The Gameshelf

Embittered Movie Review: "Metro Polis"

2009-10-29T16:40:53Z

If you enjoy my game videos, perhaps you will like this. The idea for this literally woke me up in the pre-dawn hours last Saturday, and I found the time to put it together last night.

There actually is a game connection, here. I was inspired to try applying the attitude of certain contemporary reviewers of very old video games -- who often make little to no effort to place their comments in the games' historical context -- and apply it to a very old movie. It flew off the rails from there, of course, for the sake of comedy. But, there it is.

Conquer by the Clock

2009-10-23T20:36:58Z

Another little bit of behind-the-scenesery for you: I had a great deal of fun raiding The Prelinger Archives, a collection of public domain films, to fill out the Diplomacy episode's visuals. I expect it to be a well I'll return to often for future episodes.

One film I borrowed from extensively was Conquer by the Clock, a jawdropping American propaganda film from the WWII era. Not only is its delirious visual motif of belligerent, floating clocks wonderful (and quite useful for recontextualizing), but its message is a fascinating window into the psychology of a nation completely mobilized for war. Of particular note is the lesson that every time you take a break from work, soldiers die (and/or go insane). Think of that, the next time you take a minute to screw around reading game blogs!

On another note, I've added Twitter and Facebook links to the bottom of every post on this site, as well as a few other small design changes. Feel free to let me know what you think of them!

IF activity at PAX Boston!

2009-10-22T00:27:51Z

...will happen. Details when we have them.

What? No, I really don't know yet.

What? I'm talking about Penny Arcade Expo East, scheduled for March 26-28 next year, in downtown Boston. I'll be there. Quite a few IF folks are interested in showing up. We all said "Yeah, we should get together at PAX and do some stuff!"

What? We could do some IF panels. Demo some games. Talk about Inform 7, or about interactive storytelling. I hear Jason Scott has been working on a movie, he might have something to show. I like the idea of an MIT tour, featuring "Lurking Horror" locations. Nothing's set up yet; this is all still ideas. But if you're interested in IF, and Boston isn't out of your way, stick a note on your calendar.

Boston IF Meetup, Tuesday, October 27

2009-10-21T02:26:58Z

It's Boston IF Meetup time again. This time, bucking tradition, it's on a Tuesday, not a Monday. Come join us on Tuesday, October 27, at 6:30 in The Trope Tank (14N-233 at MIT). We have two people talking this month:

Andrew (aka Zarf) will be talking about procedural text generation, using room descriptions in his game Hunter, In Darkness as an example (go play it if you haven't). Late-breaking news: he's also working on a second example in Javascript.
Michael (aka Mike) will be showing off and talking about the games he made for IFWM earlier this year (IFWM was the impetus for the Boston IF Meetups (Meetsup?)).

There will, I'm sure, also be the usual talk about games in general, and I'm sure there will be at least some mention of the competition that's happening right now and that I'm not discussing in public. Usually around 8 or 8:30, we head over to Cambridge Brewing Company for food and/or drinks.

This is free (except for food and/or drinks) and open to the public. Please feel free to come by and talk, listen, or present (if you're planning to present, some heads-up to me might be nice before the actual presentation, but it's not strictly necessary).

Go Euro Games!

2009-10-20T02:29:30Z

My friend Devon Weller and I were at Barcamp Nashville and after attending some sessions we saw that there was a Impromptu session room, and it had a couple of open slots. We decided that we wanted to talk up EuroGames and to help build the local gaming community. Mainly, to try to introduce people to the awesome world of great board games. We came up with a talk during lunch, and even got some great slides! You can see the slides we did below. Feel free to steal our slides to talk up your own local games. We think everyone should try to introduce as many people as possible to the world of great euro games (we do include all games even the ones invented here). Why? Because they are awesome! We hope to give this talk again, and hope to refine it. Anyone have comments on how to get people interested in just trying games?

Euro Games are Cool

View more presentations from christophercotton.

