No Earthbound For You

You’ve been Lawyered!  The latest rumor on the street is that Earthbound is not, and never will be, released on virtual console, at least not in North America.  While I personally would like to believe that Nintendo just likes putting the screws on us over in the west, the truth seems to be much more boring.

The soundtrack for Earthbound does a lot of sampling of the work of other artists.  Now, mind you, it’s cranked down into a midi version, and I’m pretty sure you don’t need to pay royalties when you make a midi version of a sample of the Monty Python theme song, and then screw with the tempo.  Something about fair use.

Anyhoo, Nintendo of Japan is reportedly extremely uncomfortable with it regardless, and is also unwilling to release a version with different and definitely legal music in it.

Maybe someone should tell them that witholding products from the market that are in demand is why people install emulators on their Wiis and stop paying for VC content entirely.

You can read the full story on Starmen.net here.

Adventure Games

I was talking to Dan about this a couple of weeks ago, and I thought I’d share some thoughts about the genre.

From a pure game design standpoint, Adventure Games are not particularly interesting.  You have a game space, which can be seen as a very rigid tree, or occasionally a graph.  The job of the player is to manually perform a search on this tree until they reach a particular leaf node.

The method of node traversal takes different forms, but usually includes things like finding, combining, and using items, speaking to characters, moving to various rooms, and solving pre-constructed puzzles.  In 2009, there is nothing ludologically complex about this, for the most part it has been done.  We have learned certain lessons about the way in which you should or should not go about constructing your game tree (for example, having extremely deep branches that ultimately are dead-ends are frowned upon, as is progressing down a branch that is otherwise identical to the correct branch, but is missing some key piece, such as picking up an item, that does not become appearant until it is far too late, and the game prevents you from retracing your steps).  But assuming you follow these guidelines, making an adventure game does not involve doing anything revolutionary, from a game design standpoint.

Which isn’t to say they aren’t interesting or that people shouldn’t make them.  From a narrative standpoint, adventure games can be incredibly rich, and there are people (myself included) who greatly enjoy the excerise of traversing the trees you have made for us.  In fact, in the last few years, it is precisely because these games are so well understood and strictly defined that tools like AGS have been made available, providing one of the most direct routes for hobbiest game designers to implement their visions.  I’m a big fan of the idea that if anyone has the ability to write a book (as it stands today), then there will be a large pile of shovelware books, but also an increase in the amount of good material available for me to consume.  I feel the same way about games - although we are not at a point where making games is as straightforward as writing a book - Adventure Games are one of the best places to start finding them.

A final observation.  One of the reasons that the adventure game genre has been so threadbare in the last 10 years is a lack of market for them - they became a niche.  With the ongoing explosion of the market as a whole - especially in the realm of casual games, people who were ‘non-gamers’ 10 years ago and are ‘casual gamers’ now are beginning to discover this niche, to the point where casual portals like Big Fish Games are offering titles such as Syberia 2 - a very hardcore traditional point and click game - to their members.  That says to me that you may see this genre, commercially stagnant, have a revival in the coming years (to a point, you are already seeing this via Telltale Games, et al. on the Wii).

Some interesting recent or upcoming releases in this genre:

• The Chzo Mythos
• A Tale of Two Kingdoms
• AGD Interactive remakes of King’s Quest 1 and Quest for Glory 2
• The Whispered World
• Three Cards to Midnight, from the makers of the Tex Murphy series (Looking at a March 2009 or later release at this point)

Cool Stuff in 2009

Every year I look back at the delightful array of titles and happenings in the previous year, and I can’t for the life of me remember what’s happening in the upcoming year.  Of course, there are always suprises, usually coming out of the Indie woodwork, but it’s helpful to come up with a list of stuff I’m excited about for 2009

• Cave Story (Available in English for PC/Mac here, this indie title finally gets its day in the sun on Wii)
• Halo Wars
• Heavy Rain
• Halo: ODST
• Resident Evil 5
• Star Ocean
• Brutal Legend
• Bioshock 2
• Puzzle Quest: Galactrix
• Deus Ex 3!!!
• Alan Wake
• Beyond Good and Evil 2!!!
• Mass Effect 2
• Overlord 2
• God of War 3
• I Am Alive
• The Sims 3

So all in all, I don’t know what Peter Molyneux is talking about.  Maybe he only gets excited by games he makes.

Game Sales in 2008

You can go here and interpret for yourself.  Side note:  I intend to do another round of “Who’s the best developer of 2008″, but I need to do some forensic database reconstruction first.

