there that are easily translatable, or connectable, into why they appreciate Evangelion in the first place.

Let’s say that if there are core music fans out there, who’d just rather be tapping just for the sake of tapping and making music, it might not be the right game for them. But for Evangelion fans, it’s sort of casual and light enough that they’ll be able to get into it, even without having played music games.

Did you have to work really closely with Studio Khara to  produce the game, or were you left on your own, away from the license holder?

AY: We had to work very, very closely with Studio Khara. And like I said earlier, it was all about being respectful to the franchise, but also making sure that it was treated in a way that anyone who would be touching this product knew that the DNA of Evangelion was kept in a way that it should. And so working with them was key in order to make sure that that came through.

- Christian Nutt has framed Evangelion art on his living room wall.

]]> http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/29/grasshoppers-evangelion-%e5%b1%b1%e5%b2%a1%e6%99%83%e3%81%ae%e6%96%b0%e3%81%9f%e3%81%aa%e7%b5%82%e3%82%8f%e3%82%8b%e4%b8%96%e7%95%8c/feed/ 0 who killed videogames? (a ghost story) http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/ http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:43:02 +0000 tim http://insertcredit.com/?p=4942

Pages

“who killed videogames?” (a ghost story)
by tim rogers

figure one: satan.

The smaller of the men was still talking about engagement wheels.

“Look at this one,” he said. He clicked to the next PowerPoint slide. “How about it?” Some of the men reacted.

“I . . . I . . . uh, I like this one the best.” He clicked one more time. Some of the prior engagement wheels had resembled close-up snapshots of a brier patch. This one looked like something you might see on a sticker on the side of a recycle bin in a particularly particular hippie commune. If all the engagement wheels today had been girls, this would be the one you’d one day decide you should have married.

The larger man spoke. He gestured while doing so. “You teach the player how to play the game in one minute. Within that one minute, you give them in-game money. You make them spend all of that money to buy an investment that will begin to earn them profit. They build a thing. It says: this thing will be finished in five minutes. Spend one premium currency unit to have it now. You happen to have one free premium currency unit. The game makes you use it now. Now you have a thing. Now it says to wait three minutes to collect from that thing. So they have a reason to stick around for three minutes. When those three minutes are up, you tell them to come back in a half an hour. You say, ‘You’re done for now. Come back in a half an hour.’ The phone sends them a push notification in a half an hour. Right here, you’re telling them to wait. You’re expressing to them the importance of patience. They’re never going to forget the way it feels to wait a half an hour after playing a game for one minute. They’re going to forget the second time they wait for a half an hour, and the third time, and they’ll then not forget the first time they have to wait for four hours, then twenty-four hours. This is why they’ll start to pay to Have Things Right Now.

“So after the first half hour, they get a push notification. Their phone vibrates. It tells them their such-and-such is ready for collection.”

The Other Men don’t make any sound. They have collectively folded their hands alongside their Alpine Crystal Spring Superclear Water bottles atop the glass table, collective face intent and weirdly worried, like that of a man hearing the beginning of a joke involving a rabbi, a toddler, and a lizard.

“They open the app. They collect from their such-and-such.

“Now the game tells them they’ve leveled up. It gives them some bonus coins. It tells them they’ve unlocked a new thing — a fancier thing.

“Here’s the important part. When they collect from their such-and-such, it gives them maybe 120 coins. The coin bonus they get for leveling up is about 2,500 coins — that’s magnitudes more than collecting from the such-and-such. Now you tell them to open the store. You show them the new thing you can buy. It should be around 2,200 coins. It’ll leave them with only a couple collections’ worth — maybe a couple collections and a half worth — of coins. We do this on purpose.

“Now they build the new thing, because it’s promising them a thousand coins per hour. So now they have to come back in an hour. And then two hours. And then three hours: there. They’ve made more than enough to cover the initial investment.

