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I’d read about One Big Game in EDGE this month, and it was a great idea – kind of a developer-led version of Child’s Play with a more significant UK presence, and where funds are donated from game sales themselves rather than only from related activities.

So, I was keen to see what their first game Chime was like, produced by Brighton-based Zoë Mode. At first glance it appears to be a hybrid of Tetris and Lumines, and undoubtedly shares a lot of visual and gameplay styles from those games, but actually it brings plenty to the table on its own too. And in fact, it’s actually channeling Qix very strongly as well, since the main aim is to achieve ‘coverage’ of the board through quads rather than keeping it clear (although not leaving fragments behind is important for scoring efficiency). The use of 5-section blocks (rather than 4 as in Tetris, and square shapes with coloured sections in Lumines) adds a number of extra variations, and because there’s no gravity you have a lot more flexibility in placement, which seems like it would be too easy but isn’t at all.

The musical element is great too. Lumines of course did the sweeping track marker first, with musical triggers on completed sections etc, but Chime takes it up a notch; while it uses the same idea, the music adapts a lot more fluidly and naturally via a number of variables – normal blocks encourage certain elements of the track, different shaped quads trigger different sounds, and the music itself morphs as more of the board is covered. It’s great, quite soothing in an ambient / chillout way (the complete opposite of the ‘jumping Mexican coffee bean’ level in Lumines).

The one potential downside is that there aren’t that many levels. But, this is one of those games where you can play and replay the same levels anyway and still have fun, and regardless there’s a couple of factors which make it a non-issue anyway – the price (a mere 400 points or £3.40), and the fact that most of the proceeds go to charity. That just can’t be argued with. I actually prefer the game to Lumines anyway, which was considerably more mercenary, nickel-and-diming you for certain play modes which was pretty underhand.

I’m disappointed that Microsoft are still taking their 30% cut on this though. The legal pages on the game set out how the game revenue is split for charity, and it’s clear that the 30% Microsoft tax remains – surely they could have reduced or waived that to let more go to charity? The developers are donating over 80% of the remaining 70% to children’s charities (works out at 60% of the whole purchase price).

This could have been 800 points and I still would have bought it. My wife loves it too, being a big Lumines fan – and I like it for her because I don’t have to listen to the Lumines Mexican bean track any more.

I highly recommend it to you if you have a 360, and I hope they port it to other platforms too to maximise their revenue from it (and maybe one of the other publishers will shame Microsoft into dropping their 30% charge). Here’s the launch video for the game, which probably oversells the ‘club scene’ element a tad, but there we go

Well, you’ve got to accept that Pope Benedict XVI isn’t afraid to tell people what he thinks.

The recent furore about his comments that the church should be exempt from UK equality laws, because it would “impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs” is pretty chilling. Cue a shot of loads of people on the street with banners saying that Catholics should have the ‘freedom’ to discriminate against gay and transgender individuals because of their beliefs. The message: that strongly-held beliefs should exempt you from having to adhere to the same rules of equality as everyone else, and to discriminate against anyone you like so long as you believe it’s right, or that a book (or rather,  your interpretation of it) tells you that it’s ok.

I’m amazed that some people can’t see the blatantly obvious flaw in this argument. If strongly held beliefs were a viable excuse for treating other people badly, then most of the atrocities in the last century could be excused too, if the people committing them truly believed their doctrine of choice advocated it. Where’s the line? I suspect the answer is ‘wherever the Pope wants it to be’.

A bigot in a fancy robe and quoting doctrine is still a bigot. There is never any excuse for treating your fellow human beings as anything other than equals, and if your religion tells you otherwise, you might want to update your thinking by, I don’t know, maybe a couple of thousand years or so. The rest of society’s moved on a tad in that time, such us not hacking each other apart with swords, or burning people at the stake for curing the local donkey. Being a decent human being to other people regardless of their race/sexual orientation etc kinda came out of that whole transition – you might want to give it a shot sometime.

