Happion Labs GameDevBlog

I Never Talked About Steam

I never mentioned that the way I got Half-Life 2 was online via Steam.  Now, say what you will about the whole online authentication thing (actually, don't, but I'll get to that later), I feel it's my God-given right to buy videogames without leaving the house.  I was one of the few adopters of Interplay's online thingy;  I've tried the Yahoo games-on-demand thing;  and now Steam.  The whole thing went as smoothly as I might have hoped;  it took a good long time (overnight, pretty much) but it would have taken longer to get it from Amazon.

Awesome.  Big win for Valve, because they can

a) write Vivendi out of the equation.  Instead of whatever scraps Vivendi throws them after they've "covered their marketing and administrative overhead" or whatever, they get FIFTY WHOLE DOLLARS PER GAME.  Go Valve.

b) hide from the rest of the world just exactly how much money they're making.

c) automatic patches.  Just a fringe benefit.

What didn't go smoothly was the online validation.  It worked the first time I played it, and then my bizarre firewall software decided to refuse contact with Valve in the future, and I had no idea it could do that, and Valve's only tech support was through e-mail, which took a few days of back-and-forth before they finally figured out it was my firewall software.

So that sucks, right?  I should be hopping up and down, mad, bitching about how I can't get to play the game I already paid for.  Well, my biggest complaint would be that they could spend more on tech support.  Like, maybe have phones.  And enough people to answer them.  Maybe some day they will. 

But I totally support the online validation thing, because PC game sales are in the toilet--have been steadily declining for years--and part of the reason is piracy.  It's driving everybody to make MMO's, for Christ's sake, and I don't particularly enjoy MMO's.  I'd like to see a day when all PC games are online validated, and PC games are making money again, and developers could maybe afford to take a risk developing a game that might not be the best PC game ever.

On the other hand, I'd like to see them eventually, some day, once HL2 isn't making that much money for them anymore, (or if they looked like they might suddenly go out of business), release a patch that disabled the online validation.  Because it's hard enough to go back and play classic games, without things like this on top of everything.

Quick Note On Parappa

Parappa is only superficially a Simon Says game - the real way to beat Parappa is to improvise your raps.  I was never actually that good at hitting the right timings, but if I just beat out a rhythm I thought was cool, I'd get amazing scores.  It really is a situation where the player controls the game.  I was actually a little disappointed, because I wanted to learn better rhythm, and invented my own meta-game where I didn't allow myself to improvise.

A New Game

I've gone over two weeks without videogames.  Sort of.  Played a little *God of War* at work, I mean, how could I not?  And then there's the DDR.  Even still, there are cravings.  I keep habitually going to Gamerankings and checking out the new games.  It looks like the PSP has some killer apps.  I've still got Halo 2 waiting to be played, and whatever was last shipped from Gamefly.  Haven't opened it yet.  Tom Forsyth pointed out a modern Windows-port of Elite I want to check out.  And then there's this text MMO that sounds interesting.

Reading *Rules of Play* I just finished the chapter on Gaming-As-Pleasure.  An intriguing chapter that I wish went deeper.  My favorite games seem to hit that pleasure thing right on.  This is probably more due to my particular tastes than to a unified theory of game pleasure, though.  Anyhow, the chapter ends discussing gaming-as-addiction, and they basically brush the idea off as stupid.  It reminded me of something I blogged about a long time ago.  Stevie Case and Mark Surfas brushed off the addiction idea as stupid, also.  I'm not sure that's the tack to take - as I said before, let's admit that it is an addiction.  But a fairly harmless one.  Like caffeine.

(On the violence thing in that old article, I now know more than I knew then.  Motor vehicles and firearms kill way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way more people than videogames.)

Taking the past couple weeks to detox has actually been good for me - I've gotten some reading done, I've invented a card game designed to lead to emergent stories (it needs a *lot* of work, but it shows some promise), and I've started submitting short fiction to Zoetrope, an online writer's workshop thingy.

