Rape games maybe not so nice afterall

I have written, quite a while back now, how Japan’s loose and fast obsession with nymphets is something that makes my skin crawl. The sexualisation, exploitation even, of extremely young girls, sometimes even prepubescent, may be a cultural phenomenon that I should try to accept in my attempts to integrate, but as a liberal lefty some things are beyond the pale. It is true that Japan generally has a laissez faire attitude towards personal proclivities; if you want to spend your Sundays dressed as a game character walking around Yoyogi park or spend all your money on “hug pillows” then, well, bless you. It is generally a great attitude, where people don’t necessarily get judged for being weird or wanting to do odd things, but it does sadly also include the more extreme behaviours.

Now Kotaku reports that the Ethics Organization of Computer Software, the EOCS, in Japan, have decided, in a non-legally binding or official way, to curb the creation of rape-type games. People with an eye for news of the weird may have heard of a little title called “Rapelay”, reviewed on SomethingAwful and sold, then banned from Amazon outside of Japan. In it the player takes control of a character that rapes three women, or rather a mother and her two young daughters, with all manner of features like pregnancy and forced abortions. You wouldn’t believe the furore this title caused in Japan upon its release: virtually none. Japan, purveyor of perverted pornography, pretty much provides anything to anybody, whatever ails you, you’ll find it, and things much more disturbing, for sale in Japan, though you may have to delve into the deeper backstreets of Akihabara for your own particular whims. And though I have never discussed titles like “Rapelay” with Japanese people (the title makes more sense, so to speak, in Japanese combining the last katakana of “re-pu”, rape, with the first of “pu-re-i”, play) and am pretty sure most people would be horrified at the idea, the attitude most prevailing regarding dubious issues seems to be one of “well, whatever turns people on” or “as long as they have fun” or some such.

The link between explicit titles, involving rape and paedophilia, and real-life crime are hard to prove in Japan, with so many of such crimes remaining unreported. Though personally I feel paedophilia having to be reined in by law should be an issue beyond discussion, it’s a little harder when it comes to sexual fantasies, especially between consenting adults. Ero-games are usually sold in specialty shops or special areas of bigger stores, and there are fairly decent protections in place to keep such games out of the hands of children, including a built-in morality sense where most kids seem to stay away from illegal activities and products until they are of age, like alcohol and tobacco. Rape fantasies are not unique to Japan, let’s face it. But I don’t think games are an Art, they are a product and as such have some responsibilities. That said, I’m also no great fan of censorship, and riling against sexuality explicit games, especially coming from a gun-porn and violence heavy culture, is rather hypocritical. This is why I am quite glad this is a voluntary move made by a body of developers and not a law passed by the government. Will it make any difference? Perhaps not in the short term. “Rapelay” was made quite a while ago and it is only now, amidst a mini-flood of negative press and outcry from the West, that the Japanese have sat down and said to themselves “hmm, maybe rape isn’t so nice”.

Earlier an American man was arrested for possessing paedophilic manga, importing it, as part of a much larger general manga collection, into the U.S. I am in no way an expert on this, often getting rather hot-cheeked and embarrassed at the idea of it all, but I have been told it is still legal to own explicit material with minors, like such Lolicon manga, but not to sell it? Distribute it? I’m unsure. The law in Japan is often pretty vague and useless and unenforceable. But other reports have said this issue too is being looked into.

With a crackdown, voluntarily or legally, on underage sexually explicit materials and rape-type games I am pretty sure these things will be pushed underground. No longer the banners in Akihabara shouting out the underagedness of the girls in question, but maybe under the counter approaches. In a country as happily perverted as Japan, where sexuality, and explicit sexuality, in sharp contrast to the existing censorship laws, is rather exuberant and accepted, people will always try to provide for the proclivities of the extremely perverted, as long as there’s a market. But it is good to see, though sadly only after rumblings in the West, that Japan generally is looking into these sticky issues and agreeing a more responsible approach might be required.

Plants vs. Zombies

There is something about Popcap that seems to make most of the games they release golden; it’s a mix of excellent presentation, ease of play, mixing genres and some addictive je ne sais quoi. “Plants vs. Zombies” is the latest title released and seems to be making somewhat of a splash on-line. At its heart this game is a simplified Tower Defense game, in which the player plants a variety of flora to protect the player’s house from a hoard of invading zombies. As a true Tower Defense game it doesn’t satisfy though. Mostly zombies move in single file and offensive plants, too, are limited to a single row, though later upgrades to offer a wider area of attack. Even though it’s an incredibly fun game, it does have some issues which are worth investigating. What makes this particular Popcap game so fun despite some flaws, and what is it that elevates it above the increasing flood of independent releases today?

The main problem with the game is that the basic premise, the largest chunk of the game in the adventure mode, is very slow to start. With limited options and the previously mentioned single-file approach to offense and defense, you spent the first part of the game basically building the same elements in each row, which makes the game somewhat boring. And this is a shame, because once the game starts to build, exchanges day and night cycles, adds a pool, moves to the rooftop things get a lot more strategic. Even at this point there is a fair amount of row-based similarities in your tactics, but with a huge list of plants to choose from and only a limited number of seed slots to occupy during a wave your choices in “weapons” and the way you choose to play all become strategic elements in the game outside of the actual level.

What is most telling is that the selection of mini-games is actually more fun than the basic game. Whether it’s zombie bowling, a reversal of roles where you supply the zombies, a slot-machine based version of the game or one of the puzzle modes you’ll probably be spending a lot of time on these. This is not just because they’re good fun, but also because you’ll need a lot of money to buy upgrades with. And though this isn’t a problem per se, the way mini-games are locked is rather crippling. It takes a good length of time playing through the story mode before mini-games are unlocked as an option from the main menu, and even then you’re only given a few, with more unlocked as you finish the story mode.

For the independent developer, though, a lot can be learned from Popcap’s games. Their presentation is usually very high quality and Plants vs. Zombies is no exception, with cute plants, fun zombies and a healthy dose of humour thrown into the mix, especially in the way the zombies try to fool you with handwritten notes sometimes – check out the “help” section on the main menu for example. This title is slick! Some of you may have seen the “music video” on-line, which can also be seen during the end credit sequence, and you have to be a heartless bastard not to smile at its silly cuteness. Zombie Michael Jacksons too appear and do the Thriller dance moves. This game is overflowing with character!

Value for money too is something Popcap gets right again. The number of different mini-games, although all vaguely based on the central premise, is astounding and even harks back to some previous Popcap titles with a Bejeweled knock-off in there somewhere. It’s not just the sheer amount of imagination that surprises as the amount of fun all these mini-games offer. The tradition is that mini-games are annoying breaks from regular play with little compulsion to replay them at leisure, but not so in Plants vs. Zombies, where they are actually more fun than the core mode. Then there is a Zen Garden mode, where you look after pot plants for extra bonuses, as well as an almanac that lists all the seeds and zombies you’ve encountered with funny descriptions. Content-wise Plants vs. Zombies puts most other independent offerings to shame.

Though Plants vs. Zombies isn’t quite the must-have Peggle is, and it will disappoint tower defense fanatics, it is a great little title I can recommend to anyone, though know that it only really picks up after you’ve completed three quarters of the story mode orso. For independents it is a must-check-out for the level of polish and presentation few other developers seem to be able to match these days.

iConundrum

The video game industry was arguably kicked off by a bunch of unwashed enthusiasts coding games in a few weeks in their bedrooms. A lot of them were derivative or obvious knock-offs of other titles, others were original and created new genres, but a single person could turn a hobby into a profession and make good money; it was the Wild West back then.

