Games: A Big Name in Video Games

Every area of human endeavour has its big names. Those people who have made a big impact. The personalities run the gamut. From giants and heroes on one end of the spectrum to the quiet unassuming types on the other.

In the world of video games one such quiet name is Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto may not be a household name but some of the video game franchises he has created certainly are. You may have heard of Zelda. You've probably heard of Donkey Kong. You most certainly have heard of Mario. All those and more are his creations.

Considering the impact his games have had on generations of players it's amazing how little is widely known about the man. Last year Nick Paumgarten took a look at Miyamoto in the New Yorker. Master of Play is a delightful look inside the mind of the man who's creations have entertained so many for so long.

We should all be so lucky to spend out time recreating the joyful parts of our childhoods as part of our job. Even if we can't do that ourselves we have the work of Miyamoto as he takes us to the best part of his own.

Games: Oh What An Adventure We Shall Have!

No, this post isn't about the original Adventure nor is it about the recently released Get Lamp. Interactive fiction will have to wait for another day.

No, this is about adventure games on computers. Why they work and why they don't. Recently a couple of the best of the adventure style games were rereleased for yet another generation of platforms. Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2 have been updated for the most modern gaming consoles and yet they are still the same adventure style games at heart.

(As a pure aside... if you want to have fun understanding how far computer games have come and how primitive early home computers were by today's standards then watch this video of the evolution of PC sound technology illustrated through the music for Monkey Island. I think I owned most of the sound cards and technologies listed. I think I still have my Gravis Ultrasound somewhere. It's amazing how far we've come from bleeps and bloops to full orchestral scores.)

Replaying Monkey Island had me plunging through my bookmarks to find an article by Ron Gilbert called Why Adventures Games Suck. As the designer behind Monkey Island he should know why adventure games suck and what to do about it. After all Monkey Island, and several other LucasArts games, are considered classics of the genre.

Which then lead me to remember a much more recent article Sierra vs. Lucasarts by L.B. Jeffries in Popmatters. The difference in approach symbolized by those two companies really does help capture some of the basic problems and issues in designing and writing good adventure games.

Those two resources won't help you design the next great adventure game but they should help you understand what can make a good game work well. Sadly the genre seems half dead. Sure many other genres include lots of the elements of adventure games but as a stand alone genre the adventure game seems to have fallen out of favour. For now. There will always be stories to tell, games to play through them, and designers who want to do more than just give us wave after wave of enemies to mow down. There will be other adventures to play through we just may have to wait a little while.

Games: Video Game Critiques

It used to be so simple. You munched around a maze avoiding ghosts. The invaders were moving back and forth and getting lower and you shot at them and hid behind little crumbling fortresses. You killed the bad thing. Or you just aligned blocks or found the way out of mazes. Games were simple. If they stood for anything or had any deep significance it was usually in the mind of the beholder and not the mind of the creator.

In simpler times there were simple reviews. Was it worth buying? Were the graphics good? Was the gameplay challenging enough without being impossible?

Things are different now. Games have huge budgets. There are complex stories. There are themes and ideas woven into the fabric of games even when the game seems to be nothing more than "shoot the bad things and survive". Which leads to longer reviews and deeper critiques of games.

Good writers with good ideas and a good understanding of what's being presented in video games now have a chance to show us what's good and not so good about games. And I'm not talking about whether the graphics are up to par or not.

Case in point is Metroid: Other M - The Elephant in the Room by MenTaLguY and Tuvia Dulin. It may have started life as a simple review but it changed into something bigger and deeper. A critique of some of the underlying issues inherent in the story of this particular Metroid game.

Metroid is a series of video games in which the hero turned out to be a heroine. The main character is Samus Aran who goes around protecting the galaxy. Metroid: Other M takes that simple formula... and... well... let's say the writing isn't up to scratch and the new take on the character is a feminist's nightmare.

What's interesting is that this particular critique goes beyond taking aim at the bad writing and occasionally painfully bad scene and looks at the story in it's entirety. It's a worthy piece of literary criticism in it's own right.

It's nice to see well thought out and well written critiques of video games. It's nice to know the medium can deserve such treatment. It's just makes me sad that this particular criticism of the mishandling of a story and a character is even required.

Games: Computer Games are American Right?

My early days with computers were positively cross Atlantic. My first computer was an Acorn Atom (the predecessor of the BBC Micro), I then migrated to one of the first PC clones. After time spent on DOS and Windows (among other systems) I moved on to the Commodore Amiga which was a favourite in Europe. I  used computers and program from both sides of the Atlantic.