And then, today, I realized:  Zoetrope is a computer game.  You turn in your short story, and then people review it.  The goal is to get better review scores.  It's a hard game.  High variance.  Tough to tell what the rules are;  and the rules are constantly changing.  You can't just copy the best story up there and expect to get the same score they got.  And it's part diplomacy;  you can butter up the reviewers when you review their stories, and increase your points.  I'd forgotten how addictive it is.  I'm sublimating.  One game addiction for another.

The Return of Dragon's Lair

What do these games have in common?

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga

Resident Evil 4

God of War

DDR

That's right, they all have segments where cues on the screen tell you what buttons to press, and if you press the right buttons you get to continue with what you're doing, be it combo or cutscene.  It's the Dragon's Lair aesthetic - press the right button and we'll let you keep playing / watching your movie.

Part of me hates this.  It's like, the games are controlling *us*, man, when it's supposed to be the other way around, you dig?  When we talk about how graphics keep getting better but game mechanics haven't evolved, this is what we mean.  We're still falling back on Dragon's Lair.

Another part of me is fine with it, and saying, "Sign me up."  DDR is still totally engaging to me.  (Though Parappa & Amplitude/Frequency are better as far as gaming goes.)  When I kill a boss with a simon-says series of button presses in God of War I still chuckle to myself and say, "Heh-heh, look what I did."  And as long as it's only part of the game - a mini-game - hey, why not?  The variety is nice.

Er, I thought I had more to say on the subject than that.

Obviously, this is not the blog to come to if you want rabid opinionated ranting.

Lego Star Wars?

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/924063.asp?q=lego%20star%20wars

So this is the first I've heard of it.  My first instinct is to ask, WTF?  People who've perused the archives of my old blogs (since nobody actually read my oldest blog realtime...) will know I'm opposed to this sort of thing:  http://fristrom.editthispage.com/2002/05/31.  "Don't simulate a simulation," I say.  In fact, lego games in general are suspect if you're trying to hit the mass market, as legos are a simulation in themselves, so why make a second order simulation by trying to turn them into a game? 

Then there's the bizarre feeling as IP collects media.  I had the same feeling when *Spider-Man* jumped from comics to movies to games.  We weren't just a *Spider-Man* game, we were *Spider-Man: The Movie: The Game*.  This is even weirder than that.  What next?  *Star Wars: The Breakfast Cereal: The Game*?

Presumably this is the result of strange politics.  Lego has a videogame branch.  Lego would like to see their videogames sell better.  (Haven't checked the TRST data lately, but I haven't noticed Lego titles having much of an impact.  Maybe that's because you shouldn't simulate a simulation?)  Lego says, "I know, let's do the surefire recipe for success!  Add the biggest license in history!"  Lucas says, "Okay, I'll take your money."  And *Star Wars:  Lego:  The Game* is born.

And it's probably a smart move by the Lego guys.  It probably will sell more than their other titles.  Although a smarter move might be shutting down their videogame branch completely?  *Star Wars:  Episode 3:  The Game* will outsell this.  (Check back later to see if this prediction is actually correct!)

How's Lego doing in general, in this time where "the videogame is replacing the boardgame", as J. Allard put it in the Microsoft Keynote at GDC?  Are kids buying less Lego?  Is moving into videogames a desperation move from a company trying to stay alive?  That would be a shame.  Legos are cool.  I'm looking forward to when Sofi's old enough.  (Even if it's true I'd argue that they should focus on their core competency, anyhow.  Forget growth:  there will always be people out there who want Lego.  Charge whatever they're willing to pay.  There's still one company left that makes horse whips and they charge a damn high price for them.)  If I was a more diligent blogger, like Costikyan, I'd look this up myself. 

All that said, it does look kind of cool, doesn't it?

There's a couple neat things going on there, and one of them is this:  the characters are stylized.  As Treyarch's developing *Ultimate Spider-Man* I'm learning that stylized characters avoid that whole "Uncanny Valley" problem that everyone's talking about these days.  Also, emotions are less subtle and easier to read on these stylized characters.  The same thing's going on with these Lego guys.

Also, there's just something fetishistic about Lego.  These forms and colors have been burned into our brains at a tender age. 

