OK Band – Treadmill Dance

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this attain some sort of cult status. Great idea, neat execution!

I think it’s the trousers that do it for me. 😐

Three things :-

Two articles and a fascinating fact.

• Who really makes videogames?

I’d never really felt so out of touch as I did when a colleague pointed out a Gamasutra interview with developers TOSE Software. As Gamasutra put it, they’re “the biggest developer you’ve never heard of.”

• Working in games

“Designer” is the most sought-after position. These are the people who invent games. At their core, designers are responsible for making things fun. Yet, getting there requires a lot of tedium.

• My right foot really hurts.

Further thoughts on the DS

This is my third (1, 2) post on my experiences with the Nintendo DS Lite. Since my initial purchase I’ve replaced the machine once due to dead pixels and also swapped a game (Metroid Prime Hunters) due to its uncomfortable control layout and weight of the DS Lite.

Like my GBA, I bought a DS late and with full intention of getting a flash card solution for it. If you’re not aware, a flash-card is basically a big, fat empty cartridge that you can load games onto via your pc. The GBA ones were pretty straightforward. The DS ones took quite a while to come about and are a little more complex. The one I got in July comprises of three parts and totals 2 gigabyte (yes, that’s 2000 megabytes – not bits) of storage. I’m pretty jazzed about that – that’s an insane amount of storage space for a handheld console whose games tend to weigh in at 32 and 64 megabytes.

Of course, you can do other, more noble things with these devices, such as treat them like a PDA, run homebrew applications (including emulators), play MP3s or watch video on them. Me? I’m all about the games.

So, to get the games I’ve been grabbing releases from good ol’ usenet and have all the releases (about 540 or so right now).

One thing that becomes apparent when you see the entire release list of games for the DS is just how much shit is out there. Sure, there’s the games that reek of innovaton but, by god, there’s so much shitty soduku, karting, or just lame licenced bollocks out there that I see very little in terms of what makes the DS a more ‘worthy’ platform for adulation than any other market leader. Like the PS2, PS1, SNES, GBA – the leading machines suffer from their own success and have a large amount of derivative and unimaginative copycat or licenced crap out there. The DS is absolutely no exception to this. I’m in the (un)eviable position to be able to play every DS game out there and, to be honest, I’m going to just ignore 95% of the stuff. If you want to see what I see then check out sites like gbatemp.net who have release information and feedback on game releases for the DS.

I’ve already commented on games like Tetris, Brain Training and Metroid Prime Hunters in my other posts. Here’s a short list of what I *have* been enjoying on the DS

Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan

This is, without question, the DS’s killer-app. Demonstrating superb use of both screens and stunning execution of gameplay via the touch-screen. The tactile nature of the gameplay allows anyone to enjoy a stronger sense of connection with this game.

It’s one of the only games I can think of in recent memory that put a massive smile on my face!

The game is simply designed but brilliantly executed – a rhythm action game where you tap or slide on the touch-screen as numbered symbols appear. Doing so results in percusive cymbal sound effect and a sense of making music.

The game also succeeds due to the wonderfully playful nature of its visuals and contrived narrative. The stern trio of characters are, it would seem, the local neighbourhood’s answer to every dilema – spurring each story’s central character to success by means of cheerleeding. Once again, the enonmic yet vibrant style of iconic japanese manga art conveys each story in clear, whimsical fashion that easily surpasses the language barrier. In fact, it’s probably more charming if you don’t understand Japanese.

Crucially, the music tracks are the real stars of the game. Wonderfully uplifting j-pop goodness that sound good through the DS’s speaks and absolutely brilliant through some headphones. The up-beat melodies fit with the cheerful yet striking visuals and compel you to continually retry challenges as much to enjoy the full tune as to know you’ve made progress in the game.

I’ve worked my way through two difficulty stages of the game and know there’s at least another 3 – including a female cheerleading mode which is the game’s hardest setting and looks insanely challenging.

Unless you are totally hopeless at rhythm games it is utterly impossible not to enjoy this game!

Oekaki Puzzle Battle From Yuusha-Oh GaoGaiGar

This game is a shitty bit of mecha-licensed nonsense that I don’t understand at all. Crucially, however, it’s a collection of nonogram puzzles (as seen in the Picross games on the GB and SFC) and I love nonograms.