I’ve established a tradition on this blog of  reviewing games that came out several months ago, thus cementing the absolute irrelevance of my commentary to the majority of the intertubes for whom content goes out of date in about a day. It’s kind of the opposite of a magazine that’s delivered by ninjas every 3 hours to ensure cutting-edge coverage. Thing is, unless a game is truly awful I like to try to finish it (or at least finish with it, which is not always the same thing) before deciding my opinion of it, and these things take time.

So, I got Lego Rock Band for Christmas and we just finished the main story mode last night. This is a game that’s averaged 70 on Metacritic, and has basically been described as the lazy, ugly child of the Rock Band series. What a load of old bollocks.

I can only take from the critical reception that most reviewers are so incredibly jaded, and their hearts shrivelled to the size of a small pea, that they have no concept of pure fun any more. Either that or they have their heads wedged so firmly up their own backsides that it impaired their ability to play. Because in fact, Lego Rock Band is a really fun game. Ok, it has some limitations such as no online play (we play locally 95% of the time anyway so no biggie) , and it’s basically a carbon-copy of Rock Band with different songs,  a Lego theme, and a couple of minor additions, but so what? TT Games have perfected the art of making very amusing games with the Lego brand, and this is no different. If you find none of the cutscenes, Rock Challenges and little Lego costumes and settings amusing, then something inside you has died since childhood and you’re officially a grumpy old fart. I must admit that when LRB was announced I did a double-take and wondered WTF they were thinking, but having played it I take it all back; this game justifies its existence just by being funny, fun to play and hugely endearing.

And let’s talk about the setlist. It’s shamelessly popularist, filled with tracks that almost everyone recognises and that many music snobs will hate.  I was a little reticent about the list at first, barring a few classics like Song 2 – but when we actually played it, it turned out that a whole bunch of these tracks were outrageously fun to play. It’s not arty, it’s not revolutionary, but my goodness it’s fun. Plus, you can export all of them to your Rock Band repository, which is great and means the content is given an extended life after the game itself is finished.

Speaking of which, I got The Beatles : Rock Band at the same time, and LRB has had about 10 times as much play time as that, simply by popular opinion. TB:RB has the authenticity, the brand power and the credibility, but when push comes to shove, it’s just not as much fun to play. It’s certainly not a bad game, and clearly features some good music (and some duds too – sorry Beatles fans), but it’s hamstringed by being entirely uncompromising, forcing you to play everything in the story ladder in a rigid tiered order with zero personal choice, and refuses to allow you to play anything other than Beatles music for the entire time you’re playing it (despite the hundreds of other tracks sitting on my hard drive). I’m sure die-hard fans love it, but for everyone else it’s a blinkered game that seems quite willing to sacrifice broader enjoyment in favour of encouraging you  to appreciate how goddamn awesome the Beatles were, to the exclusion of all others.

It certainly encourages players to buy into the myth that The Beatles single-handedly defined music in that era and everyone else was riding in their wake. For people who don’t worship them, it’s something of a straight-jacket of a game that’s enjoyable only in relatively short bursts. Personally,  a Capcom-inspired “The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones” would have made a much more interesting game (which could have been followed up with Oasis vs Blur, Michael Jackson vs Jarvis Cocker, and who knows what else) And hey, just let me export the songs to my catalogue, where they would enter the normal rotation, because they’re not going to get played very much otherwise, which seems highly counter-productive. Again, I think egos are getting in the way of enjoyment here – I’m a customer, and I like The Beatles (well, some of their stuff anyway), but I like lots of other music too. I want to be able to add this content to my wider collection – why won’t you let me? No doubt because the corporate behemoth that oversees The Beatles brand doesn’t want me to, which doesn’t exactly endear me to their cause.

I buy games for entertainment, and from my perspective LRB has been short-changed in the reviews on that front. You won’t receive as much kudos for it as TB:RB from your elitist game reviewer friends, but what do they know?

