OrtizGames

Hey, guys!

Don’t think I’ve forgotten you; I’ve just graduated and am now wrapping up a few chores before I can get down and dirty with SPORE, my gaming culture essay and some Beyond Good and Evil.

So as a brief prelude to anything I end up writing this week, here’s a few quick impressions on what we’ve seen at E3 so far:

1) The economy is down, so E3 is very unimpressive. They’re still hyping it up quite a great deal, but coming from the mouth of attendees, E3 is not great this year.

2) Impressions of individual companies’s “big announcements”
Nintendo’s Wii “Vitality Sensor”: The day I need a game to remind me my cholesterol is bad is the day I need to stop playing video games because they’re becoming my mother. The design looks like it may end up being cramp-city. Also, I swear I’ve seen this device before. Didn’t we see a leak preview image of this way way long ago? I’m getting some kind of déjà vu that tells me this should look familiar for some reason.
It’s argued that maybe it could help the game measure which is the best time to COMPLETELY THROW YOUR WORLD TOPSY TURVY like in a jump-spooks horror game, but considering we’re dealing with Wii graphics and Wii hardware here, how smart could the game possibly be for this? Let’s not forget, Super Mario Galaxy may have looked great, but the AI (was there any?) was pretty much limited to “Here Comes Mario, Beat Him Up”. Resident Evil 4 had that same idea down: “Here Comes Leon, Walk Sluggishly Forward And Attack Repeatedly”. Then again, somehow Capcom made it work with Monster Hunter Tri, too.
So, Nintendo, any examples on how this thing will work? What actual uses it has?
Enough speculating; let’s move on.

Sony’s WiiMote: It’s basically everything the original Nintendo WiiMote was supposed to be in its proof of concept video, only with dorky colored balls at the end of it which I suppose are part of the capture process. But of course, if it’s a visual mocap process, there will be horrible glitches involved as with any motion capture technology, which makes me wonder why we are still bothering with freaking motion sense technology. At least they had a technical demo. It made Nintendo’s and Microsoft’s presentations look laughable at best–then again, it’s just a tech demo–the actual product won’t be out until Spring 2010, which means there’s nothing coming this year. Except Heavy Rain. Of course. Which looks as amazing as ever.

Microsoft’s Wiimote “Project Natal”: This is basically an awesome futuristic idea that will never work because Microsoft can’t make it do half of the things in this proof of concept video with any accuracy. It is a wonderful idea, don’t get me wrong. If this actually ended up being what this video makes it out to be, I will personally send a letter of apology to Microsoft, purchase an Xbox 360 and shut up. But I’m quite sure this will not be what it will be like–it’s a proof of concept video, used for patent purposes more than anything, and the likelihood that it gets up and running before Microsoft gets set on releasing the Xbox 1080/720/3/THE OTHER ONE is extremely unlikely. This “Project Natal” doesn’t seem to have any working prototypes, and might as well be Duke Nukem Forever with the amount of working product we’ve seen.

In short, E3 this year is pretty much how I felt yesterday, standing in GameStop, scanning the shelves and realizing I really didn’t want to be there. We’re hitting a low point. The economy is bad. The games are bad. The future looks boring.

We need saviors.

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Imagine my surprise, logging on to my newsfeeds, reading over them in a semi-sick state with my throat in shambles, my nose congested, my attitude generally sour and so much work on my plate it is not at all funny, when I stumbled across this article on Gamasutra mentioning the debut of my hometown game developer, Xibalba Studios. As some of you might remember (most of you won’t) I worked with Xibalba Studios for a tiny bit as an intern level designer, and I got to see a bit of the development of their new title, Icebreakers. I’m very happy to see it revealed at EGS ’08 in Mexico City, and I’m looking forward to seeing the actual product released in 09.

If you haven’t already clicked on any of the links I’ve posted, do so, and look it up! Or Google “Icebreakers Xibalba” for a variety of different news sites, including this one (has a small screenshot), that all happily report the release.

Other than that, my SPORE review (and review of everything else for that matter) is on extended hiatus until I can get my ridiculous workload out of the way.