Okay, this is not entirely true. The industry as it stands today is probably more down to Nintendo reviving the market and changing the rules with the Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System), but even then most people employed to create games came from this pool of bedroom enthusiasts. During that time companies were created that still exist today, that are, in fact, huge multinational corporations today. And don’t forget, Richard Garriott started out selling his game through mail-order in Ziploc bags with Xeroxed instruction leaflets and ended up becoming a space tourist. It was a wild time of opportunity and possibilities, where an enthusiast with a dream and the chutzpah to work at it could make something of himself or at least create a game and send it out there.

The success of the iPhone platform is arguably kicked off by a bunch of unwashed enthusiasts coding games in a few weeks in their bedrooms. A lot of them are derivative or obvious knock-offs of other titles, others are original and create new genres, but a single person can turn a hobby into a profession and make good money; it is the Wild West.

Now I’m not directly comparing the current iPhone craze with the early days of the video game industry, but there are parallels. Single enthusiasts seem to have as much of a shot as anyone else to create something and put it out there. These days of course they are competing with huge, well-funded corporations like EA and Square-Enix and the surprising thing is that they are competing well. The old system of creating polished product on a closed platform, selling it and marketing it apparently works as well as getting a lucky mention and ending up in the top 10 downloads, which in turn leads to ridiculous returns.

And our industry hates it. How often do we hear people complain that the App Store is a swamp of substandard product with the occasional hard-to-find gem? How many people complain how a quick rip-off game shot to the top of the charts while their own presumably awesome, highly polished product languished in barely triple figure sales? People have even declared the iPhone a dead platform because of this already; “too much shitware” they claim, “there is no point in trying to compete in that market, it’s weighed down by crap and a bad rating and search system”.

Poppycock, I say! This is purest industry hubris, and I’ve heard it many times before. It’s a repeat of the early days of the Wii when publishers threw together cheap shovelware and declared the Wii a failure because they couldn’t make significant sales for their substandard product. Before people understood the DS it was declared a failure. We, as an industry, are very adept at pointing the finger of blame, be it the App Store system, that old classic the economic climate or the failure of a platform to appeal to the market your own game is supposed to appeal to. When things go bad it is never the publisher’s nor the developer’s fault; it’s always an outside influence that pushes down our creativity, our Art.

The fact it is incredibly hard for a highly polished product to make significant sales on the iPhone tells us a few things:
1. Maybe people are more interested in iFart applications or cheap knock-offs than expensive gaming experiences akin to those on home consoles. Just like the Wii is a massive success because the market that wants Wii Fit and Wii Sports is larger than the market that wants Space Marine FPS games. The iPhone market is comprised of gadget freaks and mobile phone users, not home console gamers.
2. It’s useless to transpose the home console business onto the iPhone; it works differently and if you get unexpectedly bad sales you might be doing it wrong. Whatever the “right” way is might still be unknown, but therein lies the challenge, right? Or do we really want to keep things as they always have been? Surely that will make us stale and irrelevant?
3. The iPhone is delivering unto us a new generation of bedroom coders and entrepreneurs. We can either sit back, complain about their successes and watch them set up shop and compete, or we can snap them up for ourselves.
4. More has been released on the iPhone Apps Store than on the three home consoles combined (this fact is entirely made-up and spurious), and people are making money of off it. How is this a failed or broken platform?

The industry must step up or shut up. Stop blaming the economic climate for studio closures, stop pointing to your bad sales on the iPhone as a failure of the system as opposed to a failure of your own business plan. Personally I find more interesting things have come out on the iPhone than the home consoles, due to the hobbyist nature and accessibility of the platform and the lower costs involved. Are we going to sit back and let Apple reinvent our industry as it did with the music business? Or are we going to take it seriously as a platform and try to crack it?

My Famicase

Kichijoji is an area outside of my usual bubble, a 40 minute train ride from Shibuya or, had I been smart enough to take an express rather than a local, 15 minutes. It has a vibrant shopping area surrounding the station, with covered streets packed with tiny shops and bars, and a nice park for family strolling. I, however, made the trek to visit the smallest, geekiest showcase of recent time: the My Famicase exhibit at Meteor.

Meteor is a tiny, tiny retro shop selling Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System) cartridges, CDs, books and T-shirts, as well as some other odds and ends, like incense and tea pots, for some reason. It boasts several tiny CRT televisions hooked up to old consoles, a Vectrex and a working VirtualBoy. The single rack of T-shirts had some awesome Famicom and Game&Watch related designs, all at a fairly hefty price, and all in either S or XL sizes. I’m apparently geeky enough to want a shirt boasting the Zelda hearts meter or the Mario Bros. pipes, but not geeky enough to fit within the two stereotypical body images of the geek: morbidly overweight or anorexic. I’m a Japanese Medium, which is great for my ego but makes geek clothes shopping difficult – which in turn, I guess, is good for my image.

The My Famicase exhibit takes up the top half of one wall and displays 50 Famicom cartridges with custom designed labels by a variety of local artists and designers. They are not specifically game based and range from abstract to faux-game artsy. Especially of note is illustrator Hawken King’s “Bush Jr.” design, the one overtly political cartridge which, I gather, has caused a minor storm in a teacup for him, showing, as it does, George W. Bush looking decidedly simian climbing one of the WTC towers. It’s a really cool design, and others too were worth checking out.

The exhibit is until the end of the month but all the cases can be seen on the website, here.

As the shop Meteor and the exhibit are fairly small, it won’t take up much of your day, so while you’re there, walk into the nearest side-street, underneath the railway tracks and a 100 meters orso into the suburban area behind it to have a quick gander at manga artist Umezu Kazuo’s funky house, often called “Makoto-chan House”. It’s a mad structure painted in red and white stripes, with his famous character adorning a ledge along the top and boasting a small tower with two round windows and a strategically placed nose. The mailbox too is an old-fashion Japanese pillarbox. So bright and, frankly, awesome is this house that it prompted dullard neighbours to file suit in complaint. In January the Tokyo District Court thankfully dismissed the lawsuit meaning curious visitors can enjoy this little splash of brightness in an otherwise fairly gray neighbourhood. It is quite literally almost around the corner from Meteor, so one might as well have a quick look.

Memories of days gone by

I am one of those gamers who some months ago hungrily lapped up the re-release of Banjo-Kazooie on XBLA and, more recently, Banjo-Tooie, two titles from the N64 glory days when the name “Rare” was still a force to be reckoned with. Playing these two titles, though if I’m honest with myself the former moreso than the latter, reminded me of two things: we’ve come a long way and where are my platformers?

The cut-off for replayable retro seems to be just after the 16-bit era where games were made in glorious 2D that has aged a lot better than the 3D era of the Playstation and aforementioned N64. Previously I have toyed a little with PS1 games released on the Playstation Network, though the edges were so rough it made my eyes bleed. The first few generations of 3D games are, frankly, ugly as sin these days. Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie however still seem to stand up pretty well. The textures are rough enough to count the pixels, as are the models and their polygons, but Rare still managed in those dark ages to squeeze a lot of character out of their worlds with cute animations and design. Don’t get me wrong, the games are ugly these days, but somehow the charm they still possess seems to make up for that.

Platformers, though, seem to have migrated to the handhelds, for some reason. I can barely remember the last decent Castlevania on home consoles (I lie, it was obviously Symphony of the Night on PS1, released over 12 years ago). I tend to discount things like Bionic Commando Rearmed and Banjo-Kazooie, as these are remakes or re-releases. Which leaves games like Ratchett & Clank and…what?

Things like Prince of Persia, Uncharted and Tomb Raider fill some of that void, as do brawlers like Oboromuramasa, yet my platforming hunger seems very badly served by today’s market. Are they the way of the point and click adventure? It’s true there is an awesome amateur platform development scene out there, but damn, I long for the old days. If the Xbox, in Japan at least, can provide for the tiny shmup community, where is my fan service?