I love it when shots from Ogre just show up in funny places. This time, it’s from a comic strip called Stolen Pixels on the Escapist, where Ogre-powered games Torchlight and Zombie Driver have been used for comedic purposes:

Thanks to BuschnicK for the heads-up on the Torchlight one, I was surprised to see Zombie Driver just days earlier too!

Yesterday saw world-plus-dog in the technology sector glued to Apple’s announcement of their new tablet device, which has now been officially dubbed the iPad. Basically, when you boil it down it’s a super-sized iPod Touch with optional 3G support and a few more apps.

Reaction has ranged, as usual, from the ecstatic “I’ve seen the face of God, and his name is Steve”, to “What a useless piece of junk”, stopping at most points in between. In the more negative camp, lots of talk has centred around what it doesn’t have (multitasking, a camera, a USB port, Flash), and that some people seem to find it hard to grasp the usage conditions of a device that neither fits in your pocket, nor does everything a laptop does.

Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic. The device was never supposed to be a phone or a laptop, so I’m curious why people are comparing it to one – the point is that it’s something else. I can actually think of multiple use cases where a device of this form factor and capability would be useful to me. Here are a few examples:

1. I’ve thought about buying an eReader before, but have always been completely unsatisfied with the existing solutions: current e-ink devices are fine for reading black and white novels, but don’t handle A4 formatted content at all well, can’t do colour, take far too long to flip through pages, and are basically unusable for keyboard input, making searching impractical – and therefore these devices do not satisfy my need for a reader that replaces my bookshelf (physical and virtual) of reference material at all. The iPad, however, looks like it would be able to do that much better.
2. Sometimes I’m in the living room or kitchen and I’d just like to look something up on the web; maybe check some news or look up a recipe maybe – just a 5-10 minute thing. Firing up the laptop just for this is overkill, but the pages are too small to really read properly on a phone. In the end I do one of these things anyway but it’s never ideal. Again a tablet form factor would be perfect for this.
3. When we’re showing photos to family and friends, these days we do it on a laptop because we never print anything. It’s not ideal, even the most elegantly built laptop requires everyone to crowd around the screen behind you or similar – it’s awkward. If I had a tablet to do it, one I can easily hold up and pass around, that would work much better.
4. When I’m in a social situation when it would be useful to have intermittent access to some documents or other information that’s too big to fit on a phone screen comfortably, currently you need a laptop to do it. Laptops are really, really unsociable to have out on a table with others around (say at a meeting), because of the way they need to be used, with a screen forming a psychological barrier between you and whoever else is on the opposite side of the table. This happens all over the place: I strongly feel that laptops are the scourge of coffee shops today, turning a social space into a cluster of virtual mini-cubicles with individuals hunched behind screens not talking to anyone. I also play pen-and-paper RPGs socially, and over the years I’ve tried to use a laptop with many highly useful applications as an accessory, and it’s never, ever worked. Even the smaller laptops are too obtrusive, but a phone is just too small to be useful. I’d love to try using an iPad with some dedicated apps for tracking things.

I’m sure there are other examples. Basically I think people need to get over the fact that it doesn’t improve on what they currently use their phone or laptop for – that’s really not the point. I see the iPad as a ‘gap filler’ – and I can certainly see some gaps for it to fill in my life.

The price is much better than expected too, mostly because it’s an upgrade of an iPod rather than a downgrade of a laptop. I’d skip the 3G option because it’s pointless for me, I’d only use it on wifi, so that makes it not that much more expensive than a top-end iPod Touch.

But, it’s not all roses. The lack of Flash is an issue for web compatibility, although at least video through HTML5 is starting to happen (YouTube added it recently). The lack of multitasking is a bit disappointing, but might be relaxed in an OS update later. The GPU capabilities are a bit unexplored online so far, it seems that it’s probably as powerful as an iPhone 3G, but falling short of the 3GS (so GLES 1.1). I’ve also heard today that iBooks might not be available in non-US countries at launch, which definitely undermines the offering as an eReader.

