Hall of Unironic Greatness Inductee: igiulamam

My last post was all about Youtube Poops, a subject dear to my heart, and to its credit contained the phrase "artificial flamingo cloaca," but it was so long that I'm not sure any of my zero readers got all the way through it.

So I thought I'd present you, in addition, with a Pooper whose work is unironically great, hence this post's title. igiulamam makes music videos, most of which feature Dr. Robotnik of the Sonic series revealing a softer side of himself. His most recent is Planet Freedom, but Robotnik's Tea Party and It's From the Show are not to be missed.

Youtube Poop: The new unit of human creativity.

If ideas can be thought of as organisms, and the Internet a breeding ground, then what stands out about the environment is its lack of pressures. If you're a proto-giraffe in pre-Africa and you want to munch on some ur-leaves, you'd better grow a neck right-quick or you're not gonna make it.

But ideas, which typically thrive on reception, can survive - or, at least, exist, without being received. For an example, take this blog. Or, rather, don't, because by actually reading this blog, you'll considerably undermine my point, which is predicated on this blog having zero readers.

Yes, it's a philosophical minefield for those of us who construct arguments that immediately collapse under the weight of their own absurdity, but even we have a forum, whether it's here on Blogger, over there in Twitter, or far off in the artificial flamingo cloaca known as Youtube.

Often, this environment leads to the rise of ideas that, although they have the adaptive features to survive, simply wouldn't thrive in a harsher environment. The Lonely Island comedy troupe, for example, who were snatched up wholly by Saturday Night Live, are certainly funny and relatable enough to thrive in a nationally broadcast show, but they got their start, and their acclaim, on the internet. Also: furries. No, a sexual fetish for cartoon animals is not universal, but it is comprehensible and you'd be pretty behind the times if you didn't know by now what a furry was. You couldn't have, apropos of nothing, launched a Lonely Island or a Furry television program, but the internet gave them an environment without predators.

And of course, the internet provides an environment for ideas that, no matter how strong they might become, simply aren't adapted to a wider audience. And here we come to Youtube Poops, a phenomenon that deliberately rejects the notion of mainstream acceptance by virtue of its mere name. People can have serious, mainstream discussions over whether video games are art (they're not, by the way. They're experience, which is higher than art), but they can't do the same for something whose very genre contains the word "poop".

Youtube Poops are basically video and audio mash-ups, except without the concern for form and sense that the name "mash-up" implies. Poopers grab audio and video from any source they see fit(though there is a body of "canon" pooping material) and the result, on the whole, can be described as "Like Tim & Eric Awesome Show, except kind of weird."

[Translation Notes: Tim & Eric Awesome Show is already extremely weird]

Take NORMAN for example. It's a bit like... if the plot of the original episode were a person, and that person were exposed to a great deal of radiation. All the parts are still there, and relate to each other in much the same way, but the whole is altered terribly. And that one's in the top 50% of Youtube Poops as far as comprehensibility goes. Edging into the low end, there's LAST FEW POOPS MASHED ACID SHIT, by the same author, which has four previous Poops arranged in a square and running simultaneously.

And you have to ask yourself, why was this made? As entertainment, it's useless, even for people who would appreciate all four Poops on their own. The answer, partly, was that it was easy to make, but even that doesn't answer the basic question. And what of My Boy for 10 MINUTES, NO EDITS? It's based on a Youtube Poop standby, in which the King of Hyrule says "my boy" in the same ridiculous voice he says everything, but why ten minutes? Why eleven thousand views and five stars?

I posit that a Youtube Poop of this calibur represents the smallest measurable unit of human creative energy - that point where the will to create just barely results in action. And furthermore, that all future creative endeavors be measured in relation to this basic unit. "My Boy for 10 MINUTES, NO EDITS" is exactly one poop, and a larger, more labor-intensive, and bolder endeavor, like Citizen Kane, is, let's say, three mega-poops.

Well, this was a productive little piece, wasn't it? We (I) invented a way to measure human creativity. But to place us back on the original tack of this article for a moment, I'd like to point out that, although the mainstream isn't ready for Youtube Poops yet, it's almost ready. Tim and Eric or Wonder Showzen are almost as weird as some of the more sensible poops; perhaps it's just a matter of time.

Permitting ourselves to enjoy weirder and more abstract entertainment is no idle pastime; the less we demand that creative minds bow and bend to the objective truth of reality, the deeper we allow them to delve into the roiling chaos of how the mind experiences that reality. Like a Youtube Poop, our minds echo with words, flicker back and forth between moments and memories, inputs and ideas. There's something of value in that kind of expression, and Poopers are slouching towards it in a thousand different directions.

Okay, this one's a for-real upgrade.

Scrolling this time. Walk to the right, and you'll quickly run off the edge of the grid. But! Press A to make a new column of blocks and extend the field of play into infinity.

(Infinity not supported in Flash Player 9)

http://trentburg.com/leveleditor4.html

I even got the Braid-style rewind (Press B) to work with the scrolling. Uh, sorta. It sometimes overshoots the beginning of the level if you rewind to the beginning. DEAL WITH IT.

Now you can reverse gravity by pressing Z!

Here it is: http://trentburg.com/leveleditor3.html

Level Editor: Now with additional called-for functionality!

Okay, see those gray boxes up in the top left? I mean, you'll see them when you click the link. Those are brush buttons, like in Photoshop. Click on one, then paint on the grid. The top button is for full blocks, the middle one is for half-blocks (two-fifths, really) and the bottom one is for erasing. Yeah, it's all still very rough-looking. I'll get to that.

The point is, you can "paint" rather that clicking on each grid square.


http://trentburg.com/leveleditor2.html

Painting capability means fewer clicks for the user! Fewer clicks means more time to manufacture counterfeit drugs. Not that you would do that, of course. Never you.

Time to stop being productive and bitch about something

I want to buy Episode 5 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People on the PC. It looks neat.

Can't buy it, though. I can't buy it because there's no option to buy the episodes separately. I could buy the whole season, but I don't want to. This seems deliberate; I can buy the Sam and Max episodes separately, but not the Strong Bad ones. I want to think I'm jumping the gun, the way I'm about to condemn Telltale for this, but if they were going to offer the option to guy the last episode separately, you'd think they'd do it on release day.

Is it just me, or does this sort of defeat the player-side value proposition of episodic gaming? You guys get to make them at a comfortable pace, but I don't get to buy them at a comfortable pace.

What's the bottom-line argument for this decision? No really, is this saving/making you money, Telltale? Because if so, and I really mean this, no harm/no foul. Or is this an experiment for you, seeing if the money lost by not letting me and my budget-conscious ilk just buy one episode is greater or lesser than the money gained from the people who are willing to shell out a little bit more to round out the whole season?

If so, I'm curious as to what your findings will be. Again, I'm serious. I happen to think it'll be a sour sign for episodic gaming if it proves unavoidably profitable to force people to buy whole-season packs.

Level Editor: This one was inspired by Blow

Now you can press B to reverse time, Braid-style. It only affects the player character.

