I had jumped into the jam knowing little of what I wanted to create, but knowing full well I wanted to have made something with flixel by the end of the weekend. Needless to say, I was incredibly impressed with how much I got done with the framework in such a short time.

While our game isn’t anything spectacular, we were able to finish it in the time that we were allotted which as far as I’m concerned makes it a success.

A few things learned from this weekend that helps keep things moving smoothly for Alex and I:

Prepare yourself early.

The night before the jam, I got my entire development environment setup. I assumed that I was going to be doing work in either flixel, or aiding on a team that might be coding in XNA. I updated my system with the latest patches, got both flixel and XNA to the latest versions, and tested compiling and running some sample projects for both platforms. I bookmarked important documentation, and downloaded a few free tools that were going to be useful for me during development. Also, I put a bunch of these tools that I was going to be using for myself up on a public folder on my FTP, so I could distribute them to my team to get them up to speed as soon as possible. Needless to say, my computer ran smoothly, I had all my tools and docs available, and I was able to jump into creating as soon as we started throwing ideas at the wall.

Start off playing some games, talking about ideas and mechanics/systems.

You aren’t going to have too much time during a short jam, so take an hour or two talking about some ideas that you enjoy, things that you may want to incorporate into a game. Play a few games that you’ve found recently that might be easy to replicate. Settings, moods, gameplay will start to fall into place during your discussions. Have the artist attempt to prototype your game on paper while the coder gets started on some basics for the game like character drawing/input, camera movement, etc.

Never turn back.

After you’ve decided on a design, keep going with it. We had hoped that our game would have some depth to it, and many more gameplay mechanisms than it ended with.  After getting far enough into the jam, we were running out of time, and decided to lock our featureset. Rather than worrying about adding extra features to make our game fun, we decided to take what we had, and make *that* the game.

Design small. Code to complete. Polish to hide everything else.

We spent probably about 35-40% of the entire jam adding content to our game, and polishing the look of it. Working on this was crucial to creating the feel of a final product. Adam and his friend Emily did a great job churning out cars, buildings, and scenery which pulled everything together. It’s incredible what a little bit of particle effects and artwork can do for a game.

Without further ado, I give you:

RUN AROUND AND JUMP ON CARS, BUT DON’T FALL OFF THE LEFT EDGE OF THE SCREEN!

Intro

When creating an A.I. system for your game, you’re going to want objects to be able to make decisions on their own, or at the very least have some sort of flowchart-like interaction. What if you were able to easily set up those basic interactions, and simply have your objects detect when certain stimuli change their states, and have actions and reactions dependent on the states of an object? We can create seemingly more intelligent objects, and a potentially more immersive game.

The Individual State

Each of the states in our machine will have the following information:

• State Name
• Minimum Duration
• Maximum Duration
• Transitions

This way, we can define the state with a human name that would make sense to a designer and something that could be easily scripted, and we can specify a range at which the state can last. With random state lengths, we can make objects seem a bit more organic. For objects that we need specific lengths, we can simply set the two to equal each other! Lastly, we need to know all the different states into which an individual state can transition.

The Transition Table

Each State will carry it’s own “Transition Table”, will include two important bits of information per entry:

• State Name
• Weighted Percentage

This way, we know which state we are going to transition to, and we are going to allow the definition of a weighted percentage of the states that are chosen. This will allow us to introduce rarity with our transitions.

The Machine

Our FSM will have several important actions which we will need to consider:

Add State

After our FSM is created for an individual object, we will add the different states that will be valid for this particular object. We will give the option to add a min/max duration of the state, in case we want to attempt to make certain states less predictable than others.

Remove State

We may see a need to remove a state from our object. Consider  enemies that after being provoked will not stop engaging/attacking the player until they kill the player or are destroyed themselves. We could get this feature ‘automatically’ if we removed the idle state from this object, and any transitions that may have brought us to this state.

Add Transition

In order for a state to transition from one state to the next, we are going to want to add these connections in individually, with a weighted percentage at which they have the possibility of being picked. This can allow for balancing the choosing of states. We will also have this action update transition if it already exists in the table.

Remove Transition

We may want to implement conditional transitions, or remove transitions for states that no longer exist.

Set State

For setting an initial state on our object, or forcing the object into a specific state.

Choose Next State

When the current state expires, the FSM will need to select a transition and set the next state

Usage

Usage is fairly simple. You’ll first want to include the code in your Solution. To every object file you wish to use the FiniteStateMachine in, you need to add a:

using Zapdot;

At the header with your other using statements.