Ignore me, I moan. The DSLite provides me with my kicks still; a few excellent Castlevanias, new quirky games like Henry Hatsworth (recommended!) and others give me all the platform kicks I really need, but for what I desire, cool platformers on my telly…I still hunger.

Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie in the meantime are excellent diversions from the usual brown, bloom space marine fare, and I recommend anyone who enjoyed them the first time round to give them another go; they’re still fun! Oh, Rare…we didn’t need vehicles…just more of this, please…

Oboromuramasa

Few consoles elicit more confused reactions, amongst gamers and developers alike, than the Nintendo Wii, to this day lambasted for its gimmicky controllers and lack of power and storage compared to its two main rivals, not to mention the supposed lack of “decent” games available for it. Yet somehow, sales figures can’t lie, it is massively successful and enjoyed by many; the market it provides for, however, doesn’t overlap the group that is most vocal: the internet hard-core gamers and journalists. Some scorn at the success of the Wii Fit but no matter how such products don’t provide for the hardcore, they do provide for the Wii’s main market, and to criticise that is not unlike criticising a dairy farm for not producing the beer you like so much better.

And despite the fact the Wii has proven itself to be the console of choice for, what some call, the “casual market”, some developers and publishers can’t help but try to pander to the hardcore. Games like Madworld and No More Heroes seem a bad fit for the Wii’s market, and their sales figures are less than stellar. This month it is no other than No More Heroes’ publisher Marvellous who bring us “Oboromuramasa”, the latest game by Vanillaware of Odin Sphere fame.

The game itself is nothing more than a brawler set in an ancient Japanese setting, through which the player moves via small stages where the occasional brawler battle takes place. There are some RPG elements involved, like levelling up and forging swords, but generally the game is a button masher and would probably fare better on other consoles where the main market is more receptive to such titles.

That said, what Muramasa has going for it is, like Odin Sphere, the drop-dead gorgeous visuals, proving once again that art direction trumps technological prowess by a mile. This game would have been immensely lacklustre had it been rendered in “glorious” 3D utilising every single byte of memory that the Xbox360 or PS3 have to offer. Instead it runs comfortably in the Wii’s low-resolution environment with its beautiful, hand-drawn 2D graphics that are rich with little touches of detail and sometimes barely perceptible animations. Seeing Musamasa in motion is gratifying in itself, regardless of the game mechanics behind it. It is simply beautiful.

People versed in ancient Japanese art and history will find plenty here to get excited about. Images borrow heavily from famous artworks, and though generally fairly “anime” styled, it has an overall feel of historical paintings. This, the Japanese version of the game, also relies heavily on kanji and a little bit of an obtuse front-end, so importers are advised to wait for the European or American versions.

Once these localised versions are released, though, I suspect it will find somewhat of a larger market abroad than it does in Japan, especially among the “Japanophiles”, as the game drips Nihonese like nothing else. But even then it will have to compete with much better marketed games like Wii Fit and big licensed fare that the casual gamer might have heard of. I fear this game might not receive the attention it deserves simply because it is a new game and people need to know about it before they actively seek it out and buy it, as opposed to stumbling across it in a game shop and picking it up on a whim; that seems to be a tactic that doesn’t work well for Wii games.

Though I am becoming less and less of a “hard-core” gamer, I am immensely gratified developers like Vanillaware continue to pursue their art and create off-beat games like Muramasa; especially as a visual artist myself I am getting a lot of enjoyment out of the presentation alone. My thumb, however, probably won’t outlast the actual gaming experience and I am probably doomed, like many others no doubt, to get the main bulk of my enjoyment from HD Youtube movies created by others.

Oboromuramasa is a gorgeous game. I recommend it to anybody who is serious about the medium to look at it as another example of games being an art in and of themselves, as opposed to something similar or equal to the more established art forms. Buy it when it is released locally and keep your fingers crossed Vanillaware makes enough money out of it to spurn them on to make more games with this visual style.

The IGDA and QoL

Few subjects are as contentious amongst developers, staff and management alike, than “unpaid overtime”; it’s sadly an issue that still divides, and about which more has been written, argued the toss about and discussed with less possible hope of an outcome than the Israeli-Palestine question. Game development being a highly creative industry staffed by motivated and, frankly, obsessive talent the idea that overtime is absolutely required if one is to develop a decent game is sadly still prevalent. Ignore scheduling issues, if the staff isn’t willing to kill themselves for the good of the project no good games, some say, can ever be made. Management obviously thinks unpaid overtime is great for business, squeezing free man months out of staff while conveniently ignoring century-old research that pretty much proves that overtime turns to negative productivity. My personal views on the matter should be obvious by this opening paragraph alone, but for every lefty liberal socialist like myself there is a raving workaholic who will come with plenty of counter-arguments. So, we look at some representative body to take up the issue, and as game developers we have, sadly, only one of those: the IGDA.

Recently somewhat of a storm has erupted when the IGDA, which claims it champions “QoL” (Quality of Life) for its members, ostensibly developers, had a roundtable discussion at the IGDA Leadership Forum 08, “Studio Heads Hotseat”, where a board member, at the time, boldly claimed:

there's a lot of talk, "oh you can make great games working 8 hours a day 5 days a week, it's management's fault if they work more than that," fuck, it's management's fault for hiring people who want to leave at 5pm every day is the way I look at it
-- Mike Capps, President, Epic Games

Video here.

This, in turn caused somewhat of an uproar on the IGDA feedback forums and a very lackluster, non-committal response from the board.

The story drags on quite a bit, and rather than recounting it here I suggest readers to watch the videos and follow all the links in the forums and the IGDA website. The long and short of it, though, is that the IGDA, the only spokesgroup our industry has really managed to create basically has very little it does for the lowly developer, seeming to be more in line with the management ideas for which us developers exactly need an organisation to protect us from.

The overall usefulness of the IGDA is also an issue many developers can’t seem to agree on, with some local chapters actually being well-run and offering a lot to the local members, yet others being pretty much useless. So far I have been a paid member, a token of support for the idea alone, as I was never in a real position to devote myself to the organisation in the form of tangible help and commitment; sadly a common situation for many developers. After this QoL debacle, though, I have decided to let my subscription run out after which it shan’t be renewed. We desperately need an organisation to protect the interests of developers, and the IGDA has sadly proven itself to be somewhat of a lame duck in this regard, peppering their site with splendid ideas and research, yet not being able to even stand up to its own board of directors when they blatantly and openly defy the very principles it is supposed to uphold.

These mundane issues, readers, are what keep developers awake at night. I’m sorry it’s not as sexy and academic as ludological narrative philosophy, but we are people after all, people stuck in a industry so mired in the 80s bedroom coding scene that it never found the time to grow up.

Only in Japan

As I, and many more Japanese developers and publishers, lament the falling behind of Japanese games, now much harder to ignore, it behooves us to remember that Japan is not doomed; it does do certain things right and allows for games that no Western publisher, even in these indie-courting times would probably ever greenlight. Exhibit A: Noby Noby Boy.

If you haven’t played this Playstation Network exclusive yet, well, um, nothing that can be said about it would make any sense. Even watching the trailers and movies on-line can’t quite convey the utter insanity this product enjoys. Imagine a designer, possibly delirious from lack of sleep or maybe even riding the Cake horse, just throws up some ideas for the Hell of it with nobody to tap him on the shoulder to say “Excuse me, this is just ridiculous and insane, let’s not do this”; imagine also graphics that are colourful and cute but also sort of smell like 1st year Game College graduate's experimental tomfoolery. Imagine a game with no direction, challenges, goals. You are now only part-way to imagining Noby Noby Boy. Seriously, just play it for a while and enjoy – that’s really all you can do with it. Like me, you probably won’t spend weeks and weeks on this, but for $5 it’s hardly worth fretting over. At that price it easily outlasts a movie rental or purchase, so just go ahead and give it a try. Your brain will thank you for it.