DoKashiteru's music

2009-10-17T19:16:44Z

I just happened across the homepage of DoKashiteru, a duo whose music I have used liberally in recent video projects - Gameshelf included. They put much of their work into the Creative Commons under remix-friendly licenses, so I plan on continuing to use it as an aural background for my own stuff. (Before today I knew the band's music via its page on ccMixter, the site I raid for all my legally clean background music needs.)

They really hit the spot for the kind of blip-happy electronica I'm quite fond of, and I encourage you give them a listen. They make videos, too: here is Sander, one of the pair, giving you a lesson on how to torture some chunky sounds out of an ancient, analog Moog synthesizer.

Diplomacy: Deleted Scenes (confessionals!)

2009-10-15T03:20:19Z

As my disheveled and shaky-cammed head at the top of the above video explains, our shoot of the Diplomacy episode featured a "confessional cam" that players could operate in private in order to spill their guts about the game, even while it was still going on. They made great use of it, as did certain members of the crew, and other persons who happened to be in the house at the time...

I ended up not using any of this footage in the final episode, but it was too good to just leave on the cutting-room floor. So, I glued most of these bits together into a bonus episode, complete with a surprise twist ending. Enjoy!

Winceful games-for-girls marketing

2009-10-12T15:52:58Z

On Ian Bogost's Twitter feed, we find this striking photograph by Allison Moore of a Nintendo DS game retail rack:

Yes, it's one little slice taken out of a greater visual context, and its true that I'd have no reaction either way to seeing any one of these titles sitting by itself. (And you won't hear me saying boo about Peggle, in any case.) But it's still hard to look at this particular picture and not think of another culturally representative game, albeit one from over 40 years ago...

Miles to go.

Another Secret Project KLD image

2009-10-12T04:53:17Z

Back in July I posted a teaser image from Secret Project KLD. I said I'd say more in "three months, or six, or a year, or however long it takes".

Well, it's taking a while. I still don't know when it'll be done. But it's been three months, so the least I can do is tease you some more.

This image is actually a month old. I've done a heck of a lot of work since then. But it wouldn't be much of a secret project if I showed off everything I had.

(Note: Some of you reading this post have already seen this image, because... I like to talk about my secret projects. And show off. But I'm trying to keep it within strict bounds now.)

Anyway, see you in another three months! Unless I change my mind some more.

A bit of housekeeping

2009-10-10T05:02:11Z

I've been tidying up the place a bit. Please note, in our newly leaner left sidebar, that I've updated the blogroll ("Friends of the Shelf") section for the first time in more than a year, including several long-overdue links to people and places of interest to the game-studying reader. Explore and enjoy. (I also seem to have added more links to the "Ego Inflation" section, but I'll let those speak for themselves, ahem.)

Note also, in the same sidebar, the more obvious links to a page containing all the show's past episodes in an easy-to-watch format, as well as to another page that will instruct you in how to obtain copies of these same episodes on shiny, shiny DVDs.

The thing that finally had to get around to all this, in fact, was a kind viewer's purchase of a Gameshelf DVD set, despite my having done approximately nothing to promote them since my initial announcement months ago. This spurred me to, er, actually create the DVDs. And now that I've gone and made myself an inventory, it seemed prudent to sweep some of the cobwebs out of the storefront...

System's Twilight turns fifteen

2009-10-08T19:43:40Z

Fifteen years ago today, I released my first full-scale original game: System's Twilight.

And when I say "released", I mean "I uploaded it to the Info-Mac FTP archive at SUMEX-AIM." I set up a web page for the game, but I didn't publicize the URL much, because what was a URL? Everyone used FTP.

(I think Info-Mac had a web server too, by that point. But HTTP was merely an alternate way to access the files. It wasn't a web site.)

For fun, here's the announcement I posted to Usenet. (Thanks to Google Groups for preserving it; no thanks for making it really hard to find.)

