Viridian Games

Um…I’m not going to mince words here. This game looks awesome. Red Alert has got a couple of defining aspects, and one of them is that the developers understood that they couldn’t do “good” FMV. No matter how hard they tried it always came out cheesy. And if they tried to fight this and Take Themselves Seriously, they produced nigh-unwatchable stuff…like Command & Conquer 2.

So the Red Alert guys just decided to turn the Cheese Knob until it broke off, and Red Alert 3 continues this tradition with pride.

“Are you ready to send those commies runnin’ back to their mommies?” Yes. Yes, I am. And frankly, that’s a hell of a cast. Tim Curry, George Takei, J. K. Simmons, Jonathan Pryce…and the best part is, they’re into it. They understand that the scenery here is meant to be eaten. The only downside is Jenny McCarthy as Tanya. Yes, I know, Kari Wuhrer wasn’t available…but could they have at least dyed her hair? Tanya is not a blonde! I guess it’ll come down to how well she can yell “Shake it baby!” Given her background…probably pretty well.

And fortunately the gameplay looks like it’s going to have some interesting quirks as well (plus some of the best-looking water I’ve ever seen):

Building bases on the ocean? Amphibious engineers? Transforming mechs? Artillery that shoots soldiers? DO WANT.

Oh, and a quick Braid update: Megan has completed the game and is now searching for the secret stars. After finding one yesterday she raised her hands in triumph and exclaimed, “Yes! I am the master of space and time!” I think it was worth buying the game just for that.

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The journey through the stars continues, weeknights on NBC.

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Braid was the first game I ever bought on XBLA. I did so at the behest of Megan, who played through the trial and loved it. I had also enjoyed the trial version even though I thought some of the puzzles were too hard to execute (of course, she benefits from having the reflexes of a thirteen-year-old).

So we’re playing Braid, right? We’re having a good amount of fun figuring out the puzzles and unlocking new worlds and seeing how time changes in each world. Some of the puzzles are just ridiculously difficult, but the game isn’t that long so if you keep at it you’re sure to finish it eventually. It’s going pretty good.

And then it ends.

I guess it’s just not possible for an indie game to have a satisfying, upbeat ending. While the maudlin text throughout the game alerted me that the ending was probably going to be a downer, it didn’t prepare me for the game becoming a lecture on the evils of the creation of the atomic bomb. No, seriously. I am not making this up. Johnathan Blow even includes the director of the Manhattan Project’s famous “Now we are all sons of bitches” line in the ending, which came as quite a surprise to me and Megan. Lest you think I’m spoiling it, believe me - it’s pre-spoiled.

If I want to be lectured on the evils of nuclear weapons, I’ll…you know what? I grew up in the 80’s. I’m never going to want to be lectured on the evils of nuclear weapons.

So overall: excellent concept, fairly well executed, with an ending that gives Metal Gear Solid 2 a run for its money. Hopefully Blow will realize that propaganda is the enemy of art and his next game will be more satisfying.

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Okay, today I’m going to talk about my two favorite YouTube channels.

First, there’s DeceasedCrab. DC does “Let’s Plays“. The definition of an LP is sort of nebulous; an LP isn’t a speedrun; it’s more of an attempt by a player to present a game in its entirety. For that reason, it doesn’t make much sense to do LPs of games that are popular and easily available, unless you want to go the MST3K route on them.

While DC did not invent the LP, his excellent LP of La-Mulana catapulted him into the spotlight. Since then he has wisely stuck to playing rare, out-of-print, offbeat and indie games.

DC talks while he plays, and he’s basically either commenting on what is happening or free-associating. His fans (including me) love him because he’s constantly dropping anime, manga or gaming references into his LPs. He’s also got a habit of breaking out into song; indeed, more than once his viewers have sent him songs to sing on the air.

DC also has a fantastic ethic about his videos. He rarely swears (indeed, he accidentally dropped the F-bomb in his second video of La-Mulana and then instantly chastised himself) and he posts a video practically every day.

Every time I go to DC’s channel I know I’m going to be treated to something funny and unique.

My other favorite YouTube channel belongs to GarlandTheGreat. Garland is pretty much the exact opposite of DC. He doesn’t do voiceovers. Most of the games he makes videos for are common, popular games. But Garland’s videos are amazing.

He’s done complete 100% runs of Crash Bandicoot 1, 2 and 3 and a Metal Gear Solid run on Extreme difficulty where he takes no damage (until he encounters some absolutely unavoidable hits at the very end).