You will then want to add a class level variable.

class Enemy
{
   FiniteStateMachine mFSM;

   public Enemy()
   {
      setupStateMachine();
   }
}

Now, for tidiness-sake, create a method that you’ll use to store the setup for this particular object, to be called once during initialization.

 private void setupStateMachine()
 {
 mFSM = new FiniteStateMachine();
 mFSM.AddState("idle", 2, 3);
 mFSM.AddState("walk", 2, 2);
 mFSM.AddState("run", 1, 3);
 mFSM.AddTransition("idle", "walk", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("idle", "run", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("walk", "idle", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("walk", "run", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("run", "idle", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("run", "walk", .5);
 // Pick our first state.
 mFSM.SetState("idle");
 }

This instantiates the new object, and adds three states to the Enemy object. (“walk”, “run”, and “idle”). Both idle and run will have random time between their respective min and maximums, but walk will always be 2 seconds long, no matter what.

We then add the transitions for these states, essentially saying that every state can transition to the other, and that they have equal weight to do so.

Lastly, we tell the object what state to start in.

After this object is setup, we can add it to our update class:

mFSM.Update(gameTime);

And do some tests on it to affect gameplay.

if ( mFSM.CurrentState.Equals("idle") )
   mVelocity = kIdleSpeed;

And so on.

The Code

Download (MIT License)

The code is available below, and being released under the MIT License. Feel free to do whatever you want with it, just don’t blame me.

If for some crazy reason you do start using the code, please tell me what you think, or what cool things you’re doing with it.

Future Additions!

This is only the starting point from here, and I hope to be able to add much more. Future additions include wonderful things like multiple concurrent states to give a little more depth to our objects and add for some interesting decision-making!

Enjoy!

The first entry I ended up jumping to seemed like an awesome start; “The Definition of Play and The Classification of Games” by Roger Caillios, 1958“. I was able to find the full version of the document, and uploaded it for reference, or the curiosity of others.

Important to note, games of chance are excluded. [This is a] discussion about games and rules when profit is not obtained, and it is merely the existence of the absence of reality. (p.124)

While it was not an article that redefined what I thought of “play” as a individual and social construct, it was interesting to see how the observations of a document in 1958 translates to electronic entertainment in the modern day.

Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often money for the purchase of [gaming] equipment… (p.125)

The industry may not be so quick to agree, but this rings true if wasted time is seen as a reflection of not accruing income. However, most if not all would agree that if play results in some form of entertainment, time and money may have been well spent.

A game which one would be forced to play would at once cease being play. It would become constraint, drudgery from which one would strive to be freed. (p.125)

I found this quote quite humorous with regards to my job, and I know some QA testers that might agree, I can’t say I “strive to be freed” from the games I play at work.

“In fact, the game is no longer pleasing to one who, because he is too well trained or skillful, wins effortlessly and infallibly.”

(In classifying games of sport) The goal of the encounters is not for the antagonist to cause serious injury to his rival, but rather to demonstrate his own superiority. (p. 132)

Both of these remind me of what the inherent draws in competitive gaming that kept such a stranglehold on me.

“Industrial civilization has given birth to [...] the hobby, a secondary and gratuitous activity, undertaken and pursued for pleasure, e.g. collecting, unique accomplishments, the pleasure in [...] inventing gadgets…” (pg. 145)

Did he just predict Achievements and LittleBigPlanet?

After that, the software transmits your input to the server-side, and the server sends back the video. Quality is dependant on your bandwidth, giving you 480p with 1.5mbps downstream, and 720p with a 5mbps downstream.

They have a very sizable booth at GDC, with a bunch of setups supposedly interacting over a 5mbps conncetion to their servers in Santa Clara, CA. They were using MacBooks, Dell Laptops, and their “MicroConsole”. People were playing games like Crysis Wars, Burnout Paradise Ultimate, and Mirror’s Edge on what appeared to be very stable, very good looking gameplay.

While the service ultimately leaves a sour taste in my mouth, it has some decent selling points (some of which I am pulling right from the press sheets they were handing out).