  From: "Andrew C. Plotkin" 
  Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.games
  Subject: NEW: System's Twilight 1.00
  Date: Sun,  9 Oct 1994 13:36:56 -0400
  Message-ID: 

  I just sent this out to the archives yesterday; it's on the faster
  mirrors already. It's in ./game/systems-twilight-100.hqx on Info-Mac. It
  should appeal to the Cliff Johnson / Heaven&Earth fans that have been
  talking recently...

  --------------------------

  System's Twilight: An Abstract Fairy Tale

  This game is a story and a puzzle. The story is made up of several
  parts, not all of which may be obvious. The puzzle is made up of
  many puzzles, some of which aren't obvious at all.

  That's all I'll tell you. The rest you get to figure out yourself. Have
  fun.

I haven't pasted in the whole thing, but check it out for historic amusement. Bang paths! Compatible with System 6.0.7 and System 7!

Trawling through the Usenet group for the era has been a blast. What were people talking about? Wolf3D. The Seventh Guest. Marathon. Myst, lots and lots of Myst. Doom (it will be ported to the Mac by Christmas! ...but only PPC Macs, not 68k.) And hey, there's a question about Zork (the mainframe Dungeon version, there, although there are also Return to Zork comments).

And some lesser-remembered classics, or "classics". FA-18 Hornet. An RPG called Prince of Destruction (which I seem to have written a detailed review of, and then forgot the existence of). An overhyped Lode Runner remake. Oxyd.

I see that nobody commented on System's Twilight for several weeks. That must have been frustrating. But some hint requests turned up in early November.

I spent a year writing System's Twilight. Was it worth it? It paid for my second Macintosh, I believe. (The PowerMac 9500! No, I neer bought Doom.) It was great resume fodder for my brief stint as a Mac programmer at Magnet Interactive. (Then Magnet tried to turn me into a Win95 programmer. Whoo-ee, did that ever not work. Ah, licensed "Highlander" video game, how poorly you worked out for Magnet.)

And then, just last week, I get this email:

  I'd like to register System's Twilight v1.0.5. Is the address provided in
  the readme ([...]) still valid?

The elided address was that of the shareware company that handled fulfilment from 1997 to 2000. So, no, it's not still valid -- please play my game for free! But I didn't ask where the querent had found version 1.0.5. Maybe one of those shareware-shovelware companies that used to orbit the Mac universe, Nemesis-like, raining down comets of questionable CD-ROMs.

Conclusion: people still like my game! That's really cool.

And now, the porting question. Every couple of years, somebody asks me if I've ever considered porting System's Twilight to Windows, or OSX, or Flash, or Java, or iPhone, or wherever the hot locus of gamerdom is. (Okay, Java was never hot.)

Answer: sure I've considered it. I haven't done it because it would be, probably, another year of work. The art is sized for a 320x512 pixel display; the code is built on the old Mac toolbox. Even the puzzle data files are formatted in Rez source code, for the Mac resource manager. So, basically, starting over. I've always had other projects that seemed more rewarding than re-releasing an old game.

(Plus, I've never been sure what would stay the hot locus of gamerdom. Mac has swapped architectures twice since 1994, and emulators are legally hairy. Java is aggressively portable, but ugly; Javascript is aggressively ported, but slippery as an eel. Flash? Ask me again in ten years. The iPhone? Ask me again in three. Maybe I'm spoiled by the IF world, where games stay playable for twenty or thirty years in a row.)

It's harder when somebody asks if they can port the game. For free, honest... but there's no such thing. I'd want the interface to be done right, which isn't necessarily the way I did it the first time. I'd want to test all the puzzle mechanics. I'd want, in short, to stick my finger in the soup all the time. Likely to be infuriating to the hapless volunteer -- and it would wind up eating months of my time anyway.

So, for now, no ports. Don't come asking. The future may hold options. We'll see.

(In the meantime, the legally hairy emulators do let you play the game.)