So, depending on the practicalities when it’s released over here, I may or may not grab one. I can definitely see places in my life where a not-a-phone-or-laptop device would be useful, and frankly, I’m intrigued by the possibilities of where this kind of device may go in future.

Watching the ebbs and flows of the game industry is simultaneously inspiring and outright depressing. As is usual for this stage in a console generation, we’re at the ‘consolidation point’ (pun unintentional)  - where the tech is pretty well understood, even if it is starting to look a bit dated compared to even a modest PC (how much hassle AA is on this console generation is a case in point), but that at least developers can crank out content in a more efficient fashion. This has led to some darned good games.

What’s depressing is what’s happening to the ‘official’ download channels – which were a bastion of independent content a year or two ago, and now are turning more and more into just another channel for the same mainstream developers & publishers we see at retail. XBLA has been the trend maker here, it was first to really embrace and promote downloadable games to a ‘core’ market, and has done extremely well. Now, however, we have a limit of 2 games per week, and all too often those 2 slots are being assigned to either major developers (Shadow Complex, Alien Breed Evo) or shovelware ports with brand recognition but little quality or innovation (I’m looking at Taito in particular: Bubble Bobble and Qix remakes were incredibly lazy, uninspiring affairs). It’s very clear that the team behind choosing which developers are published in XBLA has changed in recent years, and not for the better from my perspective. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with Shadow Complex and Alien Breed Evo, but if they’re using up the slots it means that publishing route is rapidly being cut off for small developers who are big on ideas and talent, but short on funds and established brands. Alien Breed Evo’s budget was supposedly around $2.5m for goodness sakes – although it’s looking like that’s going to backfire anyway since sales have been poor. Trials HD, ‘Splosion Man and Peggle are pretty much the only games from small studios with modest budgets that I can think of that made a splash on XBLA in 2009 – the rest just read like a whos who of regular retail channels. Indeed many developers who have had games published on XBLA are no longer welcome there, such as PomPom (interview) and Llamasoft. Clearly the message is ‘win big, or get your coat’. This isn’t the right environment for an indie scene to flourish, where experimentation and mistakes are part of the process.

Yes, I know there’s XBL ‘Indie Games’ but that’s the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, hobbled with a niche development environment that’s incompatible with the most established dev libraries and every other platform a developer might want to deploy on (barring PC), and so far almost totally lacking any way for a decent game to effectively ‘rise above the noise’, except via external review sites like XNPlay, which doesn’t work at all for targetting the majority of game players with information.  It’s just not a very good target for those I would call ’serious indies’ and actually acts as a false argument for not opening primary download channels more; there’s nothing wrong with the concept, it’s just implemented completely wrong.

PSN got started later so has been earlier in the curve of promoting independent content, but they’re going that way too. I guess they’re all just ‘following the money’, and the games industry remains obsessed with hits because of its current top-heavy model. I’d hoped that the downloadable content channels would promote an equivalent to low-budget and art-house cinema, where content can survive and make a profit for the creators, without necessarily having to be the Biggest Thing Ever(tm), encouraging experimentation. But, the giant flaw in this plan is that independent cinema is able to be published and consumed anywhere – while most games consumers remain shackled to console platform holders, who just want to publish a limited number of the very biggest hits, everything else not being worth their time or risking ‘distracting’ the customer with choice. If you’ve read my blog before, you know my opinion of the effectiveness of closed platforms in the long term when it comes to broadening and deepening a medium, but I’ll say it again – closed platforms are bad for the industry in the grand scheme of things. Games will never be as big as film until this changes, they might compete on the blockbuster level, but that’s far, far from the whole story. But, until we’re further along the lifecycle of games when hardware and delivery becomes mostly invisible,  the vested interests aren’t going to allow that to change for a little while yet.