I'm almost tempted to play it.  If only it was Episodes IV, V, and VI.

I Can Quit Any Time I Want

A lot of good games came out last year, but for whatever reason, none of them gave me the same sorts of joy that the previous year brought, with its *Prince of Persia* and *Beyond Good & Evil*.  And yet, even though I'm not getting that joy, I keep playing.  Grinding.  I am like the addict, who keeps on taking coke, hoping for the hit that will feel like the first time.

The answer?  Detox.  Stop playing for a while.  Maybe a month.  That's how long they go in moderation management. 

I started last week;  Oasis was the last videogame I played.  (It was quite pleasant, by the way.  Now that they're finaling, I recommend it.  That is, unless you're trying to forgo videogames for a month.)

I can chronicle my withdrawal symptoms, such as they are, here.  The first symptom is that every now and then I'm actually bored for a moment.  Then I play with Sofi or find something to read or to do on the web and everything's fine.

The temptation that's tough to resist:  my brother sent me a copy of *Halo* for Christmas.  It arrived last week.  (You think that's bad;  he hasn't gotten my Christmas present yet.)  *Halo* is just sitting there on the wet bar.  Waiting.  Such an attractive package. 

It's just videogames, by the way:  boardgames are still in bounds.  Scrabble with the wife.  Citadels or Diceland or Lord of the Rings or whatever at the Wednesday boardgame lunch.  Maybe some Go with Mark if I can talk him into it.  (Monday Go lunch?)  And, well, better keep playing DDR, that's good exercise.  And if I have to play an hour or so of something at work for "research purposes" here and there...

No, I've quit, really!

Putting It Yet Another Way

In still other words, although a blue square GTA might be kind of fun, it wouldn't be clear that it's "holy crap, once you get the graphics in this is going to sell at least 500,000 copies" fun.

Even if you'd given me GTA, the original 2D one, and said, "Hey, want to fund a 3D version of this?" I'd probably say something like, "Well, we'll fund you for six months:  get the carjacking and open city tech up-and-running, and if you hit that, we'll fund you to the end of the project."

And in so doing, possibly miss out on the greatest franchise ever.  I have no idea how long it took for Rockstar to get that stuff going.  It may have been more than six months.

I Put That Really Badly

Managed to stir up a lot of comments there.  Ok, so I was wrong.  I have to agree that the mechanics of Halo, DMC, GTA actually are fun by themselves in many ways, and I probably would appreciate blue square versions of all those games on some level.  But if I was an executive I wouldn't have greenlighted any of those games on the basis of a blue square demo, because they would lack the visceral fun that I believe the console market craves.  The non-blue-square versions of those games have that visceral fun in spades.

Morning Blog Reading

Typepad's being sluggish today.  See how much I can get down before Sofi (quietly sitting on my lap right now, but it seems like she's about to get bored and freak out) puts a stop to it.

Commented on a couple other blogs, thought I'd share with everyone.

Ron Gilbert (http://www.grumpygamer.com) points out that it's not distribution, it's marketing, that makes it tough for indys to break in.  Couldn't agree more.  At which point it's simply about money - how do you compete with a $20M marketing budget?  (If an indy had that kind of money, they could probably convince retailers to carry their games, even.)

Over on http://www.terranova.com, Cory Ondrejka, in an aside, said that if your placeholder-art (or "blue squares", as he called it) demo isn't fun, your game won't be fun.  That actually isn't true.  Halo, Devil May Cry, Grand Theft Auto, and World of Warcraft would not be fun if all the characters were blue squares. (Or even cubes.) The real power of a Blue Squares demo is this: if your Blue Squares demo actually IS fun, then God Damn, once you get graphics in there it's going to be AWESOME.

Sofi starting to freak, now.

Rules of Play, Rules of Life

Just read this very important line in *Rules of Play*:

The rules for The Game of Life seem simple and elegant, but it took John Conway two years of testing and refinement to arrive at their final form.

That's right, two years of work to produce a few paragraphs of text.

Games are hard.