No Accounting For Taste

I played a game demo on the recommendation of Braid creator Jonathon Blow, and I had to go back to his blog post to make sure I hadn't missed some ironic meta-type joke. It's just time-wasting busy-work like sudoku, not interesting in the least...but I suppose that's how many people feel about crosswords. Or reading!

Video Game Industry Self-Parody Watch

A magazine for women gamers is running a makeup tutorial. Like how to get the look of some character from a video game? Amazing.

I would call it a tonedeaf misread of the magazine's target audience, but clicking through, it seems the "magazine for women gamers" is actually just PR for a "gamer model" agency. I.e., the actual target audience is the dudes who hire "booth babes." Hilarious, in any case.

Nice

I did enjoy this joke, despite it relying sort of overmuch on childhood nostalgia. But well done, in any case. Which also reminds me of this game I read about the other day that sounds like it might be in sort of a similar vein. Being vague here so as to prevent spoiling the comic.

My Afternoon on the Internet

I have a recurring idea that it would be sweet to make some sort of 2D platform type game but with really awesome character animation, like if not actually rotoscoped then approaching rotoscope-caliber.

Sometimes I even start trying to animate a walk cycle before I remember that making awesome character animation is actually really difficult, and if you can pull it off then it is pretty much enough to carry a hit game. I have literally wanted to do something along these lines since I was making crappy games on the Mac using Ingemar's Sprite Animation Toolkit. And it haunts me yet!

The latest incarnation of this lunacy was an idea I had, while walking the dog, that there should be a game where the player is a dog, but only it's animated totally awesome and you can sit down and gallop and stuff and it looks like the movements of an actual dog, albeit 2D and lo-res. Amazing right!

And actually there is a game where you're a dog, but it's 3D and for the Playstation Deuce and the character animation is not even that good. (No disrespect, the animators did a great job, but it looks like they didn't use motion capture, so it's both not quite realistic and damned impressive that it looks as realistic as it does.)

And thus did I find myself searching for visual references regarding the canine walk cycle, which led me to this link, and damn. That page is huge! And loaded with diagrams! And very heavily footnoted!

And then I scrolt up to the top of the page and it was chapter ninety-one! Of what?!? A textbook with the best cover graphic ever.

Gaming System

Two single-button controllers and a 4-color, 3x1 display. Looks pretty fun!

Hair Clipping Issues

This is stupid. There is an ultimate fighting video game coming out that cut a character because they couldn't figure out how to render his hair. Which, fine, maybe if you didn't take something like hair physics into account early in the project, then you get to the character models and can't figure out a way to make it look non-stupid.

But then they tried to get the actual guy to cut his hair, so they could give the character model short hair. Why not just give the character model a haircut? People would understand.

And up until that point I'm giving the game studio the benefit of the doubt, because I can understand how that could be a kind of unforeseen wrench in the works for which there's not an obviously ideal solution. But it turns out their game also can't show people fighting in a left-handed stance...so they show everyone as right-handed! Seriously that is like making a baseball game and realizing your engine can't handle bats so they just render everyone with golf clubs.

Pinball Construction Kit

Gamasutra has a good post remembering Pinball Construction Kit for the Apple deuce, which was totally fun. I remember Nate built a table called "Mr Green Jeans," but I don't remember any of mine. I doubt any of them turned out any better than my abortive Democratic Presidents of the 20th Century table I was working on for Visual Pinball a couple years ago when I forgot to eat all day and passed out the next morning and busted my head.

VidProp

Via tiltfactor, an interesting article in the Jerusalem Post about war propaganda video games. I think it's interesting that the medium of video games is still young enough that this kind of propagandizing doesn't necessarily seem out of place. I think a lot of US-made World War II games, for example, present a perspective so simplistic and blindly patriotic as would seem crass (if not flatly offensive) were it in a movie.

Anaglyph Games

The entries from Gamma 3D have been posted. I had only really read anything about a couple of them but I look forward to giving myself a headache playing them all.

Anaglyph Game

I had been playing around with making a little video game that makes use of 3D glasses, and I sort of ran out of steam on it so I thought I'd post up what I had. It's more of a proof of concept than a full game.

