There’s a lot of really interesting commentary in this article by Alex Kierkegaard (relation to the philosopher? No, I could agree with this guy) on a review site I’ve never heard of. It deals with one of the real frustrating aspects of designing sports games: reviewers constantly ding us for not being original when we are essentially recreating a two hundred year old game. What do they want? Rocket packs? We get dinged for not having an extremely esoteric feature (online franchise mode), when Bioshock gets 100s and does not contain a multiplayer mode. (Side note: I agree with 2k not including a multiplayer mode, but it is so standard in the genre that one expects it).

Rather than comment on the whole article, I’ll leave it to you to read. I’ll just highlight some key quotes:

In fact, Virtua Fighter 5 and Virtua Fighter 4 should not even be regarded as different games, much in the same way as the experience of playing basketball in 2007 could not possibly have been much different to that of playing basketball in 2006. Does the number in the game’s title confuse you? Ignore it. Think of Virtua Fighter 5 as “Virtua Fighter Ver. 0.2963b” if you find it helps you see its essence more clearly. Because that’s all Virtua Fighter 5 is: a slightly more advanced version of the original piece of code.

Imagine for a second that the NBA suddenly decided to make some very important changes to the rules of basketball. We are talking drastic changes here, like doubling the size of the court or the number of players or the playing time, etc. etc. And imagine that a magazine wanted to run an article on this “new basketball”, which would discuss the changes made, their relative merits, and the effect these have on the flow of the game. In other words, imagine that the magazine wanted to review this “new basketball” game. What kind of person would they employ for this job? Some random dude off the street who had hardly ever played the original basketball in the first place, or an expert with years of experience?

So the point is that 2D fighting games are freaking awesome because people have been perfecting them for decades (consider that these games have reached such a level of depth and perfection, that those who play them do not even care about the quality of the graphics anymore!), whereas half the FPSes on the market right now stink because their designers are lazy and incompetent, not even daring to dip their foot into the vast ocean of possibilities that are out there waiting to be explored by the kinds of games they are making.

So good stuff. Can’t agree with all of it, but a strong case is made.

Woo! I’m going to GDC this year and will be representing my corporate masters by behaving myself and learning things. Will you be there? We could share a handshake if so. Leave a comment or email.

Confounding problem #1: Since every year I apply to go and have every year been denied, I forgot about GDC when I bought tickets to the Daytona 500 with my parents. So I’m going to have to go to the race, go straight to the airport, red-eye to San Fransisco and get my shit together for 10am the next day. Luckily that 10am is 1pm eastern. Bonus!

God, I don’t seem to be able to go anywhere without running into something by Chris Ware. I first discovered him in Issue #13 of McSweeney’s, which he guest-edited and which is one of my top three issues of all time. Then, the Thanksgiving before last, he did a couple of incredible covers for The New Yorker, which I subscribed to at the time. Then, he did the poster for The Savages, which I plan to see at the Enzian in a month. Then, I get my latest issue of Virgina Quarterly Review, which features his art on the cover. Then of all places, Chris Onstad of Achewood does a strip in his style. The guy is getting eyeballs. His style is very distinctive, but his storytelling can be quite confusing. I think it is mostly because he doesn’t follow the convention usage of panel placement, but that is part of what makes his style unique. It makes me feel a video game that isn’t browser-based needs to take it and run.

I swear to God if I read another review that says a game has Dreamcast/PS2-quality graphics on a clearly next-gen level game, I am going to cut someone. Do you even remember the Dreamcast or the PS2? Were you around for it? Or do you just cite it to look chez cultural? Do you remember how everything was jagged or blurry or somehow inexplicably both? Say you weren’t impressed by the graphics if you must, but you throw all your credibility out the window just because you can’t be troubled with coming up with a cogent bit of hyperbole.

If you say this:

Looks like this:

Then I assume you look like this:

Incredible seed of an idea called Cursor*10. It takes about five minutes to play, but it takes an incredibly difficult concept and makes it so sublimely simple.

Via my news aggregator via GameSetWatch via IndieGames.com I found a new game by the maker of Mondo Medicals (among other really great trippy freeware games) called Psychosomnium. It is a great short little 2-d platformer that does some of the game-custom breaking that Mondo Medicals did. It has the same problem as Mondo Medicals as well: there’s a vertical difficulty spike right in the middle of the game. I couldn’t beat the bee section, so I resorted to watching the walkthrough video. Nothing revolutionary here, just fun for about five to ten minutes. Try it!