Noby Noby Boy is a toy, in the purest sense of the word. We could only call it a game because it is played on a games console, but that’s about it. There are some trophies that, provided you cheat on the internet and find out what they are for, could provide some goals for you to aim at, but generally, the only function this game has is to occupy you and make you waste some time, time spent giggling, being confused, laughing, more being confused, being confounded, and possibly more giggling. If I were forced to describe the game, I mean toy, which I’d hate to do, it’d be something like: you control an extendable worm-like character that can fool about in a scene, eat stuff, poop stuff and let characters ride on his back. There is some meta-game (whatever that means) about growing long and having the Girl character grow long with you in order to reach the moon or something, but generally, it’s about faffing about.

And it’s great that such titles, alongside the gorgeous “Flower”, also on the Playstation Network, are being made. Noby Noby Boy is obviously several degrees more insane than Flower, which is simply beautiful and relaxing, but both offer a gaming experience that is quite unexpected. And if these games prove to be a success, which I not only hope they do but somehow think they will, it will show that there is a market for non-gamey games. It certainly shows Japan has an ace up its sleeve; technically it may be behind, but when it comes to mad ideas, the possibility to explore them and release them commercially, they still seems to have the upper hand.

Falling out

When it comes to video games I am a man-child who knows what he likes. I’m not interested in shooters, I’m not interested in dystopian future settings, I hate RPGs, I don’t care one jot for gore and gibs, realistic characters bore me, open world environments with little to do but travel across them are tedious. I like simple, colourful games, with fun or cute characters, some challenge but mostly just rote activity, and general glucose happiness. So why in the world am I so addicted to Fallout 3, a game which goes against every gaming sensibility I thought I had?

This is not the fist time Bethesda has made me a traitor to my own desires. I have arguably spent more time on Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion than any other game in recent memory, even though I hate your usual orcs and elves malarkey. At the time I thought it was merely because it reminded me of what I saw in my mind’s eye when playing Ultima back in those long forgotten days of my youth, such as they were. Oblivion’s pretty environments were a dream become reality, though a decade or two too late. And here they do it again, giving me a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland for my semi-realistic character to traipse through in a tedious, repetitive grind. And I’m loving every second of it.

The sense of utter devastation as I travel through the wasteland that was Washington DC, the underground shelters, vaults, dotted around in between ruined monuments and ramshackle dwellings, the burnt out buildings that hint at a past life, burned books and furniture everywhere, the old-fashioned technology that helps me unlock doors, the rebels that scour the lands for Nuka-cola bottle caps, though slightly depressing, in a ponderous way, never before have I spent so much time exploring and surviving a believable world, each new area bringing both the joy of discovery and a sense of futility, both uplifting and depressing at once.

Combat too has grabbed me to an extent I had not anticipated; not playing it as a shooter, but each time opening up V.A.T.S. and carefully aiming my rifle at specific body parts to disable them, a system I haven’t seen executed so well since Origin’s Knights of Legend. And having a rabid dog jump at me, shooting its head off with a shotgun, and seeing its headless body fly past me carried by its initial momentum, or separating a mercenary’s head clean off his torso with a single sniper shot, may be gory as Hell, indeed much gorier than I want from my games, but is immensely satisfying. Part of this is due to the slow-motion sound and the echo my gun makes as the boom bounces around this empty landscape, and the physics applied to these dead ragdolls make the experience so visceral and demanding and somewhat exhausting, I truly get the sense I’m a survivor, protecting myself for the sake of living, rather than rampaging like a buffed-out roid-rage space marine.

Another reason I am spending so much of my time in this world has probably something to do with its achievable trophies (as I am playing this on a Playstation 3). Too many games out there still have ridiculous trophy demands; spend the entire game hopping on one foot, or beat every single person in the world in an online battle within 4 hours. Fallout 3, however, has trophies designed to make you explore the wastelands, do those cool side missions you’d otherwise ignore, and collect those rare items you otherwise wouldn’t have bothered with. Sure, two bobbleheads are one-off opportunities never to be reclaimed should you miss them, a design decision I loathe with a passion. This is exactly why Bioshock never got a deeper play-through; miss a few audio dairies and you’re boned, as well as those ridiculous “play the game on the highest difficulty setting without dying” trophies no sane man with things to do would attempt. Fallout 3 rewards you with trophies for doing things that actually make the game play experience better, which is exactly how it should be. I wish designers would pay a lot more attention to the heightened experiences well-designed trophies can offer.

The question I couldn’t escape while playing this game, though, is the obvious: would this game ever sell in Japan? The answer is obviously “no”, it certainly wouldn’t. Aside from the fact the gameplay is very “foreign”, ie. not suited to your average Japanese gamer, there is also that elephant in the room: the bomb. Part of the appeal is the what-if question of what would happen, more or less, if an atomic bomb dropped on America. Japan, of course, has the answer already, though Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never plagued by super mutants and feral ghouls, as far as we know. But so much in the game surrounds the nuclear attack, from the village called Megaton to the Nuka-cola plant, that it is almost a joke. Now don’t get me wrong, I think your average liberal lefty foreigner like myself is probably far more concerned about the sensibilities of selling such a game in Japan than our average Japanese youth. Don’t forget their own proud creation, Godzilla, rampaging and destroying whole cities to the delight of the local audiences. No, the Japanese like their fantasy global or national destruction, and few younger Japanese would probably care too much about nuclear attacks forming the background of a video game; a few psychopaths aside, the difference between reality and fantasy is well understood here.

Still, one can’t help but think: Fallout 3 paints a bleak picture of humanity’s survival and corrupt governments in a barren desolate landscape filled with destruction, death and radiation. Hiroshima and Nagasaki aside, your average Japanese gamer isn’t looking for such an experience from their entertainment, I shouldn’t wonder.

And though parts of the game are rough, buggy and badly acted, Fallout 3 is already a high-point in my gaming year and I can’t wait to see what Bethesda comes out with next. Whatever it is, and however much I’ll hate it on paper, I’m sure I’ll buy it, play it and love it. Damn that confounding developer!

2008 Japanmanship Awards Listpost

It's that time of year when all websites and blogs do a list-post regarding the most fantastic, disappointing, rubbish, sexy, stupid, numerical, pusillanimous, retarded, hyperbolic games of the year and as I've been behind my posting for a while, due to being rather busy doing other things, I thought I'd bash out a quickie listing my personal gaming highlights of 2008, combined with a little mention of what I am looking forward to most in the coming year of the cow. The awards I'm dishing out today are the "Japanmanship Nugatories", recipients of which get exactly nothing other than a mention on a middling-to-irrelevant blog.

Retail Game of the Year - Little Big Planet

I have had some fun times playing many of the astoundingly great games we've been fortunate enough to buy this and the previous year, and I have been pleasantly surprised by a lot of them. There definitely seems to have been a jump in quality, which in my estimation occurred somewhere midway 2007, after which a lot of triple-A games have been, well, fantastic. No game in recent memory, however, has given me more delight and enjoyment as Media Molecule's Little Big Planet, causing me to lay awake at night dreaming up all the contraptions I wanted to make in its excellent editor. And though it had a few teething problems at first, now the servers all seem to be running smooth and players have begun to understand and use the true power of the creation tools we are beginning to see user-generated levels that can easily match the developers' own in creativity. With a continued dripfeed of new costumes and now new content I suspect I'll be playing this game well into 2009 and possibly beyond. I urge everyone to play until the contentious level-sorting clicks in your brain after which it's smooth sailing for many many hilarious and creative months. And Stephen Fry, of course, bonus points.
Visit the official website here.

