Of all the points raised by Daniel Cook in his naïvely provocative essay, “A blunt critique of game criticism”, perhaps the most illustrative is his assumption that a critique can be playtested. After publishing his “long-boiling” critique of game criticism, Cook asked with apparent credulousness for feedback in order to perfect a second draft of his screed. Cook has embraced this feedback, which has generally been of differing levels of offence and anger (unsurprising when those who are asked for feedback are labelled ‘parasites’ and their work ‘ignorant blather’) with an act of innocent constructiveness. We’re all in this together, this process of testing, and the anger of those who have given feedback will eventually result in a better critique. For science.

Cook is free to approach criticism in any way he likes. The act of criticism is personal and non-prescriptive. As Christian McCrea said on twitter in response to the discussion arising from Cook’s article,

What criticism is or isn’t good for isn’t described on blogs. It’s not bloggable or tweetable. Writing non fiction is an art and has its own responsibilities. Yes, most of it is shit. But most games are shit too.

Yet for this example, Cook’s approach to criticism demonstrates the fundamental ideas that inform his assumptions and arguments. Cook wishes the processes of game criticism to mirror those currently trendy within game design: iteration, feedback, empiricism. The best ideas within this framework are guided by informed feedback, created in concert with, and not for, a userbase. Scales of usefulness and practicability are illustrated via experience and the concentrated collection of data, be it quantitative (in design) or qualitative (in criticism). Just as we might playtest level design to ensure players do not get lost, we can playtest a critique to ensure readers do not get angry (except they do).

This position is reminiscent of Jonathon Blow’s comments in Mitu Khandaker’s article, “Toppling the Ivory Tower” in Kill Screen #2. Blow:

In general, my opinion of games academia is highly negative. Academia should be thought leaders, advanced thinkers, etc. Instead, it seems to me, it is mostly a bunch of people wasting time (and by extension their lives) … The issue is just whether people’s ideas are actually tested.

Blow’s comments were unsurprising. When Blow’s most famous game, Braid, was released to a hubbub of critical deconstruction in 2008, Blow dismissed much of the analysis of the game as “way too much of the English major, and not enough of the Computer Science major.” Blow felt that there was a disconnect between what he put into the game and large sections of the public analysis of the game:

A lot of people are a little bit too quick to take concrete bits of evidence that they find and that they recognize, and to use those to create a definitive explanation of everything and to bend all other facts to fit that explanation.

Yet for Cook, this goes further:

[G]ames are not and never will be the same sort of purely evocative media as music, video, writing or painting. Game [sic] have a functional heart that resists being reduced to the softest of sciences…

Clearly, the kind of criticism that Cook is after is practice-focussed analysis; the type of research that provides practical outcomes for designers. Perhaps under this rubric we would be looking for data-fed analyses of business models, or tell-all designer post-mortems, or analysis of specific design issues – a health-bar placement discussion, an NPC interaction-breakdown.

Cook’s focus on this particular understanding of games and the dialogue that surrounds games is plainly reflected in his own approach to criticism, with the iterative process that his essay appears to be publicly going through at the moment. Cook has edited the piece on the fly, incorporating feedback and flattening several of his points to take in the suggestions levelled at him via comments and twitter. Certainly this is a valid approach, and I’m not suggesting that Cook cannot perform criticism this way. I am, however, suggesting that it mirrors many of his fundamental errors in his understanding of the aims and processes of criticism.

I have so far resisted describing what I understand as good criticism for the very reason that I do not think that it is particularly wise or helpful to do so, or even particularly relevant or possible. Yet there are some points that I must make regarding criticism in order to sum up my response to Cook.

The best critics, to take a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu, are respecters of “the complexity of problems,” and demolishers of “simplistic either-ors.” To therefore take criticism itself as about the achievement of one particular end or the expression of a simply defined process is a mistake. In defining criticism you must inherently perform injury upon it. I realise that I am in part doing the same here. I acknowledge and respect this situation.

Further, empiricism is a faulty base from which to begin to approach criticism. Empiricism provides safe and testable answers within an either-or world: the confirmation or rejection of a hypothesis, or a set of findings that may henceforth serve as rules, established theories or a proven best practice.

Criticism, on the other hand, can provide analysis in terms that may neither be wholly right nor wrong. It can provide an understanding of the world that is thankfully fuzzy and that venerates complication and depth. It does not require confirmation or permission from creators. In fact, it should often be in violent opposition to the sovereignty of the author. Simple disagreement over analysis can often mask the different approaches and different interests of those involved.

Indeed, perhaps the surest sign of critical maturity is the ability to know if you dislike something because you actually think it’s wrong, or because it isn’t what you were looking for to begin with. This is Cook’s most significant failing.

All good things come to an end, which arguably makes this, the final instalment of RKD’s 2010 retrospective, something of a qualitative anomaly. In our ultimate send-off to the past 365 days of videogames, we look to the future, deal our predictions and play it cool like Nostradamus.

Evan: 2010′s the year I gave up trying to play everything and the year I realised we’re in for another industry crash of E.T. proportions.

Harry: Great Scott! *canned laughter*

Evan: Budgets and risk are too high, and developers have become complacent in simply making “good” games; unsurprisingly, the market’s oversaturated. 2011 and 2012 will see the industry collapse on itself.

My off-the-wall prediction is that by 2016, the videogame landscape will look like this:

• Apple is vying with Nintendo for the dominant home console position (Apple TV + Apps versus Wii 2 + HD).
• The 3DS remains the defacto dedicated portable gaming platform, but iOS and Android have significantly outpaced Nintendo in terms of volume sales.
• Microsoft has exited the dedicated console market for a lower cost “home entertainment and social media” device.
• Sony is selling two PlayStation 3s stuck together with duct tape and has almost exclusive control over the ever shrinking “hardcore” videogame market in all regions other than the US, where it’s competing against OnLive in major metropolitan cities.
• PSP2/NGP remains largely irrelevant everywhere except Japan.
• Steam is the primary distributor for all PC and Mac games.

Harry: I’m not sure how much of the above is you playing devil’s advocate (hey, that’s my M.O.!), or probable realities… but I enjoy reading it all the same.