As I expected, this was really easy to do. This is actually a "Braid lite" sort of system, in that it doesn't keep track of time you spend sitting still or time spent outside of the stage. So if you jump on a block, wait for five minutes, and reverse time, you'll immediately jump back instead of having to wait five minutes to get to your last action. Similarly, if you fall off the stage, no matter how long you wait, pressing B will immediately start you back at the point you left the stage and begin reversing from there.

Here it is.

This was a totally uncalled-for bit of functionality, but I can't stop myself. What will I do next?

I know! I'll hold a reader contest to determine what I'll do next! All you have to do is be the first reader!

And I mean the first reader ever. Like, in the history of this blog.

See, the joke is that nobody reads this thing. Ta-dah!

Level Editor v2

I updated the level editor. Now! Decent, albeit a little hacky, collision, a reset button (the R key), and Awesomeface has utterly lost the Seven Fathom Boots, and by default doesn't have the Cape of Superfly. You can press S to toggle infinite double jumps on and off.

As I make more versions I guess I'll link them instead of throwing them right on the blog.

I Flashed up a level editor

In Reno, just to watch it level edit.

Well, what I really made is a grid full of squares you can click on and a little Awesomeface guy that can interact with them when you do. Also, there's two "dimensions" you can switch between and build levels in. I'm making a quick 2D level prototyping tool for myself, and in time I intend to make it a lot richer than this, which represents a brief evening's work.

Controls:

Right Arrow, Left Arrow: Horizontal movement.
Up Arrow: Jump.
Shift Button: Switch dimensions. As you build environments, you'll see that each one is preserved when you switch back to it.

Notes:
This tool stars Awesomeface in the role of the protagonist. Due to lazy collision programming, Awesomeface is always equipped with two mystical relics that give him special powers:

The Magical Cape of Superfly, which lets Awesomeface jump at any time, whether or not he's in contact with the ground, and

The Seven Fathom Boots, which let Awesomeface scale any vertical wall; simply by walking into a wall, Awesomeface will instantly appear at the top of it.

Auntie Pixelante Watch: Edition Never

Well well well, look who comes out in favor of intelligent game criticism. It's Anna Anthropy, the self-described "all-purpose pervert" who's responsible for Mighty Jill Off and Calamity Annie.

She's plugging some thing or other called jmac's Arcade, which is nice enough, but then she drops this bomb on us: "jmac’s arcade is insightful and personal, and completely unlike the majority of videos of older games on the internet, which are interested in those games only so far as they can be sacrificed for a few cheap laughs and five minutes of fame for the author."

Well someone just lost her spot as the featured game creatrix on Episode 1 of my upcoming web series, "BadTrent Expresses Exaggerated, Artlessly Profane Rage at Indie Games"! Listen, Auntie Pixelante - if that is your real pseudonym - I don't think you quite understand how hard it is out there for people who like to get mad at videogames. Your whole gimmick is that you're a genuinely insightful, intelligent person. Good for you. But NOT ALL OF US HAVE THAT LUXURY.

Mega Man X8

X8? Really? Uh, okay. Guess I lost track after...

Three, I guess. Yeah, musta been three. Anyway. X8.

An intro level, like Mega Man X. Cool. Good idea, makes sure people start out with the same experience, and the same chance to get used to the game. In X8, you're getting used to three different characters and the ability to switch between them. You've got X, Zero, and a new guy named Axl, who plays like Bass/Forte.

Also: Dialogue, cutscenes, a plot. On principle, I should try to care about this stuff, but paying attention to the opening cinema in a Mega Man game is like counting the sprinkles on a cupcake: you can be as attentive as you like, but in five minutes it ain't gonna matter. That cupcake will be eaten, and that Mega Man game will be presenting you with eight plotless levels that you can play in any dang order.

If you're gonna give a Mega Man game a plot, why not have some fun with it? A little treat for the people who pay attention to it. The setting prevents you from making it a story about, say, lesbian slave traders on the run from their future selves, but why not take it in a different direction? Make it dark, make it surreal, tell me of betrayal, of passion! Let them talk! Let them speak of jumping sharks, let them wring their pale hands and let their shuffling feet wear grooves into the stone beneath them! Look down on them from your web of shining lace, throw them a line, promise them love, for they are no less than the measure of you!

Which brings us to the level design. Mega Man 9 gave me a renewed appreciation for the levels of old, where platforms were platforms, spikes were spikes, and enemies were enemies. X8 is grey and drab and I can't always see where the damn enemies are and that. Is. A. Problem. Rendering everything in 3D is a neat trick, but if it makes it harder to tell what I'm looking at, then the graphics are bad. You could render every muscle in Megaman's face, you could model fire and water and motion with breathtaking realism and beauty, but if I can't tell where enemies are, then your game has bad graphics.

It doesn't help that the levels aren't laid out with much apparent care. I'm asked to make leaps of faith into what looked for all the world like bottomless pits, and I've made leaps of faith into bottomless pits only to see at the last minute that the next platform required Axl's hovering ability or Zero's double jump.

There's some good choices in there, some new ideas. There's the level where you change the local gravity and blocks fall on you if you do it wrong. Cruel, but it's laid out logically, so you can beat it if you're careful. But there's also some new ideas that don't really pan out. Like a snowmobile chase. And a hovercraft chase. The snowmobile's not bad, actually, I'll give that one a pass just for being new.

But the hovercraft... Let me relate something personal. I'm making a shoot-em-up game right now - a shoot-em-up set on a spherical screen, and built to take advantage of that fact - and you can imagine how much sweaty, tearful blood has gone into making that game usable and fun for people of all skill levels. We have made aesthetic sacrifices for the sake of the user. We love the user. Mega Man X8's hovercraft minigame does not love the user. Your bullets fly off in crazy directions, your target is constantly zipping around corners, out of your reach, and your hovercraft handles like the steering mechanism is full of, I don't know, eels or something. It's not a challenge, it just blows. Admit it, guys: playtesters came to you and told you these things, and you didn't care enough. Or you didn't have enough time, sure, but somewhere along the line someone didn't love the user enough, or even hate the user enough. I Wanna Be The Guy isn't a game born out of loving the user, at least not in a traditional or healthy way, but it's lit a fire in some hearts.

Mega Man X8 represents the departure from grace that Mega Man 9 answered. I don't hold against X8 the risks it took, but I do resent its failure to remember what made the originals good. Making a hovercraft minigame when you can't even make a good platformer level is like remembering to bungee jump but forgetting to eat.

God Hand

God Hand, by all reports I'd seen, has always been one of those "love it or haven't yet played it" games. And it's easy to see why. First cutscene: a man and a woman walk into a dusty town and spot a group of tough-ugly thugs, and the first thing out of the guy's mouth is an insistence that they're better-looking than the girl. Aggressively gay protagonist? I am all over this one.