Downloadable Game of the Year - World of Goo

It has been an excellent year for download and independent games, a trend I hope and fully expect to be continued into the next year. From the excellent PixelJunk Eden, the retrogaming fanservice of MegaMan and the Bionic Commando remake to astounding development achievements like Castle Crashers my digital wallet has been under attack egregiously, which, seeing as I have a hole in my hand already when it comes to money, let alone digital magic money, has meant some months of living close to the button. One title that stands out for me, though, is 2D Boy's excellent World of Goo. It has an excellent aesthetic, a smooth yet unforgiving learning curve and offers probably the best physics-based puzzle gameplay since forever. Little touches like OCD targets and your own tower to compare to other players' are the icing on the cake. On top of that there is a lot of personal sycophancy involved too. Once employees at a large corporate game studio the 2D Boy boys went for it for themselves and, in my view, succeeded. They had a dream and went for it, and that is inspiring. The fact they created an excellent title like World of Goo in the process is both hatefully jealousy-inducing and laudable. Everybody go buy it and support their next title.
Visit the 2D Boy website here.

Timesink of the Year - Pic Pic

Counting pure hours lost on a single game 505 Games' Pic Pic for the Nintendo DS beats the rest by several man-months worth. Whenever I had some time to fill, be it loafing around listening to podcasts, battling my fiber intake issues on the toilet, waiting for the wife to get ready to go out or experimenting with not shaving to see how long it would take before the fluff gets too itchy and annoying (2 days) Pic Pic was always there. At its base a simple package it offers three different types of drawing-related puzzle games; one a simple maze game, which hasn't gotten much playtime from me yet, one a difficult to explain yet easy to understand game where you connect numbers on a grid, by far my favourite, and a third more complicated one where you draw or clear blocks in a 3 by 3 grid surrounding a number. Each puzzle type comes with an astounding 400 puzzles, ranging from the small and easy to the huge and intricate, offering the perfect five to fifteen minute play to fill the gaps in much the same way ice cream does after a particularly heavy meal. Any DS owner who claims to like puzzle games has no excuse not to own this one.
Read Eurogamer's fawning review of it here.

Free Indie Game of the Year - Dyson

Imagine an engaging, beautiful and deep strategy game for free! Well, you don't have to because there is Dyson, a procedurally generated RTS of sorts in which you, the player, tries to colonise an asteroid belt. The controls and rules are as simple as can be yet offer surprising depths of strategy and engagement. Though still in development, the title is already robust and enjoyable and I urge any broke or tight-fisted strategy gamer to check it out.
Download Dyson here.

Console of the Year - Playstation 3

Being a slightly regretful owner of all three of the current-gen systems, I base this vote entirely on which console I've spent the most time playing. With the XBox360 having died on me several times this year I have lost all confidence in it and though I occasionally buy some XBLA games, I have stopped buying retail games because I can never be sure I can play them at any given time. The Wii, though exciting, new and shiny, with perfect usability and several fun games, I found is hardly ever used anymore. I only switch it on to stop that annoying blue light flashing in my peripheral vision when watching television. My problems with it are twofold. Mostly it is the lack of games that personally interest me, with the big Nintendo titles cleared and lacking replay value. Secondly, it lacks an achievement/trophy system which I have found myself totally addicted to on the other consoles, actually playing and replaying games often just for the points. Which leaves the embattled Playstation 3. It's undeniably a decent bit of kit, especially my early release one, with its multitude of USB ports and PS2 compatibility and of course a Blu-Ray drive. It has several, though obviously not enough, excellent games on it, including my personal game of the year above. Its on-line store is slowly filling out. Which is why I am so annoyed by Sony for basically fucking up the marketing (and pricing) so badly. Every time a Sony executive opens his mouth and lets forth a stream of obvious nonsense a kitten dies somewhere, for I think the PS3 is worthy of more success than Sony has been able to muster.

Most Over-hyped Game of the Year - Metal Gear Solid 4

It's hard to think of any hyperbole not heaped upon Metal Gear Solid 4, and though it is obviously an accomplished game made by a huge team of remarkably talented people, it did turn out to be the most ridiculous, badly paced and tedious experiences of the year until Sony released Playstation Home. From the terrible writing, the badly cut cut-scenes and gameplay that tried to be a Jack of all trades but ended up nothing in particular, the weird technical choices, including lengthy installs and loading screens that required a button-press to move away from, the game just fell flat for me on every aspect. It causes me no end of annoyance when people praise the story and writing in this game as it is so obviously of the level of your average 14 year old fanboy with too much time on his hands. The secret of writing is to cut away as much as you can and still have the story make sense, yet during the development of Metal Gear Solid 4 it seems they kept every tiny scrap of paper anyone ever made a scribble on and threw it on the pile. You may think it was a great game, but, frankly, you're wrong.

Blog of the Year - Brainy Gamer

This might be a little contentious, as Michael Abbott's, the author of the Brainy Gamer blog, views and my own differ remarkably on most, if not all levels. He engages in over-analysis of games, throws around names of filmmakers and artist as if their work is comparable to video games and promotes many other bloggers with the same stances. Which is exactly why he deserves a mention. His blog posts are almost always of a high quality and well thought out, he is turning into a spokesperson, of sorts, of the gaming blogging community and spends a lot of obvious effort and time in producing sporadic podcasts. The fact I disagree with him so much makes it more interesting to read for me, as it usually engages my brain and makes me consider, sometimes, though not often, reconsider my own views. In a medium filled with bile and hatred as well as fanboyish flamboyance, The Brainy Gamer sits comfortably in an important and overlooked niche of thoughtful, well-written and optimistic navel-gazing. Usually when I strongly disagree with certain bloggers, I simply stop reading them, yet Mr. Abbott keeps me coming back. One day I might be able to break his spirit, but it's more likely he will end up breaking mine.
Brainy up your game here.

Most Anticipated of 2009 - Cletus Clay

I am a sucker for interesting visual styles. I am also a sucker for old-fashioned arcade platforming and shooting games. So when I first heard about Cletus Clay, a claymation old-fashioned arcade shooting game, well, my brain imploded. Coming from the nimble fingers of Anthony Flack of Platypus fame and a small band of co-developers I have nothing but high hopes that my personal gaming proclivities will be satisfied when the title finally makes it out. Whether that will be 2009 is still in question, but I will certainly spend the next year keeping a close eye on the game. This is exactly the kind of weird shit that publishers shy away from yet can flourish in the bustling and growing world of independent development.
Read about Cletus Clay development here.

Personal Gaming Moment of the Year

Reaching the end of level platform in Little Big Planet while playing with three of my mates and trying to obscure the winner from view by standing in front of him and generally being a dick, followed by running around his pod like a child on a sugar-rush and pulling people around and jumping, all the while tears of childish joy streaming from my face as I laughed like an idiot for five solid minutes. I have not had such simple child-like enjoyment of a game for decades and reminded me exactly what games are supposed to be: just plain fun.

After 2007 it was hard to imagine a repeat of the many great games we had, yet 2008 did a remarkable job at it. Global recession be damned, I hope 2009 will continue this upward trend of excellence in gaming in both the commercial and independent fields. I finally have the sense that gaming has "grown up", meaning it has solidified into a real, immensely diverse quality medium rather than a bedroom tits and guns distraction for single geeky teens with acne.

Not going Home

Sony, in their continued efforts to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, has just recently released their version of an on-line community for the PS3, Playstation Home, to the wider public as, possibly, the least anticipated piece of software in the history of time wasting. I was unlucky enough to have been invited to participate in the closed Beta a while back and have already had my fill of Home, to the extent that failure to connect to the servers on the day the Beta became open to everybody I deleted the application and freed up another 4 Gigabytes of "reserved space" on my harddisk.