Evan: I’m serious! Unless Kinect is a sustained success (as in, it’s still selling well from February through to June), I can’t see how Microsoft is going to be able to justify another round in the console hardware game. Same goes for Sony – it needs to recoup its PS3 investment given how badly the console has relatively sold, and I can’t see how the corporation’s board will approve another generational leap like there was from PS1 to PS2 and PS2 to PS3. The only option I can see for Sony is to do what Nintendo did with the GameCube to Wii upgrade and take the PS3, use what’s fundamentally the same architecture, make some minor upgrades to memory and the graphics processor while building Move in as an integrated component, and brand it the “PlayStation 4″.

If Sony scales back and refocuses on entertainment services, Microsoft no longer has a reason to fight head-to-head for the console market; The House That Gates Built’s goal was always about controlling the living room. Instead, the game shifts to integrated home entertainment, where Apple and Google are already moving – gaming becomes an adjunct, not the point. The irony is that Sony probably picked it right first with the way it marketed the PS3 and the way it built the XMB; the only problem being that it initially priced itself out of the market by catering to the console crowd instead of trying to make PS3 a mainstream product.

Nintendo’s a total wildcard – you can’t predict what it’ll do. It needs to do something in the next two years though as Wii sales are declining fast. Nintendo will hold for at least another year or so given marketing (and software) support, but it needs something new besides a heartbeat monitor.

Fraser: Nintendo also faces the risk that the longer it continues with its current hardware, the more people lose interest in it, and them. Compare the slow decline in excitement over Nintendo to the sustained hype for Apple: Apple has kept up consumer interest for years by continually releasing new or redesigned products before people have had time to get bored with the last one. I suspect if Nintendo had released 3DS last year (preferably right after James Cameron’s Avatar), when people were less bored with Wii, it would have sold hugely. Now I’m not so sure.

Daniel: I agree with regards to Wii. Nintendo will have to at least announce a new generation of its home console in the next year, otherwise the company will slip further than it already slowly has. In regards to handheld, I still can’t see 3DS being anything less than a runaway success.

Harry: What about PSP2/Neo Geo Pocket/(whatever the heck the next PSP will eventually be called)? You can’t deny that playing entries in the Call of Duty, Killzone and Uncharted franchises on the go is an enticing, yet entirely redundant prospect. Sony appear to have learnt from its mistakes with the PSP, because producing large-scaled, time-intensive console games for a portable battery-chomping, money-intensive system worked really well the first time around.

Evan: iOS is a juggernaut, especially when you throw Apple TV into the mix. Pair it with a series of applications for bluetooth controller integration, and you’ve got something that’s capable of playing most indie games on your TV. I’m already having great fun with Broken Sword, the Monkey Island Special Editions, Puzzle Agent, Infinity Blade, and 100 Rogues on my iPad. And, it only launched last year! I haven’t touched my DS at all so far. For the vast majority of the market, that’s perfect. For the tiny minority that’s left, there’s Sony and Microsoft.

No matter which way you cut it, I’m picking that the next generation of “consoles” are going to enter the market at somewhere between 50 to 75 per cent of what previous generations have launched at. They need to if they’re going to have a hope of attracting a broader audience. Nintendo was right: the market’s hit saturation. The console will do more, but there won’t be anywhere near as big a generational leap; the hardware’s major focus will be on integrating with first-party and third-party media services to provide a seamless social media and content delivery experience.

Daniel: You mean we can expect more ads like the “Foxtel on Xbox 360″ one? Kill me now.

Fraser: There are signs that Microsoft and Sony understand this, with their preference for building on their existing hardware rather than engaging in the typical five-year console cycle. Sony’s insistence that the PS3 will have a ten-year life cycle is looking pretty accurate.

Whether Nintendo thinks the same way or is just distracted from releasing a new console by counting its enormous piles of money is an open question.

Evan: I believe that indie games are set to become the ‘main market’ over the next few years. Developing for iOS is easy, and the returns are great. Apple already matches Steam when it comes to digital distribution; the biggest difference is that Apple’s ecosystem is huge and cross-platform. It covers mobile, Mac, tablet, and now TV. That last one makes it directly rival Steam for indie game distribution – I’d rather have bought Super Meat Boy for Apple TV if it had a controller, simply because it would have meant I could play the game on my TV. And I’m already committed to the ecosytem: I own an iPad, my work’s given me an iPhone, and I have a Mac. At $6 to $10 per game and a large active marketplace, Apple is set to become the dominant digital games distribution platform as soon as it grants us the ability to play games on Apple TV.

Daniel: It’s only a matter of time before Apps are available for Apple TV. Apple has been struggling for years to find the right application for the device, and this year it finally found the right form factor for it. And it’s putting Apps on everything else – in fact, as of now the Apple TV and ‘clickwheel’ iPods are the only Apple products that don’t have their own App Store. Apple seems to be wedded to not putting memory into it at the moment though, so it might take a while to reverse that line of thought – or some sort of cloud-iTunes to get things moving on that front.

Fraser: The vitality of the indie games market is a key difference to the industry crash of the mid-1980s. When the major videogame companies started to implode in 1983, there was virtually nobody to replace them, because making game hardware and software from scratch was hard and the longevity of the market demand was in question. If every company we’ve mentioned here went bankrupt along with Activision, EA, Ubisoft and all the other big game publishers, there would still be hundreds of smaller developers churning out games, with easy access to consumers through the Internet. The market would take an enormous hit, but it would build back up faster than it did in the mid-’80s before Nintendo rebooted the industry.

There’s also the cultural shift. Videogames are an ingrained part of life to a far greater extent than ever before, which means that however the business models of game production might change, the market for games will remain strong.

Daniel: The only problem I see is actually similar to one of the causes of the 1983 crash: on the iTunes store and on Android, there is frankly too much crap to wade through. The ’83 crash was partially caused by third parties releasing so many terrible games on the market that it looked like everything was rubbish. Nintendo solved that problem with their ‘Seal of Approval’ policy – will we be looking at a similar process in the future to halt the overload, or do the hundred thousand games on the App Store already have the Apple Tick of Quality? My guess is that on these sorts of indie games channels, the gulf between the top of the kingdom and the bottom of the table will only continue to grow and cause headaches for the market.

Will our predictions come true? Only time, and next year’s RKD retrospective, will tell. If you’ve missed any entries in the 2010 series — or happened to stumble across these ramblings while Googling for that horrid ‘Foxtel on Xbox 360′ commercial (viewable here!) — please refer to our tagged archive for the complete collection of posts. See you next mission!