I leave you with this lovely map:

Not IFComp adventure reviews

2009-10-08T01:10:10Z

Since it's IFComp season, I thought I'd get my ducks in a row by clearing my brain of commentary of the last few non-text adventures I played.

(Note: any linearity of ducks is strictly accidental. Use of "ducks in a row" as a metaphor does not constitute any guarantee of IFComp commentary, express or implied, now or later, leaded or decaf. Void where used in void context.)

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper

(Web site; Frogwares Studio)

Third in the weirdest adventure game series I can recall. Weird for one specific reason: each game so far has had a totally different tone. Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened was Lovecraftian horror: chasing down a murderous cult across Britain, Europe, and America, with an apocalyptic (well, nigh-apocalyptic) showdown in a storm-blasted lighthouse. Flashy, full of wild occult connections, occasional chase scenes even.

Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis switched antagonists entirely: from squamous Elder Things to Arsene Lupin, gentleman thief (a fictional contemporary of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories). This game took the form of a battle of wits: clues left in wry little notes and riddles, Holmes chasing the thief around London. It wasn't farce -- Lupin really was after the Crown Jewels, and he had a plan to get them. But it wasn't a cosmic struggle for the survival of humanity, either.

And now, Jack the Ripper. Another natural nemesis for the master detective; but on a completely different axis. And the game, once again, runs along completely different lines. No gentleman criminals here. The story is a murky tangle of racism, poverty, prostitution, and revenge, with plenty of syphilis and mutilation thrown in. Not the fantastical set-dressing of Lovecraft's cannibal cults; just straight-up human butchery.

The challenges, too, switch gears. You're not solving riddles, or even lining up the logic-puzzle-like suspect lists of the Lupin game. (Well, sometimes you are, but mostly not.) It's down-and-dirty police procedure. Which way did the knife cut, left or right, shallow or deep? Where did the blood splatter? Which witnesses reported a five-foot-nine shadow, and which five-foot-six? You re-enact murder scenes, dress up mannequins to test theories, and -- memorably -- hack up some hog corpses to try to figure out what kind of knife was used.

(The game isn't graphically bloody, but it doesn't skirt it by much. You are, after all, taking detailed physical evidence from human victims. The game departs from its usual realistic 3D, using stylized flat artwork for the corpses -- and for the pig heads. Nonetheless, it doesn't take much imagination to be revolted by these scenes. If you're suspectible, avoid this game.)

(The good news is, Watson finally has a walking animation. In other words, he no longer teleports from place to place when your back is turned. Forget the gore; Mysterious Teleporting Watson was absolutely the most unnerving thing about the first two games in this series.)

You run into the usual stock of evidence-collection, object-manipulation, and NPC-fetching puzzles. (And one arbitrary set of sliding blocks, sigh...) But this game also adds a large selection of evidence-collation puzzles -- again, the form of the police procedural. For example, after you've assembled a stock of information about when things happened, you enter a timeline scene: Holmes prompts you to place pins on a timeline, and then resolve inconsistencies. Locations are put together on a map; physical descriptions, as I noted, are laid out on mannequins. And all the facts you assemble go onto a big chart, with chains of conclusion leading to further deduction and, eventually, a narrowing profile of the Ripper.

All of these deduction scenes are interactive; they do a good job of pulling you into the act of tracking down a killer. Much better than cut scenes of Holmes monologuing. They follow, as far as I can tell, plausible forensic investigation. (Well, mostly. The perfume analysis bit is disappointingly and arbitrarily abstracted.) The scenes even have a depressingly realistic percentage of null results: half the time, you are tracking through a bunch of facts which turn out to exclude nothing and point to nobody.

What these interactions are not, unfortunately, are good puzzles. Most of them can be brute-forced. The deduction chart, in particular, lets you twiddle each node through its three options until the result lights up green. The designers try to make up for this with multi-stage deductions, but that just increases the number of guesses you have to make. It was always easier for me to grind through combinations of "left-handed... right-handed... taller, shorter..." than to think about the facts in the game world.