Though I'm weary of jumping on the Home hate bandwagon now roaring out of control over many a gaming website and forum, though believe me, I hate it, I am more annoyed at Sony for making me distrust my instincts. Am I, possibly, too out of touch with the wider gaming audience? I remember Will Wright pulled this trick on me before with The Sims. Early teaser trailers had be guffawing and shaking my head in disbelief. No way, I thought, could this be anything other than a disaster. Who in their right minds would play this horseshit? And as sales figures and my own subsequent addiction to the Sims has proven, my instincts can be drastically wrong sometimes and, having learned my lesson, I vowed never to jump to conclusions on new, wacky, unproven ideas.

Home, though, isn't unproven as an idea. The massive success of other on-line virtual communities has been a floating dollar sign for many a marketing executive with especially titles as Second Life raking in piles of cash and becoming cultural phenomena. The fact Home had to happen seems almost a given. And on paper Home seems awesome. A free piece of software that will add a Mii/Avatar function to your Sony ID, a home room to decorate as you see fit, special game-related items and rooms to become available over time, it seems a fantastic little gift from Sony to its users.

"Seems" obviously being the operative word there. In reality it is a cumbersome and slow piece of software that is a barely disguised excuse to hoist micropaid contents on a strangely suspecting userbase. With plenty of quick downloads of videos and trailers already, Home's slow streaming non-full-screen movie theater seems to add several layers of uselessness to an already smooth process. Very limited avatar creation options makes Home's zombie-like characters take a distant third place after my Nintendo Mii and Microsoft's Avatars. It's strange that the most simplistic looking of the three, the Mii, turns out to be the most powerful, with my Mii being a dead ringer for my own handsome self, my Avatar looking like a Barbie version of me and my Home avatar looking like an emaciated skater-version of Marky Mark, like pretty much seventy percent of my fellow Home users.

Technical issues too make Home an embarassment rather than a showcase for PS3 power, of which I know it has a lot. From the wonky avatar to the massive tedium of load-times, which really seem inexcusable, to the static and fuzzy scenery outside my bachelor pad. Queues for games in the game center too seem ridiculous, and having to boot up the beta for Namco Museum to play two levels of Dig Dug, only to be awarded a small Dig Dug doll to decorate my home with doesn't seem worth the 10 minute wait. Original arcade games available are nothing more than sub-standard on-line Flash type games. The choice of furniture and apartments extremely limited with more available for extortionate micropayments - trust Sony to turn micropayments into extortion. And as I am not in the slightest bit interested in seeing my Marky Mark me watch a poster for an upcoming game, there simply is no reason for me to endure Home.

But am I, are all of us bitching about Home online, wrong? To me Second Life sounds like torture, yet it is immensely popular. Does Joe Public care about these technical issues, or are they simply happy to inhabit a virtual word where they can pick up fat, middle-aged guys pretending to be 14 year old girls?

A case could be made that due to the PS3's high price the bulk of its users are possibly informed hardcore gamers, whom are all too enlightened to swallow this bullshit. But one could also assume that software like Home could be effectively used to market at the more casual gamer, just an extra little carrot for the "soft-core" crowd, bringing in new users and helping shift units. I'm sure the latter is already happening as, as I mentioned above, the idea of Home sounds pretty good on paper and in marketing blurbs; it's only when you get your hands on it that you realise it's not all it's cracked up to be.

However much I personally think Home is a waste of effort, time, money and opportunity, I think I'll shy away from proclaiming its failure until we have some hard figures to peruse. I have a nagging feeling that possibly Sony could surprise us. Well, maybe not Sony but PS3 users. In a sense I kind of hope they do because I am tired of all the PS3-bashing, even though Sony has, in its disastrous attempts to keep hold of its PS2 lead into the next generation, deserved every bit of scorn it has been subjected to. The Playstation 3 is an awesome piece of hardware, and more and more excellent games are being released. I want it to do better than it is, and the only things stopping that right now are Sony, its executives and their marketing. And possibly Home. One step forward, two steps back?

Not my cup of tea

I'm no great fan of games journalism but I'll admit it has been getting a little better over time. For example, the days a reviewer who openly hates a certain genre of game writing a review of a game in that genre and panning it are, generally, over. What I have noticed, though, is that it's becoming quite common for games trying something different and being criticised for it for not doing it "right", meaning the way the reviewer was expecting it. The same reviewers, mind you, who usually harp on about innovation. The reviewers who think they are part of quality control and game design and think their input is a necessary requirement to make a game good.

Three titles that have received this treatment recently in various dark corners of the internet and pod-sphere, which, I'll admit, are three titles I personally am a great fan of, are Mirror's Edge, Little Big Planet and Biohazard 5. And some of the reactions have me stumped.

In Mirror's Edge, for example, the player, through her parcour adventures, may pick up a gun or two. It was obviously a design decision to handle this a certain way, namely that it interferes with the running and jumping, which is what the game is about after all. So you can pick up a gun, yes, you can use it, yes, but really you should be thinking on your feet, literally. Grab, fire, drop and run. Aside from the fact this is a refreshing approach in the usually gun-porn heavy FPS genre, I like it for forcing the player to stick to the game's main control scheme. Yet, if some reviewers are to be believed, if you show a gun in a game, the game has to function as a full-blown FPS in the Call of Duty sense of the word. They moan that the intentional gimping of the controls is a tease, a broken design. Every game with guns, they imply, has to work as a perfect FPS shooting game, or else!

Biohazard too suffers from this reviewers' myopia. The game makes it impossible to run and shoot at the same time, which, as it did in Biohazard 4, causes some tense, intense moments where you sweat it out, cornered by a horde of zombies all coming at you with pickaxes and chainsaws. Every bullet you fire requires you to stand still and aim carefully, much like you would in real life incidentally. Yet people seem to complain you can't run and shoot at the same time, that when aiming the camera moves slower and that you can't strafe. In short, they complain it isn't Call of Duty or any other fast-action run-and-gun FPS.

Little Big Planet too has seen some controversy over their Z-jumping where, in an essentially 2D game the player is automatically put into one of three levels of depth. Now to be honest I too was a little disoriented by this. But a few levels in it just clicks and it doesn't become a problem anymore (except in a few badly designed levels floating out there). There are certain rules for the level-sorting and they make perfect sense, and once you wrap your head around it and don't fight it it works beautifully. But as it is essentially a 2D game experience people complain it isn't 2D enough and that this weird 3rd dimension to the levels with its automatic jumping around is a total game-breaker.

Of course there are plenty of people who, like me, love the games above and click nicely with the control schemes. But a small, often vocal minority seems to think doing something different it a bad thing. What is the harm in thinking something just is not your cup of tea? Personally I hated the early entries in the Biohazard series, mostly because of the controls. I didn't criticise them for doing it wrong, I didn't expect them to do it differently, I just didn't like it and hence didn't play the games. Only when Biohazard 4 came around did I give the series another go and I was hooked. (For non-Japanese Xbox360 users, by the way, the demo for Biohazard 5 is utterly awesome; it's Biohazard 4, basically, with a little plus alpha.)

The way Mirror's Edge designed its weapons use, Biohazard its limited moving and firing capabilities and Little Big Planet its 2.5 level sorting are uncommon, yes, and they might need some time to get used to. Some people might just plain not like it. But so what? It works for some. Don't demand a game to be more like what it isn't, open your mind or simply don't play it; just play the shooters and 2D platformers that conform to your expectations and leave the rest of us to enjoy something different.