For one, this service transforms any mediocre PC into a legitimate gaming system. The majority of the systems they were using to stream their service had integrated video cards, which is pretty incredible, but makes sense given the technology. Since this is streaming, there is relatively no waiting time once you’ve purchased and selected your game; you make your selection, and start playing almost immediately. On top of that, the games that were being played were not altered in any way in order to be playable on the OnLive service, they were simply approved by the developer, and thrown up on the service. OnLive is gearing itself up to be a bit more integrated than that, and is offering a SDK to developers so that you can integrate some community, statistics, and “Brag Clip” features into the game. The “Brag Clip” is interesting, and is something that has begun to catch on already – the developers either allow you to record your playing, or take clips of special types of extraordinary gameplay (such as achieving a hard task/trick), and saving it to your account as a clip to share with your friends. Also, on top of being able to be run on middle-end systems, there are really negligible space requirements for the computer using it. This is huge, especially when you have games like Crysis Warhead requiring a dedicated 15GB for the install. Users are also seamlessly kept up to date with any patches that are released for their games. Lastly, and most importantly in my opinion is that while this service will probably launch with some big name game publishers, I see this as another easy way for indie developers to get their games out to a mass audience, and help push the community forward again.

There are many more reasons why potential investors of this service should be worried however. First and foremost, OnLive cannot promise the pristine connection, and stability of each of their customers internet services. Seeing as how quality of service can change almost from neighborhood to neighborhood with the same provider, this is a huge issue that could be a potential thorn in the side of OnLive. In the case that there is an unruly customer with the service because of their dismal internet connection, it would be easy to see OnLive pass the buck from their tech support and have these customers deal with and complain to their ISP. Secondly, as stories in the past have surfaced from heavy bittorrent users being throttled because of their constant taxing on their communities pipe, could you not see the same response to avid users of the service, playing hours upon hours of games a day, and filling their pipe by streaming the 720p video to their system constantly? They begin to get throttled, OnLive starts to suck, they call OnLive to complain, OnLive sends them to their ISP, rinse and repeat. Now, one of OnLive’s boasted features are: take your games with you wherever you have an internet connection. Okay – so I pay for my games, get them on the service, and then I go on vacation where I don’t have access to the net. Whoops, too bad; no connection to the net, no games. They claim to be the end all solution to the DRM woes the industry is facing nowadays, but I would say Steam (and possibly Stardock Impulse) is doing quite well on that front as well; not only that, but you can play your Steam games offline! Also, since this is PC-only, the majority of your gaming paripherals for your consoles will *not* work with the OnLive system.

Some major issues I have with the service which have not been covered through press material as of yet:

• Achievement Tracking
• Voice Communication
• Ability for individualized, saved DLC
• Customized/saved game configurations (This has to be in there, just not a major selling point for them right now)

I could go on, and I’m going to stop by the booth again today to ask some questions on the Developer’s end, but I’ll leave you with a few questions that I got the same answer to. (There were more, but I’m drawing a blank right now.)

• What are the minimum system requirements?
• How is the pricing model going to work?
• Will there be a charge for the MicroConsole?
• Can this stream at 1080p?

The answer? “We can’t comment at this time.”

I’ll come back with some pros and cons that are faced as a developer deploying their games on the service.

As a side note, I would check out Penny Arcade’s blog post and comic about this service as well, pretty funny.

A few months back I beat Mirror’s Edge, here’s my take on it!

Overview

From Wikipedia:

Mirror’s Edge takes place in an unnamed city where a totalitarian regime monitors its citizens through invasive surveillance, tracking all forms of electronic communication in order to reduce crime and quell any challenge to its power. An upcoming mayoral election seeks to retain Mayor Callaghan in power to keep the government’s control on the city, though a new favored candidate Robert Pope promises to bring change. The Eurasian protagonist, Faith Connors, is a “Runner”, a person trained in parkour, to stay out of sight and to use rooftops and other means to help deliver physical messages between revolutionary groups within the city. Faith along with another Runner, Celeste, were both trained by Mercury who also provides radio support for the two.

Impressions

Not too long ago I played Assassin’s Creed and fell in love with a chunk of the game. It looked great, had a few choice design elements that I truly enjoyed (mainly, the “teleport” system for major cities), and I absolutely loved the movement. I had mentioned to friends that if there were a game where movement movement felt this fluid, and the major part of the game, I would snap it up instantly. Needless to say, Mirror’s Edge was that game for me. I had followed the bits of information that came down the stream counting down to its release, and I had preordered my copy months in advance. Needless to say, my experience with the game was fairly positive. I thoroughly enjoyed the movement system, went along with the story, and dealt with the fighting.

