work in progess

So I've decided that I want to make this site into a kind of portfolio and diary of the things I've been doing lately, rather than the forgotten piece of web space it has been in the past year(s?). I figure now that I have my computer back, this will be a lot easier to execute than when I came up with this idea a week ago and my hard drive died. (Funny how the list of repaired parts for my computer said the hard drive, optical drive and flex cable were replaced because they were "noisy" and not just "friggin' broken")

Anyway, I'm officially making the goal of posting 3 times a week. I'm also planning on moving this blog from Blogger to Wordpress so I can play around with themes and such.

So here we go! :)

Letter to the editor:

by me. I letter to the editor I wrote in response to this column from the Post, which is Ohio Univeristy's student-run newspaper.

And, yes, I am so excited for the Unfinished Swan (mentioned below) to come out at some point. Should contact the developer for an interview :3

Post Letter: Gaming column forgets quality low-budget titles
10/14/2009 11:15:00 PM	Email this article • Print this article
Letter to the Editor As a video game enthusiast, I love seeing games covered in newspapers and general interest publications. But I felt Greg Mercer's last column could've used a little more research, and a bit more of a solution to finding those smaller-priced, but still high-quality niche titles he's looking for. Pointing out how the movie and game industries alike roll much of their budgets toward triple-A titles is always worthwhile, but the smaller, lower-budget games have been in the market for at least the last three to five years. A look into gaming's last few years could've revealed (and recommended to readers) lower-budget games available on consoles and online. Many of these games are available on online services each current-generation console offers in the $15 and under price range: the Nintendo's WiiWare store (i.e., LostWinds, World of Goo), Sony's PlayStation Network (PixelJunk Eden, Echochrome), and Xbox's Xbox Live (Braid, Castle Crashers). Desktop Tower Defense, Line Rider, and N+ are all popular online, Flash-based games that were ported to different platforms, promising to suck up your free time not just at your PC at work, but your game consoles at home. Most of these titles may be more familiar to the hardcore gaming crowd, and maybe not so much to the "general public," but the general, console-owning public could probably find these games accessible and enjoyable. PopCap Games, a successful company that makes games of non-blockbuster, but profitable proportions, has been dominating the casual gaming market with titles like Bejeweled, Zuma and, more recently, Plants vs. Zombies and Peggle. The article also seemed to confuse what defines blockbuster, niche and casual games. Wii Fit is not a "smaller, niche-level game." I can't even begin to guess how much money Nintendo poured into research and development alone on this product that aims its $89.99 suggested retail price squarely at the casual gaming crowd. The gaming renaissance has been here for a while with the slew of "indie" games that gained recognition in the industry, just as independent films are occasionally recognized in their respective medium. Video games have so much more to offer beyond Halo, Mario, Zelda and Rock Band. Don't just tell disinterested readers that - show them. P.S. - Kudos to the editor who put in the note about GoldenEye 007, which did garner "Game of the Year" awards and other accolades for the year of its 1997 release. If you had an N64, that game most likely remains in some fragment of your childhood memories. Remember multiplayer Moonraker-only showdowns? Good times. P.P.S. - An indie game to get excited about is The Unfinished Swan. Watch the game demo online. Meghan Ventura is a senior studying journalism.

The Clique: Diss and Make Up (review)

by me. Another MyGamer review. And, yes, I really was hoping this could be a game equivalent of Mean Girls. Even though, deep in my heart, I really knew how difficult that would be for a game to pull off.

When I first saw The Clique almost everything about it—from the title to the packaging—rang not so distant bells of Mean Girls, a movie I came to love in my freshman year of college. Mean Girls, although it had a fairly standard, cliché plot of a high school drama movie, had a ridiculously funny take on the unnecessary, terribly catty way girls can treat each other. When I picked up mean girls, I was hoping I would find the same sarcastic take on high school with the witty humor, and well-loved and well–hated stereotypes. The Clique fell short of my Mean Girls hopes, and despite some flaws, the game stands as a so-so high school simulator.