Tokyo Gameshow 2008

Here is a top tip for readers from abroad who want the real news on the Tokyo Gameshow: if the site you are reading news items from also features articles and posts on other "wacky" Japanese sights and activities the "reporters" have seen, like crazy bondage doll gift egg machines or weird trans-gender cosplay in Akihabara or, most tellingly, reports on "cool swag" the "reporter" picked up in Tokyo or at the show, well, then your "reporter" is way too enamoured by Japan to be able to give you an objective view and opinion on the products on display. They are not reporting on the show but walking around in a wide-eyed daze of excitement and geekiness, "omfg I'm in Japan!", which clearly clouds the mind that that weird, colourful stamp licking DS game is actually probably just a shit game, and not an amazing example of Japan's creativity or that the show itself is exciting or significant, which it really isn't.

I'm not being overly miserable here, I do "get" it. I was very much like that too when I first moved to Japan. The lights, the sights, the people, the madness, it was all a little overwhelming. But over time the sheen wears off and the truth outs, and those fantastic little toys I got then are now revealed to be cheap tat and the Tokyo Gameshow, for me once an amazing experience of Japan's video game industry's extravaganza, is well past its prime and diminishing more every year. This is not just my perception; it can be seen at the show itself, if you are unclouded by the otaku hype, once filling the entire Makuhari Messe twice a year and now barely filling up half of it once a year. It's glory days are over and its function, to inform and entertain, long since taken over by the internet, a much more convenient and comfortable way of getting your game-related news. For developers it remains an excuse to escape the desk for a day or two and to meet up with peers, do business and get drunk. For the consumer, though, it's in obvious decline.

Despite my traditional, yearly resolution to never go again, I went to the show this Friday, the second of the two business days. I avoid, at all cost, going on a public day, as the crowds are far less manageable on those days. I'm there to meet people and check out the competition, not to hustle and bustle and queue up for lengths of time to play a demo of a game I'm not really interested in. This year, again, only 2 of the big halls were in use, with half of a third dedicated to university booths and cheap curry stalls. That said, half of one of the main halls featured more business oriented booths, with representatives from several far corners of the world pimping their middleware or promoting their country as a game developers' haven. Several new technology stands could also be found, from a "mind reading" controller, which seemed interesting but was marred by a terrible demo game experience, and head-tracking helmets.

This left the rest for the usual suspects; Microsoft, Sony, Square, et all. The main focus of attention was, shock horror, stop the press, Monster Hunter, digital crack to the Japanese for some reason. Sizable lines were also seen at Biohazard 5 (Resident Evil 5) and whatever Square had in its walled off area. Level 5 went so far as to hide their entire stage area with a massive curtain for each show. This attitude, alongside the "no photos!" rules confuse me; is this not a PR/marketing event? Why force a useless and irritating sense of exclusivity upon it? Madness. Little Big Planet too had some attention and seemed to enthrall the visitors. What with the reveal of Sepiroth and old Snake sackboys it would seem the game is on its way to make a bit of a splash in Japan too. That said, you never really know, do you? Monster Hunter will outsell anything anyway.

And that, basically, was it. Another long, tiring and headache-inducing day with no surprises or flabbergastering. A new title was revealed here and there, with the obligatory 5 second, pre-rendered and uninformative teaser trailers, but there was nothing there that wasn't expected or known already. This Saturday and Sunday is time for the punters to check out there wares, which they'll do in droves, and to dress up and be photographed, but I am glad it's over for another year.

Never again. And this time I mean it.

See you there next year.

Little Big Whoop

I am not often given to hyperbole, as everyone knows, and it is hard for me to get excited about games these days. Well, I say that but we've had an amazing year or two of excellent releases, but still, I could not have predicted how a single, upcoming title would grab my attention the way it has.

Like so many hopefuls I signed up to the Little Big Planet beta a good few weeks back and like so many hopefuls I wasn't successful, but, as so many hopefuls, we got a second chance as they expanded the number of users recently. My key was actually delivered to me on the cusp of a night on the town. You can imagine how torn I was, having to choose between good food and booze with friends and a glimpse at the one title I am most hotly anticipating. As it happened the former option narrowly won out, but once I got home, drunk and satiated, I managed to download my LBP Beta and give it a good go. Or rather, I fumbled about, fell asleep in a drunken stumpour and woke up, hungover but excited, and gave it a second, non-blurry glance. And it's had its cute hooks in me ever since.

The style is, as is obvious, heart-meltingly cute. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's going to get some attention in Japan, if the squeals of delight my wife produced are anything to go by. Watching a random Japanese player dressed as a pink rabbit sackboy grab my little Shakespeare sackboy and drag him around, having me slap him away, pulling a toothy grin and doing the pointy hand dance made us both smile like a democrat watching a Sarah Palin interview. The wonderfully low-fi quality of the design is just so refreshing in the current pool of brown-gray and the obvious humour dotted around the place, from the World's Best Credits Sequence to the little sackboy emotion animations should guarantee those smarmy bastards at Media Molecule some kind of industry award, or a cuddle at the very least.

Thought all of this was known to me from watching, and rewatching, the many videos and presentations on-line, to the extent I pre-ordered it the very second I was able to do so, I had niggling doubts about the "2.0" nature of the game. Were the tools going to be robust enough, fun enough for your average user to create the content to make this game the hit it so obviously deserves to be? After the slightly disappointing display that was Spore, which had fantastic editors that in the end didn't sit well with the rest of the title, in my humble opinion, I was on the fence with this one. I honestly believed that user generated content was going to be a buzzword that wasn't going to survive the next fiscal year. But then, I also thought at the time the Sims was a ridiculous idea that was going to flop, so I've learned my lesson about jumping to conclusions.

After just a few days with the Beta, I found, I am having Tetris Dreams. The LBP editor is keeping from sleep, as I lie awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of all the ways I could use the tools to make elaborate traps and levels. Though being bored, with nothing to do, at work as I sit out my notice isn't the most engaging activity anways, I find my daytime too is filled with daydreams of possibility and creativity. Seeing what amazing creations several users have made, and shared, in this mere beta stage I am astounded and daren't imagine what creations wait around the corner once the title is in full release. The editor, in short, is an amazing toy that just fires up my otherwise moribund creativity.

Still, I think I'll wait and see what happens before making any huge pronouncements on its success. It's obvious the tool allows the creative mind to do wonderful things, but it remains to be seen if your average, non-creative user with little time on his hands is going to use it. I think there will probably be a tiny percentage of users creating playable, fun levels for the vast majority to enjoy. But I also think that will be enough. And I'm sure some creative and dedicated LBP users can use the tools to create a game design portfolio that can help their way into an industry job; so vast are the options that truly creative brainfarts are executable within it and I can't wait to see what is going to be out there.

I am not so over-hyped as to notice the game itself isn't without fault. The idea of having to unlock "building blocks" before being able to use them in the editor seems a little onerous and the three layers of the game field are often a little hard to navigate. But compared to the tremendous fun I've had with the beta just these few days these are minor niggles. The fact I can't log into a server if my PS3's system language is set to anything other than Japanese should be considered a major bug, though, and one I am hoping Media Molecule will deal with.

At the moment there seems little hype for the game in Japan. I don't quite understand why Sony isn't pushing this game into everybody's faces; let's wait and see if they do something for this week's Tokyo Gameshow. I truly think Media Molecule has hit upon a style that could appeal to the Japanese consumer. Sackboy certainly has the looks to be the kind of mascot that can be plastered over all manner of product for advertising purposes. Damn, he's cute! Whether they are interested in the user-creation part of the game here remains to be seen, but I'll be very surprised if the title bombs in Japan. If it does I'm going to blame Sony marketing.