What makes this game important to me though, is it took something that we are so completely familiar with (the First Person genre) and turned it on its side. Rather than act like every other shooter out there, and be another Halo, or Counter Strike, or Call of Duty, or Far Cry, or Resistance (I could go on..), they made a First Person game revolve around tactical movement, and tried to create an open system (in terms of the paths you take, and moves you perform) for the player to decide how he or she progresses through each obstacle set. The game itself isn’t about mowing down tons of enemies, its about avoiding them. Mirror’s Edge doesn’t focus your attention to specific groups and NPCs within the game, but forces you to soak in as much of your landscape as possible to decide your next move. And in this day in age where shooters and rockers (while still good products in their own right) dominate – Mirror’s Edge succeeds at delivering a package that is perpendicular to current consumer expectations and offers a breath of fresh air to the industry. Sadly, in the current economic situation that we are in, people perceive risk at a much higher value, and a $60 game that doesn’t conform to a standard that the consumer might be looking for, the game’s sales are going to take a hit.

Issues (Possible Spoilers Ahead)

Shoddy story. The story was fairly shallow – yes, there was an arcing story, but it left much to be desired, less to be explained, and far more to be questioned about how exactly everything panned out at the end. The story seemed to end far too abruptly, as if the writers were implicitly cutting us short to either meet deadlines, or to scream “WE NEED SOME CONTENT FOR THE SEQUEL!”

Cutscenes. Rather than use the engine for cutscenes between levels, (and to mask loading time), DICE used animated movies to show the progression of the story. This concept slightly reminds me of the “Story Time” you can get with the princess in Super Mario Galaxy. While it’s not the same story that you’re currently progressing through (in the sense that the cutscenes are filling in narrative gaps) you are definitely breaking out of the beautiful world that Galaxy presents to you in order to follow a side story. Some people argued that with such a great engine and implementation that DICE did that the cutscenes should have just stayed ingame, but I’m inclined to enjoy the switching between story and gameplay as the mode progresses. With a game as intense and fast paced as Mirror’s Edge, an animated sequence can provide a rest to the gamer.

What I didn’t like about these animated shorts was that sometimes they seemed like they were rushed (production wise), or done in Flash with some awful tweening/repetition. Two ‘broken’ scenes off of the top of my head that I still remember: Faith running around the time she meets up with Celeste for the second time, and one time when Faith is walking back into the shadows. The perspective on this scene tween is all types of skewed, and too easily noticed from even my untrained eye.

Fighting System. Simply said, the fighting system in this game is pretty bad. It is incredibly easy to die – which is acceptable. Your a runner with no protection on whatsoever. Taking more than a few bullets and not dying would be too far a stretch of the imagination. The enemies placement can be frustrating at times, and downright infuriating towards the end of the game. My first run through of the game I was going for the “Pacifist” achievement, where you cannot shoot anyone. Towards the end of the game though, I was looking to put a bullet through my TV. I ended up resulting in taking quite a few near death leaps in the “circular” staircase level, and resorted to hiding in corners in the levels that had an absurd amount of enemies, and took out the baddies one by one until I had cleared enough of them out to make it to the next exit.

In Left4Dead’s commentary, they talk about how they automatically do some things for a player when they get near certain areas (they were talking about automatically ducking when walking towards a vent) so that the player focuses on the fear and survival and bigger picture of the whole situation, without having to worry about a simple game movement like ducking. In this sense, isn’t Mirror’s Edge about the movement? So why not make the fighting system be a little more forgiving? Rather than having multiple whiffs when you’re trying to kick someone in the balls, let the game have a larger acceptance of error, and auto-aiming those crotch shots / uppercuts to make things go a little more smoothly, and let the player focus on what’s important: getting the hell out of wherever you are.

Linearity. In retrospect, this game was a bit too linear for me. While you could definitely take the scenic route in certain areas, there was definitely a best route for everything. I think this was partly due to the fact that the only real goal Faith had throughout the entire game was simply to run. “Getting away” can be a fun thing to do, and it can easily be a good reason why the game was on the shorter side – you can only run away from so much before the idea starts to become boring. But when you have such an open setting such as the rooftops and indoors of a city, and my choices are to either jump over or slide under a pipe that is in my way, the magic of the game seems to slowly fade away.