The game begins with your character moving to a new school. From there, you traverse the various cliques (the artists, the nerds, the jocks, etc.) and climb the social ladder, trying to make friends and find your place in the school. The goal of each chapter in the game is to get invited to a certain clique’s party, eventually working your way up to the Pretty Committee, which is made up of four of the most revered and feared girls in school. You befriend cliques by conforming to each clique’s dress code, and running errands for them, eventually earning your party invitation. The story is dialogue-driven with many, many text boxes, most of which are comments from other students berating your fashion sense and the Pretty Committee making sure you stay at the bottom of the social totem pole.

The gameplay is a formulaic and simple point-and-click with a few touch screen-based mini-games at school and at the mall thrown into the mix. The school minigames are loosely based on the academic class you have scheduled for that day (i.e. art is drawing certain shapes, chemistry is tapping and shaking bottles in the correct order, gym is rock-climbing with hazards like falling bowling balls and paper planes. No kidding.). These come in three levels of difficulty and are somewhat repetitive. Minigames at the mall take the role of your part-time job, and your performance at the clothes, ice cream, taco, or coffee shop determine how much money you earn. The clothes department is easily the most lucrative, even if the game occasionally didn’t recognize my stylus’s input.

The day begins with your character getting dressed for school, and wearing different clothes and outfits boosts your compatibility with certain cliques. When you character is shopping or picking out what to wear that day, horizontal meters will show how compatible your outfit is with all the cliques. If you haven’t maxed out the meter, other characters won’t even talk to you. They’ll snub you with a snide comment and wait until you go buy more clothes. After that, you’ll run a few simple errands for them in between classes and at lunch, and they finally stop treating you like dirt and hand you a party invite. The cut scenes at parties drive along the story’s high school romance drama and dating politics.

While much of the dialogue, characters and writing in The Clique was believable, something would ring false with reality and punctuate the story, like the students used bluetooths when calling each other on the phone, or the outer space-obsessed kid who mentions a LARP club. Instructions for gameplay are made up of snappy soundbytes and tended to abuse the word “ah-mazing.” As is a problem with most text-based games, a lot of the NPC dialogue gets repetitive after the game’s halfway point.

The game’s music is for the most part poppy and upbeat, and the number of original vocal tracks is surprising. The graphics are clean and eye-pleasing, and navigation is exceptionally easy. I loved that I could teleport my character to any classroom in the school just by clicking the room I wanted to go to on the map. Moving your character around the room is simple, too, although it’s the first game I’ve had to triple-click on a NPC to talk with them immediately (one click will move your character slowly over towards them, and a double-click will have your character walk slightly faster). One major, major snag I ran into at the end though was when I triple-clicked on a movement arrow and the whole game locked up. Luckily, I’m a rabid game saver, so I wasn’t set back at all, and the error wasn’t repeated.

The Clique has a few bugs, but it plays just like a usual chick flick or high school romance movie—just not on the same echelon as my beloved Mean Girls. With the game’s shopping, dating and pure power-pinkness, The Clique has much potential to be a fun game for younger girls. Just beware of a possibly short replay value and play time.

Pic Pic review

by me. A MyGamer review. An awesome game that should be imported to America.



Puzzles! Pictures! If it were available in America, you would buy it!

Success’s Pic Pic is the most fun I’ve had with a puzzle game in a long, long time. All puzzlers I’ve played in recent memory have had their gimmicks or missions to inject fun into puzzle-solving. Professor Layton wraps mystery stories around riddles. Brain Age’s Dr. Kawashima taunts your aging brain at every failure. Classics like Columns, Tetris, PuyoPuyo all focus on battling spatial limitations, time or another player. And this is exactly why Pic Pic took me aback at first. There’s no story, no versus mode, no outside elements to inject more “fun” into the gameplay; just paint-by-the-numbers puzzles that form pixilated pictures on completion and an inconspicuous clock that times your progress. While PicPic doesn’t pack the sassy punch or dramatic overtones of many recent games, it still provides a challenging, fun, if not relaxing experience.

