Tiny Subversions

So I got Harmonix's other game for Christmas. Sure, Phase costs $255, a full $80 more than than Rock Band. But it's worth it. It even comes bundled with an 80 GB hard drive and an operating system that plays all your mp3s! You can't beat that kind of value.

It appears I jumped the gun by listing my favorite games of the year last week. Because Phase is up there. While the intelligent beat-making system is hit-or-miss, when it works it's magical, and when it doesn't work it's not unforgivably bad. And the way it encourages you to explore your music collection is wonderful. It's a lot of fun to experiment with different songs and see which ones work best.

Amplitude is one of my favorite games of all time, and Phase, as its successor, is everything I wanted. I can forgive the sometimes sloppy beats because, you know what? I'm playing with the best music in the world. My music.

The other nice thing about the game is that I now have something to do when I want to listen to music on my iPod but also want to fidget.

Labels: games

I think December 14 is a pretty good time to do a recap of my favorite video games of the year. I'm not going to bother describing the gameplay to you. You can look that up yourself. I'm just going to describe what I love about these games.

Crackdown. The thing I love most about this game is it takes the simple act of moving around this incredibly detailed and expansive city environment and turns it into a complete joy. Getting to the top of any building is a little puzzle in and of itself. The combat is actually really underrated, too. You're basically a superhero: it shouldn't be hard to take out any individual thug in combat. But the game stacks the odds so you're dealing with pretty huge amounts of enemies, and the strategy comes in way you (or at least I) succeed in combat is by breaking it up so you're only dealing with a few people at any one time. Oh, and I love that driving is pretty much an irrelevant side-quest. Driving was always my least favorite part about the GTA games.

Rock Band. I'm a drummer. I like playing Rock Band's drums. The other day I was over at Darren's house, and we had just finished watching Superbad (my favorite movie of the year). We were rocking out, and he was singing. Every time he went into overdrive, he'd yell "McLOVIN!!!" (link is NSFW unless you have headhpones on) into the microphone. And every time it cracked me up and I lost my streak. What a fucking awesome game.

Skate. This is the only Xbox 360 game I've actually completed start to finish. But then, I'm a total fiend for skateboarding games. A few years ago I bought Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 on a lark, based solely on the fact that Gamespot gave it a perfect 10. I instantly fell in love with the gameplay. The next year, THPS 4 came out, and it too was awesome. Then THUG came out and it was disappointing. And then THUG 2 made me swear to never buy another Tony Hawk game. Fortunately, Skate is everything I've ever wanted out of a skateboarding game. I love the fact that it rewards skill: when I'm able to land a move I couldn't before, it's not because my character got more skilled, it's because I got more skilled. It's a wonderful feeling of real accomplishment. Food, not drugs.

Portal. I don't really need to say anything except that I really appreciate it when a game can give me the best play experience of the year and pack it into less than three hours. I love the fact that I sat down with this for about as long as it takes to see a movie, finished it, and was incredibly satisfied. I'd love to see more of that. As much as I love the other games on this list, if I had to pick a favorite, this would be it.

Team Fortress 2. I have traditionally hated online first person shooters, but I love TF2. I guess it's mostly because I like playing with Darren. When I play this game I yell, laugh, and curse--it creates a lot of intensely physical joy for me. Lots of fiero.

UPDATE: Jeff has reminded me of my favorite game of the year that I haven't (really) played: Everyday Shooter. I've played a few of its levels at GDC, and at E For All. And I love what I've played. Jon Mak takes the zen state you get into when playing an 8-way shooter and amplifies it tenfold with Steve Reich-inspired musical compositions triggered by game events. But unfortunately it's PS3-only. If this thing ever comes out on PC, I will buy it twice.

Labels: games

While I did cover the first day of sessions at MIGS, I forgot to write about the second day. Well, my favorite talk from that day was the Crackdown post mortem. Gamasutra has just posted a detailed recap of that session. Be sure to check it out.

Labels: conferences, games

Tomorrow night is the December meeting of the Boston Post Mortem. This is our local IGDA chapter meeting, where game developers get together to chat, have beers, and see a presentation. You should come check it out: the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab folks will be doing a post mortem of the six research-directed games they did this past summer.