I'm not saying I have a better model here. Designing a good puzzle is hard; designing a puzzle around a realistic activity is hard. Doing both together is so hard that you can wind up tuning your entire game design to make it work once... if you're lucky. In trying to cover every aspect of an investigation, Holmes v. Ripper makes itself into more of an interactive movie interspersed with puzzles.

Mind you, there aren't enough good interactive movies out there. You should play this one, as long as you have a strong stomach.

But I have no idea what Frogwares will do with the next game. Their web site says it's in development...

Cursed Mountain

(Web site; Deep Silver Inc)

This Wii title was mentioned at a Penguicon "what games are you looking forward to?" panel. It sounded cool: survival horror with Buddhist mythology.

As it turns out, it's Fatal Frame on a mountain. Ghosts jump out at you and you kill them with your blessed pickaxe. Nothing wrong with this as a premise; I miss Fatal Frame. (The latest iteration of that series was published only in Japan.)

Sadly, Cursed Mountain is terribly thin on gameplay; it just doesn't push any boundaries at all. You search levels for keys (for locked doors) and magical symbols (dispelled with a little gesture game, to unlock doors). You smash ~~barrels~~ jars, all of which look the same, and which contain either nothing or ~~health drinks~~ health incense. And then ghosts jump out at you, so you whack them or shoot them with your magic pickaxe -- don't ask me, apparently magic pickaxes can shoot ghosts -- until you can dispel the ghosts with the same little gesture game.

Oh, and you find a lot of journals to read, for storyline.

Very occasionally you get to play a different gesture game (meditating, or balancing on a beam) but there really isn't any sense of variety. You never think "Ooh, I can try doing something else here!" The game just changes modes on you, briefly.

Yes, I could be describing plenty of different survival horror games here. It's not like Silent Hill got famous for rich gameplay. But the typical game offers some kind of changeup -- boss fights, or weapon upgrades, or bonus items. Cursed Mountain waves a hand at all of these, but they don't work. The bosses are some extra ghosts that fly, with extra magic symbols to gesture at. The weapon upgrades are tactical downgrades; I never found anything more effective than the third weapon you get, so I never switched after that. And the only bonus item is, as far as I could tell, a statue that makes your next two pickaxe blows more deadly. (You can't even decide when to use them -- zero added interactivity.)

As for the story -- your brother disappeared on the mountain. He had an evil mountain-climbing mentor. There's some Buddhist treasure somewhere. Try writing the rest yourself. Evil guy wants the treasure, evil guy disrespects the local religion, curses, ghosts, mass slaughter. The use of Tibetan Buddhism ought to be cool, but it's been pounded into a template that feels exactly like every other Japanese horror game out there: clumsy sexual innuendo (secret Tantric rituals!) and oh no human sacrifice. Resulting in monsters.

The developers are not, as it turns out, Japanese. (I believe it's a German studio.) But they sure got the tone right, or "right", and the result is more a case study in creepy cultural appropriation than in Buddhist theology.

Cursed Mountain also manages to lift the worst possible checkpoint system from Japanese action games... okay, not the worst. I don't want to know what the worst is. But this one is pretty bad: the game autosaves when you reach particular triggers, but only the first time you reach a trigger. You can never decide to save. So if you're trundling along with low health, and you reach a save point, that's your save state. If you lose a fight and die, tough -- you come back with low health. No fair running off to a health shrine and then re-saving.

I have not finished Cursed Mountain. You can't make me. I ran into a boss fight with low health, died about five times in a row, finally struggled through it, and then hit another big fight with even lower health. I just don't care enough to continue.

And to be fair, this annoys me. Not just because I'd climb a mountain of Towers of Hanoi to explore one bit of scenery I've never seen before. (Although I would.) Not just because the game is a waste of a decent horror premise (which it is), or the second horror game in a row I've given up on because the fighting wore me out. (Which it is too.)