I'm just being silly, of course. There's much more to God Hand than homosexuality. But in case you want more, there's also Mr. Gold and Mr. Silver, two scantily clad, quiveringly effeminate henchmen of a villain called "Elvis." They turn in a bizarre, squealing performance that makes me feel like I should be offended on behalf of actual gay people. Like some other Japanese portrayals of homosexuals, though, like Hard Gay and those guys from Mother 3, it seems more affectionate than derisive. It's like putting a cowboy hat on an American character.

Okay, okay. The fighting is the important thing, right? It's fast-paced, intense, but somehow thoughtful and patient as well. A thinking man's fistfight. You customize your attacks, building a pattern to best suit your enemies' inclinations, you read your enemies' movements, you asses the position of threats... It's got me thinking and caring about what I'm doing more than damn near any other game in recent memory.

I'm forced to compare it to another game I've played recently, the anime fantasy RTS Grim Grimoire. Like God Hand, I found the story engaging, and the game was fun - but God Hand handles tension better. Grim Grimoire is slow-paced overall, with units crawling towards each other over the course of tens of minutes.

Tens!

Still, it's tense all the way through. And that's the problem - I'm scrambling to gather my forces, all to keep ahead of an enemy who's doing the same, ever growing stronger and creeping towards my base from behind the fog of war. I get burned out on tension, playing that kind of game. There's no break from the tension, just a perpetual low-level rumble in the stress center of my brain.

In God Hand, the tension comes in discrete encounters that the player enters at his own discretion. For the most part, the player can hang back, see what he's getting into, and make a plan. As a result, the game's interest curve is perfectly ribbed for the player's pleasure, rising and falling as the player chooses to meet each new challenge. There's also some unexpected spikes in difficulty in the form of enemies who transform into demons when defeated - it's always a surprise, because even on repeated playthroughs it's never the same enemies. It's not always a welcome surprise, but it keeps things interesting and the treasure drops are good.

Oh, and that's another thing! In God Hand, failure is instructive. Because combat is won by quick thinking, rather than button-mashing and luck, the player bounces back from each loss with a little more knowledge and a little better prepared to win. But in the same spirit, the player also keeps all the treasure and currency he's won, giving struggling players a chance to pull themselves up. It's a simple form of difficulty adjusting, but it works. And God Hand can use it, because it's one hell of a hard game.

I've played other difficult games. All too often, not only am I defeated, I feel defeated. See my Ninja Gaiden II review - I was bitching about a boss that kept kicking my ass. His patterns seemed unbeatable, his actions unpredictable, and the way he fought was utterly without precedent in the rest of the game. I had a similar experience fighting Elvis - you know, the boss of Mr. Gold and Mr. Silver - but as I played, his movements began to make sense, I learned to dodge his attacks, and I figured out that son of a bitch.

If I had beaten Ninja Gaiden II, it would have been a labor of pure stubbornness. I'm inspired to keep playing God Hand because, at every turn, each challenge seems surmountable and worthwhile, made up of pieces that make sense individually and collectively add up to something like a puzzle. It's no exaggeration to say that God Hand is the Braid of brawlers. Silly and meaningless, perhaps. But not, technically, an exaggeration.

And in the end, isn't that what's

Oops, just reached my self-imposed word limit. See you later!

Boogie: Superstar

At the beginning of the year, I received a copy of EA's Boogie from a friend who had, herself, received it for free. She had a nasty case of the flu at the time, and in retrospect I should have been leery of her attempts to foist any games on me, at least not without searching Metacritic for the phrase "so bad, it might give you the flu."

Boogie wasn't a good game. Its dancing mechanics, at least what I saw of them in the tutorial, were "huh?"-inspiring - just complex and silly-looking enough that I couldn't persuade myself to bother learning them. If I'm going to expend effort to make myself look like a fool, I will do it on my own terms, thank you.

That may sound mentally lazy, but in doing game design myself I've learned to put myself in the shoes of the average player, who fears change and balks at steep learning curves. You can teach this gentle creature to do amazing things, and show them new and fantastic worlds, but only if you don't spook them right out of the gate.

Boogie's tutorial - God, I barely remember, but... there were these creatures I was supposed to keep an eye on, and I had to move around the stage, and... it made me say, "no, I'm not doing that."

And just like that, I was done playing Boogie. I just wanted a game that asked me to keep a rhythm, and Boogie wasn't that game.

Plus, its characters were... A starfish, right? Who acted like Elvis? That was one of them. I'm not opposed to wackiness, but that character concept has just enough staying power to be a one-off Conan O'Brien joke.

"Here at the Late Show, we promise to do only highbrow, socially relevant humor. Isn't that right, Starfish Elvis Impersonator?"

As a relateable player avatar, it just doesn't work. So I had to try Boogie Superstar, which, from the previews I saw, was about humans and seemed to have a reality-show aesthetic, which struck me as instantly more engaging than whatever Boogie Classic purported to be about. And I don't watch reality shows, singing-based or otherwise.

Boogie: Superstar's a pretty solid game. And if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe the TRIFORCE OF HAIR:



Basically, the game has you doing simple, arm-based dance moves in rhythm - pointing, doing an arm roll, miming a lasso or a drumbeat - and switches it up enough to keep things interesting. The got the note of simplicity right - dancing is supposed to be about the way music makes your body move, and cluttering that up with anything else is just diluting the fun. And damned if Boogie's dance moves didn't get my hips moving. Imagine that!

That's not to say that Boogie: Superstar is-

Hold on. Are you still imagining me moving my hips? Because I didn't say you could stop.

That's not to say that Boogie: Superstar is perfect; it suffers from the same interface woes that all Wii games do. For example, I'm occasionally instructed to "jump," and I do, and the game doesn't think I did it right.

I've been jumping my whole life, Boogie: Superstar. How long have you been around? Couple months, tops? Yeah, I thought so. I know what jumping is.

But Boogie:Superstar's not bad. I didn't look too deeply into its multiplayer, or its full songlist, but its core gameplay works: Keeping rhythm with a song is mindless fun, but mindless fun is still fun, which puts it ahead of a lot of other games. It didn't keep my interest for all that long, and I don't see it catching fire outside of the teen girl demographic, but I could see myself playing it again if I ever found myself in front of it. Imagine that!

And keep imagining it until further notice. Cheers!

Dead Space

So Dead Space is basically a party where a lot of good design choices got together. The first thing you'll notice is what I'll call the "Right-Shifted Third Person Camera," which is what it sounds like: a camera that shifts to the right side of your avatar at all times. This gets your guy mostly out of the way of the camera, which is sort of a toss-up between a normal third-person camera. It mostly works, but there really are a few times when I wished I knew what was going on to my left. Mainly what the camera does is make room for the plot-justified HUD, which is a series of holograms that pop up to your avatar's right, presumably generated by his technometal jumpsuit. It's very useful for the player, although the angle at which it pops up is of dubious usefulness to the suit's wearer. I suspect everyone in the future has some kind of repetitive stress injury from constantly craning their head to the right in order to see their suit's pop-up window.