One British game in particular kept me busy for quite a while - Elite. One of the first vast open games where you could do whatever you wanted. Back in 2003 The Guardian excerpted a chapter of Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford which tells the story of the creation of Elite.

Even though I was there when Space Invaders and Pac-Man and other simple repetitive arcade games were all the computer games there were it's hard to remember. We're spoiled for choice now. I think I'm starting to feel old. I almost wanted to start a sentence with "when I was young" or "when I was your age".

Math: Fun With Serial Numbers

Look around you. How many things near you have serial numbers? Almost anything technical or technological has a serial number. We take it for granted that many manufactured items have been numbered.

What can you do with those numbers? One story tells of how the allies in WWII were able to estimate the production of German tanks by collecting the serial numbers off of destroyed or captured tanks. There are a few variations on the story. Each has slightly different numbers in involved. In 2006 Gavyn Davies explained the math in the Guardian. If Wikipedia is to be believed there was additional math involved that even looked at an estimate of the number of molds the Germans had to make tank wheels.

What about using serial numbers in the present day? Is there information hidden in modern serial numbers? Could you get enough serial numbers to uncover this information?

The answers are yes, yes, and yes. Thanks to the internet it is easy to ask lots of people to type in serial numbers. Once there are enough of them... the investigation begins. Here's what can be found out from the serial numbers from a large number of Microsoft XBoxes.

Games: Who Has That Much Time?

I'd like to call your attention to the quaint game of Line Rider. A simple online game in which one draws lines for a little guy on a sled to follow.

Well... not so simple. There are three kinds of lines. Those on which the sled just slides, those on which the sled accelerates or decelerates. and those which are just there for decoration. Skilled people spend hours getting all the little line segments lined up so that the little sled does all sorts of amazing tricks. To get a sense of what can be accomplished watch Millenium by DaPoe, Transcendental by TechDawg, or Line Rider Die at the Slopes by D4N3Train. If you want some idea of how the tracks are put together watch a short tutorial on track making.

If that doesn't blow your mind then may I present The Line Rider Community Collaboration's Evolution of Line Rider. Give people a creative tools and it's amazing what they'll come up with.

And while I don't have the time, energy, patience, or ability to make Line Rider do amazing tricks and stunts (nor the creative ability to fill in interesting backgrounds) I'm very glad that some people do. And that those people get to share with the rest of us.

Games: The Making of a Game That Kept Me Up Nights

Long before cheat codes and walkthroughs there were video games that you could spend a long time playing and figuring out. One that kept me up for hours on end was DMA Design's Lemmings.

If you want a taste of the original Amiga version of the game there are online videos available. The game had a simple premise. Lemmings fell from a trap door onto the field of play and then walked directly and unflinchingly to their impending doom. Instead of walking to a door to freedom they would simply walk in one direction until they hit a wall. When they hit the wall they'd turn around and keep walking. On some levels they would just be stuck walking back and forth between two walls. In others they'd walk into traps or fall into water or lava.

You had to give some lemmings commands and others abilities in order to save as many lemmings as possible. Each level had a time limit and a certain number of all the lemmings that you had to save. Save to few or take too long and it was all over.

The puzzles started simple but soon became very difficult. Fiendishly so. I'd often look up after finally solving a level to see the sun rising and a new day starting. It also helped that the sound effects were cute Even making lemmings blow up when required was cute. I still love the "oh no!" just before a lemming would blow up into a bunch of pixels. However the sound effects were one thing. The music was another completely. It was wonderfully additive.

How addictive? Well... people are still performing the music today. On piano, keyboard, piano, guitar, and even electric guitar. Myself I prefer mp3'd version of the original Amiga mod files (ftp of the mod soundtrack and ftp of the mod extras) or rips of the CD versions of the tunes from The Lemmings Chronicles. Both of which are on my iPod and other music players.

For more history of the actual game I suggest Mike Dailly's The Complete History of Lemmings which is part of his The Complete History of DMA Design. There you will find the backstory to one of the games that kept me up at night.

Oh... and don't think you're safe because the Amiga is no more. Lemmings has been ported to quite a few computers and consoles with more versions to come in the future. Sooner or later you might find yourself trying over and over to save those little lemmings from destruction.

Games: The Red Rings of Death

I'll confess I don't have an Xbox nor do I have an Xbox 360. I'm a Sony guy at heart in the last several generations of consoles. Though I do have a Wii as well for when I want to flay around in an ungainly manner. Back in the earlier days of the console wars I was the owner of a Sega Genesis and its various upgrades.