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SPORE works. Oh, God, I was so convinced the problem was my video card, but after Googling a little, I learned about a community of people that were having the same issues, and by using a simple yet retarded fix I managed to install the game and have it work. It doesn’t run spectacularly on my PC; it’s at lowest settings, and even then it has laggy moments (so maybe I should get the XG Station anyway?) but it runs, dear God, and I’m so happy that I finally have the chance to play. I’ve been out and about all today, fretting over being able to get home and play at 8pm. I’ve only made it to the Creature Stage.

But learning all about the issues and bugs in SPORE and the features that have been lacking in the final version, I’ve become thoughtful as to what problems must have arisen in its development, and where focus has been placed in the game design in order to refine particular aspects of the game that were considered core to its experience. Why is it plagued with so many glitches, errors and difficulties? Why is the DRM so broken?

I’ll be sure to write up a SPORE critique for you all sometime very soon. For now, I’m going to go into hiding for a few days while I play it.

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David Jaffe (creator of games such as Twisted Metal and God of War) got some flak for saying the primary aspect that he felt was selling Sarah Palin was that she was hot. He had to go on his video blog and be irked recently because he felt people were being too PC about his statement even though yes, Jaffe, it’s a little insulting to suggest a politician is going to be voted for just because she’s hot.

But on that note, I think he’s completely right. She’s attractive. Men are going to like her and want to put her in the office. But oh, you guys have no idea. She’s very attractive, but underneath she’s absolutely dangerous. She’s got that fire, that sharp ferocity underneath that’s just beautifully frightening. That makes her even more attractive to me. She’s got that face to mask the inner limit break.

Mmm. Okay, enough getting riled up. I think Sarah Palin is awesome. I hope she wins. And Jaffe needs to learn to phrase himself more eloquently and not video blog, but he’s absolutely right. I hope John McCain wins. I want this woman defending the country. She’s like Nariko.

Sarah Palin, if I was an American citizen, you’d have my vote again and again. Rock that White House

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In the spirit of Play This Thing, I decided to talk a bit about some stuff that I usually don’t talk about.

So someone pointed me to this game, Coign Of Vantage, yesterday. New gameplay dynamics at work! So much an art game, but it’s lovely. Now we’ll try to think of how to implement this in a triple A title.

There’s also this game, The Fantastic Contraption, which is also quite interesting and has some lovely gameplay and all my friends from Mexico seem addicted to.

Lastly, and on a more serious note. Here’s the Invaders!, an installation interactive art piece by Douglas Edric Stanley featured at Liezpig.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6KnLWLgK_4]

When I first read about it, I was enthralled by the use of interactivity to provide a critique on the Iraq War. It was stellar. It was awesome. Games as art, right?

But then, as usual, people disliked it. It was too much message for brains that were just too small. The United States, a country that’s going to be permanently touchy about the fact that they were hit hard by terrorists, simply cannot accept any critique about its war strategy. So people bitched. And bitched. And the exhibit simply had to come down. Stanley’s blog states that he pulled it down simply because it was getting so much bad flak (from people at Kotaku, no less) and not because Leizpig organizers asked him to bring it down. And now TAITO is threatening to sue, since apparently this is an infreingement on their Space Invaders intellectual property.

Screw you, TAITO.

In a way, it’s completely understandable that good art should be refused by the masses and understood by few. It’s the same with a lot of controversial art contemporary to the time it was created in. We need artists to challenge us so that we may grow. But I’m still angry. The cream on the cake was TAITO wanting to sue. We didn’t have suing back in other times of controversial art. Suing really makes it difficult now.

Sorry for ending this post on a bad note, but it was just depressing news for this early in the morning.

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Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer

Joystiq gave us their hands-on impression of a Heavy Rain demo/bonus level playthrough yesterday, and as I read it I kept having to stop myself from screaming again and again in pure excitement. Read it now.

Everything I remember from Indigo Prophecy/Farenheit that excited me about games as a storytelling/interactive medium is brought back and hyperextended by David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream and mastermind behind both Indigo Prophecy (known as Farenheit in Europe) and the new title Heavy Rain for the PS3 (also known as Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer).