Consider this though: make the game a little more open-worldish, a little more Half-Life 2. Since Faith is explicitly a courier, working for what the government considers criminals, there are a myriad of things that could have been added to the story more than simply delivering packages. Interacting with NPCs to find out more about her sister’s issues, dive deeper into the corrupted body that the government has become, rather than it just being some ominous, sentient machine that deploys foot-soldiers in the proper areas at the worst times. Faith could have missions in areas, help other runners accomplish their tasks. If this were so, Merc wouldn’t actually look like he is running an operation, rather than being a guy who keeps tabs on (from who we met ingame) three runners from his computer. With respect to Valve’s shooter, put a bit more emphasis on physics, and throw some puzzles into the mix. Why not make Faith rearrange the landscape to be able to make jumps? Kick down a sign to make a bridge, or move the construction vehicles to line it up with a proper jump. Just a few of these would have added to the variety that this game could offer, would easily work well in the first-person view, and would have added to the total gameplay time offered to the user.

One more note, there’s DLC coming out for Mirror’s Edge in January 2009. They completely weeded out everything that the game provided before, and went for an abstract, texture-less (minus some coloring) design of a bunch of downloadable levels. It simplifies the game down to the basic element – movement. Penny Arcade had said something like “this is the game style that we fell in love with when watching previews about Mirror’s Edge”, and I couldn’t agree more. Personally, I stand by this game, as the successes in what Mirror’s Edge achieves to do outweighs the shortcomings.

A quest in the recent WoW expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King poses a big cultural, aesthetic and political question: Should games include torture? To which the answer is simple: Sure they should. In fact, I’ll go further. I think we need more torture in videogames.

The article is thought-provoking and a quick read. I have to say, if games can spawn healthy debates about interesting and important issues in society without breaking the player out of the box, I’m all for it.

Coming up this week (hopefully) my thoughts on Mirror’s Edge and Psychonauts.

I had always been cautious about MMOs, as I have seen many of my friends get themselves drawn deeply into the games, only to emerge months later, scarred and beaten by the speed at which the real world has passed them by during their virtual incubation. However, in giving myself a truly broad experience of the various genres available to the present day market, I couldn’t hide from MMOs forever.

So what better time then a budding new MMO released by DAoC creator Mythic Entertainment? I would be on the same starting plane as everyone else, minus the fact that I wasn’t really used to the gameplay mechanics. I had a few other friends who were interested in giving it a shot – so we took the plunge. We preordered the standard edition, so we’d get a two day start on the game, and be able to get our grips before the masses jumped into the servers. I got sucked in fast – within a few days I had brought my first character to level 20, within around 60 hours of in-game time. I then had a friend convince me to start another character on a server he was playing on, and we played all the time for the next few weeks on that server. Over the span of about a month, I had three characters: a level 31 Witch Hunter, a level 12 Iron Breaker, and a level 20 Disciple of Khaine (on a different server).

All in all I had played over 200 hours of gameplay, in an insanely short amount of time. While I wouldn’t say I had become “addicted”, I definitely wasn’t going out of my way to make other plans when I had free time to spare. The gameplay drags you in; you create your virtual likeness, and you work to improve him/her by learning new abilities, obtaining (either through fighting creatures or purchasing) new weapons and armor. One game reviewer said it best: Warhammer is a game of increasing numbers. While this is true of many MMOs, this is something that you are truly striving to do throughout the entire time that you’re within the game. You strive to increase your renown, your experience, your damage or healing stats, your guild’s rank, the amount of gold you have, etc.

Since this is my first MMO that I have gotten involved in, I can’t really compare the game to know what could be better or worse. I know that I loved playing with my friends, and when they moved on to other games, my interest and enjoyment of the game soon dwindled. MMOs (at least this one in my case) truly thrive on the “massive” part: the game itself is not mind blowing, it does not shatter gaming boundaries or introduce incredibly innovative gameplay mechanics never before seen elsewhere, but it provides a social experience that is entertaining with the company of a few like-minded friends.

If I could have changed anything to this game though, the kill-quests seem to be this recurring theme in most MMOs, and they are simply mindless, gameplay extending pieces that add very little to the game. While I would be understanding if it were simply included to acquaint a newcomer with the fighting mechanics of your character, I was constantly seeing these quests pop up along my entire trip to level 31 – and I would be willing to bet they continue to exist even past that. Taking this complaint to the next level: the majority of the quests really weren’t impressive to me- the majority boil down to kill quests, fetch quests, or meeting quests. I did enjoy some of the public quests that were available in the game (where you would usually need a few people to beat the final level of the boss), but getting people into these was not always easy.