A wise man once said “it’s easy to complain“. Who am I to argue against such profound logic? With the duty of producing the first ever RKD game awards solely in my hands, I duly hope negativity isn’t the foremost response. The penultimate part of our 2010 retrospective series sees me indulging my weakness for “witty” headings and the use of red text. The Triple J Hottest 100 ain’t got nothing on this list.

Best Game I Didn’t Play Because It Was Developed By BioWare

Mass Effect 2

Look, I personally have nothing against BioWare games, but… oh wait, yeah I do. The rest of the RKD team’s adoration for this series more than makes up for my grudge; too bad they’re not here to stop me.

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Best Game To Separate The Ludologists From The Narrativists

Tied between Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV

Despite their notorious difficulty levels, the most common obstacle in recommending either of these games to my friends is establishing the “reason” to be playing them. In both cases, answers to the question “What is the game about?” were met with guffaws and snickers (sadly not the chocolate kind). Evidently, some people prefer to play games for story rather than the “pointless challenge” of a platformer, no matter how badly the former is written.

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Best Game I Didn’t Play Because It Was Another Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Pretty much what I said about BioWare games, except redirected at the Assassin’s Creed series. Weird! In all seriousness, it’s a shame such historically unique (dare I say “grand”) world design is weighed down by an increasingly convoluted meta-narrative – a story that is becoming a challenge to care about even among fans of the franchise.

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Best Game That Wishes It Was Created By Eric Chahi Twenty Years Ago

Limbo

Once upon a time, game designers weren’t obligated to playtest their games. This was an era where the unfair level of difficulty a game possessed was a proud feature, and not a clue as to the deadline the designers barely fulfilled. The notion sounds out of this world, right? Limbo harks back to this model of “Surprise! You’re dead!” game design. However, in light of the superfast Super Meat Boy and the checkpoint bonanza of VVVVVV, Limbo‘s difficulty feels arbitrary and antiquated. At least the graphics are purdy!

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Best Game That Was More Of The Same

Super Mario Galaxy 2

In the Dictionary of Videogame Writing Clichés, Super Mario Galaxy 2 would be a perfect example for the entry “More of the same”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! It’s just that the grandiose feeling of “wow!” that the first Super Mario Galaxy instilled with such ease is a titch deflated the second time around. You might say it doesn’t feel as “epic” or “visceral” as its older brother, if you owned a copy of that Dictionary.

Honourable mention: Halo Reach

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Best Game You Don’t Actually Need To Play

Minecraft

If our retrospective on the game hasn’t convinced you of Minecraft’s voyeuristic merits, we probably should have embedded more YouTube clips.

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Best Game That Allows Me To Make My Own Best Games

WarioWare: Do It Yourself

Any game that gives me the tools to make my own timely interactive political statements (and share them with the world, friend codes be damned) is a winner.

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Best New User Interface That Didn’t Change How The Game Played Compared To Previous Instalments

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth

The videogame is a funny medium. Change a camera view here, add a bit of visual fidelity there, and all of a sudden you’ve apparently reinvented a long-running series of adventure games. Except playing any Ace Attorney game (thus far) feels the same, whether you have direct control over your legal avatar or not; whether your cross-examinations are set in a courtroom, or in the aisles of a dainty jumbo jet.

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Potentially Best New Game Hamstrung By Its Terrible User Interface

Sleep is Death

True story: After reading the glowing previews from quite a few reputable sources, I was earnestly prepared for the hilarious misadventures I was sure to have with Jason Rohrer’s latest thought-provoking non-game. Unfortunately, I soon learned that having Mr. Rohrer in the same room as the player guiding the experience is a requirement to make any sense of Sleep Is Death‘s cumbersome UI. Unless you enjoy watching two people slowly build penis-shaped objects out of trees in intervals of 30 seconds… look, it was the best Tristan and I could muster with the game’s incomprehensible (and downright ugly) pseudo-DOS menu.

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The Barry Burton Award for Excellence In Making Me Wish A Game Had A Voice Acting Budget

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

It’s hard enough listening to some of the narration “Daniel” dishes on your ears. [And in the game! -Ed] It’s also difficult to take the gripping atmosphere seriously when the protagonist sounds like he’s having a quiet orgasm every time the lights go out.

Dishonourable mention: Heavy Rain. Speaking of which…

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Best Game To Be Unintentionally Laughed At

Heavy Rain

I could blame the pulpy writing, or the painful voice acting. But we all know what it comes down to: Pressing X to Jason.

Honourable mentions: Cue up your browser’s video players for this lot…

• Fallout: New Vegas
• Kinect Joy Ride
• Konami’s E3 Lineup
• Metroid: Other M
• Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I
• Sonic Free Riders

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Best Game You Really Don’t Need To Hear Anything More About

Red Dead Redemption

Urban legend suggests that if you stand in front of a mirror and say “Red Dead Redemption is all right, I suppose” three times, Daniel Golding appears and gives you an hour-long lecture on the proper use of the phrase “spaghetti western”. Creepy.

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Best Game I Played Through In 2010 But Is Irrelevant Because This Industry Rarely Stops To Appreciate Its Past Achievements

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (2004)

While it took six years for me to finally get around to playing Troika’s last project EVER, it will still be an eternity before another game matches its believable cast of characters. That I’m confidently saying this about a story that centres on vampires and werewolves makes the rest of the industry’s efforts that much more embarrassing. A shame about the last third of the game, though.

Honourable mentions: Bully (2006), Every Day the Same Dream (2009), Fallout 2 (1998), God Hand (2007), Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (2006), OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast (2006), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Wario Land 4 (2001).

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Bonus: 2011 GOTY Award Predictions

Since there’s no money in writing half-arsed statements about games released last year, let’s make things interesting by putting my cynicality where my wallet is for the 365 (or so) days ahead. So it is written and so it shall be! Probably.

Game Most Likely to Fuel an Overused Meme for Another 3.5 Years

Portal 2

Game Most Likely To Enrage the Rock, Paper, Shotgun and/or Through The Looking Glass Community

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Honourable mention: Duke Nukem Forever

Game Most Likely To Win A 2011 GOTY Award Due To Its Required Time Investment

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Game Most Likely To Be Nominated For A 2011 GOTY Award Due To Its Marketing Budget

Call of Duty: Whatever This Year’s Model Is Subtitled

Honourable mention: Duke Nukem Forever

Game Most Likely To Win A 2011 GOTY Award Due To It Being A Zelda Game

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Honourable mention: Duke Nukem Forever

Game Most Likely To Win A Token 2011 GOTY Award Due To It Being Independently Developed

Monaco

Honourable mentions: Hazard: The Journey of Life, NIDHOGG, SpyParty

Cue the credits music! Tomorrow we bring things back to a more professional and reserved level of writing (no, really!) with the final entry in our 2010 retrospective. RKD’s resident professional analyst and erstwhile futurist Evan Stubbs spearheads a bold forecast of what the years ahead have in store for our ever-growing (or is it?) hobby. You won’t want to miss this one.