I’m back and the glut has worsened. Now in addition to the queue of books and games I had before the holiday, we can add about ten books and three games to the list, which means I won’t be back at even until May, at least. Then Game Tunnel has to put up their excellent Indie Games of the Year special and I find about fourteen more games I want to try.

Before I left for the break, I mentioned I had downloaded some iPod games for the trip. Since there are very few sites that seem to comment or do iPod game reviews, it’s probably useful for some Googlers to come across a post with some reviews.

First up is Phase, Harmonix’s music game for the music device.  As with all of their games, you are matching notes to a song as they fall down the screen. You know that much already. The real innovation in Phase is that you can play your own songs rather than ones that ship with the game as in Frequency, Guitar Hero, et al. This is a pretty cool feature, but results are varied. Sometimes you will get a song that seems to have notes falling at random and sometimes you will get songs that feel like someone at Harmonix made this game simply for that song. You will have to try with your library to see which songs actually end up fun to play. One annoyance with the game is that you must make a separate Phase Playlist in iTunes for your songs to show up in the game. Luckily, I noticed this before my trip, or I would have been SOL on Phase‘s main feature. It is graphically compelling, with a distinct art style and a fun background with billboards passing by in a pseudo-3d environment. Overall, Phase is an interesting idea, but like applying Guitar Hero to a toaster, it strangely doesn’t seem to fit the device. The pull of Guitar Hero and Rock Band is immersion and social play and you can’t get either on a three inch screen. A competent game and worth spending the five bucks, but nothing gangbusters.

Next is Brain Challenge. I’ll be honest, the game seems to have a lot more features than I have tried, so maybe I am not giving this a fair set of impressions. I played through a few challenges, but one aspect kept killing me about the game.  The iPod touch wheel is incredibly sensitive, which can lead to it shifting focus if you press the center button while barely touching part of the touch wheel. This caused me to miss a bunch of questions on a bumpy plane ride. Annoying. Also, in a game that requires speed, sometimes the touch wheel’s sensitivity causes you to move over two spots when you wanted to move one, causing you to have to shift back one more and lose precious time. There’s a simple design solution for this:  make the previous track, center and next track buttons the keys for three different answers and limit your possible answers to three choices. Then I could just hit a button rather than scroll over, hope that I am hovering over the correct option and then hit a button. Overall, it is a fun Brain Age-style game, but like Zuma before it, the controls kill it, so I can’t recommend.

Third is EA’s Sudoku game. There isn’t much to screw up here. Sudoku is a fairly simple concept and this iPod version, for the most part, gets it right. It too, suffers from touch wheel sensitivity issues, but since the game is a lot more deliberate that the aforementioned Brain Challenge, it is forgivable. Once again, instead of using the buttons, you can tap on the touch wheel to move around the grid. This sometimes results in double moves. Why can’t you use the buttons? Is this an Apple TRC that the non-center buttons have to control the music? If it is, it will seriously limit design of iPod games. Overall, if you like Sudoku, this is probably as good as it will ever get on the iPod. The Insane-level puzzles are diabolical. I ended up copying one down to a piece of paper for easier control because I was generally fed up with the sensitivity issues. However, I would still recommend this for a quick and satisfying experience on the go for fans of the puzzle.

Last is Peggle, PopCap’s ridiculously addictive casual game. If you’ve played Peggle on the PC, then this will be very familiar as it is a direct port, with most of the features in tact. If you have not played it on the PC, then shame on you as it is one of the greatest simple games of all time. Where it could go wrong is the same place Zuma went wrong – the controls. A small accidental nudge on any shot would completely ruin this largely skill-based game. Somehow, PopCap figured out how to avoid this in a way no other game I have seen on the platform has. The game controls impeccably and delivers the same tension and excitement as it’s PC brother has been known to provide. Apple should ship Peggle on every single iPod. If people knew iPod games could be this good, they would line up (virtually) at the iTunes Music Store to plunk down cash money for other titles. I drained my battery twice this break just playing Peggle.  People like to crow about the Orange Box‘s value-for-money, but it absolutely pales next to a $5 game of Peggle.