The one thing that made this game shine for me was the Realm vs. Realm (RvR) combat, where you would either jump into a scenario and fight up to a 12v12 battle against the opposing force, or you could find characters of the opposing force simply in the world that you were in, and fight them. It was in these instances where it was truly a battle of wits, outsmarting your opponent, and being able to outperform them with the knowledge you have of yours (and their) tactics, and what you can do to defeat them. One time a friend and I came up to a few people and we were able to defeat them. Since we were near their base, they would spawn and try to chase us down again in vengeance. We ended up killing these two guys about three times before they brought a few other players with them, at which point we retreated. It was a memorable thirty minutes within the game where the mechanic truly shined.

From what I’ve read and heard from other MMO players, WAR stands out in how much emphasis it puts in RvR combat. Hopefully it is successful enough to show other developers that this is the type of gameplay we like, and are looking for.

While there aren’t any MMO’s that I’m looking to jump in anytime soon, especially not Wrath of the Lich King, a good friend has pointed me to All Points Bulletin which looks like its going to be awesome.

After having “dragged” one of my friends into playing Castle Crashers with me, I felt that I owed it to him to pickup a game of his choice. Fable 2 would be the game of choice from him. Within our micro-community, a few of the people were super hyped about this game, having truly enjoyed the first iteration.  My experience with ARPG’s has still been touchy at best – I am not well played in this genre. I have also become increasingly critical about approaching video games as a story-telling mechanism rather than just a point of entertainment. Not ever game or genre need to achieve a perfect balance between story and mindless entertainment, but it is definitely something the ARPG’s hinge on.

So, I jumped into Fable II. I tried to keep myself as neutral about it as possible. I didn’t want to read into the hype online, and I tried to take everything that my peers were oogling about with a grain of salt. I read up on the story a bit on Wikipedia, and left it at that. My friend and I were incredibly interested in the multiplayer co-op that the game boasted, and we were looking forward to gunning through the game together, taking in the experience for what it was worth. I’m a sucker for cooperative play, so if anything had piqued my interest, it was going to be this.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The game takes place in the fictional world of Albion, five hundred years after Fable’s setting, in a colonial era resembling the time of highwaymen or the Enlightenment; guns are still primitive, and large castles and cities have developed in the place of towns. Unlike the original, the player may choose to be either male or female.

Impressions

The game itself promised to be incredibly open with never just one choice for anything you did. My friend and I wanted to take that for all it was worth. We had just finished playing another game where we had taken the good side, and we wanted to turn that around on this one. I wanted to be as evil as this game would allow. Every option the game gave, we took the most sinister approach. We rescued people, then murdered them. Our first order of business was to slaughter the entire town, and kill a few dozen guards before we moved onto our first quests. We killed parents right in front of the eyes of children. Then we tried killing the children – but I guess the game has some limits – children are invulnerable. The evil continued – we massacred villages, destroyed families, relationships, and left any possible wake of dismay, despair, and destruction in our paths. One thing that struck me instantly was the cut scenes this game had: they were absolutely gorgeous! After having beaten the game, I was entertained, but not floored by the experience that I had played through.

This game was a turning point for me in how I will approach my future game purchases as well – the overall feeling of mediocrity that I was left with this game is making me consider my purchases versus rentals/trades a bit more seriously.

Issues (Spoilers Ahead)

Lack of cut scenes. With the backlash from Metal Gear Solid 4′s hour and a half of cut scenes, this game actually had a selling point that it had “less than five minutes of cut scenes”. After seeing how great they did on the small cut scenes that were available within the game, I was simply left with wanting more. The lack of cut scenes should not necessarily be a selling point of a game, the correct balance of using them with gameplay to push the storyline forward should be.

Menu system. The menu system for this game seems to come up quite a bit when I talk about my complaints about this game to other people. It’s laggy, and takes a long time to get into and use. Secondly, there are some things within the menu system that see too much use (items, clothing, weapon changes) to require you to have to deal with such a slow moving piece of crap. There are a few reports that the menu system sped up when NXE was installed, but that doesn’t do any good because the game came out before the install feature was even an option. I personally wish the controller design had be re-engineered to control some more of the features that we had to go into the menu for rather than some of the features it gave us immediate access to.