It's just a regular side-scrolling platformer, but in addition you can use the up and down keys to move back and forth along the z-axis. With red/cyan anaglyph glasses on, you should be able to distinguish between solid blocks, spikes, and enemies that are at different depths, and plot your course appropriately.

I made it in the free version of Game Maker, which was super easy and fun. The full version might allow you to alter the low-level rendering routines to do the anaglyph offset at runtime, but I just made different versions of each sprite for the different depth levels and switched between them.

I was already playing with this stuff when I read about Kokoromi's Gamma 3D contest. Really interested to see what people come up with.

Anyway, here's the download link for Welder Wait 3D. The archive includes the Windows executable (Game Maker is Windows-only) and the Game Maker "source" file.

Doing Work in Video Games

Via a link post, an interesting Steven Poole essay criticizing the way a lot of games set players up in an "employment paradigm." Favorite parts:

Today, the most common paradigm for progress in games, for example, is the idea of “earning”. Follow the rules, achieve results, and you are rewarded with bits of symbolic currency — credits, stars, skill points, powerful glowing orbs — which you can then exchange later in the game for new gadgets, ways of moving, or access to previously denied areas...It is, you might say, a malignly perfect style of capitalist brainwashing.

I had some thoughts along these lines working on a reimagining of Paperboy that I sort of lost steam on. It's an interesting idea, though.

Remarkably, the WipEout games, for example, even count points for your “loyalty” to a particular team, be it Auricom or Feisar. The idea of inculcating loyalty to an entirely fictional organization is fascinating. In the modern “flexible” labour market, where people may be fired on a whim and companies rename themselves or merge from one day to the next, it might be thought useful to train the population in an idea of “loyalty” that is instant, portable — and, of course, unrequited.

I don't know about other games quantifying loyalty like this, but it is bizarre how many games take the player's devotion to some arbitrary cause for granted, despite taskmasters who are not merely oblivious to the hero's efforts, but in many cases outright hostile. (Getting back to Paperboy, you'd think any possibility of loyalty to the newspaper would evaporate when the editor demonstrates a willingness use the front page to publicly shame former employees following their termination.)

One thought I had is that this kind of blind loyalty, which requires one to deliberately overlook the contempt in which an employer figure holds the player, might have a distinctly Japanese character to it. What values have a generation of Americans absorbed growing up in an environment in which the vast majority of games share assumptions about deference to authority rather than, for example, class solidarity?

Nothing could be a more perfect advert for what is sometimes called the “American way” than The Sims. Buy a Sim a large mirror and she will be happier, by virtue of being able to gaze at her reflection. Buy him a new oven, and he’ll become more popular after giving dinner parties. Help your Sim climb the slippery pole of a career as a politician or scientist. This is a game in which the brutal rules of free-market capitalism are everything.

Apparently this paragraph is from an earlier essay of Poole's, linked to by a commenter, on implicit political messages in video games. Good stuff. I think I'll start reading his blog.

Most Unnecessary Video Game Review Ever

John McCain's Pork Invaders disappoints.

Interesting Choice of Phrase

From the long Times article on Sarah Palin from the other day:

Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.

(Hyperlink added by me.)

Can Tony Hawk Take Off From A Treadmill?

The alt-text for today's xkcd comic refers to a traditional internet flamewar of which I had not been aware: whether an airplane can take off from a treadmill.

After looking into it, it seems like one of the most convincing intuitive arguments supporting the correct answer involves pulling oneself forward over a treadmill while on a skateboard or while wearing roller skates. I seem to remember that the airport level in Tony Hawk 3 featured some moving walkways, but I can't remember whether they affect your ground speed when you roll over them.

(Obviously, the physics in Tony Hawk demonstrate rigorous adherence to reality in all other regards.)

Classic Video Games

Mighty Ponygirl wonders whether old video games were really as difficult as people remember them. A couple years ago my brother Josh and I were playing old games in a Nintendo emulator and taking advantage of the load/save features to help with the tricky parts. Even with unlimited saves, nobody could get past the hotel in Ghosts 'n Goblins. It's sort of stupid how hard that game is.