You really need to go to the iPhone/iPod Touch for more prolific indie content these days. But, how long will that last?

I honestly don’t know why platform holders find it so hard to manage an open publishing strategy. All you need is systems that:

• Allow users to rank content; and nominate ‘trusted reviewers’ such as those from major game review sites
• Allow wide marketing opportunities – both in-system and cross-site (such as to xbox.com, where you can buy in-browser too)
• Robust searching, on keywords, categories, user ratings, friends recommendations etc
• Cross-promotion, aka the ‘You might also like…’ lists

Hell, if Amazon can create a compelling buying experience with millions of products across a diverse range of departments, why on earth do platform holders think a console user can’t handle more than 2 game choices a week? It’s hugely patronising, and says more about the inadequacy of the platform to manage larger amounts of content effectively than about any limit on what consumers are willing to peruse. Saying “we can’t sell as effectively if we have more product available” actually means “we suck at organisation”. This argument stacks up at retail, where there’s a limited amount of shelf space, and customers don’t want to wander around a massive warehouse or to squint at shelves of tightly packed boxes looking for something, but not when you have unlimited shelf space and a cloud full of computers to index it in the blink of an eye for you (and make suggestions), and where a marketing campaign or friend recommendation can bring a customer instantly to the point of sale with the use of a simple link.

For Christ’s sakes platform holders, wake up to the opportunities of the channel. Stop being blinded by what works at physical retail, it’s really not the same. There are people out there already doing it leagues better than you (see pretty much any of the e-commerce leaders), and putting your fingers in your ears and saying it can’t possibly work  is both ignorant and doing a massive disservice to both customers and content creators.

So, I’ve been a little quieter than usual since the new year, and that’s because I’ve been in  a rather reflective mood as I plan out how I’m going to spend my time in 2010. That’s right – planning! Talk about the final frontier

Basically, as you may have gleaned from my previous post, I’ve been looking to make some significant changes to the way I do things in 2010. I spent 2009 reeling from a back injury and trying to figure out how to deal with that given that I’m self-employed (ie I don’t get paid when I’m not working, regardless of the reason), and a leader of an open source project (with the inherent time requirements that comes with). This meant working out on the fly how to stay afloat financially, and still keeping my own interests and open-source plates spinning, without slipping back into the ‘permanent voluntary crunch mode’ style which triggered my back problems. I can’t stress enough how difficult that transition has been for me – it’s not like anyone was forcing me to work/live that way, I did it because I wanted to, but then it suddenly had to stop. When you invest so much of your time and perceived identity in something, backing away from it is very, very hard.

Of course the economic climate wasn’t great either, meaning I spent a lot of time jumping around between many small projects, leading to more overhead dealing with admin & business relations. I ended up just going almost month-to-month on-demand, not  planning very much and just being grateful to be able to work a decent amount at all – which given how unwell I was at the start of the year was definitely something to be glad about. But, now I’m back on my feet and pretty confident of my future health again (within reason – I’m not going to be bungee jumping any time soon!), I’m ready to start being more pro-active again and to map out some plans.

One thing is for sure, there’s no going back to how I used to do things. My days of saying ‘yes’ to almost everything and being at the keyboard until past midnight most days, and most of the weekend, are gone forever. I don’t regret doing it, despite the pain it ended up causing me, because OGRE wouldn’t be here otherwise and I learned a vast amount and had a ton of fun – but I’ll leave that to the under-35s in future; have fun guys From now on, I’m being ruthless and somewhat selfish about what I work on, and concentrating on things that maximise my personal love-growth-cash triangle. It means I’m passing on a lot more projects, and concentrating far more on things that are strategically significant to me, rather than anyone else.