Of course, as Titan Quest shows us, a fantastic tool does not guarantee a success, and LBP's editor could overwhelm your average gamer. But it's powerful and playful enough to make me think there will be something special come the final version. I, personally, can't wait. For once the (western) media's hype and my own seem perfectly matched and the product, what's I've experienced of it, delivers in ways I could never have hoped.

I know, I know, this is basically nothing more than a pretty sycophantic love-letter to Media Molecule and their excellent game, but I don't get this excited that often, so take it as it comes.

I am Joe's utter lack of surprise

In the pre-Tokyo Gamehow press hype it is probably all over the internet by now but Nintendo have finally announced a new DS iteration, this time with larger screens, a thinner design, no GBA port, a camera and whatnot. Aside from the fact I had picked up this rumour a while back through some trusted sources*, this should really not come as any great surprise to anybody; it's the classic Nintendo Way(tm).

Looking at the new features, especially the camera and the funky software with which to manipulate your photographs, it seems to be aimed quite squarely at the DS's biggest market; Japanese women. It seems like a lot of fluffy fun and though technically not on par with other alternatives on the market, it does seem to get the "gee, this is fun" element right; Nintendo have long since given up on the specs race and have focused mainly on functionality and low manufacturing costs. And so far it's been a winning strategy. To this day the number of DSs I see in the wild outnumber the PSPs by a huge margin.

So if the DS follows the GBA redesign route we can see one more iteration of the DS before its demise, possibly a novelty version (GBA Micro?), and onto the DS2, whatever that may be. I expect the DS to survive for quite a while yet, and sales figures are still good. I still think they should release a Louis Vuitton themed DS. Personally I still like to see more Wii/DS connectivity and who knows, with this new version's better Wifi this may be on the cards. Being able to see my DS on my large TV would be great; it's the only way I ended up playing GBA games on the GBA Player for the Gamecube. Control will be an issue, though, but I'm sure some boffin somewhere will sort that out.

Obviously I don't need a DSi, but as a free agent it's more important than ever that I keep up to date with progress. That is, at least, the excuse I'll tell my wife, along with the promise she can take over my DS Lite, as she took over my DS when I bought that. It won't work, of course, but I can handle a few days of grumbling and exasperated head shaking . I mean, I can't buy every GBA iteration and then not buy every DS one, can I? That's not the mentality that made me a Club Nintendo platinum member.

* Sorry, I have no desire to be the new Surfergirl.

The Truth about games, apparently

Let's face it, television never lies. That is just one of those facts. And television, as well as other media, teaches us a lot about video games and video game development.

* * *

Video games are played almost exclusively by young boys who sit upright on pouffes a few inches away from a CRT television and hold their controllers up in front of them. All games can be played while mashing buttons and simultaneously holding conversations with the person standing behind you.

Though graphics have progressed, video game sound has hit its peak in the mid-80s. Even today sophisticated FPS games use bleeps and bloops for audio, incessantly.

The only genres in video games are sports and shooting.

A lot of games require text input, which must be delivered in perfect English grammar and must be sounded out by the player as he is typing.

Video game development studios are always housed in lush, modern buildings with a lot of space and cool, trendy lighting and technology. There are never any security measures for visiting friends, family, delivery boys or crime scene investigators who can waltz through the premises with impunity.

The boss's star employee in every company is the programming genius, with an I.Q. in the high 300s with matching sociopath tendencies. Or indeed homicidal tendencies. He always has his own office which is spacious and has many, many monitors and awards.

The best job in video game development is that of Quality Assurance, or "tester", but competition is hard. Only the most super-elite video game playing masters need apply, but they get compensated extremely well and everybody looks up to them.

Triple-A, next-gen, big name productions require a team of around 7 people with job titles as "gore designer" and "bullet programmer". It may look like they live in a frat-house like, spacious office, but this tiny band of heroes actually makes your games for you. Except those times when the rogue tester creates an entire game on his own to wow the boss with, at home, doing code, art and design, while being stoned most of the time.

Nobody in game development is older than 23. Producers and bosses may be older, but only if they are metrosexual and take care of themselves, like ex-surfer dudes with money. Developers themselves are pretty and handsome in bland GAP-model ways, but all female developers geek themselves up by wearing glasses.

The role of the producer is to come up with game ideas.

Video games that inspire murders can faithfully recreate the circumstances of the real-life murder and lead to revelations on the identity of the murderer.

Massively-multiplayer on-line worlds are run and kept up by one guy.

Browser games look identical in style and quality to the best console games and load up in seconds.

You can always tell if an artificial intelligence wants to kill you because it will ask you, using a bad speech synthesizer, if you want to play a game. Never play games with a computer that asks you to play with it out of the blue.

Game development is fun!

Episodic done right

I’ve dipped my toe in the episodic gaming world once or twice. The results were usually pleasant enough, if never overwhelming. The Sam & Max series, for example, were mostly fun but as games paled in comparison to the original and the art re-use was always a little too obvious. American McGee too is currently toying around with the concept with his Grimm series and Telltale are further building on the idea with Strongbad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. It’s all go, apparently. However, I was most pleasantly surprised by Insomniac’s Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty, released this week over the Playstation Network.

I have just spent a very fun few hours of a hang-over blighted Saturday playing through R&C:QFB and it was tremendous fun. Coming as it does on the heels of the full-priced Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction, it continues the story and play mechanics. Needless to say you’ll have to have enjoyed the latter before contemplating purchasing the former, but as it was undoubtedly a superb gaming experience it took me a mere 2 seconds to opt for the download.

I fully expect to see more of such “plus alpha” games appearing on PSN, it makes perfect sense. You reuse the tools, tech and assets that so many people have sweated over for so long and build a quicker, new game out of it of such high visual quality and presentational sheen it already stands head and shoulders over the competition in the download market. Development is quick and cheap, compared to the full game, and it keeps the fans warm for when the next instalment arrives, which, as by the unspoken rules of video game markets, must somehow require all new art and tech. It only took a few hours to complete, which is cheap at even half the price, but I was rewarded with a promise of more of the same this autumn, which I’ll lap up like a thirsty kitten when the time comes.

Insomniac really did deliver, in so many ways, even beyond the excellent craftsmanship of the game itself. We had a simultaneous release in Japan and the West, a very cheap price point pushing it nicely into the impulse buy sector, a fully localised game that sets its language to your system’s preferred choice as opposed to your IP, even in Japan, and, a commitment from the developers to deliver more, soon. Nothing is quite as good as feeling a little delicate one weekend, deciding there and then to buy a game, install it within minutes, play and finish it before the day is done.

I fully expect more companies to follow suit. Why spend years on creating a pipeline and assets only to never use them again? And indeed, many games could follow suit. There is of course the much touted extra content for Grand Theft Auto 4, though not owning the Xbox version nor a functioning Xbox, that will pass me by. Though not a full-priced game itself, PixelJunk Eden could easily add extra gardens to prolong the wonderful gameplay. Why not add an extra few hours of storyline to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, using all the art assets and tech of the game but simply create some new areas and extra story?

If you want your fans to keep giving you money it’s extra games like Quest for Booty that give you the most bang for your buck, especially as a consumer, as opposed to paying for a few extra multiplayer maps or extra costumes, God forbid. Previously boxed games had a very short timeframe to sell, as sales would usually drop off significantly after the initial months. Using extra episodic content can keep money coming in on the back of that first initial development cycle. And even better, because such episodic extras are cheap and quick to produce, you’ll face less internet fury over “leeching the consumers dry” or “cynically reusing stuff from the previous game”. This is exactly what Quest for Booty does, and I feel in no way cheated!

As if the glass wasn’t half-full enough, I have to say that slowly PSN is shaping up to be what we all hoped it would be. Though I may have spent more money on full, boxed PS3 games, I have actually spent most time playing PSN titles, and that will certainly have an influence on my future purchases.