“Now they can buy an upgrade — for 2,200 coins — so that their thing will make them 2,000 coins an hour instead of 1,000. The mathematical part of their brain sees this and thinks: ‘That’s double what I was making before.’ Everyone loves when numbers double. We control the game world, we control the numbers: we control the ceiling for doubling. We control the player.

“The player is almost hooked.

“This is very important: now we give them something that gives them a reason to come back in two and a half hours. Then we give them ninety minutes. Then we’re telling them they can get 25% more coins per hour overall — maybe now they’ve got investments bringing them 5,000 coins per hour — if they do this thing that’ll take twenty-four hours.

“If you can hook them for a day, you can hook them for two.”

“And that’s where it becomes tricky,” the smaller of the men says. “If you can hook them for two days it’s very difficult to say whether or not you can hook them for three.

“And if you can hook them for three,” he says, closing his eyes, focusing his pupils perhaps on the core of his head, before opening his eyes and staring right at me, “then they’re going to be considering sticking around for a week.”

“And if they do stick around for a week,” the larger man — he has gold cufflinks — says, “they will not find it difficult at all to conceive of sticking around for a month. Then three months.”

“And once this concept has occurred to them,” the smaller man continues, “they will be ready to spend some money. All we have to do is show them something and say it will take three days to build. Or they can spend eleven in-game premium-currency units to have it right now.

“We sell the in-game premium-currency units twenty for a dollar.”

“The second they buy twenty units, they’re hooked for at least twenty more,” the larger man says.

“How can you say that?” one of the older men says, breaking a long, throaty silence.

“Our man here can tell you all about that.”

I am sitting at the head of the table playing Action Button Entertainment’s ZiGGURAT on my iPhone. I designed this game and am the director of its team of three people infinitely more talented than I am at everything except math and acting like a jerk in public. During this meeting no one is going to mention my game — though during the next one, the guy with the money is going to ask, while someone else is at a toilet break (he drinks a lot of green tea), “What is that? It looks awesome,” and I’ll say “I designed this game” and he will ask to play it; he’ll die six times, his groan of excitement upon death gradually escalating to football-spectator volume by the sixth death. He’ll hand my iPhone 4 back, casually touch his fingertips to his forehead, and say, “I want that.” Then, after a pause, once I’ve jumped back into a game, he’ll say, without a trace of irony, “What is your monetization strategy for that?”

I used to stand up a lot at these meetings. I try not to, anymore. It genuinely took me a couple months to realize that I wasn’t talking about things you should stand up while talking about.

This time, I put my white iPhone 4 to sleep, lay it face down on the board table, fold my hands, and say, “It’s all math. It’s all math and psychology. By which you might say, it’s all economics.” I clear my throat. “Economics and philosophy. By which you might say it’s modern video game design.”

Now the larger man praises me; I am above blushing: “He is an expert at balancing these things. He will construct an algorithm that shrewdly obscures a downward-trending curve for in-game investment values.”

“What we’re saying,” the smaller man says, “is that the other guys are making things that people will fathom playing for three months if they play it for a week, and that we’re going to make a thing that people will consider playing for six months, if they play it for three days. We’ll generate a mathematically proofable engagement wheel. The players will come for the cute characters, and–”

I’m not listening anymore. For all I care, he is probably going to say “The players will come for the cute characters, and stay for the cruel mathematics.”

]]> http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/feed/ 33 Dan Froelich and his Yamaha FM chip http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/09/dan-froelich-and-his-yamaha-fm-chip/ http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/09/dan-froelich-and-his-yamaha-fm-chip/#comments Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:21:43 +0000 eric-jon http://insertcredit.com/?p=4938 If I were smart, years ago I would have tracked down Dan Froelich and asked him what he used to write his funky CMF soundtracks for Jill of the Jungle, Solar Winds, Xargon, and other early Epic MegaGames stuff. Turns out I no longer need to, as he has written about his experience on his website. It seems he tracked his early game music in Adlib Visual Composer, a program that spoke to Adlib’s Yamaha FM chip (not dissimilar from the Sega Genesis chip) using a combination of piano rolls and FM instrument banks. Those elements were later crunched together into .CMF files for use with early Sound Blaster cards. To give a rare peek at the raw Adlib sound, Froelich has included clips of his Jill of the Jungle score, exported into ProTools. Cool beans!