Each grid has numerical clues along its rows and columns and, by using logic and deduction, you can determine which squares on the grid to colour in or not. The result ends up being some lo-res image of some object such as a lamp, keys or glasses. There’s four ranges of puzzles starting at easy (10×10 grids) to super-hard (40×40). Like sudoku, the stylus makes great sense in completing traditional paper and pen games in a more up-to-date fashion.

The music is dire and repetitive and the graphics are functional at best. I look forward to more nonogram games for the DS – but I fear I won’t see them.

Pheonix Wright – Ace Attorney

Ah, take me back to the old school! Pheonix Wright is an alarmingly limited game that features some very bleepy-bloppy (but rather catchy) music and a decent array of character art and nicely drawn backdrops.

The level of interaction in the game consists primarily of click the ‘next’ arrow to allow on-screen text to flow from one paragraph to the next. You’ll be doing that for roughly 90% of the game. You might also get to make decisions as to what to say or where to go. These decisions are made by pressing on one of between two and five on-screen buttons. Every now and again you will get to use an item from your inventory but, generally speaking, this game has very little for the player to do.

The scenario, however, is quite novel. You are a defense attorney and you play a series of episodes that play out like an episode of Perry Mason or Columbo. A seemingly water-tight story is presented showing your client committing a crime (typically murder) and being caught. The game then leads you through the episode by gathering evidence (talking to people or double-tapping areas around the crime scene to find clues or topics to ask people). When you’ve gathered so much evidence the game moves to the court-room scenes where the same characters give testimonies and you get to interrupt them and conduct cross-examinations and, hopefully, find contradictions in each case that show your client to be NOT GUILTY and even find the real culprit. Each episode features a fairly outlandish crime and some incredibly cliched character stylings. This isn’t to the detriment of the game and makes the cross examinations far more enjoyable as the characters’personalities really come across well.

Where the game succeeds is not in it’s limited interaction but in the quality of it’s writing. To be honest, like all point and click adventure games, you can’t really go too far wrong. You may get stuck for a while and not make further progress but it’s unlikely you’ll ever fail. The difficulty tends to come in at various points in the courtroom where you know you must present some evidence to undo a witnesses tesitmony but you’ll find it hard to determine which piece of evidence you have will do the trick as, even when you select correctly, the connection between testimony and evidence may seem very chancey. The writing covers this very well and and is the game’s compelling factor to make you keep playing. You want to see characters crack or uncover twists or just enjoy being called ‘Pal’ by Detective Gumshoe when you see him.

The writing keeps you guessing and keeps you interested but I find the gameplay to be fairly flat and very limited. The charm of the narrative and the tension of the court trials are the high points without question.

Well written games are nothing new and although this is an enjoyable game it is nothing that hasn’t been done before decades ago by companies like LucasArts or Infocom. These ‘Interactive Books’ have been a staple diet of many a japanese gamer’s life and most of their PC games (including the wildly popular Princess Maker series) follow this format. Capcom have been smart enough to create a new kind of hero and find a setting that suits western audiences as much as (if not more than) their eastern counterparts and the result is Pheonix Wright.

Good call Capcom. Good timing too.

So, those are the ones at the top of my list. Disappointments so far include New Super Mario Bros whose classic Mario control mechanism of holding down the run button most of the time just kills my hand in about 5 minutes flat. The forced use of the touchscreen to select stored powerups is also something that rubs me the wrong way. Starfox Command is fairly underwhelming too. The Mario 64 remake is an absolute travesty of control and shows just how uncomfortable and unsuited to 3D gaming a stiff digital pad can be.

I’ve enjoyed Yoshi’s Touch and Go more than I expected after an initially luke-warm reception to it. In fact there’s a number of games that catch my eye but they do so only as brief diversions from what I feel is ‘proper’ gaming with a full spectrum of gameplay options and achievements. This is what I fear that novelty or gimmicky control will present to gamers – diversions and pleasant distractions but ultimately shallow and limited gameplay.

It’s nice to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. Know what I mean?

Still not dead – The Return

Hello,

My two weeks in France are well and truly over. They were pretty good. The place the family stayed at was fantastic with great hosts and wonderful hospitality. The weather, on the other hand, was rubbish. Thunderstorms? In the south of France? In August? Gah!

Fortunately, for those times when staying indoors seemed the only sensible option, I had my DS and 50 or so games to keep me company. I will do a write up of my broadening impressions of the DS, my 2gb DS flash-kit and the games I think are worth it at some point in the future.