Because most every hit on my website for the past few days seemed to have been somehow related to Heavy Rain (people continue to read my old Heavy Rain article despite the fact that I have written like, sixty others) I decided to continue reporting on every scrap of information I can get–simply because Heavy Rain really is pushing the boundary on games as a medium that should appeal to more than just kids and teenagers. David Cage has an interview up on Gamasutra in which he talks about a number of things, including his belief that games are really marketed far too much towards teenagers, a reflection of how the industry started: teenagers making games for other teenagers. Even a seriously gritty, mature work such as MadWorld seems to be a fest of all the things that a teenager would find cool, from badasses to blood to chainsaws. There’s also this video interview with David Cage to pore over in which he mentions much of the same thing.

And for now, that’s everything. I’ll continue keeping my eyes out for all information I can, including screens, videos and more, especially since I seem to be such a valuable resource according to search engines.

Thanks a lot for your reading, and I hope my providing concise information is of some use to you interested people!

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My friend Carlos (a brilliant person I will never be able to follow in conversation because he thinks and talks too fast and knows too much for me to understand entirely) pointed me to Bob’s Game a few days ago, before Bob became famous. Bob is otherwise known as Robert Pelloni, a 25-year-old self-taught game designer who created an entire Nintendo DS game himself.

Recently, he got an interview up on France 24, which I read and replied to. In the interview, he talks about his process and the amount of work he put into the game (5 years!).

He also was replied to by a Ubisoft representative, who said, and I quote, ”I don’t think it’s possible for a single person to create a game. Today, designing a videogame is a collective enterprise, putting together a team of about 30 people. Furthermore, publishers need to privilege their own creators, while taking into account trends in the sector.”

Regardless of the context that statement is made in, it is what it is.

You are free to reply to that how you like. My opinion is written up on the interview page, and my rage is just a shade under poignant.

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David Cage Should be working with these people.

Also, here’s a link to the new Heavy Rain trailer in Hi-Def. It comes out in 2009. I’ll talk about that later.

Nothing else for today. After that rant yesterday I’m tired out, and I need to work.

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World of Warcraft released an exciting promotion this week called “Recruit-A-Friend” that completely breaks their game. Read up on it here.

Now, there’s a big principle of game design that is “make your players feel like what they’re doing is meaningful”. You want to have a balance to difficulty and skill and make sure that the stretch to the end of the game is a challenging but rewarding one.

With this new promotion, a newly recruited player playing grouped with a friend earn triple experience on all quests and monsters, allowing them level up almost insanely fast, ensuring that well within the 90 days of the promotion they will have hit at least level 60. And their bluebar is unaffected, simply pushed back constantly as they gain more group XP. Also, for every two levels they gain, they can grant one level to any grouped character one level below them, which pushes their XP bar all the way to the same spot on the next level. Yes. It’s unbelievable.

After having started several WoW characters I can safely say the climb to 70 is a long, ardous one that takes several months of hard work–but as a friend and I started up another account to see how this promotion worked, we realized that in the span of three days of casual play (under ten hours total) we were already close to hitting level 25. That’s unheard of. That’s practically a World of Warcraft record. Our quests would gray out before we even turned some of them in.

Safe to say, I will finally get a character to level 70 now.

I understand Blizzard wants to push people out of levels 1-60 and into the Outlands and the Burning Crusade Expansion (not to mention Wrath of the Lich King levels 70-80 which comes out later this year) but seriously, breaking well over half the game for the sake of encouraging people to level up? I can see the near distant future filled with level 60s, all running around the fields of Azeroth and massacring new enemy characters trying to level a character to 70.

It’s retarded. And insane.

My friends and I have agreed that this has to be a temporary promotion. 90 days of triple the experience on Iquests and monsters is ungodly. The game is almost not fun anymore, it’s so easy. The only reason we’re relishing it so much is because we’ve gone through these initial quests multiple times, and now being able to breeze through them is relieving. However, I’m sure any new WoW players will not find this experience as comforting; rather, disconcerting.

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This just in: new screenshots from the highly anticipated (at least I’m highly anticipating) Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer. Pictures can be found here.

We see a girl, a motorbike, a man, and a knife. All of them look eerily real, and yet still have that uncanny-valley sense to them. Hopefully these beta images are just a shade under the final quality–or animating them will bring lifelike spark to these digital personas.

Source: N4G

PS: Yes, I am playing Soul Cal 4. More on that and some other things later.

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