For more info, see our blog post.

Labels: boston, postmortem

So I just got back from a day at Boston's Bazaar Bizarre. I was helping my girlfriend at her booth, but I did a bunch of shopping, too. In particular, I found a vendor there called Huzzah Goods who was selling a bunch of awesome T-shirts, mostly video game themed. I ended up purchasing two shirts from him: the Beatles/Pac-Man crossover Blinky Road (he spells it with an 'e', but it's clearly e-less), and The Garden, the only T-shirt to ever remind me of Chaim Gingold's wonderful game Orange Tree.

This is excellent, because I'm usually really embarrassed to wear video game shirts. Because most of them suck. These, however, are well-designed and they make me happy to look at. Not unlike a good Miyamoto game.

Here's me rocking Blink[e]y Road.

So I urge you to support a great Boston-area artist! Buy his goods for your loved ones this holiday season! He'll ship just about anywhere, it seems.

P.S. To those of you who would say, "But Darius, that shirt isn't orange!" I say unto you: yes, but I can wear an orange zippy shirt over it, unzipped, and thus have my cake and eat it too.

Labels: clothing, games

Here's a brief scenario.

You've just come back from a conference, and you lost a business card for someone you really need to follow up with.

Or, you met another game developer by chance at the airport yesterday and neither of you had your cards on you.

The point is, you met someone interesting, but you don't know how to contact them. Ten years ago this was a really tough problem to have. You were pretty much screwed. But now we have the internet! Here are a few tips on how you might reconnect with that person.

Google

Obviously, you can start by typing random stuff about that person into Google. Okay, her first name is Delilah, and she works at Frazbiz Studios in HR? Well, search Google for "delilah frazbiz HR". This is usually a shot in the dark, and probably works for me one out of every ten times, and only when that person has an unusually good internet presence.

LinkedIn

Where Google fails, and it usually does, I turn to LinkedIn. If you don't know it, it's basically a networking site that is laser-focused on business. So instead of your favorite bands, you put your work history. It's Pokemon for executives.

Almost everyone in the game industry has a LinkedIn profile, and you can enter "delilah frazbiz" into their search engine and you will almost certainly come up with her profile, along with a way to contact her. And if her contact info is private, at least you know her last name now, and can go back and refine a Google search.

Facebook

You've probably heard of this one. Like LinkedIn, many people in the game industry are on Facebook (although in my experience folks are more likely to be on LinkedIn than Facebook). On Facebook I think you really need a person's first and last names to do an effective search, but I usually give this one a shot if all else fails.

Guesswork

But wait! We don't need no steeeenking technology. We have this thing called a brain, that allows us to reason, and perform neat tricks as a result.

Let's assume you know Delilah's last name is Boddington. And you know she works at Frazbiz. But you still can't find her email address. That's okay. You can guess. How about dboddington@frazbizstudios.com? How about delilah@frazbizstudios.com? If she works in HR and you really need to talk to her, maybe a polite note to hr@frazbizstudios.com will get you in touch with her. Or maybe it's dbodding@frazbizstudios.com, because they still enforce an eight-character limit on usernames. The worst that can happen is a bounced email. Or you get a response from David Boddington at Frazbiz, which is really more funny than tragic.

It Ain't Stalking. Really!

Some people feel weird about looking up this sort of contact info. I think that's nonsense. If you've met someone in person who's in the same business as you are, and you had a nice chat, you are well within your rights to find this person's contact info.

Labels: networking

Rands just posted a pretty good (brief) article on writing a resume, including the ever-dreaded objective statement. I like the way he approaches it. Like me, he doesn't put, "I am seeking a job in ______." Also, take to heart his point that you should be ideally updating your resume while you're not looking for a job. That way, you're not desperate and you can focus on cramming a good representation of yourself into that page.

Labels: breakingin, resumes

Here is the only reasoned response I've seen to the whole Gerstmann firing.

Labels: journalism

Holy crap.

Labels: business, industry