So for anyone who wants to write early 1990s shareware music, that’s how the experts do it. Or rather, how an expert did it. I’m sure there are other methods.

]]> http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/09/dan-froelich-and-his-yamaha-fm-chip/feed/ 0 TGS themes of the last 11 years http://insertcredit.com/2011/08/30/tgs-themes-of-the-last-11-years/ http://insertcredit.com/2011/08/30/tgs-themes-of-the-last-11-years/#comments Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:56:32 +0000 brandon http://insertcredit.com/?p=4934 It struck me today that the official “themes” of the Tokyo Game Show have gotten weirder every year. I decided to research as far back as I could to find them all. We’ll start with 2000, when the show was still twice per year – I couldn’t find official confirmation for 1996-1999, so if anyone knows those, feel free to drop me a line.

Looking at the list, it seems that from 2009-2011, maybe someone new was in charge of the theme. That’s also around the time the mascot started showing up, and the English takes a marked turn for the unintelligible. But the first one in 2000 is no slouch! So, let’s be off on our gaming journey of heartful energy.

2000 (spring) Tokyo Game Show Evolves into the Year 2000 Version

2000 (autumn) The Entertainment of Your Life

2001 (spring) Entertainment in the 21st Century, Unfolded by Games

2001 (autumn) Let’s Play Together

2002 Playing Is in Our DNA

2003 A Playful Spirit Can Change the World

2004 A Brand New Sensation for Everyone in the World

2005 Your front row ticket to the next generation of gaming

2006 New Excitement. New Sensations. A New Generation.

2007 Link up, Reach out, To the World

2008 Ready for GAME Time!

2009 Game, it’s so energetic!

2010 GAME goes to a new chapter.

2011 Game-Dancing Your Heart

]]> http://insertcredit.com/2011/08/30/tgs-themes-of-the-last-11-years/feed/ 0 The future of Marvelous http://insertcredit.com/2011/08/30/the-future-of-marvelous/ http://insertcredit.com/2011/08/30/the-future-of-marvelous/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:23:01 +0000 brandon http://insertcredit.com/?p=4932 A bit ago I interviewed Daniel Kurtz and Toshinori Aoki for Gamasutra. The article has just gone up, and shows MMV’s bid for retaking the global market, as they merge with AQI. The trouble is, many of Marvelous’ leading creators (Kimura of Little King’s Story, Wada of Harvest Moon, Ohshima of Sonic fame) have left, as has almost all of the Nier team (thus, all of Cavia), and much of the company line sounds like the same old things every Japanese company has said for the last 10 years. Global (read: Western) expansion, fewer, more specific core titles led by MMV’s production team and developed by AQI.

I’ve said most of this in the gamasutra article, but here’s some bonus text from the interview, since I cut a lot of it out. The discussion below starts out from the company’s discussion of creating and owning IP at Marvelous. It’s probably worth reading the Gamasutra post first.

Brandon Sheffield: I know that Marvelous has been very good at keeping control of IP when it makes, when it releases a game.

Toshinori Aoki (managing director of digital contents): You’ve been talking to Grasshopper haven’t you?

BS: I’ve been talking to everybody, not just Grasshopper. And I mean it’s something nobody’s going to answer, but I mean Natsume has that lifetime deal for distribution of any Harvest Moon content in America, so I’m guessing MMV’s hard-line policy on IP these days is a reaction to that. And you’ve had to partner with Western companies to publish, and then you can’t control the US rights there. I don’t have a question about that really, so I’ll just move on and ask what is going to be the global strategy for Marvelous going forward? I know there was Rising Star in Europe, I don’t know how exactly that is working, fitting into this new scenario.