Controller Bindings. Generally, games have you aim with your right joystick, and move with your left. I’ve had this unbreakable habit of having my right stick be inverted. I tend to blame 007 on the N64, but it is probably more likely a testament to how stuck in my ways about my controller setup I am. Either way, this game has the left stick be your aiming, so neither regular nor inverted felt right for aiming. This is compounded by the fact that when you shoot, you need to hit B, rather than a trigger to shoot, making it ineffective and even worse design if you were to make the right stick be aiming, because you need to move your thumb off the joystick in order to shoot. I think that this is a case of either trying to put too much into the game, or just failed controller design.

Fashion, the big deal, but not really. RPG games are starting to put quite a bit more effort into the customization of your character. Dying, various lines of clothing, and Fable II even has tattoos that you can apply to your body. Pretty interesting stuff, as the customization allows you to really create your unique image within the virtual world that you’re immersing yourself into. Only problem, is the game doesn’t really do too much in letting you be able to see that. The camera control allows no zoom, there are no cut scenes where you get any closeups of your character, and even the character “dress-up” menu doesn’t let you zoom in to your character to look at the details of the features you are adding. It’s a few steps back from pushing the customization features.

Eating disorders. I’ll admit, I was a bit sexist in the approach to building my character. I wanted her to be an evil, magic oriented character, but I wanted her to be good looking. After I mistakenly ate a piece of cheese and saw +Fat, I never let my character eat anything again – I sold any food I came up to. I eventually learned that veggies were good to reduce fatness, and she got to eat some old celery, but it was just potions after that. The game itself lets you “let go” in terms of food, equating a few pieces of pie into about a 25-50 lb gain. And with all the damn running I do from quest to quest? Come on!

Your under annoyance! No matter how many guards I killed, I would continually be approached for arrest. This brings up a delayed menu, which chooses what you want to do: pay a fine, community service, or resist arrest. Because of the delayed menu, I once had to start killing some guards right in front of my husband. He divorced me soon thereafter – probably couldn’t stand that I was wearing the pants in the relationship. Either way, one easy way to get around this nuisance is to promise to do community service, and never do it, with no fear of repercussions. It was the personality that I wanted to be portraying in the game, but too much of a cop out of the feature.

Play a game, not a job. Yahtzee did a great job at picking fun at this part of the game, and I can’t help but agree with him. The jobs in this game, which you use to build money, buy houses, and thus continue to increase your wealth are BORING. What’s that you say? Jobs are boring in real life and thus this is just more of a realistic approach? Oh okay. Well when I want a real life simulation, I’ll step outside. For now, please focus on entertainment while I play a game which I purchased to ENTERTAIN ME. Also, another complaint about the jobs that I have, is the game seemed to be truly pushing the limits of the 360, and I was experiencing a bit of frame lag now and then. When you’ve got a minigame that suffers from framelag at fast speeds, the experience is further deteriorated for the user.

Multiplayer? As I said, multiplayer was the one thing that I was excited about for this game. Technology has come along way since the 2600, we’ve got the hardware, we’ve got the bandwidth, now give us some jaw-dropping co-op experiences. Sadly, this game didn’t deliver a good multiplayer experience. First off, anyone who joins is your “henchmen”,  any of their actions have no affect on their character whatsoever, other than that they can gain experience and use to train their character. The game, overall, seemed to move incredibly slow with this feature, and take any entertainment value out of the game that was previously there. After a few hours of this, my friend and I ended up doing something that has been called “orb-questing” online. Where we progressed through the entire game nearby while online, and we could see each other’s position, would help each other finding objects, unlocking puzzles and whatnot. This actually brought some entertainment to playing it alongside someone else.

Premature Ending. This entire game builds up for you finding these three “heroes” to get together so you can fight and oppose the evil that is overtaking your area. After you’ve amassed your trio of assistants, you merely use them to suck up their powers, and punch the bad guy off his proverbial pedestal to his death. End Game. After this happened, I realized that the last fight at the beach against that huge shard was the last boss fight, and I felt even more cheated. For an ARPG, we could have used more A. To add to this anti-climactic ending, my friend who was playing waited too long before he did anything to the enemy, and the gun hero ended up shooting the bad guy and said “Oops, were you going to do something?”. Essentially taking the game chugging along at 30MPH right into a brick wall.

The “ending”. At the end of the game, after the dream sequence where you are taken through the color changing landscape with some sound bytes that show you coming from where you were as a kid to where you are now in your life, this was an absolutely great idea. It had very similar experience to Shadow of the Colossus, Call of Duty 4′s nuke-death sequence. However, just like the game itself, the thing was over before it started. In the beginning of the game, you were not allowed to run when following the butler in the castle, and this should have had the same sort of speed control. While this did have an impact, I feel the emotional impact to the gamer would have been much stronger had the entire transition period from the dream world to the “grim reality” that is your characters life had lasted another 30-60 seconds, to really let the whole weight of everything that’s happened sink in.