But his real love is in destroying Square RPGs.

Remember the Midgar Serpent in Final Fantasy VII, which was deliberately made so powerful your party couldn’t beat it, forcing you to tame a chocobo to get past it? Here’s a video of him defeating it with just Tifa at level 5.

He has completed a run through Final Fantasy X where he was not allowed to use the Sphere Grid, not allowed to customize his weapons, not allowed to summon Aeons, and not allowed to use Overdrives. Indeed, that wasn’t challenging enough for him, because he’s now begun another playthrough where he is also not allowed to use items or Riku’s “Trio of 9999″ mix.

The thing that really makes his videos is his patience. He routinely talks about taking hundreds of tries to get a video right. In the intro for his Metal Gear Solid videos he mentions that he has played Metal Gear Solid all the way through 62 times.

He is currently working on his two magnum opii: a tool-assisted 100% speedrun of Final Fantasy VII…and a non-tool-assisted 100% speedrun of Final Fantasy VII.

Whenever I go to Garland’s channel I know I’m going to see something amazing done to a video game I thought I knew everything about.

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Okay. Despite the fact that I specifically said that I wouldn’t be posting every episode of Let’s Play Starflight! here on my blog and that you should check my YouTube channel for updates, I am still getting IMs from people asking where Part 2 is…even though Part 2 went up four days ago.

So here’s Part 2.

And here’s Part 3, which went up last night.

I guess I will be posting all of these to my blog…

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Yes, let’s!

I’m probably not going to post about every video I do for this…I just wanted to let you guys know I’m doing it. I love Starflight, despite its flaws, and I want more people to learn about this groundbreaking game.

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So two froody dudes, Dan “Gibbage” Marshall and Ben Ward, decide to stop piddling about with their own pathetic projects and team up, creating Zombie Cow Studios in the process.

And to celebrate, they decided to give away a game for free - an adventure game called Ben There, Dan That!, which stars…um, them. That’s right, you control Ben and Dan as they bumble through a loving homage to the classic Lucasarts Adventure games, doing things like smacking priests with bibles, visiting alternate dimensions, and…um…climbing out of a cow’s rear end. Hey, they’re British.

Now, even given the fact that they used Adventure Game Studio to create the game, that’s a heck of a lot of work to just give away. But I heartily, heartily approve of the process, and not just because I’m cheap. I think it’s the right thing to do because it helps them grow their community, and I believe that community is the solution to all of gaming’s problems.

Does your game stink? Get people interested in the potential your game might have and they can help you fix it. And you don’t have to do it all before you ship. Feedback after you ship is just as vital - but those lines of communication must be open.

Are you having trouble marketing your game? Again, community can help. Bungie’s testers sang the praises of Myth: The Fallen Lords to all their friends once their NDAs were lifted, which helped Bungie as they took their first steps into the PC market.

Are you having trouble keeping people interested in your game? Once again, community to the rescue. The most popular online first-person shooter in the world is still Counter-Strike, which kept copies of the original Half-Life on store shelves for years. The incredible response of the Korean community means that you can still walk into a Wal-Mart and buy a copy of StarCraft - a game that was released in 1998! Caravel Games goes even farther with their Deadly Rooms of Death series. The DRoD games consist of a layout of rooms, each containing a puzzle. The DRoD website gives you an overall map of the game - and clicking any room on the map takes you to a forum thread discussing that room. It’s an excellent way to provide player-based support, in addition to player-created content.

Are you having trouble funding your game? Yes, this is the iffiest one, but it’s been done. Lots of people have started by creating a small, well-supported game and then rolling the profits from that into something much larger. I think my favorite story of this nature is that of Jeff Minter, who was saved from having to get a real job by the incredible response to Llamatron, which Minter released for free along with a README.TXT file that included this paragraph:

Here’s the deal. You play Llamatron and check out the hook. If it gets you (and I reckon it will if you like mayhem), then send us a fiver and, as a reward for being so honest, we will send you an ace poster of our gun-toting llama, a newsletter, and a complete copy of Andes Attack, originally released in 1988 to considerable critical acclaim. Two games for a fiver - can’t be bad. And if the response is good, there will be more Shareware. And better.

And of course there’s also the aforementioned Dan Marshall, who is currently in the process of giving away two hundred pounds to an indie developer chosen by his readers.

This is the kind of thing Jeff Vogel is talking about when he says, “Shareware is a force for good.”

And finally, the big one.

Are you having trouble with people pirating your game?

Well, of course you are. People pirate stuff. They’re going to do it. You can’t do much about it.

