Prince of Persia: the bloopers.

Last night a bunch of us coworkers gathered at a friend’s place for music and rhythm-based games. What a great time we had!

We played Guitar Hero, a game where the controller is a guitar with multicolored buttons for frets. Press the right buttons at the right time and tip the guitar in a cool way to keep the song playing correctly and score points. Next thing you know, you’ve got two non-musicians performing in perfect harmony. Too much fun.

Next we popped in Donkey Konga, which had four of us sitting each with a set of bongo drums and banging and clapping away in four-part harmony. That was my favorite.

The night finished with Karaoke Revolution. The best were the rounds where song picks were randomly selected by the console, yielding some pretty odd results.

I now have a few more ideas for my Christmas wish list!

He’s talking about game level-design tools, but it applies to so much more:

“The dark side of tool use is that, in your eagerness to make the tool cost-effective, you start to distort your approach to design problems to make them fit the special capabilities of the tool. The old saw that beautifully expresses this idea is, ‘When you’ve got a big enough hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.’ … We must always be vigilant against the subtle influence that a tool exerts on our thinking”.

- Chris Crawford on Game Design, 2003. (Emphasis mine)

I don’t know how many times I’ve said this about the usability of this website or that software package: “By now it’s trained me to use it the way it wants to be used, and I can no longer ascertain whether it’s actually well designed”.

XBOX 360 is experiencing crash problems.

In the words of my good friend Dr. Wank: “Latest Microsoft product crashes a lot. Also, water is wet”.

XBOX 360 scalpers clean up on eBay, with one system going for 3000$.

No, I don’t have one yet. Stop asking.

This weekend, I caught the first ever Arcadia fest, a videogame show open to the public here in Montreal.

Overall, it wasn’t bad for a first effort, but here’s what I think should be improved for next year:

- 99.9% of the games I saw are already out. I’ve seen most of them, own some of them, have tried lots of them. Why would I pay to see them again? Also, they should have used demo versions of the game, which are usually pre-configured, do not contain lengthy cut scenes, are edited to give a good cross-section idea of the gameplay, and limit use by any one player to about 15-20 minutes.

- Next-gen content was almost non-existent, which I think is a capital sin, two weeks before the first next-gen console is launched. Saw one XBOX 360 behind a pane of glass. Big whoop. When I saw Kameo at E3, it had 1000 enemies on the screen, each with its own individual AI. However, because it wasn’t the demo version this time around, the epicness of the game was really not shown off. It looked worse than just current-gen. What I saw of it actually looked like a Gamecube game.

- The whole thing was kinda small. I don’t know how much people had to pay for just one day, but I know the price for the whole weekend was 25$, and I had about 90 minutes of stuff to look at. The XBOX booth at E3 was about the size of the entire Arcadia fest.

On the positive side:

- They had a beautifully designed “Flashback zone”, complete with vintage consoles like Telstar, Intellivision, Atari, Colecovision, LeisureVision, all in these mocked up seventies living rooms. My father and I had lots of fun in there, laughing at the blocky graphics and clunky controls.

- Lots of local content. I think over 50% of the games shown were made in Canada (and no, that doesn’t mean they were lame).

- The design was a success, with the whole thing, from the brochures to the booths, looking quite cool and consistent. The booths weren’t cheaply done, and the show managed to have a bit of an E3 feel to it.

I’ll definitely attend again next year, and maybe even get involved in the organization.

Photo: Paolo

…that I’m seriously considering starting another blog.

I’ve been going to the Montreal International Games Summit this week, and it’s made me think about lots of stuff. I’ll digest and regurgitate later.

Also on the personal front, got some excellent news today, also making me think about lots of stuff.

But the summit closing party awaits me, gotta scoot!

For those who don’t yet know, the increasingly popular expression “jumping the shark” refers to the moment at which something good peaks and goes downhill from there. It comes from the episode of Happy Days where Fonzie jumped over a shark with his bike. Some fans consider that that’s when the show definitely died.

Well, I’ve been thinking for a few months (since E3, really), that this is the year when the good game franchises jump the shark.

Cases in point:

SSX On Tour - Yes, I’ve spent a relatively large amount of time playing it, but in many ways it is very inferior to its predecessor, SSX3. The only innovation to gameplay is that you can now be a skier, but it feels like shit. The graphic design is supposed to be cool and grungy, but 3 was so much slicker. The soundtrack is repetitive and includes Scorpions and Iron Maiden, while the soundtrack for 3 made me discover Royksopp and Fischerspooner.

JakX Combat Racing - Come. On. The Jak and Daxter series has traditionally been a platformer with great vehicles to drive, fun combat moves, well-tweaked platforming (jumps, climbs etc), and projectile weapons. All that stuff takes a lot of effort to balance and get right, and they did a pretty good job of it on the first three iterations.

In this one, it’s now a RACING game! They took their well-polished vehicle physics and simply created a bunch of racing tracks, and voilà. A game made with little effort. I’m not impressed. Bad dog!!!

Finally, and most heartbreakingly:
Ratchet Deadlocked - The beauty of the previous three games was in the platforming (jumping, climbing, and other ways of getting around environments without vehicles) and the fantastic weapons and gadgets you used to get around beautiful and diverse worlds. In a similar scenario to Jak, the fourth in the series has taken their well-tweaked combat code, and plunked our hero in a bunch of deathmatch arenas where all he has to do is shoot, shoot, shoot. Aren’t there enough shooters around? Plus, Clank is no more.

I’m finally posting about this because today I actually bought Ratchet Deadlocked. It’s the last time I can say “It will suck” before being (please please please) proven wrong.

Ratchet 4 came out last week and I just realized this today. Shame, shame, shaaaaaame on me.

(oh, and it’s been nice knowing you)

The IGDA (International Game Developer’s Association) has just published the results of its demographic survey of the industry. Not surprisingly, the typical game developer is:

White,
Male,
Hetero,
31 years old (really? they all seem so young to me),
University educated.

(remind you of anyone?)

I was happy to find out that although the industry is highly homogenous, most respondents also agreed that increasing the diversity of our workforce would greatly benefit the industry. But that’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem. Make more diverse games, attract a greater diversity of gamers, attract a greater diversity of game makers, make more diverse games.

I have so much more to say about this, it’s not even funny.