In short, if I could do it again, I would have simply rented this game.

From a hardware standpoint, there has been a massive speculation about Microsoft’s latest console, the Xbox 360. With varying reports saying that their latest console showing anywhere from 16% upwards to almost a 60% failure rate. When the Wii launched, it’s update service was bricking a small number of consoles. There were a few recalls/fixes for some major game accessories as well – Nintendo sent out a batch of straps and wiimote sleeves for added protection, and Rock Band’s guitars were suffering from issues with the whammy bar. I’m sure I’m missing a few on this list, and I am only going back a few years in terms of hardware issues.

I guess I should give some slack to the issues that have spawned up in the manufacturing process, as there will always be a small failure rate for any mass produced product. Bad CDs will be made, and defective consoles will get out there, and it will normally be a small majority (with the exception of the widespread issues with the 360) who have the bad luck and inconvenience to deal with the problem, and get a replacement.

However, I’m not so quick to hold my tongue on software releases, as there is a bit more involvement of putting together the game from start to finish, then declaring a product gold, and sending it out for mass duplication. From conception to gold, it’s all input: the development process, the investors, the studio, and your distributors.

For instance, I searched Kotaku for “bugs”, and “issues”, and I came up with a few recent games with some slightly annoying to fairly serious issues:

GTA IV (PS3)- Crashing/Freezing and multiplayer issues

Castle Crashers – Online play issues causing players to lose their entire save files

Bully: Scholarship Edition (360 Port) – Freezing Issues

Guitar Hero III (Wii) – Mono sound in a music game

The list goes (The Orange Box (PS3), Saints Row, Rainbow Six Vegas, Battlefield 2), and I only went back a few pages for each search to get a broad idea of what’s come up recently. Some of these issues are near unforgivable, so glaring that it would seem that any competitent programmer/tester should have been able to see the issue from a mile away, and have made note of it before this was released to the masses. When you look back, how many consoles had recalls, or huge defects, or games went out so buggy that they were unplayable? While it wasn’t something that I noted when I was that young, it seems like the rate of failure and growing issues post-release seems to be coalescing at an alarming speed.

Before I piss off any game studio employee that may be scouting this blog to check me out for employment, I don’t outright question the quality of the employees that are creating and testing these products. In one hand, the problem lies on the gaming community. Gaming as a socially accepted hobby has become much more mainstream than it was twenty years ago. The competition between genres, studios, and product sequels is so fierce as new features, upgraded graphics, larger environments, and hours upon hours of gameplay are crammed into the products that it is forseeable that losing sight of anything is not possible — but probable. And why is there such a frenzy for all these additions? Consumers flock to the shiny, new features that are released. Media tends to highlight games with something new to offer, rather than focus on simple design and elegant gameplay. Because of this, studios can’t ignore what is inevitably required of them, and the laundry list of things to add piles up fast. The involvement of people in one major game release jumps into the hundreds, development cycles jump into multiples of years, IP and projects change hands as publishers, producers, marketing and corporate execs clash heads over features, content, the release timetable. And none of this aids in speeding up the release of the game by any means.

All of this is beyond me, and far removed from my biggest issue that has been plauging the industry lately. When it comes to games released in the past five years, I have grown increasingly sick of companies using the internet as a crutch for their development cycle. It seems that games now have a release schedule that extends far beyond going gold, and the definition of “gold” is almost unquestionably turning into “beta”: A studio finishes a game to get as complete as they can, to get as close as they can to the wishes of their higher-up’s for both the feature set and the timetable requested. The game is then packaged and sold to millions in its released locations. The developers then field the mass of bugs and issues that come up with the game, and release a patch over the ‘net shortly thereafter to fix what has come up. With PC games, this is okay – you can’t expect a developer to be able to test every driver, every setup that exists out there. But consoles? Come on.

As much as I am giddy for LBP’s release – they are only going to be releasing the online “create” functionality down the road. While their marketing spin on it almost makes sense (give the gamers time to actually learn the tools before you go working with others), it doesn’t remove them from hitting the principle problem.

Don’t rely on the internet to release an unfinished, unpolished product. It’s your job to keep your feature set managable in the time that you require to finish it in, including proper time to thoroughly test the product.