Beside the Point

Via Game Set Watch, some d-hole in the internets lays out his case against the legality of Scrabolous. He obtusely sticks to the technical legal points while refusing to engage what would seem to me is the common sense argument that: copyright exists to encourage people to create stuff; nobody is going to be discouraged from making anything because Hasbro can't make enough money selling a centuries-old board game.

Activist Video Games

GameSetWatch has a post about Hunter College's Tiltfactor research group and their "Values at Play" project. Basically it is a research lab based around creating socially conscious video games.

It's something I knew somebody else had to have thought of but which I'd had trouble finding anything about. I think I was using the search term "political," which brought me to a bunch of "UN simulator" type games, when I should have been looking for "activist" games.

In any case, there are people working on activist games (the post links to Hush, and it's pretty amazing), and there are definitely people, mostly academics, talking about activist games. There's some good stuff.

The Evil Resident In Us All

Someone somewhere linked to a blog that linked to a blog called Token Minorities, which has some recent posts looking at some of the controversy stirred up last year by the the Resident Evil 5 video game trailers. The game appears to feature a white hero mowing down hordes of zombified black people.

What I find interesting about this is that the zombie genre has always dealt with the fear of the mindless avenging horde. The classic point almost always being the danger that said fear could lead us to commit or condone horrific atrocities, or that society's injustices could blind us to the real threat.

My feeling is that, even if a given zombie story doesn't explicitly portray racial conflict, the very invocation of the mindless avenging horde archetype resonates along those lines when situated in a societal context that includes a strong undercurrent of racial fear. Stories about supernatural mindless hordes tap into actual fears, so in a way all something like Resident Evil is doing (both with this iteration and in the last installment, in which I gather players had to kill waves of marauding Mexicans) is making that culturally-imposed subtext explicit.

Which isn't to excuse the racism. Even when done intentionally (a la Night-Wight) to prompt a meta-conversation about subtext, the racist content is still there and still real. Hopefully the Resident Evil creators will do the mature thing in response to the public outcry, and change the problematic content before the game is released. But it's also worthwhile to take the opportunity to reflect on the feelings that are triggered by the whole series, and by zombie narratives in general.

Video Games

I actually have sort of liked baseball video games longer than I've liked baseball. Which is to say, just slightly, and more in theory than in practice. When my parents got an Apple deuce computer, one of my dad's friends gave him this whole box full of pirated games, and one of them was called like "Ultimate Realistic Baseball Simulator" which for some reason (I was and am retarted) sounded so awesome to 10-year-old me. And it was one of these games where you select the teams and press "enter" repeatedly and there's these primitive graphics and text showing you what's happening, but you don't actually do anything other than make substitutions and call for bunts. Like, no action, just statistics. Horrible. It's not at all like playing baseball, it's like watching baseball, but you can't see the awesome plays and it's not even real baseball.

But then eventually I had a Nintendo and there was that awesome softball game where one of the players was a witch and used a broom instead of a bat. And also Base Wars. Basically I liked any baseball video game aimed at the crucial gay sports fan audience.

So now that I am a baseball fan, and I own a computer, I thought I'd get a read on the current state of baseball video gaming. The first thing I found was that the most popular baseball game on the PC was something called Baseball Mogul. And so I shared it from the internet and it was exactly like the stupid Apple game. The graphics weren't even much improved! What is it with baseball fans? I have a theory about this, but I'll save it for another post. In any case, it was terrible.

And then I did some more research and found out that there are no action-oriented baseball games for the PC because the team and player info is all licensed exclusively to some company that only makes, like, Play-station games. (Which is a ridiculous business move since, duh, baseball dorks do not have Play-station, they have fucking Windows.) So the last game before that deal went down was called MVP and was for 2005, so I shared that and it's pretty cool. The mod to update the rosters to 2007 broke it, but then I reinstalled and it doesn't even matter since I don't know all those players anyway.

But yeah, it's really hard. I can swing but have never got on base (nullus), and I can pitch into the strike zone but have never gotten a strike. I don't think I've even tagged anyone out: all my outs are from when the computer team hits a fly ball and the computer moves the appropriate fielder underneath it. All the instructions I can find for the game are for the Play-station version, so they're all talking about analog sticks (nullus) and whatnot, so I have no idea what I'm doing.