What a beautiful day! The sun is shining, the barbecues are sizzling, and the local drunks are congregating for their annual meet. Meanwhile, the RKD 2010 retrospective would rather stay indoors and talk some more about games. Pfft, social judgement… who needs it?

Fraser: 2010 seemed to be the year that most people started to have an opinion about games

In the past, I found that any mention of videogames in the company of people who didn’t identify as “gamers” would be met with a pained expression and a brief awkward silence. But in 2010, I met people right across the demographic map with at least partially formed ideas about how games are significant and where they might be going.

At work, when I told people I was interested in games, I used to get comments like “how old are you?” Recently I’ve had several long conversations with colleagues who profess not to play games but have read about how pro gamers’ brains work differently during some tasks than the brains of non-gamers, or have identified the videogame market as a boom industry for creative production, or have thought about how motion gaming could be partially replacing outdoor sports.

I gave a presentation at my (non-games-related) workplace on games as learning engines. I pitched it for a broad audience, and I probably did get some silent scorn from the audience, but there was plenty of interest as well. It was overbooked; I was asked to do an encore session.

No doubt Nintendo has had the largest role in this broadening of the public perception of games, although the traditional game market did a lot to make itself impossible to ignore. Where Nintendo came in by the side door with its strategy of presenting games in appealing new ways, the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops crashed straight through the window by selling enormous amounts of copies. CODBLOPS made twice as much money in its first 24 hours ($310m US) as the largest ever opening weekend for a film (The Dark Knight, $158m US).

Harry: *insert tired comment here about how videogames cost more than movie tickets*

Fraser: And games have continued the trend of successfully tying themselves in to existing cultural touchstones, to a greater extent than perhaps ever before. The Lego movie games are widely recognised; Gorillaz new album Plastic Beach promoted its tie-in game world on the cover; music games continue to squeeze sales and widespread enthusiasm off the back of famous bands. A musician friend of mine who has been openly suspicious of videogames in the past turned out to be even more excited than me when I was given The Beatles: Rock Band as a present.

All of that is why earlier this year I thanked Roger Ebert for giving his opinion on games. He was being a crotchety closed-minded fool, but he was treating the medium as a serious topic that merited the time and attention to think and write about. (Apparently they didn’t merit enough time to actually play one, it must be said.) Even people who irrationally hate games are finding them difficult to ignore.

Daniel: And yet a friend’s mother laughed in my face at a get-together last month when she found out I was writing a PhD on videogames. It will never be roses and sunshine until at least the baby-boomers die out (can I get arrested for comments I make on a blog?).

If we manage to break Daniel out of prison in time, tomorrow’s penultimate instalment of RKD’s 2010 retrospective series cordially invites you to attend our first annual RKD videogame awards ceremony. We’ll try keep the blunt truths and crappy jokes to a minimum.

Elton John and Tim Rice got it wrong. Life in videogames is far less of a circle and more of a revolving door. Fortunately, today’s instalment of RKD’s 2010 retrospective series suggests a ‘meaningful’ trend in the way our virtual deaths are handled.

Tristan: 2010 seemed to be a year that developers began to feel comfortable allowing the death of their protagonists to mean more than a simple ‘retry’ screen.

It’s not that main characters haven’t been sent to their graves as part of the core plots of games before, it seems though that now they’re doing so more often and in more gameplay-based ways (rather than through cutscene exposition). It’s a sign that videogames are moving further beyond their arcade, coin swallowing roots towards being a medium in which death is something that can finally be examined, rather than simply getting in the way of a speedrun.

I won’t mention all of them (for the sake of anti-spoiler goons knocking down my door), but there were some great character deaths in the stories of some of 2010′s games. Heavy Rain had meaningful player-character deaths. Mass Effect had the possibility of members of the ensemble cast disappearing from Mass Effect history (even though Shepard is the main character the deaths had more impact than most). There was One Chance. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, released last year in Australia, has death as its central theme.

Harry: To each his own, but I interpreted Shattered Memories’ themes as less about Cheryl coping with Harry’s death, and more about how she (through the player’s “psychology” choices) now perceives him (and thus, her subsequent lifestyle choices).

Daniel: Agreed regarding Mass Effect 2′s meaningful deaths. The finale really made me glad that I had invested in each of the characters and knew what I was doing; if I’d rushed it, I’m sure I would have killed someone. I’d like to know if anyone actually managed to kill off their entire crew, though. I’ve seen YouTube clips of it, but really, you’d have to be seriously bad at the game to get that ending. Still, sucks for you if you wanted Mass Effect 3
to be interesting.

Mass Effect 3: In space, no-one can hear you scream. Because they’re all dead. And so are you.

Tristan: I had two characters die and the fact that I’m kinda bummed about it, but at the same time interested to see how that’s going to affect the next chapter, is testament to just how important character is in that game. The traditional gamer in me wanted to go back and change things so that everybody lived, but the guy in me that loves story in games told me not to.

Fraser: It was a year for games that reflected on our tropes and traditions. Death has always been a big part of gaming, but usually as an inconsequential event, or an inconvenience that can be remedied with a coin or a quickload. Not to say that no game has played with the death-cheating conventions of videogames before, but as Tristan said, there was a definable trend towards a sober treatment of death in this year’s games.

Tristan: It’s interesting that within the everyday of Western culture, death is a topic that is almost to be avoided at all costs, and at best is to be treated as a final destination. While at the same time, so much of our creative output deals with the topic of how to live with death.

Gamers can be a thoughtful bunch after all! Tomorrow, RKD’s 2010 retrospective looks at the ‘acceptance’ of videogames in the grander scheme of society.

Things You Thought You’d Never Say a Decade Ago: “Who needs to play games on bulky hardware, when a simple phone will do?” Today’s chapter in RKD’s ongoing 2010 retrospective series is one that appropriately fits neatly in the palm of your hand.