Pic Pic has three modes of play, which end with the puzzle forming a pixelized picture. Players input their answers on the touch screen, and can watch this picture form on the top-screen, which contains a scaled-down version of the whole puzzle. Maze Paint mode presents players with a maze and, in traditional maze-solving style, has the player trace a line on the touch screen from the entrance to the exit, filling in the lines to a picture.

Drawing and Magipic modes, however, present more interesting challenges that have a much steeper learning curve. Drawing mode lays out pairs of matching numbers ranging from 1-20 on a grid. The player must connect matching numbers (i.e., a four to another four, and a five to another five), but the length a player can extend the connecting line from the number is determined by the number itself (i.e., if you have a four, you can only connect to other fours that are four spaces away). These connecting lines are drawn horizontally and vertically, and can do a lot of zigzagging once the player reaches the higher-number puzzles.

MagiPic mode easily has the highest learning curve and is the most frustrating. In an odd sudoku/Picross/paint-by-numbers mix, MagiPic challenges players to fill in the correct amount and placement of pixels in a 3x3, nine-block square to form a black-and-white picture. The number in the center of this square, which ranges from 0-9, represents the number of pixels that will be filled in this square. Having a square with 0 or 9 is easy enough to fill in, but when the nine-block squares begin to over-lap, the puzzle easily becomes chaotic. A wrong guess can throw the whole puzzle off and be very difficult to solve. The monochromatic picture is also more difficult to guess than the one’s in Maze Paint and Drawing, where the player can make an educated guess on where to go next if they’re stuck on a half-formed picture.

The sheer number of puzzles (1,200, total) in Pic Pic is astounding, as is the amount of digital screen space the most difficult puzzles span. I spent an hour or so solving Drawing puzzle #395, which is several screens wide and tall on the most zoomed out view, and had only completed 75% of it. PicPic provides seemingly endless hours of puzzles, and, surprisingly, the concept never gets old. Once I actually got the hang of completing the puzzles, the game was very easy to pick up, and play for about 15 minutes on a regular basis. While Pic Pic allows the player to save and solve one puzzle at a time and each mode, I wish each mode could’ve had a couple of save files because I would get tired of working on the same puzzle for a while.

The design and controls of the game are flawless, and incredibly easy to understand. Everything is controlled by a simple click or press on the touch screen with the stylus, and the D-pad can be used to glide over the puzzle and fill in the easy-to-solve spots in Drawing and MagiPic, and also allow you to keep your stylus free as you navigate which passageway to take next in Maze Paint. The sounds and music are all repetitive and simple, but blend well with the game and are easy on the ears (except for the jarring buzzing sound from when you hit the border of a puzzle). Prepare to switch on some different background music while solving puzzles, because the one track of music the game provides gets boring after while.

The final pictures are strangely rewarding, and a nice complement to the “oh-thank-god-I-finally-finished it” feeling that comes with filling in the last pixel. I ended up drawing a ninja, a horse, a man and a woman at a festival, a frog, elephants swimming through the water, and many other things more simple and complicated. While the no-frills fun of Pic Pic has seen releases in Japan, Europe and Australia, it has yet to hit North American shelves, which is unfortunate because it definitely has potential as a portable puzzler. Until then, I’ll be one of the lone (or at least very, very few) gamers in the States who will be hording away hundreds upon hundreds of hours of picture-coloring puzzle fun.

Bringing FPSs Back from the Brink (preview/interview)

by me, of course! :) As seen on Mygamer.com, where I write all kinds of gaming stuff. Also, I'm probably too proud of the title I thought of for this article ^^


Bringing FPSs Back from the Brink

Listening to Edward Stern, Senior Game Designer at Splash Damage, talk about Brink isn’t too different from listening to a political ad campaign. There are idealistic promises of fixing all the broken systems (within the realm of online first-person shooters), plans that will reach out to the whole nation (or all of gamerkind), and new technologies with fancy names and acronyms to execute these ideas.