Dead Space is a beautiful implementation of HUD-clearing-away, or whatever you'd call it: all the holograms make sense as conveniences for the suit's user (Isaac), and items of constant concern are displayed as various meters on the user's back. The life bar is a glowing flexi-rod that sits over the spine, and your oxygen meter appears as a little countdown on your back. If we assume that the same information is displayed on the inside of Isaac's glowy maskplate, then it makes sense to display this information somewhere the user can't see it - if you don't think so, wait for the section of the game (brief, I assure you) where you're protecting a woman from monsters. You'll be happy that her health is displayed on her spine.

The level design is very good, very tight. At first its purpose is to usher you from scripted spook to scripted spook, which it does well, but when Dead Space opens up a bit and becomes more game than movie, it also works admirably as a series of battlegrounds that allow each encounter to play out in a way that's at least somewhat fresh. And the navigation system, which gives you glowy lines to follow, upon request... GAME INDUSTRY TAKE NOTE: Until you find a way to make aimless wandering fun, please always make sure I know where to go next. Thank you.

Obviously Dead Space isn't the first game to give the player good navigational tools. But I so often found myself thankful for them that they deserved a mention.

Combat's beautiful too. A symphony of mutilation, is what I'd say if I were a slightly creepier person. Actually, I think I am a slightly creepier person now that I have played and enjoyed using the Ripper on enemies.

Let me explain: in Dead Space, the dominant strategy is spelled out for you: CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS is written in blood in the first battleground, and it remains the rule throughout the game. The tools you're given let you aim for flailing limbs and hack them off at a distance, which gives a frantic sense of strategy to encounters and provides you with a lot more options than boring ol' "shoot for the head." We're all really good at shooting for the head now, game industry. Take a page from Dead Space and give us something else to do.

Anyway, the Ripper is a weapon that levitates a spinning saw blade about six feet from you, functioning as a sort of medium-range chainsaw. Whether you're chopping off legs or giving that circular saw a tour of your enemies' gut, it's a grotesquely satisfying weapon. The other weapons are a bit subtler, if the term "subtle" can really be said to stick to the experience of punching through a tentacle with a line of hot plasma. The various types of enemies give combat a sense of priority, and the wide-beamed default weapon lets you strike a comfortable balance between firing frantically and lining up shots. When your weapon is essentially a foot-long blade, you have to aim carefully - but not so carefully that you become monster food in the meantime. It gives combat a perfect sense of pacing.

Speaking of pacing, Dead Space's overall story and objective progression is likewise great. From the minute you get on the ship, you have your objectives, handed cheerfully to you by the other members of your team. And it always feels like you're accomplishing something. There are setbacks, but for the most part you are steadily progressing from "no hope of escape" to "some hope of escape." You can't send a distress signal, so you fix that part of the ship. Then you send the signal but you can't get a response, so you fix that part of the ship. A lazy game would give you one objective and a villain that keeps you from reaching it over and over until everything seems pointless. In Dead Space, you're in constant danger and overwhelmed by enemies, but you have the feeling you're getting on top of the situation in one way that counts.

And as for the rest of it? The store works really well, the weapon upgrade system is pretty good (I've never liked having to permanently devote resources to upgrades, because it's hard to know what's going to be the most useful weapon later on, but the store system gives you a decent way to correct mistakes: upgraded weapons sell for huge coin, which you can use to buy more of the "nodes" you use to upgrade weapons. So you can sell your upgraded weapons and try again, at a loss). The story's good, if not mindblowing, and the atmosphere is dark and forbidding without being crushing and miserable.

I do have one beef with the story: Isaac comes to the space station partly because he's looking for his wife. She might be alive, says everyone. We'll find her.

But I took one look around that place, and I didn't believe for a second that she was still alive. The odds were just really badly against it. That's not a spoiler, by the way. I'm not telling you whether she is alive or isn't. I'm just saying I never felt like she would be. That sort of ambiguity is difficult to create; maybe if they'd given me some reason to believe it? Like, I don't know, she's part of a science team that operates in a heavily secured area of the ship, equipped to survive on its own indefinitely. Then maybe I'd give her a fifty-fifty on managing to seal herself in there safely.

But maybe that's how I was supposed to feel. Resigned to the probability of her death, but seeking her out because, on the tiny sliver of a chance that she's alive, I have to save her.

Okay, I like this game even more now.

Anyway, it's a great game overall, certainly among the best survival horror has to offer, maybe even the best, all things considered. Like Silent Hill 2 if you made the story a little bit worse and the combat about infinity times better.

MS Paint Adventures: Besides, you don't have enough MANNERCITE SHARDS in your ETIQUETTE MONSTRANCE for a polite request.

http://www.mspaintadventures.com/

I barely know how to talk about this, it's so incredible. All I can do is describe it simply: it's a faux adventure game, run using suggested input from visitors to the website. Sounds bland enough, until you read it and see the expansive imagination of Andrew Hussie, the man behind the show.

It's something unique, a blend of the demanding rigidity of computer games and the inspiring fluidity of a pen-and-paper (or live, whatever) role-playing games.

Execution

So I played Execution today. And...

Okay, go play Execution. Download it and play it. I can't imagine it'll take you more than a few minutes. This is one of those don't-read-further things. I'll put the rest of this post in a comment.

I've moved from Pittsburgh to Silicon Valley!

I'm spending my last semester in Silicon Valley!

The good:

The time zone change means all the websites I check daily update earlier now.

The girls. Pittsburgh? No girls.

Rail transit. I have no idea why I like rails so much.

The weather. Pittsburgh? No weather. It's weird - the daily weather report is always just the word "no," and the entire city is, day-and-night, suffused in a sourceless gray light.

The bad:

Local grocery store is Safeway instead of Giant Eagle. Now when I'm cooking meat for someone, I can't plausibly say I got it from a giant eagle without breaking a lot of laws.

No harsh, murderous winter. It's going to throw off my internal rhythms if there's no part of the year when Death Himself rides in on a cold front and molests every inch of my exposed skin.

The cost of living. Pittsburgh? No cost of living. When you arrive in Pittsburgh, the Matron (the less said about her, the better) shows you to an apartment that has been appointed to you. Mine was okay, except for the constant, soft sobbing that sounded a lot like my own voice.


Four good, three bad. Consensus: Happy!

Soul Calibur IV: a Non-Feminist Review

I think we can all agree that a female perspective on games is a good thing, whether it comes from a hardline feminist or a bound-and-gagged sex slave. But it’s important to remember that gender isn’t the only lens through which games can be approached. So as a thought experiment, I’ve decided to review Soul Calibur IV in a way that is not only not feminist, but which completely excludes women, female issues, and female needs from the discussion.

In short, I tried to begin this article by completely forgetting that women exist, and proceeding from there. See what you think.

Soul Calibur IV

First Impressions:

I was a little distracted by some of the characters in Soul Calibur IV. Don’t get me wrong, the character design is quite good, and I don’t mean I was distracted by the presence of sci-fi icons Yoda and Darth Vader. What I’m referring to is this: there were quite a few characters with basically familiar human proportions but a physique that was distractingly unfamiliar.