TA: So basically global wise we’re thinking in basically, fundamentally in the western markets, you have the mass expansion and building up of the mobile base. You’re not just talking DS, PSP, Vita, and 3DS, but iOS and Android are taking a large share of the market as well. We feel there are going to be a whole lot of new chances and opportunities with Wii U, and other next gen or current gen PS and Xbox platforms. We want to focus on those platforms which we feel will be in the future very successful in the global markets. So I mean while we’re going to be maintaining the whole thing of, we’re not going to lose or get rid of that style of a Marvelous type game like the you mention before, Little King’s Story, and those sorts of titles, but we also realize that more than, now more than ever we need to be successful in the west, specifically North America.

So we want to start developing titles that actually focus and target for that North American gaming audience. As we’ve mentioned before, as we’ve been really relying on third party partners in the West and even in Japan in order to focus our strategy. Since we’re really going to be pushing a global strategy from here on out we’re going to be increasing the amount of partners that we’re working with in order to really bring forth games that fit this target demographic.

Daniel Kurtz (business development coordinator): This is adding something a little bit onto it, but the most important thing that we feel in order to succeed in the west is to rely on partner feedback. Their feet are on the ground, they know what gamers want much better than we do over in Japan so this is going to be something that’s very important.

BS: You mentioned a social strategy – do you want to elaborate on that? In that kind of arena you have to be extremely quick or else you may as well not bother. What is going to be your approach?

TA: I think for the first few steps that we’re going to be taking here, and that you’re already seeing in Japan is we’re going to be relying on strong IP that has a fan base built around it already in order to drive in those initial numbers and get in that initial market, such as on smartphone or even in the browser really where we have, we can’t say the name of it aside from bokujou monogatari ([aka Harvest Moon], because as you mentioned before the whole IP thing. That’s something that we’re making a very strong push for and other titles and IP that we have as well that we can’t right yet talk about that we’re going to be really trying to develop for on both smartphone and the browser to really build up that initial fan base and acceptance among western users.

–

The problem here is that everything they said, while it sounds nice, is stuff I’ve heard countless times before from countless other companies, and MMV has shown that it really knows how to over-manage things and lose money, but not that it knows how to grow and shepherd a brand. So how are they going to succeed, with the same mindset as Square Enix and Namco Bandai, who essentially haven’t merged in anything but name? I’m going to be watching curiously, but given what I heard, I’m not very confident. MMV had a very strong rise in the early days, but seems to have gotten bogged down by process. I’m not sure they’re nimble enough to recover – and that’s what they have to prove.

]]> http://insertcredit.com/2011/08/30/the-future-of-marvelous/feed/ 0 Video fever – vintage 1982 report on video games http://insertcredit.com/2011/08/18/video-fever-vintage-1982-report-on-video-games/ http://insertcredit.com/2011/08/18/video-fever-vintage-1982-report-on-video-games/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 05:23:12 +0000 brandon http://insertcredit.com/?p=4931 Late last year, someone uploaded a 1982 ABC report on arcade games, and it’s unusually interesting. Here you’ll see inside Taito USA’s factory (the president is about the biggest sleaze I’ve seen caught on tape from that era), hear about “pac-man wrist,” and get some wise words about games and kids from an unusually sensible psychologist. That man deserves an award. And at the 2:30 mark, is “Burt Price” actually Will Wright with a beard? Sure looks and sounds like it! The whole thing is worth a look though, if you like your history.

Perhaps the best bit of this video is the revelation of an unreleased Taito USA arcade game called Toasters and Chainsaws, which was reportedly being made by “Rex and Mark.” Frank Cifaldi deduced that Rex is Rex Battenberg, and through him, I learned that Mark is Mark Blaszczyk. Unfortunately, Rex is the only guy I can get ahold of so far, and he doesn’t remember the game at all. I’ll be following these leads until I root out the truth, so stay tuned!

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