Tristan: 2010 was a year in which traditional handheld gaming died for me.

Harry: You finally stopped playing your vintage Game & Watch systems?

Tristan: With my iPhone in my pocket all the time, and mobile gaming finally venturing beyond Snake and Bantumi, I no longer felt the need to carry another device to kill time on. In fact, the only handheld game I bought this year was the latest Professor Layton and I haven’t even gotten around to finishing it yet, what with my all consuming drive to keep up with my wife’s
steadily climbing Drop7 scores.

Harry: I finally got around to trying a Professor Layton game (for those keeping score, it was Pandora’s Box) last year. It was certainly fun, but coming from the Ace Attorney series, it’s a shame that the context and story of the Layton games don’t play a larger part in the puzzles. But that might change soon enough, Wright? Erm, right?

Tristan: iOS has everything that I love about quick playing titles. There’s enough experimentation with games such as Eliss or the audio-only Papa Sangre, and also more than enough simpler and/or big budget titles to allow for bite sized gaming to fill an overflowing-and-almost-becoming-unmanageable online store to the brim.

I’m starting to think that if Sony and Nintendo can’t create something which can plaster a look of surprise to my face akin to that of a blow up sex doll’s then it’s close to the end of those companies in the handheld market.

Fraser: My heart says no, but my iPod Touch says “You bought and played 30 games on me this year, and only one on your DS.” And it cost about the same.

Harry: With 2010 being the year that the Nintendo DS had its acceptance speech slowly but surely drowned out by the announcement of the 3DS, it’s unsurprising that there wasn’t much to look forward to on the release calendar.

As for Sony and its PSP: there was nothing there to look forward to from the start.

Daniel: Does the iPhone do 3D without the glasses, and can you play remakes of classic Nintendo games on it? When it can, Apple will knock Nintendo completely out of the handheld market. This might only be a matter of time (if Sonic can take Mario to the Olympics, then Apple can release a virtual N64 emulator in the year 2016), but until then Nintendo won’t be completely out of the race.

Harry: The day Nintendo relaxes its grip on its back-catalogue and lowers its standards to the now sadly irrelevant Sega, is the day Pokémon ceases to exist. Answer: Never, ever, never. Never.

Reality hurts, especially when it comes time to consider the Final Truths of our existences. Tomorrow, RKD’s retrospective gets all philosophical, as we recognise the evolved nature of death in some of our favourite titles of 2010.

With both the highs and lows of last year already (somewhat) covered, the next instalment of RKD’s 2010 retrospective series tackles a game that needs no introduction. Seriously. It’s right there in the title of the post.

Fraser: What will be remembered most from 2010? Perhaps Minecraft, although it has a ways to go before it becomes the kind of game that will interest a great number of people as a traditional game, rather than a generator of stories and funny videos.

Tristan: We could just as well fill this post with our favourite Minecraft-related YouTube clips, and it’d say a lot more than we’d ever muster.

Daniel: When it comes to Minecraft, a video says a meagre thousand words. If Brendan was writing for RKD, we’d probably have about a million more.

Harry: The argument for Minecraft’s current worth could go either way. Personally, I think the spread of personal accounts and amusing videos hold all the more weight and fascination when it takes place in a world someone has constructed on their own. That you don’t even have to be interested in playing the game to eke some entertainment out of this phenomena is an all the more noteworthy evolution of videogames as a “spectator sport”, or a form of public play.

It’s one thing to create a narrative of sorts in an already rigidly defined game, but it’s a completely different thing when such player-created experiences are the whole point of a game. With promises of a  ‘story’ and ‘goal’ to eventually be patched in, I’m concerned that future updates to Minecraft might ruin that magic.

Tristan: The most interesting part about Minecraft is not so much the game. Rather, it’s the seemingly unintentional grassroots (dare I say ‘viral’) marketing and how ridiculously well the game has managed to insert itself into the online collective consciousness; and as a result just how many copies it has managed to sell. That’s the really interesting story. I’ve got friends who are ‘occasional gamers’ and even they’re into it. In many ways it’s perfect for the types of people that don’t keep up with the general gaming landscape but are prepared to throw all their time into one game in a Sims-like manner.

Daniel: As I’ve been saying for a while now, the ‘game’ part of videogames is often the least interesting, and Minecraft again proves my point. Videogames are experiences above all else, and I think you’ll be waiting quite a wait before Minecraft offers up a game as well designed and balanced as something like poker or Counter-Strike.

Harry: In a year where a game like Minecraft sweeps the compulsion and free time of so many, and yet — come ‘Best of’ awards time — is still relatively ignored in light of the brick-and-mortar best-sellers… that says a lot more about the structure of games criticism and its audience, than anything.

There definitely seems to be this strange division between hard-copy games that are bought in a store and games that are purchasable exclusively via digital means. As if the delivery of the product should automatically restrict it’s merit and scope.

Fraser: Would you consider giving an award to a game that’s barely a month out of its alpha stage of development?

Harry: Hey, what’s good for the IGFs is good for everyone else.

RKD’s 2010 retrospective series has barely started and already we’re making demands. Tomorrow we tone down our self-service and word counts, as we pay tribute to the portable games that saved so many public transport trips.

From “meh” to “ooh!”, in part deux of our 2010 retrospective series, RKD dons its pseudo game designer cap in an attempt to quantify and qualify the freshmakers of last year: the games that didn’t feel like “more of the same”.

Warning: It’s only natural if, after reading through our not-at-all biased diatribe below, you feel that VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy are the only noteworthy things to have come out of 2010. Because it’s totally, totally true.

Harry: 2010 was definitely one of those gaming years dominated by sequels: it’s hard to argue differently, with the top guns in most “Best of” lists being Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption and Super Mario Galaxy 2, among others. Of course, then we have to ask: has any videogame year not been dominated by sequels?

This reliance on yearly iteration can understandably be a frustrating thing… but it can also inspire the independent and rebellious.

2010 was the year where I did not simply echo the voice of so many hipsters but actually truly believed that indie games are where the freshest ideas will be found/stolen from for some time to come. It’s certainly an inspiration for budding wannabe game designers like myself!

As such, 2010 is also the year where I realised I should stop placing blind interest and faith in the output of personalities who were once involved in great things over a decade ago. Game designers and their creative intentions change; not to mention their ability to implement fundamental systems. It’s high time for the new blood to receive wider acclaim beyond the predominantly blog-based clique we’ve got going here.