If you want to come to terms with piracy, you need to come to understand that you’re not trying to eliminate it. You’re trying to reduce its impact to the point where you can still make the money you need to make on your game to stay in business. I wish I could tell you to just ignore piracy but I can’t - you should be going onto those download sites and demanding that they remove your game, because you do want pirating your game to be more complicated than just doing a Google search.

How can community help here?

Well, it’s harder to steal from somebody when you feel like you know them personally. It’s also harder to steal from somebody when they are trying to be the good guys.

The seminal example of using community to beat piracy is Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations 2. Absolutely no anti-piracy stuff on the disc. No CD key. No CD check. No phoning home. No refusing to run if there’s a compiler on the same system. No installing low-level drivers that monitor all data traffic without the user’s knowledge. Nothing. The only thing it uses is a unique account key that allows you to create a support account on Stardock’s digital distribution network, so that you can redownload the game if you lose your discs.

And yet it sold a bazillion copies and was a huge moneymaker for Stardock. And as I’ve mentioned before, one of those copies was sold to me. Even though I’ll never have time to play such an involved game. Why did I buy it? Because they were doing it right.

I have said that game design is a conversation between the developer and the player. But now I’ve come to realize that the metagame of game development is the same thing.

If you want to succeed in game development, don’t just make games. Help people have fun. And that means getting personally involved, with all the risks that carries.

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Tim Schafer cannot catch a break in this goddamn industry.

Move on, Tim. Go work for Pixar. Write an animated movie for them and make a hojillion dollars. I know you loving Gaming, but Gaming is currently controlled by her chain-smoking crack-addicted abusive alcoholic mother Corporate Game Development and until Gaming finds the courage to sneak out of her mother’s house and jump into your convertible so you can spirit her away, you two are obviously never going to be together.

Edit: I jumped the gun just a bit on this (though reading that headline, can you blame me?) I had actually gone to the Double Fine Action News Site to find out if Brutal Legend was going to be okay. I did not think to mouseover the picture of the weevil, but that’s Schafer for you.

Edit 2: Turns out that Activision did drop Brutal Legend - fortunately, Double Fine owns the IP. So things aren’t quite as rosy as Tim made them out to be. Yes, in theory, with Guitar Hero and Rock Band making squillions of dollars finding a new publisher for Brutal Legend should be a no-brainer, but please see the “chain-smoking crack-addicted abusive alcoholic mother” comment I made above.

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“It’s awesome!”

I am inclined to agree. Pulled down the demo over Xbox Live and I am very impressed with it. Lego Star Wars was much more combat-oriented, with the gameplay basically consisting of you entering an arena, shooting or eviscerating anything that moved, and then figuring out how to move on to the next arena. David actually had trouble with this because most of the puzzles weren’t explicated very well. Most of them required you to use a Jedi power to open a path for another character, who could then open the door. While David did figure it all out eventually, I had to help him a fair bit and there was some frustration.

Lego Indiana Jones is much closer to a traditional platformer with lots and lots of well-constructed puzzles to solve as well as some combat. And excellent cutscenes - when Lego Indy escapes the first temple after being chased by the ball he is confronted by Lego Belloc, who demands the golden idol. Lego Indy tries to give him Lego C-3PO’s head instead. I don’t care who you are, that’s funny right there.

One of my design philosophies is “Let players be clever, and reward them when they are” and Lego Indiana Jones follows that philosophy well. And frankly I was amazed at how quickly David - without any direction from me - figured everything out. He had no trouble with the puzzles where you had to do something with one character then switch to another because the game made it much more clear what you were supposed to do. After seeing the demo I will definitely be picking it up.

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Yes, it’s another “while you are waiting” post. Deal.

I’ve got a couple friends here at work whose websites are definitely worth checking out.

First, Patrick Rogers. He’s an avid Go player who recently hit traffic gold on his site by being the first person to post the complete lyrics to all three episodes of Dr. Horrible.

Second, Brandon “Rusty” Parks. Rusty’s a real character, as you’ll be able to tell when he starts talking about how the universe has a discrete pixel size and a discrete frame rate.

Third, Bobby Thurman…who I actually don’t work with any more and probably should keep in better contact with.

And finally, you know those people who keep coming into game development forums or IRC channels and ask how to program an MMORPG? Yeah, laugh at them. Go ahead. Because everybody knows that nobody can possibly write an indie MMORPG. And oddly enough, it’s being worked on by all three of the gentlemen I detailed above! What are the odds?!

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