Let me see if I can describe it: they’re a bit shorter than average, and a bit – how to say it – curvier? Particularly striking are the two protrusions, “lumps” you might say, front-and-center on the torso. I flipped through the instruction manual to see if they might be a fantasy race, like the Black Plastic Head People that Darth Vader hails from, but I didn’t see any explanation.

I know, I know. It’s a fighting game, I shouldn’t be delving too deeply into the backstory. But I saw hints that the inclusion of these characters was well-thought out; for example, they tend to be referred to as “she” and “her,” which I assume are honorifics on their homeworld. You don’t put that kind of detail into your characters without some kind of reason. I know Vader and Yoda because I’ve watched Star Wars; is there some hugely popular sci-fi or fantasy series that explains these other characters? Or perhaps some other video game, one that details how they live, work, and play beach volleyball?

I have to admit I’m intrigued by these creatures, and I’d like to learn more if someone could point me in the right direction.


Sound, Graphics, Gameplay, Balance, Fun, and Story:

I couldn’t be bothered to evaluate these things. Too intrigued.

What I Believe, part 1

Games are the new journalism. And "new games journalism" is the new new games journalism journalism.

I've Recently Been Annoyed by Quick Time Events!

So... Quick Time Events.

Really. Truly. Who. Likes. These. Things.

I don’t mean “who likes games that have contained Quick Time Events,” I mean who likes the Quick Time Events specifically. Is there anyone?

I see what developers are trying to do with QTE’s. They’re trying to combine cinema sequences with interaction. Very noble, but it’s hard to imagine it being done worse, at least without malice. Yes, as a player, I want to be in control of my avatar as she jumpkicks a nuclear missile and bites the head off a lava monster, but unless you can give me real gameplay during those moments, I’d prefer to just watch. It’s good that you’re asking “how can we let the player control the missile/lava monster sequence?” but the correct answer is not “by pressing the square button once”.

As Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw said in his Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune review, if you’re going to make QTE’s a part of the game, make them a core part of gameplay. But I’m going to do Yahtzee one better (I’ve been doing that to him his whole life. He hates me) and name a game that actually did a good job of that. It’s called Indigo Prophecy, or Fahrenheit, and a great many of its cutscenes are overlayed by a Simon-like game which roughly mirrors the onscreen action and which determines your success or failure.

A game of Simon is far from the most graceful interface for an action sequence, but take note: this is what it looks like when QTE’s are stretched into a full-fledged element of gameplay. And get this: they’re preceded by a message to “get ready!” So unlike, say, Heavenly Sword, where I can never tell whether a cutscene is going to let me relax, the user interface communicates clearly how and when I should interact! What a fresh concept! Except totally, completely not!

Did I manage to keep a positive tone in this post, despite my annoyance? I’m going to say I did! I’m terrific!

Gaming Goofus and Gaming Gallant: Comparing adultswim.com's Gigolo Assassin with Telltale Games' Sam and Max

"But Trent," you say, not even giving me a chance to start my own article, "how can you have the same expectations of a free flash game on a cable channel's website and a professionally made game from a dedicated game studio?"

I'm reeling a bit from your pre-emptive ire, but the short answer is, I don't. But that doesn't mean I can't draw comparisons, and it doesn't mean I can't have minimal expectations. I realize these are two strange games to talk about, since there are relatively few point-and-click adventures on the market, but they're a pretty clear-cut example of a user interface done right and done wrong.

In case you missed it, Gigolo Assassin is an old-school point-and-click adventure, in the same way that trepanation is old-school medicine.

I'm sorry, I can't decide if I want to be one of those angry reviewers who constantly exaggerate their fury at poor game design. Time will tell.

Anyway, what I mean is that Gigolo Assassin divides your interactions up into "Pick Up," "Look At," "Use," and "Talk to," while Sam and Max combines all meaningful interactions into a single-click interface.

Believe me, I understand how the divided interface came about. You do different things with different objects. And it creates design space for puzzles involving objects that you should look at, but not pick up. Because… y'know, everyone likes things that you can look at but can't touch.

But really, there may be one or two decent uses for that kind of interface. But none are so compelling that it justifies the aggravation that the interface causes. If I click on a bottle of poison, the game can safely assume I want to LOOK AT it, and maybe PICK IT UP, but not USE it on myself or TALK TO it. Unless it's a talking bottle of poison, in which case the game should make me talk to it by default instead of waiting for me to guess. By the same token, if I click on a person, the game can safely assume I want to TALK TO her and LOOK AT her. No meaningful challenge is lost if "click" always means "interact with or perceive this object in every rational/purposeful way possible." If you want to make certain interactions optional, then prompt a separate "drink poison/don't drink poison" interaction.

Do you know what happens when I lose my way in a Sam and Max game, and I can't reason out a way forward? I click on every object in the world. Do you know what happens when I lose my way in Gigolo Assassin? I click on every object in the world four times. Actually, I select each option, then click on every object in the world. That's eight times the clicks. That's punishing. It's defeating. And, sure, I should be able to figure out point-and-click puzzles without having to retrace every possible interaction, but the game should account for the possibility that I can't.

I feel like a persistent theme of my reviews is that it's good to make games easier for the player. That was even the theme of my gimmick review of the deathtraps in Saw. I honestly feel, though, that I'm always promoting not simply ease but user friendliness. I thought Braid was brilliantly designed, after all, and there's plenty of people who can vouch that it's not an easy game. I suppose you could argue that the single-click interface for takes away too much challenge because it does work that the player should be doing – that, in a well-designed adventure, it's should be player's job, not the interface's, to observe and judge. But I don't see divided interfaces being used that way. I see them being used to punish me for TALKING TO a man but not LOOKING AT him, and so failing to notice his nametag or something. As if I was averting my gaze from him the entire time we were talking. You know, like people do.

I also see it being used to punish me for not knowing which items I'm allowed to pick up. As far as I'm concerned, usable items in adventure games fall more or less into two categories:



1. Obviously useful items, like screwdrivers or keys, which the game shouldn't even have to ask whether I want to take. If I were on some sort of adventure in real life, I would grab these even if I had no specific need for them at the time.

2. Really obscure items, like dirty napkins or broken pencils, which the game should automatically make me pick up because I would have to be insane to independently guess that they would be useful.


So I think I've made my case that frustrating and clumsy interfaces are bad, and don't constitute meaningful difficulty. Another triumph. Tune in next time when I guess I'll pick an even higher- and lower-profile pair of games and draw unflattering comparisons between the two. Or come back in a month when I'll be explaining why Portal is better than Jim's Awesome RPG Maker Game.

Braid

Sometimes there’s a new idea that changes the world because it fulfills a desire that nobody knew they had. And sometimes a new idea is powerful because it fulfills a desire that everybody has always, always known they’ve had, but they’ve felt like a pussy for asking for it.

Any video game you’ve played, you’ve wished you could take back a mistimed jump or a brush with a touch-of-death enemy, but errors like that are where the challenge comes from, right? How can you make a game where errors are instantly and easily reversible, but still gives players a challenge?

