SteveStreeting.com

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!

My friend Damien was blogging about his early experiences with computers & programming yesterday, and it reminded me of how I got started. Specifically, it reminded me of an influential magazine I read at the time called “Input”, which taught BASIC programming for the ZX Spectrum and BBC. It was a short-lived, esoteric British thing, but I was astonished to find that not only does Wikipedia have a page on it, but they also linked a TV advert of it which has been lovingly archived on YouTube:

This brought back some serious memories. I remember that as well as the demo snippets there was an adventure game of sorts which was being published bit by bit in the magazine, as an incentive for you to buy them all. Like most magazines of this type there were regular typos that you’d scratch your head over, but in a way that was a good thing since it taught you to debug other people’s code.

I was 10/11 years old when this magazine came out, and I can probably trace my programming beginnings directly to it. It’s probably a bizarre concept to the younger generation, now that they have instant access to almost limitless information on the Internet. What I would have given to have the Internet back then when I was learning, instead of scratching around for information in magazines like this.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, I certainly did. I received a number of new games, which was good (will blog about them individually at a later juncture), but I also encountered something I haven’t done before – Evil Red DVD Tag Syndrome.

For those who, like me, haven’t encountered these before, some shops in the last couple of years have been adding red theft-prevention strips to some DVD cases. These strips, as shown here, run through slots in the DVD case and not only hold it firmly closed, and include a security RFID thingamabob to set off the alarms at the door, but they press against the underside of the clips that hold the disc in so they cannot be released- so even if you manage to pry open the case, you can’t (easily) get the DVD out.

One of my game gifts this season still had this tag attached, and given that I doubt my mother-in-law is a shoplifter, and the RFID tag hadn’t set off the doors, I assume that the shop staff had forgotten to remove it. It was completely new to me (all my other games have just had RFID tags taped to them), and was surprisingly difficult to defeat, which is the point I suppose. Marie suggested I took it back to the shop to get them to do it, but a) I’d have to get hold of the receipt to avoid being assumed to be a thief b) that’s way too much hassle, and c) this was a logistical challenge that simply had to be solved without outside assistance, in order to prove…something. It’s a male thing.

In the end various implements (knives, forks and pliers) were involved, but I managed it without destroying the disc or (surprisingly) even the case. But, there’s certainly no way you could do this in the shop without being completely obvious, so I guess this is a ‘good’ security system, if only the stupid employees would remember to do what they’re supposed to. I was going to post a series of images of this, but then I realised others have already posted videos of it which were similar to my technique anyway, so here’s one for the similarly afflicted:

Merry Christmas!

I really enjoyed the original Professor Layton, and was glad to get the sequel (Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box – for some cultural reason ‘Diabolical Box’ on the web site, I assume internationally some people haven’t heard of Pandora’s Box) from a friend as an early Christmas present. So far it seems like more of the same “puzzles embedded in slightly hokey but nonetheless enjoyable story, set in a whimsical Victorian era”, which is precisely what fans of the original (which includes me) wanted. In many ways it reminds me of reading The Famous Five books as a child, to the extent that I’m expecting someone to propose the consumption of ‘lashings and lashings of ginger beer’ and for Timmy to say ‘woof’ in his traditional enigmatic fashion, at any moment.

There’s only one problem. They seem to have decided to increase the amount of voice acting this time around (at least in the introductary sections), and Luke – the Professor’s constant companion and apprentice mystery solver – has an absolutely terrible mockney accent. I actually had the US version of the original (because EU distribution was terrible), where Luke’s accent was fairly standard ‘public school received pronunciation’ style, but in the EU version they mocnkeyfied him it seems. Here’s a comparisoin of the two Curious Village versions:

This time I’ve got the EU edition and they seem to have decided to let it all hang out and compete with Dick van Dyke for the oscar of Worst Cockney Accent Ever. And you know, I think they’d win. It’s that bad. I can’t find any videos online of the EU version, but this basically sums it up:

“Bloimey Prowfesha, wot’s that?”

NNNnnggg. As heart-warming as the rest of the game is, and as trivial as this issue is (and in no way does it detract from the game’s enjoyment), when this boy chimes in it’s like nails down a blackboard for me and probably anyone else in the country; I hate to think how Londoners would take it.

I know the game is taking an incredibly whimsical view of the world, that’s part of its charm, but how did anyone not notice how grating that accent was? My only conclusion is that it was acted and organised by people who have watched Mary Poppins several hundred times over until they are slightly unhinged.