Fraser: Many of the year’s critically successful games were re-visitations of old formulas. VVVVVV, Super Meat Boy and Limbo all went back to the 2D platformer – a genre that most people must have thought had virtually run its creative course – and rebuilt it in unexpected ways. In particular, each of the three took the moment that has historically been the source of the greatest frustration – failure and death – and turned it into a perversely pleasurable experience by minimising undue punishment and turning death into a joyous spectacle. VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy are infamously difficult games, but while they ask you to do things that are punishingly difficult, they never ask you to do things that are boring.

Completing Veni, Vidi, Vici is easily the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in a videogame, and in almost any other game I wouldn’t have bothered – because almost any other game would have put the save checkpoint at least a tiny bit further away. It’s ironic but true that over the hundreds of lives that I wasted in that small section, a five-second walk from the checkpoint to the start of the challenge would have proved more off-putting than my constant deaths against the walls of spikes.

Harry: Unlocking “The Kid” (himself from an indie game renowned for its masochistic difficulty) in Super Meat Boy takes ‘The most RIDICULOUS thing I’ve ever put myself through in a videogame’ award for me (well, until I try completing VVVVVV without dying once). It doesn’t help that The Kid has the biggest shiteating grin on his face the entire time.

Fraser: Madness.

Harry: Did I mention I achieved this feat in the Steam version, and therefore, via keyboard controls?

Fraser: Mega madness!

Harry: I’ve actually tried revisiting some 90s era platformers after playing through both VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy, and the realisation of just how well designed those two games are is astounding.

There are no traditional “cheap deaths”: no frustratingly needless waste of the player’s time, no “trial and error” surprises; everything that the player needs to know is communicated on-screen in such small, yet varied and tightly constructed spaces, leaving only the player’s capabilities in mastering the controls at the forefront of both game’s requirements.

It also helps that both VVVVVV’s (Pressure Cooker!) and Super Meat Boy’s (Betus Blues!) soundtracks are amazing.

Daniel: Relatedly, and I’m almost certainly the only one on this boat, but I think the whole PETA fiasco with Super Meat Boy made the developers come out looking pretty small-minded and mean. At the time, most people I know were cheering them on for taking on PETA, but I thought they looked pretty churlish and it has actually discouraged me from buying their game. Sure, PETA was dumb and predictable in doing what they did, but by doing so they only reinforced what everyone already knew about them. Team Meat let the world know that they’re willing to be equally stupid, when they need not have.

Fraser: The code to unlock Tofu Boy in the PC version is “petaphile”. Really, Team Meat? Really?

Harry: At the risk of coming across as a heartless prick (that’d be a first), I can’t help but make the subjective comparison: some people may find Team Meat’s harmless bickering with the ever petty PETA a turn off; but others may feel that the alarmingly poor working conditions and subsequent layoffs at Rockstar San Diego holds a bit more weight against the purchase of a certain widely-acclaimed Western game. I guess for all the harping about vague concepts like ‘innovation’, we should be mindful of the utter crap (PETA-related or not) developers experience to bring these (innovative, iterative, or otherwise) games to our cynical laps.

Anyway. Back to the non-bleeding heart topic at hand.

Fraser: The bigger-budget successes of the year were in most cases polished iterations on a successful formula. Consider StarCraft II, BioShock 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Halo: Reach, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Rock Band 3, Dragon Quest IX, Mass Effect 2, Fallout: New Vegas. The typical assessment I heard about all of these games was: “It’s pretty much the same as the last one, but they’ve improved some things” – spoken without much enthusiasm. All of those games are made to a high standard, and yet I can’t shake the feeling (and perhaps this applies just as much to the indie platformers) that none of them will be considered noteworthy in a few years’ time, because they didn’t show us much that was new.

Harry: Fair point, but I think it’s one that could be muddled by genre distinctions and cross-comparisons.

Personally, the elements of noteworthy games I look fondly back on usually involve the designer(s) having tried (and succeeded!) in implementing something relatively different with how their games play (simultaneously pushing their respective genres) than with how the games look or what story they’re trying to tell. If the games manage to hit on all three of these points, it’s a bonus.

As such, I don’t think there’s any risk of VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy being disregarded in 2020′s ‘Best of the Decade’ lists. They each offer something distinct (VVVVVV’s no jumping), or specialise their design to seem like they’re providing a ‘why didn’t anyone do this sooner’ service (Super Meat Boy’s unbelievably precise controls), on top of their (respectively) charming presentations. In contrast, in 10 months time, the next Call of Duty will have players saying last year’s was the best one… until next year’s, ad infinitum.

From what I understand (because hey, I personally don’t play/can’t stand BioWare games), Mass Effect 2 tried some very different things with its approach to combat and what generally can be constituted as a ‘role-playing game’, and is probably one of the few games you’ve listed that will be looked back upon as truly noteworthy (favourably or otherwise).

In any case, there are relatively few ‘evolutionary dead ends’ in game design, which is both a blessing for the lazy (poor, poor Canabalt) and a curse when expecting something truly fresh with every game release. Deranged message board arguments take note: Halo sequels are what they are.

Daniel: Like Harry, I disagree about your inclusion of Mass Effect 2 in that list, Fraser. It did plenty of things differently from its predecessor – to the point where I think I’d struggle going back to the first game. It might look the same, but it plays very differently.

Fraser: It’s a great game, but I maintain that nearly everything it did well was an iteration on the solid design of its predecessor. The combat and role-play aspects were tweaked, refined and streamlined, but not substantially reinvented. When it came to completely new features, there was… mining.

The most noteworthy upgrade, for me, was the story and quest structure at the macro level. The array of short, character-driven missions was effective both to control the rhythm of the game and to allow the player to explore the history and motivations of one character at a time, in a way that felt natural and purposeful.

ME2 also mitigated the incongruity of Bioware’s trademark ethical quandaries by tying the biggest tests of judgement into the stories of the ensemble cast, who had a reason to trust your decision. There were still plenty of NPC strangers wanting you to resolve their problems for them, but this time those quests tended to be more active and less dependent on Shepard’s messianic moral authority: ‘prove the Quarian’s innocence’ rather than ‘give parenting advice on a sensitive medical matter’.

Harry: I have no idea what you’re talking about. Please to be returning to discussing VVVVVV and/or Super Meat Boy.