Interesting Notes:

• In terms of volume, the top 5 game sales of 2008 are all first party Nintendo Wii titles
• Sony has only one game in the top 20 (Grand Theft Auto IV on PS3)
• GTA IV sold nearly twice as many units on the Xbox 360 than on the PS3
• 2/3 of the games for Xbox 360 in the top 20 are titles primarily played online
• Of the 13 games for Nintendo Platforms in the top 20 (DS and Wii), only one (Guitar Hero 3) is not a first party Nintendo title.
• Games for Xbox 360 outsold games for PS3, PS2 and PSP combined in 2008 with over 84 million titles sold
• On average, as of 2008, the average Xbox 360 owner has more games than any other system (just over 10).

Witcher Coming to Consoles

CD Projekt RED’s excellent PC-only RPG is getting a Console version! According to this newsletter, they’re developing the Console titles (Xbox 360 and PS3) from the ground up using the same storyline as the original PC version, but with a brand new game engine and a ton of new features. The new console version is set to release in Fall 2009.

NXE is here!

After months of work, the magic day has finally arrived.  Many of the features my team has developed are invisible to you, dear reader, but trust that the dark magic they emit fuels the juicy bits now flowing to your console as of 45 minutes ago.

One reasonably high profile feature, and a personal favorite of mine, that you can see is Marketplace on the web, which you can find here.  It’s a million times easier to find games and movies, manage the content you’ve already purchased, and play with your download queue.

Any feedback you guys have on either the new user experience, or especially the web-side stuff is welcome and appreciated!

The Swarm

As you’re probably aware, I’ve been severely negligent in updating recently.  Between being sick and working my ass off to get NXE out the door, I’ve been sleeping very little, and as a result my mind has been hazy and uncreative = no blogging.  Some might feel guilty about this - I’ve found that feeling guilty is usually a waste of time.  Nevertheless, I’ll be making an effort to blog more going forward.

Last autumn was absolutely retarded for great game releases, and despite the fact that my upper management keeps telling me that this year is even more so, I don’t think it’s really sunk in until now.  I hit up Dead Space a couple of days after release, and got about half way through before Fable 2 came out.  I’ve said this a few times recently, but I really must applaude EA for getting their shit together, Dead Space is a really great, innovative game. 

From a design perspective, there’s three highlights: The use of anti-gravity and limit oxygen in a survival horror game adds a lot of tension to the atmosphere;  the concept of killing enemies not by shooting them enough times that a certain damage threshold is reached, but rather by strategically dismembering them; and finally the floating, over the shoulder UI that leaves the screen unobstructed.

While Dead Space comes from EA Redwood Shores, another EA Studio, DICE, is releasing the highly anticipated Mirror’s Edge next week, and it looks to be another innovative blockbuster.  I get the feeling that there’s a lot of talent in EA that’s been suppressed by the policies of upper management for a long time, and we’re starting to see it explode outward.

On the homefront, Fable 2 definitely interrupted Dead Space for me, and hooked me in long enough that I’ve nearly pummeled that game into the ground.  Peter Molyneux’s stuff has always delighted me, and I think Fable 2 is much more the vision of what he was looking for in the original Fable.  While the game is great, I think my biggest issue with it is how easy it is to flip the characteristics of your character.  Human beings are very good at optimizing and finding shortcuts to things, and there are many, many features of this game that seem to be superfluous - they add a sort of sugary filling into the world, but the manner in which they are implemented means that you have no reason to ever do them because they are a slower route to the same destination with no benefit (chopping wood to earn money over blacksmithing or serving drinks would be an example of this). 

Another homefront title Gears of War 2 is released Friday, so that will likely take over when Fable gets put back on the Shelf.

I’ve started poking around at Fallout 3, naturally, as well, but this is a game I want to savor, and I’m not prepared to comment at this juncture.  I’ve heard rumors about Prince of Persia and Red Alert 3 coming out at some point here, but at this point I feel like I’m eating at one of those country buffets where everything smells amazing, but there’s just so much food that you can’t eat it all without making yourself sick.

I’m really going to need a vacation.

Bioshock 2: Sea of Dreams

Yay for unauthorized video footage of teaser trailers.  See below. [via Steve Gaynor]

Secret of Mana released on WiiWare

Woot.  Although I prefer its alchemy wielding and unpopular little brother, Secret of Evermore, a SoM re-release is definitely a plus.  With Chrono Trigger coming out on the DS next month, and Super Mario RPG’s release a couple of weeks ago, if they get SoE in, that would pretty much round out re-releases of SNES era Square RPGs.

One can still point to a major gap in the lineup though.  Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

NXE has a street date

Via Major Nelson:

John Schappert, Corporate Vice President of Xbox LIVE, Services and Software, announced today during his Tokyo Game Show keynote that the New Xbox Experience will ship to Xbox 360’s around the world (in 26 countries, localized in 11 languages) on November 19th 2008.

I just tried out Netflix last night, and all I can say is that my god, there is something truely beautiful about streaming nearly any TV Show I’ve missed (Starting with second season of 30 Rock) from the last couple of years onto my 46″ Plasma seamlessly through my 360.  It brings tears to my eyes.

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