I also have a rant I’m preparing to write. The theme came to me in that period between going to bed and falling asleep when your brain starts to close its windows and put its lights out. I’ve been reading a lot of videogame news and an increasing amount is coming from sources that are, for want of a better phrase, enthusiast powered rather than anything else. When you look at sites outside the realm of IGN (eww!), Gamespot or Next Generation Online (the closest thing this culture has to proper online journalism) you see a lot of gamers telling the industry what’s right and what’s wrong. Now I don’t disagree that these vocal gamers are the customer to a certain degree (non-gamers and casual, less vocal gamers are actually a far more significant customer) but I do disagree that they have the faintest clue as to what they’re preaching about most of the time. So, in a rare role-reversal in this culture, you’ll have someone inside the videogames industry preaching to gamers about what they should and shouldn’t be doing. Let’s see them have a taste of their own medicine and see how gracious and diplomatic they can be.. 😈

Life at work is still blissfully wonderful. OK, it’s not entirely perfect but it’s as close as things are likely to get. If you hadn’t heard from Free Radical’s recent press release the top-secret project I’m working on has been partially revealed in that we’ve announced we’re working with LucasArts. I know what you’re thinking but I’m not going to tell you whether you’re right or wrong. I will say this though – I’d done a game for LucasArts some years back with my previous game developer employer. It was a GBA version of Jedi Power Battles and the collaborative experience had been quite a trial – particularly at the very end. Recently, LucasArts had made an announcement explaining their commitment to making great games and to raise the standard of their output. It may be too early to see just how that committed they are but over the last few months it’s become clear to me that, internally, they’re very focused on gameplay and fun. I’m looking forward to seeing their future games and am thrilled to find myself working for such a professional publisher.

OK, that’s all I’ve got for you right now – this post was intended to be a fairly short update. I do want to talk DS, rant a bit and write up about what I actually do as an Associate Producer at some point but I’m so easily distracted!

See you soon.

Avez vous une cuppa?

I just thought I’d drop a quick note to bid folks au revoir as I’m off to the south of France for a couple of weeks to drink wine, laze about by a pool and generally do bugger all.

See you in a fortnight!  8)

Koffdrop on the DS Lite

So, I’ve had a DS for a while and I reckon it’s time to give my verdict.

I bought myself a black DS Lite, Brain Training, Tetris and Metroid Prime: Hunters.

The gizmo looks wonderful – however, after a few hours a dead pixel appeared on my top screen. Not good.

Moving on I found myself playing Tetris quite a lot as, after all, the game is a classic. I enjoyed all the modes and found PUSH to be the most enjoyable and workable of the new additions. I found the layer upon layer of in-your-face Nintendo iconography added into the game to be totally unnecessary and a little worrying. In a few years from now there will be, I’m sure, a new wave of fanboys insisting that, amongst other things, Tetris was invented by Nintendo. As someone who has played Tetris since it’s earliest Western incarnation (C64 – courtesy of Mirrorsoft) I’m not going to let anyone, least of all Nintendo, try to steal Tetris’ thunder. The game is great and cleanly presented on the marvelous DS Lite screens. In terms of gameplay everything is present and correct, my biggest gameplay gripe is that the ‘hold piece’ function isn’t really necessary and adds nothing particularly useful to the game (and can be too easily used unintentionally). Crucially the ‘infinite spin’ game mechanic is in this version of Tetris and also damages the original play balance in my eyes.

Brain Training is precisely what I knew it would be. Daily puzzles that are nicely presented with some contrived cuteness and a ‘sticky’ factor to encourage the player to come back for more. For me, there’s not much there that’s particularly clever or interesting. The game is a success in Japan mainly thanks to the receptive audience and the timing of the release. The pseudo-scientific spiel the game spouts is pretentious nonsense – as much as those adverts for cereals that “help to keep a healthy heart” or work “as part of a calorie controlled diet”. Yeah, regular excersize is good – for mind body and soul. Just because thousands of lazy gamers can barely read or write doesn’t mean this game is going to make anyone intelligent. Don’t believe the hype and don’t believe that, just because it’s big in Japan it’s amazing. After all, they gave us Karaoke didn’t they?

Sodoku’s nice. But it could be nicer if input and navigation weren’t solely based on stylus control. There’s a d-pad that might let me navigate the zoomed-in view of the grid but the game doesn’t use it. Instead I have to tap the edge of the screen each time I want to move one square in any direction. Or I can zoom out and zoom in again. Would have been easier with D-pad support.