“It’s kind of an interesting sell in a kind of way because we’re basically claiming that lots of thinking games are broken, which people are really not having a problem with so far,” Stern said, explaining how certain features attempt to make the game more accessible to experienced and inexperienced gamers. “With an online FPS, you can either have the best time or the worst time possible. So we wanted to take all of the good stuff and build on it and fix all of the stuff we haven’t been able to fix so far. And also make it available to everybody.”

Brink is set on an artificial continent called the Ark, and although the actual plot is still a little mysterious, the events occur after the “Ark Project” fails. The conflict involves two groups called the Resistance and the Security, and the player will be able to play through both teams’ versions of events. I needled Stern a bit to see if some great environmental message was going to emerge, but he assured me it was just a cool setting for a game and that Splash Damage has drawn on some real-life ecological projects in making the game (and that some of those projects are creepier than the fictional stuff they’ve invented).

The missions are based on two teams of eight, which Stern describes as the perfect balance for Brink. “It’s 8v8, which is the sweet spot for us. Teams with lower numbers just don't last that long. More of the players have the most the most of the time with that kind of busyness. Also, it means we can have smaller environments, much more richly textured, and much more richly detailed, which is just immersive.”

Brink’s SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) system, for example, attempts to simplify and streamline movement. While moving toward an obstacle, like a bunch of pipes you can either jump over or slide under, the player’s avatar just has to glance slightly up and will automatically jump over the pipes. If they’re looking down, they’ll slide under the pipes. SMART is designed with the goal of helping players move smoothly over varied terrain, without having to worry about getting hung up on a one-pixel-high wall, or what buttons to press.

In addition to stream-lining movement controls, Brink has a few other tricks to try to make the game accessible including a more assuaged style of storytelling called “instant deep concepts” that will get rid of those “let’s tell the history of this game’s story” cutscenes. You know the one’s that start “XX years ago –this terrible incident- happened and now gameworld X has YY conflict.” Instant deep concepts tries to tell the story through clues in the game environment and show the player what happened rather than telling them through an NPC monologue. At the same time, while Brink aims to immerse the player in its post-ecological-utopia world, it doesn’t shove the narrative down uninterested players’ throats. The player can finish the game with understanding little, but players who want to understand more of Ark’s conflict can really dig deeper into the game environment and get involved with the story as much as they’d like.

Another long-standing issue Splash Damage is attempting to fix is the disparity between online/offline, single-player/multi-player modes in some past games, an issue that can sometimes present different control schemes and overall game experiences between different modes. As Stern said, at Brink’s load screen, there won’t options for single-player or multi-player—just one option to play the game. The game runs from a single executable file. For example, if a player boots up Brink and sees a friend is playing a solo mission, the player can join their friend and make it a co-op mission. In joining, you’ll be replacing an AI-controlled NPC on your friend’s team. Splash Damage is experimenting with split-screens for local multiplayer.

During skirmishes, players will have a few objectives to choose from and complete for experience points that will bolster their character’s skills. The difference that sets this EXP system apart is that objectives are dynamically generated based on how the game is going.

“We brazenly, openly bribe players with XP,” Stern explained. “If you do the thing that earns you the most XP, you will be an awesome teammate and be doing the best thing for your team.”

I think it’s reasonable to expect great things, or at the very least a great amount of detail, from Brink’s environments thanks to a new, nifty technique called “virtual sparse texturing”. Virtual sparse texturing compresses GB-sized source textures into mere megabytes, allowing tons of data to be stored on disks, and for the data to be transferred easily across internet networks for multiplayer modes. This also frees up a lot of room for customer characterization, which Brink is packed to the brim with, although not quite enough to store male and female avatar models—players will only be able to choose from various builds of male avatars. While the various clothing, hairstyles, tattoos, etc. available for these avatars won’t have any effect on the gameplay, the character’s physical build will. So if you choose an avatar that’s beanpole wiry, he’ll be much faster than the beefed-up super-sized soldiers, but way more susceptible to damage and have less health.