Well, that’s Braid. And Braid’s greatest triumph is not its graceful weaving of story and gameplay, or its gorgeous artwork, or even its clever and logical puzzles. It’s the way it fulfills our desire for forgiveness in our games (forgiveness is, in fact, the theme of the first world, which introduces the time-reversal mechanic). Braid encourages you to learn how its world works, and lets you learn in the best possible way: by making as many mistakes as you need to. Braid pays homage to Super Mario Bros. in more ways than I care to list, but rejects, in the strongest possible terms, its unforgiving gameplay(granted, the Super Mario series, and the industry in general, had already rejected it). Where Super Mario Bros, and countless other early platformers, demanded hours and hours of your life, honing reflexes and restarting levels, Braid wants you to reach the end as quickly as your brain can take you there.

Of course, the wind of game design had long ago turned toward forgiveness, as a consequence of the gaming market expanding to include people without infinite free time. We have FPS’s where your health regenerates, action games where you reach a checkpoint after every accomplishment, and platformers where extra lives are in arbitrarily large supply. Braid is not a revolution in that sense, but it does represent a high point on the “challenge versus forgiveness” graph.

The official website of Braid will tell you that its puzzles are “reasonable,” and that is no empty boast. The world of Braid is logical, and made of small, easy-to-grasp pieces. Once you’ve beaten World 3 (the second world), the environment practically has no new surprises for you, just familiar elements arranged in a different and challenging way. There’s only a couple puzzles that I would consider a logical stretch. I’m reminded of Telltale Games’ Sam and Max series, which are absolutely the best point-and-click adventure games I’ve played, because they do away with the sort of “use spatula on tiger” nonsense that adds artificial, hair-pulling-out difficulty to some of the genre’s older offerings. Granted, Sam and Max’s approach to logic is a bit more madcap than Braid’s chrono-logic, but both games understand that real challenge comes only from a game that makes sense and communicates clearly with the player.



Story’s a little tricky to address, with Braid. It’s less a game of story and more a game of themes: case in point the aforementioned “theme” of forgiveness in the first world. Each world is preceded by brief text passages that tie an emotional state to the prevailing game mechanic of that world. Before World 4, where time runs forwards and backwards as you run forwards and backwards through the level, you will read (or ignore) passages on how different places evoke different times and different memories. After that, the levels themselves contain no text, no ruminations, no sense of a story. But the theme sticks in your mind, and lets you do the thinking for yourself. In an interactive medium, game designers are constantly trying to figure out how to better tell a story without taking too much time and control away from the player. The way Braid manages it is a hell of a trick, if you can pull it off. The last level in particular is a wonderful and surprising – but logical – merging of gameplay and story.

I’m a firm believer that, limitations aside, an interactive narrative has tremendous potential to be personally meaningful, even without trying to script out twenty different endings or create a world of perfect freedom. Braid succeeds because it has something to say, says it, and gets out of the player’s way.

Ninja Gaiden II

Ninja Gaiden II is in most ways a skilful refinement of the previous game, which is what we had every right to expect. Mind-blowingly new features are all well and good, but to be perfectly honest, they have their place and I suspect it isn’t here. I was impressed with the way Metal Gear Solid 4, for example, stuck to its core gameplay but took it in engaging new directions, making new demands of the player. But the Ninja Gaiden games are not thinkytime games. When I sit down to a game of Ninja Gaiden, I expect to slip blissfully into a warm bath of ninja limbs and backflips. Occasionally my higher-order brain functions will rouse themselves to solve a dead-simple puzzle or suggest a charge-up attack instead of my default “flying decapitation technique no matter what” strategy, but overall I’m not looking for an intellectually challenging experience. Ninja Gaiden is a workout for the twitch reflexes, and most of the time it’s a well-crafted one.

The most noticeable improvement on the previous game is solving a number of control issues that hampered freedom of movement. In creating Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox, the developers boldly – BOLDLY - envisioned a game that let you move like a ninja, but they only took it halfway.

Okay, more like nine-tenths of the way. But there was still room for improvement. For example: that “flying decapitation technique” I mentioned got its start in the previous game, and it got my love for being a fun and practical way to move around in combat. Jump, slash, and you’re fifteen feet forward, usually behind a headless opponent. Kickass. The problem was, it only worked when an opponent was within range, as if his cooperation was somehow required. So I’d misjudge the distance between myself and my opponent, and instead of diving forward like a hawk, I’d slash in midair and fall straight back down into a cluster of enemies. Ninja Gaiden takes away the arbitrary restriction on the technique, and they make other tweaks to combat that generally make the player feel more like a ninja, free to leap about and cleave apart lesser martial artists.

And the other martial artists you encounter are very lesser, which is as it should be. No single enemy grunt is going to present a challenge, which is why they attack in at least threes and sometimes in waves. The game has an auto-heal system after encounters, as well, which is another trend in gaming that I’m really fond of. Nobody likes limping to the next encounter with three hit points and no healing items, knowing that a single enemy bitchslap will kill you. Regenerating health, or in this case a checkpoint-based health refill, is a great way to keep the player from having to ever, ever do that.

Enemy mooks are, as I mentioned, pushovers. The bosses, though... look, I don’t object to hard bosses. I also don’t object, at least in principle, to you-have-to-die-a-hundred-times-and-memorize-his-pattern-flawlessly bosses. I don’t object to them, I just reserve the right not to play their games. So when I say the bosses in Ninja Gaiden II are too hard, it’s not just because I suck. It’s because the game doesn’t prepare you for them. There are no grunts who interrupt my combos, or whose combos I can’t interrupt. There are no grunts who dodge my decapitation attack without explanation, or who pull off several combos in a row with minimal indication of when it’s going to be safe to attack them. At least not in Novice mode. You want to throw a tough boss at me, fine. But get me ready for it.

I’ll admit that games tend to be favoring playability over difficulty these days, and a game that demands as much from the player as Ninja Gaiden II – even in easy mode – is rare. But the reason for that is that game design is being refined. Like phones and computers and all manner of interactive devices, games are now made with an educated understanding of the player’s needs. Needs like “having at least a glimmer of an idea of how I might approach the next challenge.” And that decreases difficulty, in the same way that eyesight decreases the difficulty of birdwatching.

Ninja Gaiden, along with games in general, is in a tough spot, challenge-wise. A predictable, Mega Man-style combo wouldn’t be nearly challenging enough for a Ninja Gaiden boss, but when the developers take it in the other direction and – so it seems – try to mimic the experience of facing a strong, unfamiliar opponent, it just becomes unpredictable, which makes the player die a lot in the process of figuring everything out.

Ooh! Ooh! I know! What if you were fighting an opponent with unfamiliar moves and patterns, but in a game where failing to react properly generally resulted in a clash of swords rather than damage to your flesh? That way, you could carefully parry and read the opponent’s moves until you were ready to strike back! Yeah, I like that. It may sound less challenging, but since Ninja Gaiden forces you to spend about the same amount of time figuring out your opponent, why not cut out the constant dying and reloading?