[Edit 20th Dec] We did it! Rage Against The Machine is number 1 for Christmas, proper music fans in Britain give Simon Cowell and his manufactured karaoke bullsh*t the finger. Very, very happy!! Best Christmas number 1 that I can ever remember.

I detest reality TV with a passion. I think it’s low-brow, cheap nonsense that bare-facedly celebrates the very worst elements of human nature; promoting the idea that being famous (for anything) is somehow a laudable goal in itself, and indulging the public’s cathartic desire for a feeling of superiority and power over others via venomous gossip and voting people off. It’s a corporate goldmine of course, given how they don’t have to employ writers, directors or anything – just stick a bunch of people (preferably at least 75% maladjusted) in a house/jungle, give them a set of half-assed tasks that are preferably as humiliating or conflict generating as possible, and just sit back and watch the money roll in. Repeat ad infinitum. Reprehensible drivel – and it seems to me that it taps into the same psyche as that which was seen two thousand years ago in the arenas of ancient Rome; sure, it’s illegal to watch people fight to the death or be fed to lions anymore, but it’s basically the same thing, just on a psychological level instead – right down to a modern equivalent of the chanting mob influencing which way the emperor’s thumb goes. It’s a depressing indictment of how primitive the human race really remains, for all our swanky suits and digital watches.

Compared to the likes of Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity, X Factor is almost a saint, but it’s still got plenty to answer for. Every year what is basically a glorified karaoke competition determines what will be the Christmas Number 1 single in the UK. Now, of course anyone with even a remote taste in music doesn’t pay any attention to what the charts say anyway, particularly at Christmas (oh the horror of Bob The Builder and Mr Blobby in previous years) but it is pretty depressing that every year at Christmas we get the same thing – airwaves filled with some over-produced cover version of yet another soppy ballad from someone who will most likely be mopping the floors in McD’s in 12 months time, once the corporate mangle has wrung all the commercial opportunity from them.

That’s why the Rage Against The Machine for Christmas Number 1 campaign got started, encouraging music lovers in the UK to protest and to mass-buy the anarchic single Killing In The Name in the week which will determine the Christmas #1, to send a message of disapproval. I like RATM anyway, but even if I didn’t I would have joined the campaign just for the protest vote. So far, RATM has been winning, but as of today only marginally and all the predictions are that this will be overturned on the last day of chart sampling (Saturday) as the mob descends on town centres around the country and hurry bleating to the counters with the latest production-line tat from the X Factor machine.

I hope with all my heart that somehow RATM can win – not because the charts matter, but because it would be a symbolic gesture, and an affirmation that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, there are sizeable numbers of people in the country with a decent, independent thinking head screwed onto their neck (yes, I’m aware of the irony that to prove this requires the use of crowd behaviour, that’s not the point). If you’re passionate about music, even if you don’t like RATM, I encourage you to buy the single Killing In The Name today or tomorrow, just to make a stand (iTunes, Play – or others, allegedly it’s uncertain whether Amazon counts in the charts though so avoid that one).

Here’s the video of BBC Radio 5 Live’s interview with RATM and a live rendition of the song. The band was supposed to avoid the swearing, but at the end either they got carried away or just decided to adhere to their own lyrics (“F*** you I won’t do what you tell me”) and so got frantically pulled from the airwaves at that point (this version which came from the BBC website is censored, the live version was not). Well, it was in the spirit of the thing after all, what did they expect?

I’m a fan of Tim Schafer. Quite apart from the fact that his Wikipedia page shows him lovingly holding a jar of Marmite (good man), he’s been a writer/designer/coder on some of the funniest, quirkiest games in history: Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. How can you not love this guy?

It’s a terrible tragedy that Psychonauts didn’t sell better – sure its platforming was a little ropey at times and the game was padded out in places with uninspiring sections, but buried within this game were some of the most original, funny and bizarre ideas ever to grace the medium. In what other game can you wander the deranged mind of a conspiracy theorist, a twisted suburban landscape filled with badly disguised secret agents trying to prevent you from discovering the true nature of the Milkman? Or the mind of an unexpectedly sensitive undersea monster where you, as the human representative, are portrayed as a Godzilla-sized klutz of a human, terrorising a civilised city populated by tiny little fish monsters that scream and run away from you in panic? Genius, pure genius. And yet, most gamers just ignored it, the philistines. It was based on this history, and because I felt a responsibility to buy games from people like Mr Schafer in the hope that lights like his won’t disappear from the gaming world to be replaced by more CoD / MoH games, that I bought Brütal Legend.