There were several reasons I decided against the Xbox 360 when I thought about buying one of the latest generation consoles. The primary one was the type of games that I like to play. While I play a little of everything I'm not as enamoured of the first person shooters as I once was. I also am drawn to turn based RPGs and rather quirky offbeat games. At the time the PS3 and Xbox 360 hit the market Sony had many more of the games I like in its catalogue. So I chose to stick with Sony and the PlayStation 3.

The other reason I didn't get an Xbox 360 was the sheer number of them that needed to be returned and replaced. It seemed like the majority of people who had bought a 360 had to have it replaced or repaired. I can't think of any other recent consumer electronic device that had so many problems. Not only did it have problems but they didn't go away for a long time.

Making that type of mistake for such a long period of time cost Microsoft a great deal both in terms of reputation and in terms of money. Actually Microsoft paid a great deal when it came to the Xbox. Not only to cover the costs of so many broken Xbox 360s but also to just get into the console gaming market.

Inside story: The birth of Xbox is a series of reminisces from Ed Fries who was the vice president of game publishing at Microsoft. While not a comprehensive history it gives glimpses into what went right with the introduction of the Xbox to the console market.

Xbox 360 defects: an inside history of Microsoft's video game console woes is a much longer article. It looks at what went so wrong with the introduction of the Xbox 360. Not many companies have the deep pockets to get themselves out a mess as bad as the Xbox 360 debacle.

I'll stick with my PS3 and Wii for now. I may change my allegiance when the next generation of game consoles appears on the market. Or I might way to see if any of the new ones have teething problems like the 360 did.

Games: Living The Experience Without Playing the Game

It started on Something Awful. People would play through a video game while taking notes and pictures and post the results in the forums. Known as Let's Play these are not walkthroughs in the traditional sense.

A traditional walkthrough, as exemplified by Game FAQs, is a document that tells you step by step how to complete a video game. It tells you the tricks, points out the traps, and is told from the point of view of one gamer helping another. Want to know how to get past a tricky section? Read the walkthrough. Want to know how to get the ultimate magic sword? Read the walkthrough.

Want to be told the story of the video game instead of the steps needed to beat it outright? Potentially with running commentary by the author? Then a Let's Play is for you.

Since the Something Awful forums have a reputation for holding on to precious historic content with all tends to suggest the admins would hav brought matches to the Library of Alexandria others have taken on the job of archiving and maintaining the list of "Let's Plays". Thus the Let's Play Archive was born. Collected here are text Let's Plays and video Let's Plays. Yes... you not only can read along but in some cases watch as someone plays a video game for you.

Don't let that fool you though. Yes... some of them are pretty bland descriptions of playing the game. Many do explore the game and its world in detail. There can be interesting running commentary while the game is being described.

There is also a few places where the Let's Play has a life of its own and becomes a truly memorable event above and beyond the game in question. Case in point is the tale of horror that is The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing. You'll never look at a fun little game quite the same way ever again.

Games: From the Gridiron to a Video Game

I remember when I first saw John Madden's face on a video game. Though I didn't own a John Madden football game until the sequel. Now it's hard to remember a time when his face and name hasn't graced the cover of a video game.

How he managed to become the face of football for millions of gamers and how the games themselves turned into a franchise is quite the story. A story told by ESPN in The Franchise. Don't think you won't learn anything along the way. There are some secrets about the early days of video game consoles that I didn't know and the truth about Joe Montana Football was a revelation to me.

Who knows who will be the next unlikely person to become the face of a video game franchise. After all if it can happen to John Madden it could happen to anyone.

Magnificent Obsessions: Building a Game Console

If I said someone was working on building their own computer gaming console that would plug into a TV you'd probably say something like "I can believe it".

If I said the person wasn't working on a 63 or 32 bit modern system but was going to build their own 8 bit computer system along the lines of the Nintendo Entertainment System you'd probably say "I can't imagine why anyone would do it but I can still believe it".

If I said that the person in question isn't going to use any modern components except for an inexpensive modern microcontroller. All the support chips, memory, video timings, and the like will be handled with components that were available back in the 8 bit era. At this point you'd probably agree with me that this qualifies as a magnificent obsession.

Brad Graham from Lucid Science is attempting just such a feat. He's building the Lazarus-64 which he started thinking about while on vacation and named because:

The name "Lazarus-64" was penciled on the top of the notebook, and it seemed fitting considering the mythical character that rose from the dead.