Well, I’m sure that game has its time and place. For now, Ninja Gaiden II is more or less what the fans expected, and it does right by its predecessors. But I have my differences with it – differences that I will take to my grave, once I am hacked apart. Again.

Grand Theft Auto IV

I'll start with a laserlike focus on a single, almost insignificant aspect of GTA IV's driving, because things like this have a tendency to stick in my mind, and hey, details matter. Niko's, er, "ability" to fly through the window after a head-on collision is what I'm griping about. It's slick, but... well, it's like this: it’s often going to be necessary to punish me, the player, somehow. And sometimes that comes naturally: if I don’t brake properly in a turn, I lose control. If I don’t use cover in a firefight, I get perforated (GTA IV has a pretty good implementation of that, by the way). So punishment I can deal with. But frankly, I’m not jazzed about any gameplay mechanic whose only purpose is to punish me more. That’s what’s happened with the “through the windshield” thing. I was already avoiding head-on collisions, because they bring a complete stop to my motion. That was enough of a punishment. But now a head-on collision means I pretty much instantly fail any mission where time’s a factor. It's not necessary. If there were a button that made Niko put on a seatbelt, I might be more pleasantly inclined towards it.

It’s been a while since I played a GTA game, but the driving feels a bit more sensitive than I’m used to. It’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing, since it worked fine in previous incarnations. I like it, personally, for the same reason that I’m grudgingly in favor of different nuances to driving in various Mario Kart games. I got crazy good at Double Dash, and if the DS and Wii versions had played exactly the same, I would have been instantly bored by them. Changing things up is a fairly non-artificial way to inject a little additional brainwork into the new game.

More than that has changed, though: Rockstar waited quite a while to move from "GTA III" to "GTA IV," and in a way, you can see why: the technology’s been updated, rather obviously, and the setting and tone have a different feel to them. The game’s more focused, as well: gone are San Andreas’ vast expanses of empty land, and its airplanes (and its flying car cheat, for that matter). It’s all city driving now. It’s a fine thing for a game to be focused on what it does well, but I can’t help but think GTA gave up too much. The planes I can understand; San Andreas’ wide open spaces weren’t always a lot of fun to traverse, and giving them up means the whole map is choked with tall buildings. Which means flying in an airplane, or a flying car, wouldn’t be much fun. But why cut out the jetpack? San Andreas’ jetpack was a great little treat at the end of the game, giving you unlimited mobility. Yeah, it was goofy as hell, and the way you acquired it was even goofier, but who cares?

Rockstar cares. They’re taking the game in a more serious direction, so much so that its adherence to peepee humor threatens to tear the game in half. (I’m not dissing juvenile comedy, by the way, but I do think the tone of Niko’s story breaks sharply from what you see and hear on the in-game TV and radio). All the interactive portions of GTA IV, by contrast, are played relatively straight. Niko, in particular, is businesslike and occasionally mopey. This change in tone has, it seems, driven the scaling back of mission variety, which was admittedly hit-and-miss in previous games. Not everyone liked being forced to fly through rings in San Andreas, and nobody liked that one mission where you control the RC planes. But GTA IV has given up on everything but driving and shooting, which just feels like... well... giving up.

To be fair, I can say this about GTA IV: What it does, it does better than previous installments. It just does less. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not; it all depends on whether you think of GTA as a series about driving, or a series about flying and boating and jetpacking.

Finally, the more serious tone has accomplished something that, despite the series’ media reception, it hadn’t accomplished before. Namely: it feels like a murder simulator now. In the other games, I was mostly just offing caricatures, barely more human than Koopa Troopas. GTA IV has me doing things I’m actually reluctant to do, and Niko accepts these missions coldly and without reservation – in some places he’s actually eager to do what I cringe at. GTA IV puts me behind the eyes of a character I’m sometimes unnerved by, which is no small accomplishment. I’m not one hundred percent behind this change in direction, but if Rockstar is dedicated to it, they’ve made a good start.

It's pronounced "Tuh-three-tris"

The Dragon Question project got finished up. But the big news isn't some pop-up storybook, oh no! It's T3tris, our three-player Tetris game! And when I say "our" I mean we took an existing Tetris game and remodeled the controls to work with our physical platform, a table which houses a rotating knob, a sliding knob, and a button. The rotating knob controls the blocks' rotation, the sliding knob controls left-and-right movement, and the button controls the accelerated falling of the blocks.



Sounds simple. Is. But when you play it, you can see that it's a clever little exercise in communication and cooperation. This thing we're doing, giving players three different controls in cooperative games, is something we're calling "asymmetrical cooperative gameplay," a term I don't think has been coined before, and it really gets people playing in new ways. Because everybody has their own job, a job no one else can do, people really seem to get how important communication is.

It's surprisingly fun, too. The unfamiliarity of the control scheme, plus the multiplayer aspect, lets people do really badly without feeling bad. Doing well feels like a triumph against impossible odds.

MLS Game Review: Take 1

I recently got it in my head to discuss game design in the form of game reviews, and I thought it only right to start with a high-profile game designer whose fame is, I feel, entirely undeserved, whose games are big on spectacle and desperately low on any sort of redeeming value, even by his own irrational standards. I’m referring, of course, to the character of Jigsaw from the Saw series of films.

Now, I’m not a fan of these films, but I have, in one peer group or another, been dragged out to see the first three, and from a game design perspective I found them appalling. There’s a number of objections already raised against the Saw movies, amongst them the near-irrefutable “they are torture porn,” but as far as I know, no one’s taken the movies’ insane killer, Jigsaw, to task for his poor skills as a game designer.

Yes, he introduces his deathtraps as “games,” so he’s a game designer. And not a very good one. The stated goal of his games is to teach the people involved in them the value of life; he himself has cancer, and in his mind, his impending mortality gives him the right to impose his beliefs about life on others by murdering them.

That belief, in itself, isn’t a problem as far as game design goes. He’s crazy, so we can cut his philosophy a little slack in the “does-it-make-sense” department and just focus on how he puts it into practice. Like a twisted Marc Prensky, Jigsaw believes that games can be powerful teaching tools, and so he puts people into marginally escapable deathtraps in the hopes that those who survive will be better for the experience- that they will appreciate life more, and be better people in general.

It’s not a totally boneheaded idea, although putting it into practice is unambiguously evil; the problem is that Jigsaw makes the mistake of being totally uncompromising. In game design, it’s important to remember that your game is not a vehicle for your ego, but an experience for the player. Miyamoto didn’t make Super Mario Bros. a lengthy, punishing treatise on the value of life because it would have sucked and he knew that’s not what players wanted. Granted, Jigsaw is proceeding from a different starting point, since no one wants to play his games to begin with, but he still forgets that the game is ultimately about the needs of the player. To put it simply, the problem with Jigsaw’s games is that no one can win them.