Metroid Prime: Hunters. Ugh. Wonderful presentation – doing what Nintendo do very well – taking some musical themes, jazzing them up and dropping them into another game in a series. Really nice FMV. Absolutely impossible to play if you’re left handed. The control isn’t very comfortable (an issue compounded by the DS Lite’s form-over-function design) and just not very intuitive. Perhaps it’s ok for right-handers. I’m not one of those.

I decided that Metroid Prime Hunters and a dead pixel were enough reason for me to walk back into the GAME store I bought the goods from. The staff were exceptionally helpful and replaced the unit immediately and also allowed me to swap Metroid Prime: Hunters for Mario and Luigi – Partners in Time. I’m enjoying this new game far more than Metroid.

I’d enjoy playing the DS more if it wasn’t so uncomfortable to hold. The unit is heavy enough to demand two handed play (or a flat surface to rest it on) and, in adult hands I’m finding gripping the thin unit, having my index fingers over the shoulder buttons and also pushing my thumbs up to the surface buttons to be rather uncomfortable rather quickly. I’d play the Mario and Luigi game more but, unlike any other system I’ve ever used, it’s simply too uncomfortable. I’ve also played New Super Mario Bros – a game where the player might choose to hold down a surface button to make the character run for most of the game. Doing so induces painful cramp after a couple of levels. I don’t regard my hands as particularly large or malformed so I have to wonder if the unit has suffered in its redesign to look like a sexy Apple product. Perhaps it’s Nintendo’s way of forcing people to play with the stylus. Either way I’m thinking that some where along the line they forgot about what your typical western adult is going to feel comfortable holding. For those of you with small hands – good for you.

In summary:

Pros

• Wonderful screen quality
• Exceptionally good audio quality
• Backwards compatibility

Cons

• Too uncomfortable for me to have extended gaming sessions on
• Sound quality suffers due to speakers
• Sleek design made hideously ugly the moment you take advantage of backwards compatibility
• Terrible 3rd party western support (can you say ‘Spongebob’ or ‘kart’?)

I will, however, love this as much as I love my GBA due to the Flash Linker that I am trying out – more on that in a later post.

One good deed..

With my recent PC woes I’d been doing lots of unplugging and plugging in of cables and whatnot. The back of my computer desk resembled black spaghetti and I’d felt that a tidy-up was in order. With some cable-ties located I set about unplugging absolutely everything in this room – all the PC shenanigans and the console stuff too.

Three hours later it all looked a fair bit better and I felt hot and sweaty and virtuous.

Getting back online and checking a few things I was stunned to see my download rate go well above it’s norm and into the high 400kbps margin. I guess I hadn’t realised that my ISP had upgraded my service and until I’d reset my cable-modem (by unplugging it from the wall and it’s connection for a period of time) it had been using it’s earlier speed settings.

I don’t really know why cable-modems seems to have this sort of memory for things. I recall that I’d phoned my ISP’s service department (not the nightmare experience that many people seem to have experienced) to ask why I seemed my connection had appeared to slow down. I didn’t really get an answer but I did get a solution – switch off, disconnect and unplug the cable modem and PC for about 5 minutes, reconnect and it should have sorted itself out. The old adage of when in doubt, reboot seems to apply to this apparatus as much as any other.

So, all in all, a good result. I’m a bit happier knowing my cables are a little better organised and my broadband is now at 4mb. The only problem is finding enough goodies to download to make the most of it!

Ah.. life is good 😀

Newsbites

Yes, another skin. There’s no artistic reason to this change – I just managed to tinker about with the old one, break it and decide I couldn’t be bothered to fix it.

I’d like you to take a glance at the sidebar on the right of the site and focus on the column called ‘Newsbites’.

Newsbites are a sort of cherry-picked newsfeed from yours truly. I’m a big fan of using RSS to gather news and have a lovely piece of server-side software that does that for me based on the feeds I’ve subscribed to. Whilst reading up on the new entries to my feeds I can ‘publish’ certain ones to a sort of output feed. This feed is what makes up the Newsbites and is stand-alone feed in it’s own right (you can subscribe to it by using the in the shaded title area)

Longtime readers of this site may remember some tinkering I did that pushed lots of newsbites into the content area of this site. I decided to stop doing that as koffdrop.com was becoming more like some random games blog than the sort of place that had any sense of individuality.

So, whenever you visit, check out the Newsbites. Everytime I collect my feeds I push the stuff that catches my eye into Newsbites. So it’s quite likely you’ll find something new in that area each time you visit.