The RKD 2010 retrospective train keeps on chugging tomorrow, with an examination of everybody’s favourite excavation simulator: Infiniminer. If time permits, there might also be a quick look at some game called “Minecraft”. It’s surprisingly not a Blizzard-developed title.

If annual videogame retrospectives were a party, RKD would be that fashionably late arrival who everyone pays attention to because they’ve already exhausted the conversation (and alcohol) for the night. Probably.

Fortunately, this is The Internet. For every day of the upcoming week, the whole RKD crew will be sharing bits of its sweeping generalisations and opinions stated as fact regarding the year that was 2010, along with its bold predictions for the 11.3 months to come. Let’s get this party started… again!

Fraser: I don’t really know where to start, as 2010 seemed like an oddly uneventful year in retrospect.

Harry: I feel 2010 was a bit of a “meh” year too. We need another 1998 or 2004, dangnabbit.

Fraser: And yet there were plenty of Things happening and Big Games being released in 2010, from the crowded first months of the year to StarCraft II, Minecraft, CODBLOPS (significant for its acronym if nothing else) and Red Dead Redemption. Not to mention Activision’s continued descent into Evil Superpower status.

Somehow, though, I didn’t have a strong personal reaction to any of that stuff. I’m not sure why. That could be just me, but I picked up a distracted vibe from other games writers last year as well.

It’s like things happened this year, but not much of it felt memorable or historically significant. Except Minecraft, for some people.

Harry: I’d like to think that as the average age of people who contribute to the industry grows older, we’re slowly but surely getting closer to the level of “higher brow”, somewhat retrospectively “tougher” criticism other mediums benefit (heh) from. Maybe someday Metacritic won’t need to make laughable excuses.

Fraser: Am I the only person who still thinks the clustering of game reviews around the 7-9 out of 10 mark is perfectly reasonable and not about to change?

Daniel: Yes. Yes, you are.

Harry: It could also just be that 2010 was slightly tainted by the “We’re late, but still great!” motion controller celebrations held by both Sony and Microsoft. That’s an instant 7.5 on the Fond Look-back scale.

Fraser: Aside from Mass Effect 2, I can’t think of any game that I played that actually came out last year, until I got Red Dead for Christmas. I’ve been meaning to try StarCraft II and Civilization V, but somehow that hasn’t happened yet.

Actually I haven’t played many games at all, by my standards, since winter. I think I burnt out my brain writing a thesis on Mirror’s Edge.

Harry: Personally, I’ve slowly reached a point in the last few years where my time and interest in playing games the videogame hivemind tells me to — yet I did not ask for — is getting smaller and smaller. BioShock 2’s release in 2010 best exemplifies this feeling. This year, I’ve come to understand that the videogame medium is one that thrives on iteration; but that doesn’t necessarily mean I have to be obligated to indulge in every single revision of a given idea.

Tristan: And because of these feelings, I imagine you haven’t played what is one of 2010′s best games, which is Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (a game that is not without it flaws, mind you).

Fraser: I’ve been uninterested in Brotherhood because the bits and pieces I’ve heard haven’t made it sound very different from Assassin’s Creed II. I assume it’s a good game, but I think “I’ve already been there.”

Harry: Yeah, pretty much what Fraser said (jerkface).

Daniel: I actually look back on my time with Brotherhood with some kind of nervous twitch. I enjoyed it enormously for the first three quarters, but it’s one of those games where the developers clearly ran out of time (especially given the one year development timeframe) and decided to leave the end of the game pretty rough. In fact, the end of the game is so bad that it’s pretty much soiled the rest of it for me.

Harry: I just don’t find the Assassin’s Creed games interesting (blasphemy!). It doesn’t help that the growing convoluted narrative elements of the series is also making it that much harder for newcomers and estranged players of the first game to jump back in. I admire the world design they’ve gone with (especially since Assassin’s Creed II), but I’d just be forcing myself to actually play through them. Which again goes hand in hand with my sentiments of flipping my finger off at what people think I should be playing.

That said, in 2010 I learned to embrace the types of games I enjoy (sequels and all), and quit trying to (begrudgingly) play through things I dislike; and simply appreciate from afar. For example, 2010 marked the umpteenth time I’ve tried and failed in getting past the first few painfully slow hours of Planescape: Torment (thanks a lot, GOG!). On a more contemporary note, StarCraft II, while an enticing prospect from most accounts, will likely join its predecessor in non-engagement on my behalf.

Daniel: I played two games this year that I really, honestly loved. The first was Red Dead Redemption, which I now think is probably my favourite game ever. I’m not sure how much I need to say about this game, though – either you’ve played it and you already have an opinion, or you probably will play it in the near future anyway

The other game isn’t technically a 2010 game, but it came out in December 2009 and was pretty overlooked at the time so I feel justified in including it – Pandemic’s The Saboteur. This is surely the best hidden gem I’ve played – though it is very rough around the edges, none of that overshadows the experience of the game, even if the writing is very pulpy (read: rampantly sexist and racist). However, the sense of place in wartime Paris is nearly unparalleled – even the Assassin’s Creed or Zelda games don’t, for me, evoke a sense of time and place as well as The Saboteur does. Red Dead does, of course, but whatever, I’m just a fanboy. In any case, The Saboteur didn’t sell well and is now clearly in your local bargain bin, so there is no reason not to try it.

Harry: Unless like me, you keep confusing the The Saboteur for Rogue Warrior, for some irrational reason. Remember: only one of them features a rapping Mickey Rourke.

Mickey: I #$%*ing do what I #$%*ing can.

Tomorrow RKD continues its belated 2010 retrospective by pondering the fine line between last year’s “iteration and innovation“. Can Dan last without mentioning Red Dead Redemption at least ten times? Will Tristan have more than a sentence to contribute? Tune in to find out!

When Irrational Studios head Ken Levine wrote about The Future of PC Gaming on Kotaku last month, he mentioned a little-known iPhone game called 100 Rogues. It seems an odd thing to bring up in an article about PC gaming, but this is the kind of game that gets stuck in your head.

100 Rogues is described as a roguelike, but really it sits somewhere between a roguelike and an action RPG. It’s a solo turn-based hack and slash adventure through randomly generated levels of a monster-infested dungeon, where progress is irreversible, death is permanent and loot is everything. The world it presents is cheerfully erratic, with traditional fantasy creatures like rats and skeletons existing alongside invisible babies, anthropomorphised bags of flour and cowboy-hatted robot bandits that shoot homing missiles. Usable objects range from swords and healing potions to butter knives (for softening up your enemies), dodgeballs (which make you taunt your opponent as you throw them) and a Griffin Slayer (in a game that features no griffins).

