Tiny Subversions

Gamasutra just posted an article on The History of Activision. It's certainly an interesting read from a Boston perspective, especially since that company has had, uh, interesting relationships with some of our biggest game companies, including Infocom back in the 80s, and more recently, Harmonix (*deep breath*: Harmonix developed Guitar Hero which was published by Red Octane who were bought out and effectively dissolved by Activision who are now it seems to me screwing up the Guitar Hero franchise but it's okay because Rock Band has nothing to do with Activision and will prove to be the greatest music game ever made).

Labels: boston, know_your_history

Holy crap. I need this (from here, sadly, it's Photoshopped and not real):



I'm a huge BBQ fanatic and also a pinball fanboy. I had a friend in high school whose dad collected pinball machines, and I used to hang out at his house and play free pinball all the time, and also would lend a hand in repairing the machines.

While I'm on the topic of pinball, I would like to put forward my theory that the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games are a modern extension of pinball. The games aren't about skateboarding as much as they're about racking up a high base score and getting a huge multiplier. Plus, you're moving this rolling thing all around a physical environment consisting of ramps and things to bounce of off. On top of that, pulling off a single chained mega-trick in THPS is a very similar experience to keeping a single ball in play in any pinball game.

I did not expect to like the THPS games, but I bought THPS 3 based on the perfect 10 score that it had received in Gamespot. And they were right: it was a brilliant game and I loved it, although I had to figure out why since I really had no interest in skateboarding. When I made the pinball connection, it all became clear to me. The aesthetics of THPS may be skateboarding, but the mechanics and especially the dynamics are mostly pinball.

Labels: games, pinball

I recently bought a Super Nintendo off of Craigslist. I already had one, but it stopped working all of a sudden. So, armed with a "new" SNES, I loaded up one of my all-time favorite games, Earthbound, and lo and behold, my old savegames were still there.

In one of these savegames, my party is maxed-out at level 99 with 9,999,999 experience points and Poo has the Sword/Bracer/Cloak/Diadem of Kings. Took me 12 damn hours to get that sword. Anyway, this savegame took place more or less right before the final boss battle. Since I had maxed out my party, all the battles were extremely easy and I managed to beat the game in about 15 minutes.

And then I realized: Earthbound is one of the only games I've played that has a true dénouement: after you beat the final boss, you get to walk freely through every area of this very large game while a sort of lullaby plays in the background. Every single person you meet has something new to say to you, congratulating you for saving the world and oftentimes having some hilarious or satisfying conclusion to previous plot points. Talking to everyone in the game can take upwards of two hours.

Most game don't have any dénouement at all. Or rather, it's usually limited to an ending cinematic. What I like about Earthbound is that you actually play out the dénouement by walking around and talking to people. And you can make it as long or as short as you want, since whenever you get bored of talking to people you can go straight to your house to see your family and officially end the game.

Do you know of any other games that have a playable dénouement?

Labels: narrative, stories

I used this neat web application called TagCrowd, along with some Blogger-fu, to visualize word frequencies for my last 200 posts. I removed common words. Top ten words I like: game industry networking GDC developers people think talk work design. People who know me in the game industry can verify that this pretty much sums me up. (Also note that I used three of my top ten in that last sentence!)

Also, I use the words something, really, important, and probably way too often.

Labels: meta

Holy shit: Dave Sirlin's famous and excellent book on competitive gaming, Playing to Win, is now available for free on his website. Definitely give it a read, and if you like it, donate some money to the guy! (found via Jane)

EDIT: I was inspired to look up SF tourney vids on Youtube. This one just blew my mind.

Labels: books, know_your_history

So at work today, eagle-eyed Craig noticed an advertisement in an old issue of Game Career Guide for a game studio called Derivco. Wow. Who thought that name would be a good idea?

Labels: advertising

So, I really like The Escapist. I just had my first article for them published a few weeks ago. And I'm really glad that they just turned two years old. It's a fantastic magazine, and a credit to this industry.

They just did a total redesign of their site. Now, I didn't really like the old design. Not readable enough. They really did need a redesign.

But they managed to make it even less readable. I go to their front page now and all I see is a shitload of boxes, two big advertisements, a box full of pictures in the upper left which I guess represents the articles in the current issue.

They're clearly trying to push their daily content more. But to be honest, I come for the feature articles, which are usually written by game developers or respected game writers. I get my daily industry scuttlebutt infodump from any number of other better practiced sites.

People need to understand that focus is good. And it looks like The Escapist is losing its focus!

Granted, what I'm going to do now is subscribe to their feature article RSS feed and ignore everything else.

Labels: design, escapist