Brink will certainly be a game of details and experiments with the shooter genre. Splash Damage has hired a lot of new talent for this project and Stern expressed a lot of confidence for the FPS experience Brink will bring in Spring 2010. “Splash Damage started as a mod team,” Stern reminisces, adding with a slightly maniacal laugh, “We get paid for this stuff now.”

E3 posts to ensue

My first E3 has come to a close! And now I'm off to Skype in my online journalism seminar presentation >< It's soooo early here. Anyway, my favorites from the show:

Playable
Bayonetta

• I'm so happy the guys from the former Clover Studios are developing new IPs. Their latest work is a sassy, over-the-top, violent action game that follows the story of a witch named Bayonetta. Although Hideki Kamiya said they did not directly draw from their past games, it's not hard to pick up on echoes of familiar aesthetics.
  

Brutal Legend

• I could not stop smiling while I was playing this game. The writing is brilliant and Eddie Riggs is a charming, hilarious stereotype of the rough-hewn rocker. The gameplay and abilities already have a fair amount of depth and are easy to pick up.
  

Scribblenauts

• So ridiculously simple. So ridiculously understated. So much fun and definitely a favorite. Scribblenauts was a joy and a painful frustration as the game challenged the player to earn Starites by guessing which items could solve the puzzle presented on-screen. The item can literally be almost anything. At one point, I was trying to use a cheetah to stop a leprechan from beating me in a race. In a simpler puzzle, I was just trying to give a firefighter and a police officer tools they used on the job. The brilliance of Scribblenauts lies in the multitude of answers for a puzzle, whether they're obscure or obvious. You don't have to find the one word that will earn you the Starite, but use your creativity, which is a parameter that affects your overall score, to develop an answer.

HONORABLE MENTION:
Professor Layton and the Mysterious Box

• Recommending this just because I want Nintendo to bring the rest of the Professor Layton series from Japan to America. Marketing staff at the Nintendo booth were asking E3 attendees to fill out surveys to get a better feel for if the series should be brought stateside. Even the rep at the Nintendo booth admitted the series's ability to make even the hardcore crowd glow with delight as they solve puzzles and move through the storyline. I really enjoyed the first Professor Layton, and the 2nd game is promising more of the same (with maybe more animated scenes).
  

Non-playable
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction

• The fast-paced stealth is neat, but what really appealed to me about Splinter Cell is the transitions and story-telling. Objective and flashbacks are projected onto the environment (usually on the walls or ceilings of buildings)
  

Announced
The Last Guardian (aka, Project TRICO)

• As with Platinum Games, Team ICO is another developer that I will always be happy to see showing off a new game. The trailer frames the story of the boy and his giant griffin/cat/chihuahua companion, and hints that this game will have roots closer to Ico with an emphasis on exploration. It seems to have potential to be heart-warming story with the usual darker undertones from Team Ico games, but for now I'm just hoping the mangy-yet-adorable griffin companion doesn't pull an Agro towards the end of the game.
  

Golden Sun DS

• A series I thought for sure was long dead. I tried to stay professional during the conferences but I have to admit that the attendees in the next aisle over heard me flip out when the trailer for this started. It was a non-playable demo at E3 that was playable for about the five seconds it allowed the player to walk over a bridge. The menus were disabled during this time, too, so there's really no other news than it's announced. Isaac seems to be included in the game, but it's unclear whether he'll play the lead role yet again. The Djinn are back, and I have my fingers crossed for the same turn-based battle system.
  

Metroid Prime: Project M

• The trailer looks so slick. Samus pulling off acrobatic combos and a narrative that goes beyond her wandering alone on an alien planet. Can't wait to see what Team Ninja will bring to the franchise and hear more about this title.
  

Crimson Room - Superlite 2500 (DS)

by me. A MyGamer review. I *loved* this series when it was a Flash game, and have played the PSP version too. Surprisingly, I think the PSP version functions way more smoothly than the DS.

Fun frustration... sort of.