But because Cursed Mountain is only marginally worse than all those other games I've played. Nothing about it is a raging disaster. All the pieces are kind of fun. It's just a steady stream of tolerable. The nicely-laid-out levels and intensely atmospheric environments -- see, I can say nice things -- are not quite enough to make it work. I wish they were.

Tales of Monkey Island

(Web site; Telltale Games)

I never played the original Monkey Island games. Even more heretically, now I don't want to. Telltale Games pull off their episodic contributions with the finely-honed design skills that we now all know from Sam & Max. (Wallace and Gromit was somewhat limp, which had me worried, but apparently pirate snark is sufficiently similar to private-detective snark to put their dialogue writers back on track.)

I just don't believe the older games were this well constructed.

Sure, I could be wrong. I'll cope. In the meantime, my ignorance lets me attest that the Tales episodes are fully comprehensible to newcomers. There's clearly backstory -- you're married, you have a nemesis and a voodoo ally -- but it's all cleanly introduced and it doesn't drown in the lake of dredged-up back-references that I feared. I've played two out of the promised five episodes; the first set up a story arc, and then the second carried it forward with twists, and, well -- it's well-constructed. Enough said, really.

Or not quite enough. I should lay out I mean by "well-constructed"...

The player always has goals, short-term and long-term.
Every action the player needs to take is motivated -- even (especially) the actions with surprising results.
Correct moves are rewarded immediately.
Incorrect moves are also rewarded immediately. The response explains why your attempt failed, and also reiterates what you wanted to do.
The game clearly distinguishes "that can't be done" from "you tried to do that wrong."
Also "that doesn't work" from "you can't do that yet" from "you've already tried that, and it didn't work."
If a puzzle requires deep experimentation, the game (usually) locks you in with it, so that you can't mistake "doing it wrong" for "need something else, come back later".
Funny.

Not to mention the particular virtue of the episodic adventure: repeating elements that you recognize and rely on as the series progresses.

These are all freshman-level design points, and why do I even list them? Because they are executed consistently and cleanly, so that the player's trust never fails. "Listen to what the game is telling you" is the right strategy, and is taught as the right strategy, and so the player gets through.

Sure, you get a lot of reiteration of goals, and a lot of over-explained action results. That's fine. Solving ten easy puzzles is more fun than solving nine hard ones and getting stuck on the tenth. Telltale gets that.

Also, funny.

IFComp begins

2009-10-05T05:12:11Z

If you know what the IFComp is, then you didn't need to read it here. Nonetheless! I'd feel dumb if I didn't mention it.

The 2009 Interactive Fiction Competition has begun. Twenty-four short text adventures. Including one by the Gameshelf's own Kevin Jackson-Mead. Play 'em, vote on 'em by November 15th. Or play and vote on as many as you get around to. Or just play some. Up to you.

Free game | Randomness in games | IF suggestions

2009-09-27T14:41:13Z

Wadjet Eye Games is giving away its game The Shivah (normally $5) in honor of Yom Kippur:

his weekend is the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur! It's a special time of year when Jewish folk reflect on the past year. So, on reflection, we're giving away The Shviah for free.

From now until Tuesday, simply use the coupon code "FreeShivah" when purchasing and you can nab the game absolutely free of charge.

Greg Costikyan posted his talk from Austin GDC about randomness in games. Definitely worth checking out.

Nick Montfort posted his updated list of interactive fiction suggestions, games he suggests for people who have some interest in IF but who haven't played much.

Diplomacy Show is back up

2009-09-23T21:41:22Z

Writing Yet Another post, just to get copacetic with alla y'all who read Gameshelf via RSS. If you tried to watch Episode 7, "Diplomacy", earlier today only to find that it didn't work - or that the video was missing entirely - please try again. It should be all better now.

And this is the last word on that. (If there any any other gaffes I missed, I'm not gonna pull the video down again; we'll just have to laugh at it together.) Thanks for your patience!