The Good: From an art direction standpoint, Brütal Legend is a triumph. It’s a joy just to drive around the landscape looking at the towering stone statues of guitars jutting out of the landscape, mountains of bone and metal, and the roiling stormclouds (which give a nice lightning storm sometimes too). The distinct areas have a feel of their own and fade beautifully from one to the next, and the sense of scale is always great. Their goal was to capture a world hewn straight out of the classic metal album covers and posters, and they have undoubtedly achieved that, it looks wonderful. There’s a ‘lore’ story covering it all which is suitably grandiose and over the top, encompassing demons and titans and generally fits the atmosphere very well.

Musically they’ve packed a lot of stuff in here. I’m not a huge metal fan, but there’s no doubt that when combined with the visuals it sets the tone perfectly, and I even started to like many of the tracks that I previously wouldn’t have had time for. There’s some great comedy numbers in there too – such as “Destroy the Orcs” by 3 Inches of Blood which is hysterical (“Kill the orcs, slay the orcs, destroy the orcs!!”), and whenever Master Exploder kicks in I can’t help smiling.

Comedy wise, it’s good near the beginning. The parody elements are amusing, particularly the ’70s real metal’ versus ’80s hair metal’ war that kicks it off. Jack Black is quite funny at times, and not as annoying as you might expect (although I don’t generally find him that annoying anyway, but he is toned down a bit here).

The Bad: It runs out of steam way too fast, in almost all areas. While the art continues to be breathtaking (and mostly why I kept playing), the gameplay elements get very repetetive with basically only about 5 types of side-missions which just repeat ad nauseum and just a series of collect-em-up achievements which get tedious once you’ve explored the admittedly sumptuous world. There just aren’t enough original ideas; the metal parodies are great right up to the end of the hair metal war, then it just repeats the same thing with a Goth / Emo style for the rest of the game and you feel they’ve used up all their jokers already. The comedy script sputters down to embers too, with Black’s lines getting ever more predictable and a tiresome, all basically variations on a theme.

I didn’t like the RTS gameplay elements either. I’m not a big fan of RTS’s anyway, but even I know they need more subtlety than this. I don’t think the console controller worked well at all, and the mechanics here were the traditional scissor-paper-stone of units (which is fine in itself) and a few control points which added little except resources, and that was it. Like the poorest of RTSs most maps could be won by just being the most efficient at working the interface, meaning you’re the first to build the biggest units and the first to capture the resource points. Since there are absolutely no advantages for terrain, nor any fixed emplacements that you can build, it basically comes down to a build-race-and-tank-rush style gameplay, which means really very little strategy in my opinion. These were sections I just tried to get through as fast as possible, which is also the best way to win. A low point.

And, although it’s amusing to see the ‘hair metal’ units mirroring the ‘real metal’ units but with garish headbands, sparkly bracelets etc, in gameplay terms this was a mistake, because it makes telling your units apart from the enemy really difficult at times. Not a problem after the first third of the game but it bothered me early on.

Conclusion: I don’t regret playing it, because it was a good experience, particularly visually and aurally, but there’s no getting away from the conclusion that Double Fine felt they had to create something with a wider appeal this time, and a more recognisable ‘theme’ that was marketable in a way their previous game wasn’t, and that that has become restrictive. I don’t blame them for taking this route – after all both Grim Fandango and Psychonauts were critically acclaimed original pieces that were hard to classify and sold relatively poorly. Brutal Legend fits a marketing strategy in a way that Psychonauts never could, you can grok it very quickly just from the imagery and it has a recognisable star. But at the same time the game definitely feels like it was stuck in its own straight jacket – it had enough ideas to take it through the first 2-3 hours confidently, and then it had just used up all of its best lines and ideas and had to find some way to string that out to 10 hours – compared to Psychonauts where they could just turn on a dime and do something completely different, the Brutal Legend world & canon seems to have become an anchor in the latter sections. The artists did a fantastic job in making enough content for that to be worth your while exploring it right to the end, but from a gameplay and writing standpoint this is not Tim Schafer’s finest hour. If you’re not specifically a Tim Scafer fan (and carry a deep collective guilt like I do that the gaming public ignored some of his best work) I’d have to say this game is worth renting just to experience the visuals, but not buying.