If you have any suggestions about RSS feeds you think might interest me then please don’t hesitate to let me know.

I grow old(er)

My 33rd birthday approaches so I’ve updated my wishlist page so everyone can buy me stuff.

What are your waiting for?

I’m still not dead

But my PC was. I’ve had about three weeks worth of PC woes which have resulted in exchanges of motherboards, cpus, ram and quite a variety of four-letter words. I’m back on track now with everything pretty much ship-shape. There’s a couple of minor niggles I want to investigate but I’m sure they’re nothing I’m going to lose much more sleep over.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my best friend, best man and PC technician extraordinaire Marc for his advice and saint-like patience over the last three weeks. Thanks, as always, goes to my wonderful and astoundingly tolerant wife who helped to keep me sane!

I’ve not blogged from my new job because I’ve been rather busy doing a variety of things that I’m delighted to say I can’t tell you. Yes! Call me Mr. TOP SECRET because that’s the status of my current project. All I can say is that it’s next-gen and would be a number of videogamer’s DREAM project to be working on. Expect an official announcement in the far future (2007 at the earliest).

Making games isn’t quite the dream many gamers might think it is. My role as an associate producer has seen me doing many mundane things that aren’t exactly worlds apart from stock-taking or auditing. Of course, the context under which these tasks are performed is where the difference lies. All in all I’m delighted to be working with Free Radical and hope the relationship is rewarding for us both.

Speaking of employers.. ..my previous one, (the one I left just over 6 weeks ago) has seen fit to pay me a bonus this month. The bonus is related to the company’s performance during their financial year (April to April). I was working throughout that period and I guess they feel that makes me eligable for a bonus even if I’m not working for the company at the time the bonus is given out (June). I’m not complaining of course, just bemused and pleasantly better off.

I’ve done two very strange things this weekend. Things that many people would assume I’d never do – even under pain of death.

The first is that I went to see Take That live at the Milton Keyne’s Bowl. Look, that’s me on the right*:

*not really.

I’m not a Take That fan. I’m not a boy-band fan. In fact most popular music doesn’t interest me – I still prefer chiptunes. However, my gorgeous wife was a bit of a fan of the boys back in the day and when a reunion tour was announced her eyes lit up. Presenting tickets for the gig as a birthday present went down very well. I made it very clear that the pair of tickets were for her and a guest – not me. She invited her best friend who, a week or so ago, realised she’d double-booked and couldn’t make it. My wife put on her most alluring irresistible face and made it very clear how much she wanted me to be there and I was powerless to resist.

I made it very clear that I would NOT be enjoying myself nor be converted into a Take That groupie. I’m happy to say that I kept to my promise. The boys clearly put a lot of work into their 2 hours and the Beatles medley was a nice change from the blandness of the other tunes. The 2 hour ordeal to get out of the car park at 11pm wasn’t so great.

So, Koffdrop at a Take That gig. Whatever next?

Well, courtesy of Experian’s belated bonus, I splashed some cash on a DS lite. I’d been pondering over this for a little while. I’d been waiting for the DS homebrew community scene to report reliable flash-kits for the DS and a few months ago the compatibility seemed to reach the high percentages. This was what I’d been waiting for and then the DS lite date got announced and with Experian’s recent generosity it seemed that the stars had aligned and I should just go and get one.

Another massive incentive is that my sister (who doesn’t really play games) told me she got one some time back as when I explained the game Trauma Centre to her she was too interested in the idea to resist. She’s such a sucker for hospital stuff. Other gaming highlights of my sister’s select career have been Theme Hospital and the Life and Death PC games. And the Sims, naturally.

The DS Lite then. It’s cute. It’s certainly heavier than I expected and becomes a little *too* heavy for it’s size on lengthy sessions of Tetris and particularly Metroid Prime Hunters. I’m worried that I’ll not make much progress in the latter as the controls for a lefty like me are pretty grim (yes, even with ‘left handed’ mode on). Still, time will tell. My birthday is in July so I may ask for some more games and a WiFi connection to investigate gaming options. I must say the idea of throwing myself into a community of rabid DS fans isn’t a thought I relish. Thank God I’ve got some gaming colleagues to embarass myself against!

Oh, about the only other thing I have to report is that I finally decided to bash my way through the original Halo on the Xbox. It starts very strong. But they really switch the fun off in the second half and make the game a bore-fest. What a shame. Maybe I’ll have a gander at its sequel in a bit.