Oh, there are exceptions, and I’ll get to them, but all in all, the overwhelming majority of people who play Jigsaw’s games die. Basically, Jigsaw has made Battletoads, if Battletoads could kill you. Jigsaw’s games are useless as teaching tools if no one survives them, and it is the height of game-designer arrogance to believe, as Jigsaw must, that it is the fault of the players that they always fail. I’m sorry, insane murderer, but it is you who have failed - failed to create an experience that benefits the player, regardless of how gratifying it is for you.

There are, if memory serves, exactly two people who have survived Jigsaw’s games- the young woman who he later took on as his protégé, and the man he ran through his game in Saw III. The young woman went on to be a murderer, even by Jigsaw’s lenient standards, and the man, who was supposed to learn the value of mercy from the games, sliced Jigsaw’s throat open upon meeting him.

So – even among the people who survived, Jigsaw’s rate of success, according to his stated goal of improving people’s character, is exactly zero. We don’t get a chance to see whether Jigsaw might have amended his methods upon learning this, since he finds out about both of them very shortly before his own death, but given his arrogance in the past, I doubt he would have. The lesson he should have learned, though, is that putting people into deathtraps apparently makes them feel powerless and angry at the world, which spurs them to take out those feelings on others.

So how could Jigsaw have improved his games? I’ll admit, deathtraps are a tricky line to walk, which is one reason they’re rarely attempted. You don’t actually want people to die, or at least you shouldn’t, but if you’re trying to test out your hypothesis that the threat of death can improve people, you’ve got to make the threat seem authentic. That’s easy enough the first time – just design a trap that looks like it can kill you, but really won’t, and for Christ’s sake give the player the means to escape without mutilating himself. As long as the player at least sort of believes he could have died, the game will already be serving its purpose better than the ones that leave the player, y’know, dead.

Granted, once word gets out that nobody actually dies in any of your traps, your cred is going to slip a bit, but if you kidnap someone, throw them in a dark room, and tell them they’re about to die, I think you can count on them to take the matter seriously regardless of what they heard on the news.

And how to avoid the feeling of helplessness and anger that comes from surviving one of your deathtraps? Simple: give the player a sense of accomplishment. The way the games work now, Jigsaw’s voice on the videotape just tells them whatever gruesome thing they need to do to get out of it. “Oh, crawl through barbed wire to escape this room.” “Dig a key out of a guy’s stomach.” Even when people do escape, it’s only because they did exactly what a madman told them to. That’s no way to build up a person’s self-esteem. Give the people a puzzle to solve, Jigsaw. Something that’ll make them feel like they saved their own lives.

I hate to be so hard on the old murderous psychopath, but forgetting the needs of the player in favor of your own ego is a cardinal sin of game design. Murdering your players is also a sin in game design, but it doesn’t come up so much unless Jack Thompson is around.

Dragon Question

Dragon Question is my current ETC project. We’re plotting out an adventure game and a rhythm game based off the original game’s principles of simple interface and cooperative play. I’m the lead designer on the project, and recently received the swanky new title of “director.” Ooh!

The original Dragon Question was a three-player cooperative game, set in a pop-up storybook and based around minigames and story sequences. I was a game designer and the scenario writer.

Dragon Question was built around a large (huge, actually) rotating, lazy-susan-style table, containing the players’ controllers on one side. The controllers consisted of one input each, all of them utilized in different ways for each minigame. The first player (as Vincent) used a single rotating knob, the second (as Alexander) used a sliding knob, and the third (as Elric) used a vibration sensor set to detect blowing. This necessitated frequent use of the word “blowing” when I explained the game to players, which was a great source of fun.

Another, more intentional, source of fun was the rewards we handed out to players after each minigame. The rotating table was originally designed to give people different inputs for each game, but in two weeks that proved impractical. We were left with a rotating table that wasn’t for anything. Good design principles dictate that you throw something out if it no longer does anything. Awesome design principles dictate that you figure out something cool for it to do. In our case, we curtained off the backside of the table and used the “backstage” to load up treats and treasures that we’d rotate out towards the players between minigames .

Giving people chocolate is arguably a cheap shortcut to winning hearts and minds, but we do what works. But we also had some very cool games and a fun platform to play them on, and we got people to have fun playing together.

More on the original Dragon Question:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

3-minute Trailer

Rabbit-Proof Fencing

Rabbit-Proof Fencing was a game I wrote and game-designed for, built for a sword-shaped controller that the player swings to fight rabbits and cane toads (both of which are pests in Australia, rabbits for their rapid population growth and cane toads for their poison). It’s a first-person game, in which rabbits and toads hop towards the screen and the player swings the sword to knock them away.
It is also, in almost every way imaginable, the simplest game we could make. We told people to “swing” the sword to attack, but the only moving part of the sword is a mercury switch, which is entirely binary: when the sword is pointing up, it’s not attacking, and when the sword is pointing down, it is. So: if the player lets the sword droop, he’ll hit the enemies every time. The smoke-and-mirrors part of the game was our insistence, as the game’s presenters, that the sword MUST be pointing up when the player isn’t attacking.
It worked. I never saw anybody figure out how the game really worked, though everybody seemed to have their own theory about the best way to swing the sword.
The game’s a semester project now, being developed as a tool for attracting foreign students to the city of Adelaide, for a client called Education Adelaide. I’m not officially part of the project, because I’m on the other side of the planet and I’ve got a project of my own, but I’ll be talking with the team. I don’t know much about the project yet, because the Australian semester hasn’t started yet, but I assume they’ll have to replace the smoke-and-mirrors with full functionality and replace the mercury switch with something safer.
I mean, the mercury was wrapped up, perfectly safe, but people get squeamish around a metal that causes brain damage. So, yeah.

Educate yourself further: Rabbit-Proof Fencing lives here

Parallel Worlds: Pittsburgh and Adelaide

My ETC education started in Australia, and in retrospect I should have expected a tough time. Oh sure, I dosed myself with increasing amounts of a venom cocktail so that I could shrug off the bites of the native fauna, but what I should have braced myself for was a campus that hasn’t proved itself in the way that the Pittsburgh ETC has. And yet now it’s the third semester and I’ve got projects going on two campuses. I’ve truly hit the big time, inasmuch as one can hit the big time while still working as a student, within a school.

Hi, by the way. I’m Trent Burg, and I’m a game designer at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. I’m working in Pittsburgh on a project called “Dragon Question” and I’ve got ties to a project in Australia called “Rabbit-Proof Fencing,” which is being developed along with an outfit called Education Adelaide as a tool for attracting foreign students.

Both of them started as two-week projects in a class called Building Virtual Worlds, or BVW, a first-semester course in which five such projects are made by constantly-changing teams. So I’m part of the first and second ETC semester projects to come from BVW projects- although a much smaller part of the one that’s taking place on the other side of the world.

Here's the trailer for the original Dragon Question, on which my current project is based:

For the truly impatient, there's a shot of the real-world interfaces at about 20 seconds, and the action picks up big-time at 1:45. Full gameplay videos are here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Rabbit-Proof Fencing can be learned-about here.