I’m still planning to lead OGRE, so long as the community is happy for me to do so, but by necessity I’m stepping back a bit to let other people take more responsibility where they want to, and to refocus my time on mentoring and advisory roles rather than trying to be everywhere at once. We have some great people in the team and in the wider community, and I hope our MIT license will foster even more in future. Both I and the community have gotten used to perceiving me as the ‘go to guy’ in the first instance, with responsibility for pretty much everything, but in practice for some time now it’s been very much a team & community effort, just one that I happen to lead (and financially support where needed). In fact one of the things I’m quite proud of is the way so many others have picked up on the way I do things, and taken things forward themselves in a way that I wholly approve of. That’s open source in action, and I’m glad to be part of it, even if I can no longer have my fingers in absolutely every pie with an OGRE symbol on it

Here’s to 2010 anyway. It’s going to be different, but change is good.

Zero Punctuation reviewed Torchlight yesterday!

Of course he was both inaccurate (you don’t have to keep clicking at all, you can hold the button down) and overly harsh, but still very funny. It’s odd to enjoy watching something you had a hand in (albeit in a background technology way in my case) being ripped to shreds, but when it’s done in such an amusing way somehow it’s ok. I guess this is why Yahtzee hasn’t had his teeth kicked in by disgruntled game developers yet

As Runic’s Twitter said: “We’ve arrived!”.

I’m far from being a gamerscwh0re who mines every game for every last Achievment, but nevertheless they’re fun to get. I like the ones that encourage you to do something memorable rather than the rather less imaginative “complete game on difficulty X” or “scour the world to find all of item X”.

Having picked up a number of games for Christmas I’ve had something of a boost recently, but last night while playing Assassin’s Creed II (which is a vast improvement on the original which had great atmosphere and free running mechanics but was riddled with tedious repetition and hence I never finished it) I completely accidentally landed on precisely 10,000 gamer points at the end of the night:

How can I possibly play anything else now? I’ll never, ever have a score that perfect again!

I’m not sure why my gamercard is currently in German (’Bereich’), thanks dodgy XBL site localisation.

Although many popular films and TV shows don’t seem to use the convention of using roman numerals in their copyright statements anymore, the BBC has, as far as I’m aware, always consistently used them. It used to be kind of fun to see who could figure out the roman numerals first, although my wife was always better at it. For anything made since 2000 (MM) of course, it’s become a bit boring, since you only need to know how to count to 10. For some reason this occurred to me today as I considered that, after this year, we won’t see as simple a roman numeral representation until 2050 (MML). This year of course, we have to live with the knowledge that our year is named after a SIMD instruction set. But hey, it was funky, right?:

So anyway, 2010 is here. I’ll be keeping an eye out for black obelisks, but since we didn’t come up with an equivalent of Hal by 2001 I’m beginning to suspect the books weren’t that prophetic a vision of the future after all. It’s a new decade that we have to find yet another awkward moniker for – the ‘noughties’ was pretty rubbish but the ‘tens’ isn’t much better. Frankly, I couldn’t much care for the significance of entering another decade – after all, it’s all arbitrarily counted anyway, and after you’ve seen the passing of a new millennium (in all its vastly anticlimactic glory) it’s hard to get excited about any piddling small numbers any more.

I can’t say I mourn the passing of 2009, which despite a few high points (returning to Canada on holiday, seeing the viral success of Torchlight, getting 1.7 out the door, and so on) wasn’t an ideal year for me. Better than the end of 2008, when my back injury was at its worst, but due to the economic climate and needing to recover my health, I’ve been juggling lots of smaller jobs in 2009, and as such have not felt a great deal of attachment to most of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ve also had to consciously hold myself back from over-committing for fear of putting my recovery in jeopardy. By nature I’m an ‘all or nothing’ kind of character, so I’ve found this deeply unsatisfying at times. It’s kept the financials ticking over, but it also comes with lots more admin overhead (= wasted time) and doesn’t motivate me as much. I intend to change that in 2010 – I can’t go back to the kind of hours I was doing in 2008 and before, but I intend to try to fill the hours I have with things I can feel more personally committed to. OGRE is one of those things of course.

In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2010!