Note: This is a review of the Japanese version of SuperLite2500 Crimson Room. An English release for other countries has not been announced. If you’re buying the Japanese version, I would suggest knowing a small amount of Japanese.

You wake up in an unknown room with little to no recollection of how you got there. All you know is that you need to escape. This may be reminiscent of those days and nights in college, but for the Crimson Room series, it’s the very premise of the game.

The DS’s SuperLite2500 Crimson Room is Success’s port of Takagism’s semi-popular flash-based “escape-the-room” web games. The player is trapped in a room and has to MacGyver their way out by scrounging the room for items to use in a meticulous, detailed escape (hopefully, this is not reminiscent of your college days).

I was extremely pumped for this port because I was instantly reminded of how fun and rewarding cracking this series’ sense of logic could be. However, two large characteristics of these games were buried under the wave of nostalgia: feeling the frustration rise as you click every last pixel in order to find every last clue, and the sheer difficulty solving some of the puzzles. This game could easily have you running for an online FAQ.

The DS really lends itself well to the point-and-click genre, especially a game like this where heavy amounts of random clickery can lead you to a big clue. With the stylus, you can just tap around the room to investigate purposefully or just poke around until you find something (you can also use the D-pad for this purpose, but the stylus is much easier). But what I miss most from the original series is the in-game items menu. You find a lot of random crap to put in your inventory and have an equal amount of crap in the room to test your items on, so having easy access to your many puzzle pieces is key. The flash game did this by providing small icons of the items in a side-bar. In the DS version, you click the items menu button in the upper corner of the touch screen or hit R to access your inventory. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’re stumped and are testing out 5-8 items on your surroundings having to click into the menu, click the item (sometimes you need to click around a bit to get to it, too), then click out again, click around the room with the item equipped and THEN repeat until you find a solution can easily spread your patience a little thinner than usual. I realize the DS’s screen is much, much smaller than the average PC’s screen, and don’t know what constraints the developers faced with this, but I can’t help but think the original item sidebar could’ve provided a friendlier interface.<*>

The new navigation set-up also includes an optional thin, white frame around the touch screen that has small arrows pointing in the directions you can turn. The arrows didn’t make things any easier or any more difficult for me, so I usually just turned it off and went about my business.

Like most of the flash-based room games, the DS Crimson Room has no in-game music, and sounds are used as more of indicators for when you discover, unlock or mess something up. Both the graphics and audio are fairly barebones, but interestingly and eerily styled.

One of the nicest added features of the port is that you can actually save your progress, as opposed to angrily leaving the game’s window up in your browser when you go take a break. Each room has it’s own save file, so you can attempt multiple rooms at a time. And, of course, you don’t need to be tied to the Internet to play.

I definitely enjoy playing the “room” games at my own leisure, but being the penny-pinching gamer I am, it’s hard for me to recommend buying a game that is available for free online even if the game has a comparatively low price of $26 or so (that’s about the price it is for the Japanese version; there’s no mention of a release outside of Japan yet). If you are a fan of this series and the idea of having this game on the go appeals to you, I would definitely say go for it. There’s a $26 price to pay for freedom from your computer, and if the pros of the portable version (primarily being able to save) appeal to you, this game would also be a decent addition to your collection. It’s one of those games I enjoy going back to every now and then, especially when the finely detailed answers to the puzzles start to fade from my memory. But, if you’re concerned about the lack of new content in this port and have a PSP, you can check out the PSP version that has 4 new scenarios.

Navigational changes aside, it’s a true port with hardly any extras from what was offered in the online games. If you’ve never tried any of the escape-the-room games, you might want to evaluate some of the online game (or, as I like to call it, the full demo) before you buy and see if you even like the genre, because either way, you’re probably going to be pleasantly frustrated with this puzzler either at your PC or with your DS.

*In fact, I crossed over into super-geekdom for a second and screen-captured a shot of the Crimson Room online game and shrunk it to DS size to see if having the side-bar items menu was a feasible design. A crude test to be sure, but the result did not look terrible.