The project is very much a work in progress but there has been a lot of progress. Going through the work Brad's done so far will remind us old fogeys just how complicated early systems were. No simple systems-on-a-chip back then. I'm looking forward to seeing how far the Lazarus-64 will progress. It reminds me of how much programmers and designers could get out of systems that seem incredibly limited by modern standards.

Games: The Story of an Early 3D Game

In the late 80's I played a game called The Colony. Long before Wolfenstein 3D or Doom a lone developer named David Alan Smith created a game in which you help the survivors of a remote space colony.

For a look at what one of the first 3d action games looked like just watch David A. Smith demo the game on youtube (part 1) (part 2). I have many memories of moving slowly down hallways and wondering where the next alien might be. There were many immersive worlds and environments to come but The Colony was my first taste of what games would be like.

If you're interested in the story behind The Colony, and some of the technical details that made it very advanced for its time, David A Smith has written My Colony Memoir. It's hard to imagine a single person working on a computer that didn't even have complete development tools building a complete game from scratch. Especially since we live in the era of huge budget games created by huge teams of specialists. Sometimes it's good to remember what can be done on a small machine by one person.

Games: Pac-Man

If you're old enough to remember when video games first started showing up in arcades alongside pinball machines I have a question. What original arcade game was the one you first played over and over?

Space Invaders? Q-Bert? Galaga? Or maybe one of the first huge hits - Pac-Man?

Recently a Dutch blog post made the rounds. Toru Iwatani was visiting the Netherlands for the NLGD Festival of Games and he brought with him some rather historic documents. His original design documents and ideas for Pac-Man.

Which got me thinking about Pac-Man. The game has more depth than you think. It may seem as simple as a face running around a maze after dots while ghosts just blindly chase the player but it isn't. There is much more to Pac-Man than that. Don't believe me? Take a look at The Pac-Man Dossier by Jamey Pittman. It's truly the most comprehensive exploration of Pac-Man I've ever seen.

If you ever stumble across an original Pac-Man game and get a chance to put in a few quarters just remember it's deeper and more complicated than you ever thought.

Games: The Best Game Ever?

On Wednesday's the topic is games. Including sports, video games, and games people play.

For those of you who play video games I have a question. What is the best video game ever?

Maybe you like Civilization because of how it draws you in to build an empire and conquer the world? Maybe a game that changed the face of gaming. How about Doom or Quake? A best seller perhaps? Such as Super Mario Brothers or Tetris? Or a darling of the critics like Portal? (And if you know the game and the ending I dare you not to be humming Still Alive right now.)

How about a game that doesn't have the graphics to change the face of gaming? The graphics are just text characters re-purposed into walls and creatures? How about a game that will never be a best seller because it isn't for sale? This one is available for free so you couldn't buy it if you wanted to. As for being a darling of the critics....

Slate magazine made the case for a game called nethack back in 2000. Nethack is a descendant of rogue and other dungeon crawlers that were first written back in the days of text screens and terminals.

No graphics, no theme song, and no marketing. A text based dungeon crawl that's difficult from the beginning. If you play video games and want a true challenge... try nethack. Be warned. It's been known to take up a lot of time. The goal of nethack is to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor from the bottom of a dungeon and sacrifice it to your god. Doing so grants your character immortality. When you do this you are said to have ascended. Nethack is such so well known that in many geek circles having ascended is either a requirement or a badge of honour.

Nethack is a descendant of rogue. Rogue is the game that first turned a text screen into a dungeon crawl. Every game that has used roughly the same idea has been classified as a roguelike game. There are several lists of roguelike games available in case you want to explore other similar games for any number of different computers.

In terms of games that pack lots of information into a text screen and fully use the imagination of the player to fill in the blanks the roguelikes have had the upper hand for the longest time. (I'm leaving text adventures that don't use letters on the screens as symbols for another time). In recent years there is a new contender for the most complicated and involving game that works in text. The game is Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress' programmers have not spent the time to add graphics or make the interface more user-friendly. Instead they've concentrated on increasing the games' scope and adding feature after feature. All within a text window. While you can play Dwarf Fortress as a hero or an adventurer the more popular mode is one in which you build a fortress from scratch in a world constructed before hand just on your computer. Dwarf Fortress is vast, hard to master, and apparently addictive. So far I've decided not to give into the temptation to get too involved.

In case you want to get involved here's a pointer to the Dwarf Fortress wiki to get you started.