Unlike traditional roguelikes, which are presented in simple ASCII graphics or static tiles, 100 Rogues features gorgeously animated pixel art. The animation is pretty and expressive, giving characters a strong sense of personality and intention, but it comes at the cost of diversity: it’s not possible to include the raw volume of content found in games like Angband and Dwarf Fortress when every idea needs to be matched with art. Still, compared to non-ASCII games, there’s plenty of material in there, and what exists is pleasantly bonkers.

I wasn’t convinced when I first tried the game. Over a few weeks, though, it’s become the one single-player game on my iPod Touch that I keep coming back to with enthusiasm. There’s a level of strategy to encounters that isn’t obvious at first, and the “random” generation of levels is underpinned by rules that keep the flow of the experience consistently engaging. For example, each room you enter contains a mob of mixed enemies, large enough to kill a careless player but nearly always manageable with some thought and planning. The mana pool for spells and abilities is small, but refills quite fast, which allows the player to use their abilities regularly, but keeps them close to the risk of being cornered without any mana to cast a healing or teleport spell – the surest path to an ignoble death.

It’s obvious a lot of thought went into the details of this game’s design, so I spoke to the lead designer, Keith Burgun, and the software programmer, Wes Paugh, about their experience making 100 Rogues and plans for the future…

RedKingsDream: One thing that stands out about 100 Rogues is the sturdiness of its controls. The App Store is full of games with awkward, hacky controls, but 100 Rogues doesn’t suffer that very badly, aside from the odd misplaced touch. For a genre that isn’t native to the iPhone, it suits the touch screen well. Was the initial idea for the game heavily guided by the characteristics of the iPhone, or did you begin with a cool idea and then try to figure out how to build it for that platform?

Keith Burgun: I would say both. The task was to build an iPhone game first, and then the next question was “what kind of game would be good on the iPhone”. A Roguelike with a good visual presentation seemed a very good fit.

Wes Paugh: As far as input design, the device definitely drove the mechanics. Roguelikes traditionally offer 8-direction movement, which we decided against very early on. Errant taps and touches are inevitable without the tactile feedback of a physical controller, and 4-direction movement greatly reduces the incidence of fatal mistakes.

We have had a number of requests for inclusion of a virtual d-pad in the game as another input option. Technically the game has a virtual d-pad, it just takes up the whole screen. In a turn-based game as difficult as 100 Rogues, moving the wrong way will get you killed sometimes. The input mechanism we chose used the highest number of pixels-per-gesture we could come up with. Any other input option would reduce the size of each move ‘button’, increasing the likelihood of not gesturing appropriately, and therefore death. We want our monsters to kill you, not a UI we provide.

Virtual input devices have been made to work comfortably, most notably in Epic Citadel, but there are few games for which even that would be practical. We chose to embrace the quirks of the interface, and the game is much better for it.

RKD: So you started developing 100 Rogues in December 2008, released it early this year and added a substantial amount of content since then. How much further are you planning to expand the game?

WP: From the start, we’ve been planning on 4 player classes, and more worlds. Now that version 2.0 is out, we are starting work on the first new character class, the Skellyman Scoundrel. She’s got a real thirst for vengeance through subtle, yet maniacal, brutality, and she’s obsessed with blood, always trying to deal critical damage to monsters that can spill it.

After she has been added to the game, we’re looking to refine and expand existing mechanics more. There are rough plans for optional sections to be added to the dungeons that resemble quest areas with NPCs, and for further adoption of traditional roguelike mechanics like item identification and traps. We’ll also continue adding new monsters, rebalancing skills and enhancing their identities, and adding challenges to Challenge Mode with regular updates.

KB: Yeah – there are also discussions about other possible game modes and other ways we can expand on 100 Rogues. I’m very excited about the future of 100 Rogues, because from a design perspective this is where the most learning for me can happen. We can try out a new game mode for instance and see just what that does to the gameplay, and the player base. For instance, Challenge Mode was very helpful for me in helping to develop the class skills – it was a filter, and only a skill with a little dimension could get through.

RKD: That iterative design process has obviously helped the game, but it means that, by iPhone standards, 100 Rogues has been in development for a very long time. How do you think that approach has worked out for you? If you had another great idea for an iPhone game tomorrow, would you go about it the same way?

WP: Release smaller and release earlier. Our frequent updates of varying sizes have gone over really well. We’ve got great fans that have stuck with us through thick and thin, and have loved seeing the game evolve and expand (not to mention providing feedback that has significantly shaped the game’s direction). A game with as modular a design as a Roguelike could easily benefit from tiny, periodic releases earlier in development.

KB: I agree that any future iPhone games I work on would be far smaller in scope as a project – it just makes more sense given the platform. However with that said – REGARDLESS of the scope or size of a project, I would always want to support it for as long as possible. I think the idea that you make a game, then just move onto the next game is horribly wasteful. Games take time to mature, even after they have shipped, and they deserve to be taken care of forever.

RKD: My pet peeve in iPhone gaming is not being able to listen to my own music while the game is running – something 100 Rogues doesn’t (seem to) support. Any plans to implement that?

WP: Yep, absolutely. Actually, until about a month ago, your iPod music continued playing after the App launched. We lost the functionality in 1.08 when we upgraded to iOS 4.0 to support Game Center, but will have it back in the live version of the game in the next month, roughly. And! Since I was looking at the problem anyway, I incorporated the iPod Playlist Selection interface into our options menu, so you’ll be able to choose your music after the game has started, and switch back to the game soundtrack without reloading.

RKD: Excellent. Finally, is there anything you can say yet about Dinofarm Games’ next project?

KB: I don’t want to go into too much detail now – it’s a ways off – but if you’re familiar with SSI’s 5-Star General series then you’d have a decent idea of what the gameplay is like. Expect us to treat that genre as we have treated the Roguelike genre with 100 Rogues – balance innovation with keeping what was great about the genre, and immerse it with a charming, somewhat silly theme. That’s pretty much the philosophy of myself and our lead artist Blake Reynolds.

100 Rogues is on sale for AU$2.49 until Sunday 28 November. You can download the soundtrack for free from Bandcamp.